bruschetta

Debbie, she of the gorgeous kitchen in the last post, joined a co-op this summer and is knee-deep in fresh produce, which she willingly shares with anyone who will have it. Since The Husband loves tomatoes (and since I didn’t buy him a present for his birthday yesterday), I scored a few and stashed them in the fridge. He came home early from work today not feeling well, so I decided to make him some bruschetta to cheer him up and make tonight’s dinner of spaghetti (which we have at least once a week) a little less common.

My faithful Betty Crocker cookbook didn’t have a recipe, so I took to the internet to figure out what all goes into bruschetta. Tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, and balsamic vinegar seem to be the accepted ingredients, so I tweaked it a bit to help get rid of the lonely onion sprouting on the top shelf of the fridge: onion, tomatoes, olive oil, italian seasoning, olive oil, and black pepper. The recipe was fairly straightforward, but I stopped short after reading the first step — parboil the tomatoes so the skin comes off easier.

Let’s get one thing straight: The Dumbass Gourmet doesn’t parboil. I also don’t braise, poach, or chop up celery, onions and carrots into mirepoix, which I only know about because they do it all the time on the Food Network. (For one, onions are gross and carrots turn you orange.) What I do do (haha) is throw things into a pan and keep my fingers crossed.

Tomato skins never hurt anyone, I reasoned as I grabbed the knife, tomatoes, and cutting board:

Sleep easy, my pretties.

… but I was nice enough to painstakingly scoop out all the seeds and guts:

Red’s looking a little nervous.

It was at this point that I slipped on a slick spot on the kitchen floor and almost went down. Was it water? Tomato guts accidentally slopped off the cutting board? No … it was grease from the meatloaf I made earlier this week. Please don’t ask me how it got on my kitchen floor (and how it went unnoticed for three days), because I don’t know. What I do know is that I should purchase stock in lemon-scented Clorox wipes, and possibly hire a housekeeper.

After chopping the garlic and onion and giving the mix a good shake of olive oil and italian seasoning, I toasted some leftover multigrain bread from a local steakhouse (the Dumbass Gourmet strives to clean out the fridge above all else, except for that “don’t kill people with your cooking” thing) and spooned the bruschetta on top. A twist of fresh peppercorns, and here we go:

I really wish I liked tomatoes.

It got a big thumbs-up from The Husband, and I’m officially the Best Wife Ever. I try to remember these moments so I have a cache of goodwill upon which to draw when I do something like dump a plate of spaghetti on my laptop. The Clorox wipes came in awfully handy then, too.