Bruschetta Extravaganza!

Last night I had a go at making bruschetta - a traditional Italian dish - but with a few additions to try and turn an entree style dish into more of a main meal. It was apparently so filling that Alana did not finish her second bit of bruschetta! This dish was inspired by our huge basil plants that have been doing very well with the sun and having lots of water dumped on them. I thought I'd post my modified recipe up here.

Ingredients

1 loaf of Italian bread - pane

3-6 ripe tomatos - I used truss tomatos as they were a bit nicer and flavoursome

Lot of basil - a bunch from the supermarket would suffiice

Olive oil - I used lemon infused extra virgin olive oil

Sea salt

2 Onions

4 cloves of garlic

It was a really simple dish to make. I started by plucking the basil leave off the stems where the stems were a bit to tough and chewy looking. I then chopped the onions and finely sliced the garlic. You could probably halve the amount of garlic and onion that I used. Or for more traditional bruschetta remove them as ingredients completely. I then pan fried the onion and garlic with a little olive oil on a low temperature until the onions are sweeter to taste. I sliced the pane into relatively thick slices. You could get the baker to put it through the bread machine on sandwich thickness if you wanted. I then popped the bread in the toaster until golden brown, but you could do under the grill on on the barbeque if you wanted to. I then chopped the tomatos. Assembling the onion and garlic layered on top of the toast, then some basil leaves, then the tomato, then some salt, then more basil leaves and then drizzle with some olive oil.

An Afterthought

It was delicious. But I am very garlicy this morning, so if you have to go anywhere and see people it may be wise to halve the amount of garlic I think. Despite it being very tasty and useful seeing off colds and flu!