Meat!

Twisty at I Blame The Patriarchy posts pictures of her dinners and that is really one of my favorite parts of her blog (though I do sometimes like to get my blame on).

Pappa al Pommodoro

Good way to get rid of your stale bread.

• Stale bread, cut into bite-sized cubes.
• olive oil
• garlic
• canned tomatoes or other tomato substance
• maybe some red pepper flakes
• basil
• parmesan

cut some stale bread into 1/2 inch cubes. or, if you only have fresh bread, toast it in the oven at 350 degrees for a few minutes.

saute this in a pot with some olive oil and a few cloves of chopped up garlic. The bread will really soak up the olive oil. careful not to burn the garlic.

add the tomato stuff and red pepper flakes if you want them. I have tried all kinds of stuff here, and it always seems to turn out fine. Canned tomatoes are fine. Fresh tomatoes with maybe a little extra liquid and tomatoe paste have also been fine. Just make sure you add enough that the bread can soak it all up and get mushy. You want this to end up the consistency of a very thick stew. definitely moist, but you could put it on a plate and eat it with a fork if you wanted to.

add salt if it needs it, but usually the tomato stuff is salty enough.

When you're just ready to take it off the stove, tear up some basil leaves... lots... and stir it in. you still want them pretty much raw and fresh.

About 10 seconds before you start eating it, grate some parmesan on it and sprinkle on a little more olive oil.

The key here is GOOD olive oil. You know when it kind of tastes the way fresh grass clippings smell? mmmm.

salad

• some kind of decent lettuce. Bib or Boston or Butter or whatever... just not Iceberg. Those mixed, slightly bitter salad greens don't really work here. I love them, and arugula, but this isn't the place for it.
• radishes, sliced very thin.
• ripe avocado

The dressing is that same nice olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a little dill. And some fresh ground black pepper. This is so damn simple I'm not sure why I'm posting the recipe except to insert a note about how sublimely awesome a really good balsamic vinegar is on such a simple salad. My roommate's sweetheart is from Modena, so I got a few tips from her on this:

First, get balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Second, they are often numbered. This means something. We have a 5 and a 12. The 12 is thick and sweet, the 5 more like the typical tangy stuff. That's really all we know about the numbers.

I had heard somewhere that with the right kind of Balsamic, you could put a little on vanilla ice cream and have a delicious dessert. I always wondered about this it seemed so ill-conceived. But this new vinegar we got, it tastes just like raisins (it is made from grapes); I could totally see how you could treat it as a sweet.