Day Four: Maintenance

Mama said there'd be days like this. Took the day off work today sick, spent most of the day in bed, some with my computer writing code. Then again, this is a project in cooking quick and easy so I had to rally and put in a good effort.

Bruschetta:
1 medium tomato, chopped to 1/4 inch, came out to about 2 cups chopped
1/2 a medium onion, chopped to 1/4 inch, came out to about 1 cup chopped
2 large cloves garlic, smashed thoroughly
A hand-sized bunch of flat parsley, chopped rough, about 1/4 cup

Sautee everything in a tiny bit of vegetable oil. I did onions, then tomatoes, then parsley, then garlic. Cooking the garlic less tends to make it more garlicy. I needed about 1-1/2 cups of vegetable stock to keep things from sticking. Cook quickly, try not to let the tomatoes break down too much. Move them out of the pan. That venture took me 16 minutes start to end. I added a touch of olive oil when it had cooled a touch.

Clean the pan a touch and melt about half a stick of salted butter. While it's melted, cut 4 large slices, about an inch thick, at 45 degrees across an Italian loaf. I used the good, enriched loaf I made last night. Fry in the butter until slightly browned. Top with the mixture from before and grind some fresh pepper on it. Salt too if you want. This took 4 minutes.

If frying the bread in butter is too rich for you, toast it instead.

Delicious, trivially easy and 20 minutes end-to-end. This scales well and I could have made ten times as much in not much more time. I even had some time to clean up around the kitchen and throw on some stock while everything was cooking. Did I mention it was delicious?

Yesterday's stock was great. The celery really added some warmth to the pot. I'm going to have to find some other things that do as well. Today's brew is cabbage and onions. Three cups chopped onions and half a hearty cabbage. We'll see how that turns out tomorrow.

The down side to this today is that it's not all the fortifying. There's not much protein in it. Some from the bread, but that's only because I engineered it so last night. That also took a long time. This is more likely to happen more often from store-bought bread which is much less enriched, I think. I have leftovers and I'm going to try them with some mozzarella cheese, kind of like a pizza thing. Good lunch tomorrow...