November 15, 2006
Dishes of Comfort: Tomato-Rubbed Bread
It can be the simplest of things that send you hurtling back into your childhood. When someone says Comfort Food, you immediately think of what you ate as a kid, what your mom or your aunts (who weren't really your aunts) fed you when you came home from school.
Recently, even the thought of these foods will start the tears flowing. But, it's been almost a year since my mother died and I will have to start facing things that I haven't been able to manage before. Like listening to music...reading the emails she sent to me...and of course, eating those lovely foods that she made for me. If I trust my memory correctly, I spent the majority of my childhood amid wonderful aromas of cooking ... tasting, helping. I thought everyone's mom carried a wooden spoon around with them...or got together in August to make sauce, and fig jam ... or that the women in every family gathered together at christmas to make the "cose dolce" - the lacy fig-cookies made by hand and carved with teensy knives. No, it wasn't everyone, I soon found out when I met american kids in school. It was just lucky lucky me.
When I came home from school, I ate Tomato-Rubbed Bread while they ate peanut-butter-and-jelly. It is one of those delicious, magical foods of my childhood that I will never forget.
Tomato-Rubbed Bread
So I've jazzed this up a little bit by using big, square slices of fresh bread from the bakery. Normally, you'd split a loaf of Italian bread in half lengthwise and start with that...use what you have, as long as its good. Sprinkle over a bit of good olive oil and either grill it in a grill pan or put it on a tray under the broiler until it gets nice and toasty. Take a half clove of garlic and when you're done toasting, rub the bread lightly with it. Cut a ripe plum tomato in half and squish it down into the bread, rubbing it up and down the length of the bread until you're left with mostly skin. Repeat on the other half. Sprinkle with sea salt.
Do not underestimate the simplicity of this recipe -- it is wonderful.
technorati tag Dishes+of+Comfort
