Bruschetta con peperoni pomodori campanili e shish kebab

"In Italy they add work and life onto food and wine" - Robin Leach

I love the quote above and having witnessed this in Italy, I would say if you dare to eat, eat like the Italians, nothing in moderation ever, never :) and that's my motto for cooking as well.

I turn 31 tomorrow and I suddenly realized that one activity I have pursued for most of my life (21 years should be most right?) is cooking (obsessing about cooking). I began cooking when I was 10 and I have never stopped enjoying it. Unlike many who say they began cooking after marriage, I was momma's sous chef at 10 :). But my tasks then were limited to chopping and peeling. And then one fine day ( 3 months after the peeling business) I noticed this calendar back home with few recipes on each page. My momma was no different from me (when it came to collecting recipes) and we had no internet those days so she managed to get recipes on calendars, magazines and books and she maintained a book with these recipes cut out and neatly pasted. And while skimming through the recipes on this calendar, I came across this recipe of  cantonese fried rice. Having tasted something at a party a week before this incident, I thought this could be the closest to what the recipe at the party would have been. And since we had frozen veggies, sausages and eggs in our refrigerator all the time, I rolled up my sleeves and made my first ever dish for mom. I remember waiting eagerly for mom to return from work to exhibit my skills.

 Mom tasted the rice and was silent for a minute, she did that always and I knew she was trying to analyse or rather retrace the steps I must have taken to cook this dish. " The rice needs to be undercooked a bit and you need to add salt to the eggs before scrambling", is all she said and before leaving the room she said  'good job' in a low tone. And that's the way she compliments anyone, she is hard to please but I took that as a 'phenomenal wow' and proceeded. Years down the lane we still disagree on a lot of stuff in the kitchen but I am grateful to her for having let me experiment and learn cooking with her in my formative years. I guess a lot of her traits in the kitchen have rubbed off onto me. I  have no patience for people who are slow in the kitchen, for people who don't follow my instructions or ask me to repeat instructions, I don't amend my cooking plans, I am a strong critic and I keep promising myself each day that I will change these behaviours in the kitchen and that I wont become a Gordon Ramsay or my mom ! I hope I got time to change that before Sarah becomes my sous chef. 

Now that's a lot of writeup for a food blog and I have no clue if you read this people, so please tell me.

The last time I blogged a recipe of bruschetta here I went overboard. I added a lot of cheese and my pics were horrible. View link http://ooonuready.blogspot.in/2011/05/bruschetta-with-sausages.html. I thought of taking that post off and replacing it with this but then my hubby reminded me, that I should not forget my humble beginnings. So I have left that post there. We are trying to avoid cheese these days and this bruschetta therefore was a new beginning and I guess it worked. So here's a healthy( read reincarnated) bruschetta from my kitchen.

Ingredients for Bruschetta con peperoni pomodori campanili e shish kebab

Baguette- 1

Shish kebab- 1

Olive oil- 3 tbsp ( 2 tbsp for frying the kebab and tossing the veggies)

Tomatoes- 2

Bell pepper- 1

Garlic- 2

Salt- to taste

Pepper- a dash

Sweet basil- a pinch

 

Directions

Cut the baguette into 1 inch thick slices diagonally. Rub some salt, garlic and olive oil onto the slices. Chop the other ingredients roughly. In a skillet add a tbsp of olive oil and toss the ingredients. Saute them or toss them around for 2-3 minutes. You want the rawness to dissipate but the ingredients should not cook. Take the skillet off the flame and spoon the ingredients onto the sliced and herbed baguettes. Sprinkle some basil, salt and pepper. Toast the bruschetta's in   your oven at 180 degrees for 5 minutes. Or you could toast the slices first and then top them with the filling. I do them both ways depending on my mood. But this time I toasted the slices with ingredients because I wanted the ingredients to cook a bit more.

 I have a food theme movie review coming up soon, so keep reading and check out this space once in every five days.