I found a way to make my tomatoes taste ten times better and it simply involves adding two ingredients I had sitting in my cupboard. Tomatoes and I have a strange relationship. I love tomato sauce and even tomato soup but there is something about a raw tomato that I am not a fan of, and I tend to avoid incorporating it into things like salads, sandwiches and burgers. But I recently discovered that they taste amazing when I add two other ingredients that I tend to always have in my kitchen cupboard.
Recently, I hosted a BBQ with friends and tomatoes were bought so that people could enjoy them on burgers and hotdogs, and I even made a tasty Caprese salad. As per usual, there were plenty of leftovers, one of them being a Monte Rosa tomato. I couldn’t just throw it away but I also wasn’t planning to make a pasta dish any time soon, so I needed to come up with a way of enjoying it as it was. So, I decided to look through my kitchen to see what I could add to it to enjoy it as a snack.
After landing on dried basil and some olive oil, I was left more than impressed by the flavours together. As we are all well aware, these three things (tomaoes, basil and olive oil) are staples together and make for a tasty Italian dining experience.
And let’s be real with each other, tomatoes on their own are pretty bland. They are not something that I or many other people would be in a rush to just cut up and eat.
So, chopped my tomato into slices and when I was left with just the top around the stem, I diced it up and threw that on top. After that, I went in with my olive oil and drizzled a generous amount over the tomatoes, which I had laid out on a plate.
While I didn’t have any fresh basil (this would have really elevated this snack), I did have a jar of dried basil so I sprinkled that on top. I went by eye but made sure to spread it evenly around the tomatoes, making sure no spot was overpowered or no spot was left unseasoned.
I have to say, I really enjoyed this snack and it is something I would do again if I had left over tomatoes after a dinner party or a BBQ. What was even better was I was left with the tomato juice, oil and basil on my plate after I was done eating the tomato.
So the only logical (and delicious) thing to do here was to grab some bread, which was also left over from the BBQ, and use it to soak up what was left on the plate. At this stage, I added a small bit of salt and pepper to really amp things up.
