Insalata Caprese

Sounds fancy and complicated, right? It's not. But it's delicious.

You don't need balsamic for this. You just need to throw the following on a plate. We'll talk "lowbrow substitutions" in a moment:

Two roma tomatoes, sliced
10-12 leaves fresh basil, whole
5-6 slices fresh mozzarella (1/4 inch slices work well)
2 tbsp olive oil, drizzled over salad
1/2 tsp cracked black pepper, or to taste
Salt to taste (4-5 good shakes)

Serve with:
Toasted grocery store baguette, halved and sliced into 4-inch pieces and drizzled with olive oil before toasting (pop into 325-degree oven for about 8 minutes, olive oil side up)

Arrange baguette pieces around plate and sprinkle whole plate with your favorite Italian seasoning blend.

Huzzah. Dinner. And it took less than ten minutes, provided you toasted the baguette bits first.

Now, here's what you can and can't do with this recipe, based upon what you have. I've experimented with this.

1) Bread: don't worry about this if you're not in a bread kind of mood. The salad is wonderful on its own.
2) Mozzarella: food snobs will hate me for saying this, but I've made this with shredded generic mozzarella before, about 1/4 cup, and it's still really, really good.
3) Tomatoes: I discovered tonight that my romas had gone bad. So, wanting some insalata caprese very badly nonetheless, I actually plated a half a can of diced tomatoes instead, and followed the rest of this recipe. It was still outstanding, and easy to pile onto the bread. Again, the snobs will hate me, but in this economy, you can't listen to the snobs so much.
4) Fresh basil: Do not substitute dry for this. It will not be anything like the intended product. The basil makes it. This is the lone no-no substitution in the recipe.
5) Olive oil. All out? I'll bet you have Italian dressing on hand. Don't drizzle too much on - leave it to about a tablespoon - and forget the Italian seasoning part.

Canned tomatoes? Shredded grocery-store mozzarella? Italian dressing? Can you still impress someone with that? Yes. As long as you have fresh basil.

-A.