Lisa Mushaw: Hi, I am Lisa Mushaw, owner of Treasures of Tuscany, an Epicurean Voyage. Today, we are talking about preparing Papaalpomodoro. Papaalpomodoro is tomato and bread soup. Right now, we are sauting the garlic and we are going to get ready to put the chopped tomatoes into the garlic-olive oil mixture.

So, all I am going to do is take my already chopped tomatoes and put them in. Turn this down, just a little bit, take it off the oven. And sometimes that happens. If your heat just gets too high, turn it down, take your pan off the stove and let it cool off for a second and then just simply put your pan back on the stove.

And you are going to go ahead now, and put the basal in and this is two bunch of the basal and like I told you earlier, I am a big basal fan so a little extra basal isn t going to hurt anything. And you simply just going to tear off the leaves and put them in.

This is cooking down so if you want to tear them and break them up even further, please feel free to do so, but you certainly don t have to. But you do want to make sure that you do not get the stems in there. So I am just pulling the leaves off the stem and throwing it into the dish. And the basal too has a wonderful smell, right now, you really can smell the garlic and the olive oil and the tomato and the basal. And the great thing too is, reason that you do not want to use too much garlic in this recipe is because you do not want it to overpower the rest of the ingredients. In Tuscany, that s a big thing, they don t over salt and they don t over garlic. Like we have it, and say sometimes to do here in the stage. They want to be able to taste each ingredient that you are using. And then we are going to be able to do that right here, all right.

So, I have used my bunch of basal and now I am just going to stir, I am going to just go ahead and stir the basal into the tomato and garlic mixture. And then this is going to saut and cook down for about 20-25 minutes and so, all the tomatoes are crushed and it s almost looking like a soup. The tomatoes will be liquefied.

And at this point also, I am going to go ahead and add the salt and pepper. You get a salt and pepper to taste and again like I said earlier, I believe in layering, so right now I am putting in pepper and salt and I will do it again towards the end, when we are adding the bread mixture. Okay, and I am going to stir this in a little bit. Also this is optional, but when you are cooking with tomatoes a lot times, the acid can be a little bit too high and I don t want to make this into a sugary dish by any such imagination, but to add just a pinch of sugar and I do mean just a pinch, just to balance out some of the acid, it s not bad then. So, now I am going to stir this thing again, and then we are just going to go ahead and let this cook down like I said earlier, for about 20-25 minutes.