salsa fresca bruschetta with balsamic vinegar

what i love about living where i do is the availability of fresh produce all year round. i am so close to a lot of different small produce markets. there's a lot of them within a 10-mile radius of my house. but you know, it's a shame that sometimes, i am too lazy to drive even 5 or 10 minutes to go to those produce places. i would normally end up going to foodmax or raley's. i know, i suck. it's just so hard to make myself drive further when i know that raley's, though their prices are really inflated, is just down the street from me. i just hope that they support local produce *fingers crossed*.

anyway, i made this a week before finals and i thought that it's would be a really great snack, but it ended up being our dinner. at first i was thinking of making something else with the tomatoes but then i had a random craving for salsa. i tried making salsa few years ago, but it failed. it tasted bitter for some reason. i don't know why. oh wait, i think i remember now. i put it in the food processor and didn't stop it until it's almost mush. then i thought, oh maybe it'll be like those store bought salsa like pace. i was wrong. dead wrong. it was so bitter i couldn't make it get past the tip of my tongue. i was traumatized from then on, and thought that fresh salsa was really hard to do.

then i tried it again and added what i didn't a few years back. lime. i thought if only i put lime before, i wouldn't have spent so much money on store bought salsa in the last few years. but i've put all that behind me now and i am addicted to making my own salsa.

i was originally planning to just make chips from the soft tortilla that's inside the fridge, but i already bought french bread earlier, so i decided to use that. i feel like this is not so blog because it's so simple, but, what the heck, this blog is about food and what i eat and make, so i might as well share you the stories that surrounded it. and by the way, shawn liked this very much. he fought me for the last piece! so i just had ice cream to fill me up.

salsa fresca buschetta

what you need:

salsa fresca
3 roma tomatoes
1 small onion (i used half of a medium onion)
1 tsp of minced jalapeno (you can use more, i just can't handle heat very much)
1/4 cup chopped parsley
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste

bruschetta
crusty bread
garlic
olive oil
balsamic vinegar

what to do:

salsa fresca

dice tomatoes and finely dice onions. then put together everything in a large bowl, tomatoes, onion, jalapeno, parsley and lime juice. add salt and pepper if you like. as i have said before, taste as you go.

assemble the bruschetta
slice the crusty bread diagonally and put it in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes. then rub garlic on the bread. top it with the salsa and drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. that's it!!! enjoy!