Now another easy recipe straight from the Mezzogiorno.
Pane Cotto (cooked bread)
Ingredients
> 1/4th loaf of old, dry bread (preferably grey to brown)
>Salt
>2 cloves of garlic
>Parsley
>Dried oregano
>Parmigiano or Gran Padano
>Olive oil
>Basil leaves
>Dried thyme
>Optional: crushed red pepper (if you like it hot), long sweet green peppers (for extra veggies and taste
So what's going to happen is, we're going to straight up cook the old bread.
This is REAL peasant food, where one could add additional stuff laying around in their garden (I added rocket leaves and sweet green peppers when there were some in the garden, as an example).
What to do
>Boil water
>Add salt until it tastes mildly salty (don't be afraid to add a hand of salt)
>Clean and cut the 2 cloves of garlic into big, coarse pieces
>Clean the fresh herbs (basil leaves and parsley), shred them in coarse pieces with your hand and add them to the boiling water
>Add a small hand of dried oregano and thyme
>Once the water is smelling like a herbal tea/broth add the old bread (make sure they're all the same size!)
>Take out the bread and the herbs with a skimmer once the bread is getting soggy
>Garnish with a lot of olive oil and some FRESHLY grated Parmigiano/Gran Padano and optionally crushed red pepper
Do note that every type of bread is different, real white bread with lots of holes will fill up in a minute with water while dense brown breads need smaller pieces and more time.
You can easily pimp this recipe by using good soup stock to cook the bread in instead of making the pauper broth I described.
It's a very good Lent recipe that will fill you up very easily due to the bread soaking up all the water.