Caprese-ious

"Once upon a time I had plenty of nothing, which was fine with me because I had rhythm, music, love, the sun, the stars, and the moon above. Then time went by and now I've got plenty of plenty, which is fine with me because I've still got love and still got rhythm, but look at what I've got to go with 'em!" -- Stephen Sondheim

Every Sunday morning in the late summer, I go out to the backyard to pick tomatoes and basil for the day's meal. I can't use our tomatoes for the gravy -- our plants thrive in joint-compound buckets and don't yield nearly enough fruit for that -- but they're sweet, fleshy, and seedless enough to make excellent caprese salad.

Caprese salad is probably the easiest Italian mainstay imaginable. Slice two tomatoes, arrange the slices prettily on a plate, top with a handful of torn-up fresh basil leaves, slices of mozzarella, and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and serve. It's simple yet classic, the flavors are clean, and it showcases seasonal items to perfection -- all of which, in my book, illustrate the very essence of proper Italian cooking. And maybe I'm biased, but I prefer caprese salad the way I make it, in its purest form, using tomatoes and basil I grow myself, fresh mozzarella from Rosario's, and olive oil personally pressed by a cousin in Abruzzi.

Unfortunately, my family's balsamic vinegar tastes fell to the mercy of Costco Syndrome: someone bought a million-gallon jug of it somewhere along the line and we lived off of it for far too many years. Then, when I was finally old enough to recognize the syrupy beauty of a good balsamic, I became a poor college student and was forced to live off of economy brands once again. Thus, I became an expert at preparing reductions -- even the nastiest balsamic becomes palatable if you boil it down enough.

This morning, I prepared my caprese salad with a recent acquisition: fig-infused balsamic vinegar from Oliviers & Co. It's thick, it's syrupy, it's sweet, it's complex, and an eight-ounce bottle of it cost me a quarter of a day's salary. It's far removed from the simplicity of my other ingredients, but it produced the best caprese salad I've ever experienced in my life. It felt incredibly strange pairing such a precious, extravagant ingredient with things I nurtured from seedlings, but it'll be a long time before I resort to reductions again.