I love Ital­ian cui­sine. I love its rus­tic acces­si­ble prepa­ra­tion, pre­sen­ta­tion and use of fresh ingre­di­ents, Yes, FRESH ingredients.

Here’s the rub. Herbs. I love fresh herbs and I usu­ally swear by them. A recipe isn’t the same — I’d preach to you!

Well, herbs are not cheap and they are so frag­ile. I always feel bad throw­ing away the lit­tle wilted green leaves of lovely basil.

This past week, I received my quar­terly ship­ment from Styrker Wine Club. I knew I had a nice bot­tle of Speedy Creek Caber­net and I really wanted a bit more than chips and cheese dip to accom­pany it. Bruschetta Cap­rese imme­di­ately came to mind.

When I reached for the fresh basil, I winged a bit. I knew I wouldn’t fin­ish a bot­tle of wine and all the toma­toes this evening. The basil leaves would be wilted in a few days. I looked at the tube of basil. I’d seen it before, I didn’t roll my eyes at it then, but I’d still bought the fresh basil.

This time  I thought, hmm, I won­der if the tube of basil would be all that bad. No, I use FRESH ingre­di­ents.  Put back the tube. Reach for the fresh basil leaves.

$1.99 for a small pack of leaves. $3.99 for a tube. Since I was using small round of bread and not mak­ing a sand­wich, I wouldn’t be using the leaves that quickly. One leave per round wouldn’t go that far.

I reach for tube. I’ll last longer I “says” to myself.  Obvi­ously, on a sub­con­scious level, I wanted to check it out. So, I bought the Tube O’Basil.

Well, I’m here to say, it’s not bad. Skip read­ing the ingre­di­ents. It’s not going to say– Ingre­di­ents: Fresh Basil Only. There  are  preser­v­a­tives involved– none that I couldn’t pro­nounce– so, how bad could they be? That is a rhetor­i­cal question.

I toasted small rounds of french bread, brushed with yummy olive oil, a squirt and shmeer of basil, a small boc­concini round, diced grape toma­toes with a dash of kosher salt, a twist of pep­per and another driz­zle of said, yummy olive oil.

I knew I could not tell any­one about this. You can keep a secret, can’t you.