When I was growing up, a version of this salad always made an appearance at our dinner table during Colorado's long, hot summers. My paternal grandmother wasn't actually Italian, but when she married my grandfather, she learned how to cook all of the Italian dishes that he loved. My grandmother would make this salad from vine-ripened tomatoes that my grandfather grew in his vegetable garden. What tomatoes were not used in salads and antipastos were canned to make pasta sauces during the cold winter months. My grandmother would always throw a few torn mint leaves from the garden into the salad, imbuing the simple red wine and olive oil vinaigrette with a lovely herbal flavor. When I was young, the thing that I liked best about this salad was the way the sweet juices of the fresh tomatoes melded with the red wine vinegar and olive oil. After the bowl was empty, I loved dipping crusty Italian bread (preferably the heel) into the last drops of vinagrette remaining in the bowl and eating the moistened bread. Indeed, my father and I used to fight about who got to eat the last serviing of salad from the salad bowl because that person was the lucky one who got to sop up any vinaigrette remaining in the bowl. <br /> <br />When I decided to replicate this dish, I opted to keep things simple as my grandmother and my mother used to do, but I played around with the idea of the bread. So that everyone could enjoy the fun of sopping, I use garlic rubbed croutons here. They are thoroughly mixed with the salad before serving, so that the bread soaks up some of the salad juices but the texture still remains a little crispy, not soggy. It is sort of a deconstructed panzanella. The garlic salt in the vinaigrette seem at first to be an odd ingredient, but my grandmother and mother always used it, and I have found that it does give the salad a distinctive flavor that I have found difficult to replicate.

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