Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Stuffed Cheesy Bread on Crack, found over at Food Wanderings in Asia. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice. I’m pretty sure I spotted it on Pinterest and I was instantly hungry for cheesy bread. Bread and garlic and cheese and butter? Yes, please!

The ingredients:

Loaf of Italian bread, garlic, olive oil, dijon mustard, poppy seeds, and cheese. What the recipe calls for, but I left out on purpose: parsley. I just cannot stand the stuff. It tastes like dirt to me. Blech.

What the recipe calls for, but I left out accidentally: minced onion. Wah! I love onion! How did I forget the onion? HOWWWWW?!

Melt your butter and stir in your garlic, olive oil, mustard, and poppy seeds. Also your onion (if you’re not a stupidhead who spaced on that particular ingredient) and parsley (if you like the taste of dirt).

Cut your loaf of bread in X slices without cutting all the way through. Basically, I did diagonal slices one way, and then the other way making big Xs. X’s. Exes? YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

The annoying part of this recipe is that the butter, olive oil, etc mixture doesn’t stay mixed. The instant you stop stirring, the garlic and everything else drops to the bottom of the bowl or measuring cup or whatever you’re mixing it in. So when you do the next step – pouring the butter mixture into the cuts and over the top of the bread using a spoon – you’ve got to continually stir. It’s very annoying, especially if you’re a klutz who ends up with shit all over the front of her shirt when she stirs stuff. Grrrr.

Oh, and I found it easiest to do all this preparation on a big piece of tin foil, since you’re going to be wrapping the bread in tin foil to bake it, anyway. Because if I’d poured the butter stuff over the top and then had to move the bread to the tin foil, there would have been a big ol’ hissy fit going on around this here place.

Stuff the cheese in the cracks the best that you can.

Wrap the bread in foil and place on your CLEAN but STAINED baking sheet, and bake for 15-20 (I went for 20) minutes.

Remove the foil – or, in my case, unwrap the foil from the top of the bread – and bake for another 10 minutes.

This is what it looked like after 20 minutes, when I unwrapped it.

And when the loaf was done.

Pardon the crappy pictures – the sun hasn’t shined here for a million years, and I don’t think it’s ever going to shine again and it’s driving me NUTS.

“I AM your sunshine. Bitch.”

The verdict? It was really damn damn DAMN good. I’ll definitely be making this again – hopefully remembering the onion – though I think that next time I’ll use a smaller loaf. It’s just the two of us here, and I sensed that rewarmed cheesy bread might not be the best thing (although now that I’ve typed that out, it sounds REALLY freakin’ good, and I could shoot myself for not saving it), so the rest went to the chickens, who thought it was AWESOME.

Two thumbs up – and if you’re the sort of person who has Super Bowl parties (I’ve been to one Superbowl party in my life. Bears vs. Patriots, Superbowl XX. I could probably still sing about half the Super Bowl Shuffle if I had to.), this would be an ideal snack food to serve. I’d make more than one loaf, though. You don’t want to end up in the emergency room ’cause there was a kerfuffle over the cheesy bread.

(MY SUPER BOWL SHUFFLE WILL SET YOU FREE!)

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Nance’s Take:

When Robyn sent this recipe out as one of her choices I was pretty sure that even if I didn’t care for it, my family, being the garlic bread eating motherfuckers that they are, would love it. I like garlic bread well enough (who doesn’t?), but given the choice the only thing I really like on my Italian bread is good ol’ fashion butter. Not margarine. Not oleo (Shirley). Not spread. Just plain butter.

Did I mention I like butter?

Now having said all that, I was kind of nervous about this recipe because Shirley (aka: my mom) is a hater of the white cheese. You all may think I was joking about the murdering mozzarella, but I wasn’t. The woman has white cheese issues. I wanted to stick as close to the recipe as I could so I was worried that she would hate it based on the white cheese alone.

The recipe is easy enough. You start out with a loaf of Italian Bread. 5-½ lb. dog for scale.

An important lesson is to be learned here. When you send your husband out for a block of cheddar cheese…

make sure you designate how much of it you will need. I have a sneaky feeling that this household is going to be constipated for weeks.

I made him do the grating because OH, HELL NO! I’m not grating 5 pounds of cheese. Now I have to decide if it’s a good idea to freeze it or not. I want to just throw it into bags and freeze it until I need it, but I’m afraid of it losing something in the process. If anybody has done it, please let me know!

BUTTAH!

I mixed everything up in the same measuring cup that I melted the butter in.  I left out the poppy seeds because I just couldn’t be arsed to go out to the store and buy them.

My mother, God bless her, was helping me by taking pictures with my camera. She was snapping away when I finally said, “Are you even focusing on anything?” She forgot. Heh.

It didn’t matter because I was truly struggling to get that shit in there with a spoon.

I pretty much gave up because I was getting annoyed. I mean, really, who in the hell cuts diamonds into their garlic bread anyway?

Shirley showed me how she would do it, by holding the bread open with a spreader and then pouring it in, so that knocked about 7 hours off of my total kitchen time. I’m such a dumb-ass sometimes.

I just used my hands to stuff the cheeses in (I used 1/2 sharp cheddar and 1/2 monterey jack).  Your hands are THE BEST tools ever made. Except for my left hand. It struggles.

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven. My mother wanted to add more parsley. I told her no because I figured the husband wouldn’t touch it for fear he might be getting vegetables.  Heh.

This is what it looked like when we took it out of the oven (before we put it back in for the extra 10 minutes). If you look closely, you can see where there are missing pieces of bread. That would be Shirley who is like a child and couldn’t wait until it was finished.

This is where I tried to take an artistic shot. And failed.

Finally. Everyone loved it and I can honestly say that I ruined a good steak dinner I was supposed to be eating because I filled up on this stuff so much. But I cannot imagine having this along with a meal because it’s just too much. My mom was going up to my aunt’s house to play cards that night and I had her take what was left with her. Everyone up there really liked it, too.

Robyn picked a winner!