Five Valentine-red Bow Ties o’ the Day are proud to provide a recipe we think you’ll find tasty. It’s cheesy and bready. Who could find fault with that?
Actually, I really can’t call this a “recipe.” Mom’s recipes ranged from easy-peasy to intricate and near-impossible. This is a simple one. Three ingredients are all you need. Oh, and you’ll also need an oven.
1 loaf of French bread. 1 stick or 1/2 stick of butter. And one jar of Kraft Old English Spread.
Lay a sheet of foil across a cookie sheet. You do not want to have to clean baked-on cheese off your cookie sheet. Use the foil.
Hand-mix the cheese spread and butter together. Mom generally uses the whole stick of butter, although I’ve seen her use just half a stick. I always use just the half.
Skin ALL the crust off the bread. Ditch the crust.
Cover the entire loaf of bread with the cheese/butter spread. Spread it as evenly as you can. Since the size of French bread loaves vary, you might or might not use the entire amount of spread. If you want a thin layer of cheese on the entire loaf, you’ll probably have enough to cover two loaves.
Throw the loaf on your foil, and bake for 10-ish minutes at 350 degrees. Ovens vary, you know.
Although it’s this simple to make, it’s important to keep an eye on the browning of the cheese. You need to experiment with how crispy/browned you want the top. You do not want the entire loaf crispy/browned. Well, maybe you do. I suggest experimenting many times with different levels of crispy/brown. That gives you an excuse to eat a ton of cheese bread.
The other thing you’ll want to experiment with is how thick you want your cheese spread layer to be.
I recommend you slice the cheese bread (an electric knife works best) while it’s still hot. And put it on the table hot. But it’s still yummy when it has cooled off.
As any good cook knows, even with an easy recipe the taste is in the details. Mom’s excellent cooking was the result of tweaking good recipes to make them better, and her knack for timing. She cooked primarily by sight, smell, and taste. Measuring ingredients wasn’t much of a concern to her. She guesstimated a lot.
That’s what makes it difficult to pin down her actual recipes. If someone wanted a recipe, she’d give them one, but she also invited them to come to the house while she made what they were asking about. Her candy-type creations are especially almost impossible to re-create, even if you watched her make it and tried to write everything down. She was always changing the way she did it or adding a new twist or a different ingredient. [I’ll write more about Mom’s recipe collection and locating specific recipes in another post.]
Oh. About the potato chips and Diet Coke in the photo. Those are to snack on while you make cheese bread.