Dear Reader,
I hope you’ve had a good week.
I have had a mixed week, but in terms of work, I’m like a pig in mud.
During the week, Lorraine from Not Quite Nigella wrote about her garlic bread with ham and cheese. It looked very fancy, and I’m sure it’s decadently delicious. Lorraine’s cooking always looks amazing and reads fantastically.
I thought I’d make a Yummy Lummy version. When I compare what Lorraine does and what I do, I reckon I’m on the bogan and coarse end of a scale that extends up to refinement and sophistication; my version is cheap and cheerful. Because I’m me, I’m using bacon rather than ham.
Recipe
Equipment
- Toaster oven
Ingredients
- Bread roll. The bread I’m using is a cheap sourdough roll from Coles. I buy three in a packet and freeze them. This one has been frozen for a few weeks, so it isn’t at its best.
- Butter. I usually buy Lurpak® because I like it, so that’s what I’ve used.
- Garlic. I had a tube of garlic purée in the refrigerator plus some garlic powder as Lorraine recommends. It’s within its use-by date. If you wanted to you could buy fresh garlic, peel it, and then mince it with a sharp knife.
- Bacon. I bought a rasher of streaky bacon from the delicatessen section in Coles.
- Chives. I bought a bunch from Coles.
- Cheese. I like the Devondale three-cheese bag, which comes grated. I’m sure it has enough antifungal chemicals to treat a yeast infection. (That’s a joke, pre-grated cheese needs to be sold with antifungal chemicals, but the amount would hardly treat a good going yeast infection.)
Instructions
- Thaw the bread. I took the roll out of the freezer in the morning, put it into a Ziplock bag, and left it on a kitchen bench all day.
- Soften the butter. I cut off a hunk of butter and left it on a plate on the kitchen bench for about an hour.
- Mix the garlic and butter. When the butter is soft, mix in the garlic purée. Use as much as you like or can tolerate. I live alone, so there was quite a lot of garlic.
- Chop the chives and fold that into the garlic butter.
- Like Lorraine I melted the garlic butter. I used microwave radiation.
- Cut the bacon. Eyeball the width of the bread roll and cut the bacon to the same length.
- Cut the bread through to the crust on the bottom. Make the slices as thick or as thin as you like.
- Unlike Lorraine who used a brush I used a teaspoon to spoon the garlic butter into the cut surfaces of the bread.
- Insert the bacon between the cut surfaces of the bread.
- Place the bread on some aluminium foil and place a strip of baking paper over the top and close the foil around the bread. Bake for about 20 minutes at 200 °C.
- Pull the garlic bread out of the oven, open the foil, and remove the baking paper. Add the grated cheese over the bread roll and put some between the cut surfaces of the bread on either side of the bacon.
- Place the garlic bread into the oven (with an open surface) until the cheese has melted and turned golden brown.
- Remove the garlic bread and allow it to cool enough to pull apart with naked fingertips.
- Give thanks to the Lord.
- Consume
- I ate the garlic bread with lamb shanks.
Thoughts on the garlic bread
I liked it. It was buttery and cheesy and it had bacon. What more could you want? It probably also had enough cholesterol and other lipids to ensure a disgusting lipæmic layer if I collected a tube of blood and subjected it to centrifugal force in a centrifuge. I expect, Lorraine’s had better mouthfeel and flavour (take a look at how she made hers and you’ll see why).
I added a lot of garlic powder and garlic purée so tomorrow will be interesting at church. My pores will exude garlic.
Photographs
Endnotes
Pig in mud. Happy, joyful, and contented.
Bogan. Oxford Dictionary of English | bogan / ˈbəʊɡ(ə)n / noun Australian New Zealand informal, derogatory an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status: some bogans yelled at us from their cars my family are culinary bogans. | ORIGIN 1980s: perhaps from the surname Bogan.
Antifungal microbial agents. I like the idea of using microorganisms which elaborate antifungal chemicals to preserve food.
