Fontina Cheese

It’s Monday’s Comfort Food. Nothing says comfort like cheese and bread, but this dish will knock your socks off.

It comes from the same cookbook where I got those Fleur de Sel caramels that will put you into a coma because you want to eat too many. I’m pretty sure you might want to pick up Barefoot Contessa, how easy is that? by Ina Garten.

My daughter Jessica had been wanting to learn a few cooking tips from her momma, but she’s always busy. However, she was home when I decided to make this dish and since she’s a vegetarian, it was right up her alley.

It’s so simple… easy, just like the book title says, that she could even do it, and she did, mostly. She bought the cheese, cut it up in cubes, put it in the pan. I drizzled the olive oil over it and sprinkled the rosemary, thyme, kosher salt and pepper. Jessica could have. Oh, I made the bread too. And I put the pan under the broiler until the cheese melted and started to brown. I also dropped the pan on the floor, screamed and Jessica came running thinking I hurt myself. Guess I should have let her do it all.

Just a tip, you might want to wear oven mitts on both of your hands in the event your one hand isn’t quite capable of holding the heavy pan and it starts to turn. If your other hand had a mitt on, it could just grab it. I at least had enough sense not to grab the just-out-of-the-oven pan with hot sizzling cheese with my bare hand. In slow motion the cheese slid out of the pan and plopped onto the floor. I grabbed a spatula and scooped it back into the pan. I had just swept the floor, so I didn’t think it would hurt.

Here’s the end result.

It would’ve looked prettier had I not dumped half of it onto the floor. It didn’t seem to have any affect on the taste as Jessica and I gobbled up as much as we could, which was about half. When my husband got home, he ate the other half. And yeah, I told him I had dropped it on the floor. And it was so good that I wouldn’t have cared if I had pulled out a cat hair from my mouth.

Ingredients:
Italian Fontina Cheese
Bread
Spices

Rating & Type: EE/V

Sunday Bread

One—okay two—staples that went with every meal when I was growing up was bread and butter or gravy bread. And how I loved both, especially gravy bread. I’m not sure if that was to help fill us up due to budget restrictions or if it was just something my mom made because she liked it or to please my dad.

Boiled potatoes seemed to be another thing one could count on. I liked mashed potatoes and would whine when boiled potatoes were set on the table. I was told, “Just mash them with your fork and put some butter on them.”—as if that really did the trick.

My mom was the best home-made bread maker. We’d come home from school and that was our snack sometimes – fresh out of the oven, butter melting all over it.

My younger sister, Ruthie runs a close second in making bread. I’ve failed miserably at it so many times, I gave up until Ruthie found a new way of making bread and shared it with me. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day was something Ruthie didn’t think was possible, but she swears by it and won’t go back to the traditional way of making bread with kneading, rising, punching, and more rising.

Before the bread is baked...

Fresh out of the oven...

Okay, bread isn’t a dinner, but I’ll bet there’s a lot of us out there who could make a meal on bread—especially home made—still warm with melted butter.

And if you’re really not into healthy eating, whip up some gravy and feel the comfort just ooze into the arteries of your soul.

Ingredients:
Bread
Butter
Gravy

Rating & Type: EE or NSE/V