The Bread That Could Kill You and Other Things...

No one who knows me could ever say that I am a fan of moderation. It's part of my personality to be ALL or nothing. It's just who I am. With that in mind, you may discern the joy I get when I have a good piece of garlic cheese bread. I mean, you start with bread, which I love. Add butter (c'mon, I'm an Easterday... nuff said.) and garlic, which I also love, and then top it off with cheese. In truth, the only thing that could make those things better is bacon. Hmmmm... I may have to make that happen...

Anyway, when I saw the recipe for Pasta alla Marlboro Man on Pioneer Woman's site I thought, "Hmm, that looks good. Wait. What is that next to the bowl? Garlic Cheese Bread? Holy Moly!" Really, that's almost verbatim what I thought. An aside: can a thought be 'verbatim' if it isn't verbalized? Just wondering...

In the past 6 days of NFA I have repeatedly made the exact same mistake at dinner making time. So far, I have failed to read the recipe fully and fully understand the process that will get that dinner made. Case in point: 2 half chicken breasts does not mean 4 whole chicken breasts. On the day that I made this, the whole family was playing outside with a couple of the neighbor families. Let me just take this time to say that I LOVE having my house and I LOVE the neighborhood it's in and I LOVE having neighbors! I'm glad I got that out there.

Well, on said day, I came inside around 5:45 to start dinner. I know, I know, that's a little late to start on dinner, but I thought it was a fast one. I mean, it's pasta with meat sauce. Well, first I had to clean the kitchen. You see, a few days ago, my amazing wonderful talented husband lost a bet to me. So, it's been up to him to do the dishes. So I had to clean the kitchen. I'll leave you to figure out the finer details of that story. Anyway, when I read this recipe, I realized it takes an hour to cook... awesome. But it was a nice day... blah blah blah. The boys were having fun outside, it's ok if they go to bed a little late. We ate at 8:15. Yowza! But this blog isn't sposed to be the wordy, long winded story of my life. Let's get to the food, shall we?

This pasta sauce was mostly meat. I'm serious. It was 2 lbs. of meat and two cans of whole tomatoes. It was good. The picture is a little red... Don't blame me, I don't have Photoshop like all the cool kids.

The bread is really the star of this show... let's have a look.

Again with the direction reading... it said to mince the green onions and I only chopped them so the onion flavor was a little intense. In fact the whole thing was a little intense.

I am not one of those "healthy" people. I promise you. I should have loved this bread. It has all my favorites on it. With one glaring exception. Mayonaise. In all my years, I have never been able to get past the ingredient list of this condiment. Raw egg, oil, and vinegar. GUH- ROHSE! If I don't know that it's in something, I can handle mayo. However, when I saw that this cheese bread had mayo in it, I tried real hard to like it. I determined in my heart to love it as much as my own wonderful cheese bread.

PW is not known for her healthy dishes. I daresay she has a few, but this is not one of them. This bread has a grand total of 3 1/2 cups of cheese, a whole stick of butter and that nefarious 1/2 cup of mayo. Along with 4 cloves of garlic. I can feel my arteries closing just writing about it. I wasn't lying when I said that it was bread that could kill you.

I really was determined to like it, but knowing that there was warm mayonaise in it really just put it over the edge for me. I am honestly sad that I didn't love it. Maybe someday, I'll try it again with no mayo and (if you ever say I said this, I'll deny it and kill you) less butter. I must be getting old...

All in all, the pasta was a winner and the bread was a winner with my family.

Next up, Pampered Chef Cool and Crunchy Chicken Tacos... here's a hint: AWESOME!