Stone Lantern

Recently, my mother has re-taught me to make native bread. I have built upon this knowledge and twice used it to make delicious garlic bread with cheese.  When I say delicious, it is not an opinion, it is fact. Three people have told me so.

I will now teach you to be cool like me.

Equipment:

• frying pan
• source of heat (stove, fire, several lighters taped together)
• spatula
• spoon
• big mixing bowl
• tiny mixing bowl
• G.I. Joe with kung-fu grip
• bread knife
• flat pan (pizza tray, cookie sheet)
• cutting board
• vegetable cutting knife

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of flour
• 3 tsp baking powder (sorta heaping)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups of water (just enough to make it sticky is what you want)
• margarine (you can use butter if there is something wrong with you)
• clove of garlic
• cheese (mozzarella, cheddar or anything that shreds or spreads nice)

Instructions:

1. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together in the large mixing bowl. Mix it well while it is dry.
2. Add the water slowly. Don’t add all of the water right away. You just want enough water in there to make all of the dough sticky, but not runny. Stir it all up with your spoon until it is well mixed and has a uniform consistency of something you wouldn’t want to put your hand in.
3. Melt some margarine into the frying pan, with the stove element on medium. If you are using a campfire, set it to “two logs”.
4. Drop the dough into the frying pan and mush it down into a circle.
5. Let it cook for 15 minutes on that side.
6. Set the stove to low and flip the bread. To get the bread to be brown on both sides, you need to add more margarine to the pan when flipping.
7. Let it cook for 30 minutes on that side.
8. Set G.I. Joe to watch the bread so it isn’t invaded by Cobra. It’s best to set him up somewhere high, so he can look down on the pan. If you don’t have a conveniently high shelf, you can tie him to the handle of the fridge.
9. Meanwhile, to make the garlic butter you need to remove the skin from the clove of garlic. I do this by squishing the clove with the side of a large knife and pulling off the parts of the skin that look inedible. I also yank out the green core because it looks funny.
10. Chop up the clove into little chunks. You could try to slice the garlic so thin it melts in the pan and impress Ray Liotta, but he doesn’t really care and won’t return your emails. Little chunks is better because they mix well.
11. Mix the garlic and some margarine in the little mixing bowl. I don’t know how much margarine as I’ve never measured, but let’s say about 2-3 tablespoons.
12. When the bread is done cooking, pull it out of the pan and let it cool for a few minutes. You will notice one side of the bread wheel is soft (the fifteen minute side) and one side is hard (the thirty minute side). You will use the soft side for this recipe.
13. Take the bread wheel and cut it lengthwise, removing the hard crust. Cut pretty close to the hard crust as it isn’t the part of bread you are interested in. (Don’t throw it away though. You can slap some pizza sauce and toppings on it for a quick and crunchy pizza bread.) What you should have left is a thick bread with a soft crust on the bottom.
14. Spread your garlic butter over the exposed, warm bread. It should completely cover the surface and glisten wetly.
15. Shred the cheese you want to use and sprinkle it generously over the bread.
16. Let the bread stand like that for about ten minutes. This gives the garlic butter a good chance to soak in. Because we have a thick crust on the bottom, you don’t need to worry about it leaking out.
17. Place the bread on the flat pan and throw it in the oven at about 350 for a few minutes. Just long enough to melt the cheese.

What you will end up with is a delicious, bland looking loaf of cheesy garlic bread using no yeast.  If you want to spice up the breads visual appeal, just sprinkle it with something colourful, like parsley or crayola.

This makes enough garlic bread for four people, two of whom can be fat. If you want to make a smaller loaf, only use 1 cup of flour, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 cup of water and 1/3 tsp of salt.

What I hope you’ve learned from this blog today is that knowing is half the battle, knowledge is power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, kill a librarian.