"Cheese and Rye Casserole"

It was risky, but had this idea that I could make a Bay Leaves recipe for our family dinner. Up to this point, I had only made appetizers or desserts. If they were inedible, at least we didn't go hungry. But what about a casserole, for dinner? A casserole isn't just a passing snack, it is a commitment. You gotta throw a bunch of stuff in there, and then live off it for a few days -- like a hastily-packed suitcase. The components of a casserole typically don't offer much until they come together in a hot, gooey baked mass. The goal being to make large quantities of modest ingredients better in unison. There isn't anything particularly elegant about casseroles, but with enough cheese and hot sauce, it can't be a complete failure... RIGHT!?

The Recipe:

Cheese + Bread = Da culinary bomb. The magnitude of cheese in this recipe was enough to pique our interest. It sounded like a tasty sandwich in casserole form. I merely glanced at the ingredients before I decided to make this recipe, and had overlooked 3 cups milk. That's a lot of milk. As I got out my ingredients and realized this, I began to feel that familiar Bay Leaves concern of Oh dear, this is totally not going to work, but I pressed on.

The Players:

The Bay Leaves recipe for this casserole was not super detailed. It instructed to butter one side of the bread, and mustard the other, but there was no information on arrangement -- butter side up or down, how much butter? rather vague. My goal is to prepare these recipes as close to the instructions as possible, but I did have to do a little guesswork for this one. I decided to put the butter side down and the mustard side up, with 1/3 of the cheese between layers. I guess this isn't exactly what the recipe describes, as adding cheese is only mentioned for one layer, without mention of putting any on top. But it is a flippin' casserole, and you basically HAVE to put cheese on top! I ended up with three layers of bread and three layers of cheese. We'll just call it a triple-decker version.

For a moment, I strongly considered using less than 3 cups of milk. But I tried to set my experiences aside and trust the recipe. Someone was confident enough about these amounts to submit this to the Junior League of Panama City, by Jove! BAH, fine! I'll use 3 cups of milk!

Wren was getting stir crazy, and I asked her if she wanted to help. With the added height of a step stool, she was ready for some cooking action, which she interpreted as sticking slices of party rye under running water and then sucking said water back out of the bread. Look, toddler, whatever floats your boat, as long as you are being relatively still and not trying to seriously injure yourself.

I poured the milk mixture over the layers of bread and cheese, and an appetizing vision it was not. The snot-like eggy stuff just kinda pooled on top of the bread while the milk soaked in. After all the intricate buttering/mustarding of numerous slices of bread, pouring like 10 gallons of milk over it seemed dumb. I am the one who picked this recipe, so who is really the dumb one? WU'LL NEVER NO.

Ok, so I kinda fudged part of this recipe: The 8-hour rest. Maybe it would have made all the difference in the world, but I did not have time to let it sit for 8 hours. It was more like an hour and a half. Perhaps around the 6th hour, some sort of magical melding would have occurred that made it seem like there wasn't 3 whole cups of liquid in here. Maybe it just required 8 hours of evaporation to take place -- I don't know. But my family was getting hungry, and bedtime was quickly approaching, so I called it, and it was time to bake this bad boy. It was going to take an hour to bake anyway.

Around the midpoint of baking, it started to smell very alluring and a beautiful puffy crust started to emerge. Right when it came out, the crust on top looked pretty good, other than the mysterious white patches, which I was worried was still milk but was actually egg.

There was no time to lose, so Tim was called to the kitchen. Perhaps we should have waited a couple more minutes...

I kinda liked it at first. I think maybe the fact that Tim singed off all his taste buds and sacrificed his oral lining for the recording impeded his enjoyment. I may have also been influenced in other ways, as I was starving by the time this thing was actually done. The inside bread parts were mushy and gross, but the top layer was delicious. It was perfectly cruncheweezy, one of food's finest textures which the gifted chefs at Taco Bell have mastered. I MAY have eaten the tops off of 3 slices. But then, clear greasy liquid started to pool in the baking dish between remaining slices. The appeal of this casserole was rapidly dwindling. The white patches of egg were kinda tasty, but the texture was less like egg and more like silken tofu.

I think there would be ways to make this concept a winner. Obviously, less liquid. I think the addition of another layer, maybe caramelized onion or sauerkraut, would take this to the next level of Sandwich Gone Casserole. The sauce could be one cohesive thing, like a prepared Welsh Rarebit-esque sauce poured over layers of bread rather than splitting all the components of a sauce all over the place and waiting for a thousand hours for them to meld themselves.

Basically, dinner was ruined. We each found substitute dinners while the mush continued to quietly weep. Note to self, read quantities of ingredients in the future.