Garlic bread is a huge favorite to make. In the past, I’ve had some mixed results with different methods until I stumbled upon a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for garlic bread. That set me straight in several respects, and I can turn out some pretty good ones usually and fairly cheaply as well. The two most important things are oven heat and roasting the garlic first!

Garlic Bread

1/2 loaf french bread (1/2 of $1.19 large loaf) — $0.60
8 medium cloves garlic (about 1 head) — $0.33
Parmesan cheese (1/4 oz of $3.50 8oz can) — $0.11
Butter (2 tbsp of $1.00 4 oz stick) — $0.26
Parsley (1/4 cup chopped from $0.69 bunch) — $0.06
Kosher Salt / pepper — negligible

Total: $1.36

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Yes, that’s right 500 degrees. You need blastingly high heat to make it, otherwise the tops will be soggy.

Mince up parsley and set aside. Cut up the butter in small bowl and allow to come to room temperature. Meanwhile, separate head of garlic into cloves, no need to peel the papery skins off! Toast them in small skillet, shaking pan frequently about 8-10 minutes on low heat, or until small burnt marks appear on outside.

Allow to cool, then peel and mince finely. Add to butter, and add in Parmesan cheese, about 1/4 tsp of pepper and about 1/8 tsp (or less) of kosher salt. (You may not need the salt at all, because Parm cheese is salty). Mix well. You should have a paste, but the butter should still be semi-solid.

Cut bread in half (or, you can use the whole loaf, just double the rest of the ingredients). Now slice the bread down the center so you have a top and bottom half. Spread garlic butter mixture on top of both sides. Place on cookie sheet and bake in oven for 10-12 minutes. Cut the bread crosswise with a sharp knife into finger food sized pieces. Sprinkle parsley on top.

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Part 5 : Banquet Fish Stick Meal
Amazingly, I still haven’t gotten tired of these things.. Well, truthfully, since they’re only a dollar I just bought a bunch of them to try out and have been slowly making my way through ‘em. This one is the Banquet Fish Stick Meal and I was particularly interested in it because of the promise of macaroni and cheese which I’m a huge fan of.

So anyhow, I should mention that for some reason this package came with a FREE Game of Bowling included. Huh? What does Fish Sticks have to do with Bowling? I guess they figure that the weekly highlight of a lonely person who eats frozen dinners is the bowling alley. Geez.

Anyhow, baked this in the oven on a cookie sheet for 22 minutes, and the results were promising. Although, I knew that the meal would suffer a bit because of the brownie (more on that later) which had gotten shot down in the Banquet Pepperoni Pizza Meall.

The fish sticks were surprisingly crunchy… they aren’t the “smooth” battered type you see a lot in frozen food, but rather the crumb kind. Using crumbs on frozen foods is a good way to get a nice crunch if you put the meal in the oven rather than the microwave. But the big problem I had with the fish sticks were that they were so small. These are only slightly bigger than pieces of CHALK for god’s sake. Although you get five of them.

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