Garlic Cheesy Bread and Blue Hawaiians

Last night my friends and I decided to get together to cook some food and make some drinks. I firmly believe that you need quality time with friends to ensure that your life is full of happiness and good memories. So last night, that is exactly what we did.

My friends and I watch a TV show called iCarly and in the show, they frequently eat what are called "spaghetti tacos." As the name implies, you take taco shells, put spaghetti in as the filler, and top with mozzarella cheese. When we make it, we do things a little differently. Instead of spaghetti, we use egg noodles (they stay in the shells a little better) and instead of marinara sauce, we use a la vodka sauce (mostly because it's really yummy).

So, we thought to ourselves, what appetizer could we make that would go with our theme? We went to the best resource on the internet if you need a recipe: Pinterest! There, we found an amazing recipe for garlic cheesy bread and we thought: yes, yes, let's do this. After that, we realized we needed a nice drink, so we perused Pinterest yet again and found a nice, simple recipe for a Blue Hawaiian. After we had all of our ingredients together, we started cooking!


Garlic Cheesy Bread

Website: http://www.laurenslatest.com/hasselback-garlic-cheesy-bread/

My biggest problem with this recipe is the fact that this lady wants you to make your own bread from scratch (crazy, right?). It's not that it's a hard process, it's just super time-consuming and in the words of a wise woman:

                                  
 To save time and money,  I just bought a loaf of french bread which worked just as well and only took the time that I spent to drive to the grocery store. Since we won't be making bread from scratch, we will have to alter this recipe a bit.

The first thing you'll need to do is grab your store-bought garlic herb butter and microwave it until it's melted (but be careful not to burn it! It should only need about 20-35 seconds depending on how much butter you put in). Since my grocery store decided to be lame and stop carrying garlic and herb butter, I had to make my own (harsh, right?).

To do this, my friend Beka chopped about 5 cloves of garlic (we like garlic!).

We melted about 3/4 of a stick of butter in a pan on medium-low heat. After the butter is melted, you'll want to reduce the heat to low so it doesn't burn. 

Before I added the garlic, I put in a teaspoon of oregano, a teaspoon of basil, and about half a teaspoon of ground thyme.  I let these herbs simmer for a minute or two before I added the garlic. After a couple minutes, I added the minced garlic and let these simmer in the pan for a few minutes. While the garlic was simmering, I cut slits in the bread with a serrated knife (but not all the way through; make sure the bread is still slightly connected at the bottom).

Once you've done that, turn off the stove and use a pastry brush to dab the butter mixture onto each side of the sliced bread. Don't be scared to spread the butter very generously :)

Leave a little bit of butter in the pan to pour over the top of the bread. The next part is to put cheese slices between each cut of the bread. I used mozzarella cheese because it's delicious and goes well with garlic (and pretty much everything else).  I also folded the slices in half to get the full amount of cheese for each slice!

When you're done putting the cheese slices in, it should look something like this:

Now take that leftover butter and garlic mixture and drizzle it over the top of the bread (believe me, you'll be glad you did).

Since the bread didn't have to cook, I put the bread in the oven on broil. This will allow the cheese to melt, but the bread won't continue to bake (that would make it hard and icky!). Leave it in the oven for about 5 minutes or so (or until the cheese is melted); once it's done broiling, it should look a little like this:

 Looks pretty scrumptious doesn't it? This bread was so delicious I could have eaten a whole loaf all by myself! My friends fell in love with it, so I think I'll probably be making this bread again soon. My only thing is, try to get the pre-made garlic and herb butter; it will save you so much time and make your cooking go a lot quicker.

Blue Hawaiian

Website: http://www.squidoo.com/luau-summer-party-ideas

We wanted a drink to wash down all of our delicious food, so we decided on a Blue Hawaiian.This is a fun drink and most of the ingredients aren't too hard to find. We decided to omit the sweet and sour mix, but in hindsight, this might have been a good thing to add. This drink is really easy to make and we really only had to buy the vodka and the pineapple juice because we had the rest of the ingredients. So we gathered them all up and got started:

 

3/4 shot of light rum:

3/4 shot of vodka:

1/2 shot of Blue Curacao (yay, so blue!): 

With the addition of three shots of pineapple juice:

Isn't it pretty? It just reminds you of a tropical island!

This drink was really good, but the pineapple juice was really sweet, which made the drink a bit overwhelming. In the future, I would only add 2 shots of pineapple juice, or maybe add the sweet and sour mix (that might have balanced it out).

All together, it was a nice meal and we all had a great time! All of our food came out great and, although the drink was really sweet, it was quite tasty! I would definitely (DEFINITELY!) recommend making the garlic cheesy bread, mostly because it was so delicious, but also because it was really easy to make. The drink was also tasty, just a bit sweet.

I hope all of you had a great Labor Day weekend and thanks for reading my blog! The subscribe button to my blog is on the right hand side of this page below the search bar and you should totally click it (clicking that button creates good karma for you!). Keep coming to my blog every day for more great (or possibly horrible) recipes that you can recreate!