Quick Snack

This is a quick one. Only took a few minutes, in fact. The ingredients: 4 wide slices of bread (we used a multigrain bread from CostCo), about 1/3 stick of butter, maybe 2 or 3 Tablespoons of finely grated hard cheese (we used Lincolnshire poacher, you may want to stick with Parmesan) and a few shakes of your seasoning of choice (we went out on a limb and used a couple shakes of cinnamon and a few shakes of chile powder).

Melt the butter in a frying pan. While that's happening, cut the crust off the bread, and then cut the bread into strips. Shake a bit of seasoning into the butter, swirl it around a little bit, just to mix it all together. Then dip one side of the bread strips into the butter, and quickly flip them over onto a baking sheet. You don't want to leave the bread in the butter for too long, or else the bread will soak up too much butter and get all greasy and nasty. Once you've got all your bread coated on one side, sprinkle with a bit of hard cheese and put it all under the broiler. Toast until golden, brown and delicious. Let cool for a moment before serving.

Now, I know my version sounds crazy. Cinnamon? Lincolnshire poacher? Yes, I have things like Lincolnshire poacher laying around. So sue me. Cinnamon? We went light on this one. It's just one of those things that you don't expect, and it kind of works with the chile powder. If you still think I'm crazy, take a look at the ingredients for Chinese five spice some time and wonder a moment about how such a thing would ever come together in the first place, much less find its way into a beef stir-fry.