Cheese Savoury: A big pie pan full of melted cheese

Looks like I got a return flight just in time! (well, aside from the fact that I landed in Texas.)

Cheese Savo(u)ry ¾ cup breadcrumbs ¼ pound ground beef (or meat of choice), cooked ¼ pound sliced tomatoes ¼ pound shredded cheese (use the type(s) of your choice) about 2 tbsp butter Heat oven to 400°. Grease a 9-inch pie pan. Sprinkle about two-thirds of the breadcrumbs into the bottom of the pan. Then sprinkle the meat on top. Lay the tomatoes on top of the meat. Put the cheese in the pan over the tomatoes. Sprinkle the remaining breadcrumbs on top. Dot with the butter, cut into small pieces. As you put everything in the pan, sprinkle a pinch of salt and a little pepper over each layer. (Be careful how much salt you use per layer lest you overdo it. You want all your little salt sprinklings to add up to just a few good shakes of it.) Bake for about an hour, or until browned on top. Cut and serve while warm. The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

At this point, airport construction almost feels like an act of defiant optimism. You have to believe in the future before you can build for it. Pittsburgh Airport even has cute signs with the local English.

After our post-return grocery trip, everyone in the house expressed an interest in making a beef pot roast. I had no interest in eating any of the meat (though I did skim out a lot of the potatoes in there). So I decided to instead use my portion of dinner to explore the new-to-me world of "savo(u)ries"-- mostly because this particular one involves a lot of cheese.

I'd barely heard of savories before making this, but some quick reading tells me they're like a non-sweet dessert. In other words, they're something you serve after the meal as a nice finish, but they're savory instead of sweet. I'm going to stop my explanation here so that I can avoid being wrong.

Now, the recipe starts with minced meat. Apparently outside of North America, they mince meat instead of grinding it. I could have gotten out the hand-cranked grinder (mincer?), but today I went with the dishwasher-safe one.

The recipe next calls for sliced tomatoes, which brings us to the other reason I made it (besides cheese). These tomatoes were pruning up in the refrigerator. No one wanted to eat them, but I couldn't let myself throw them out.

The tomatoes were half-frozen from sitting in the coldest part of the refrigerator for a while, which made them wonderfully easy to slice.

Well, having gotten all our ingredients ready, the time had come for assembly!

If you look closely at the tomatoes, you can see that they still hadn't defrosted. This happily meant that all their tomato-y goodness would melt into the food instead of going to waste on the cutting board.

Now, we finally arrive at our featured ingredient: half a pound of cheese. I didn't expect it to fill up an entire pie pan, but fill the pan it did. If you like cheese, I already recommend this recipe and I haven't even baked it yet.

As a finishing touch, we're supposed to dot this with butter. Since I already had the cheese shredder out, I thought I would instead put little butter shreds all over the top instead of trying to cut it into tiny pieces. The butter softened instantly, and all those butter curls clumped together instead of scattering like cake sprinkles. We managed to tease them apart, but I don't recommend bothering with this at home.

The recipe ends with the instruction "put in a hot oven and bake 1 hour." That seemed too long to me. Then I thought that perhaps the long baking time is to get the cheese equivalent of onion caramelization (if such a thing exists). So I let our savoury stay in the oven until it looked like it was nearly burnt (which, by the way, happened well before an hour). It wasn't too overcooked to be good, but I definitely should have taken it out earlier.

This really made me want a beer to go with it. Also, it somehow tasted like I had put a lot of sausage in it. There's not a whole lot of meat in there, and the whole dish contained no spices besides black pepper. But somehow it tasted like it had a lot of sausage anyway. I have no idea where that came from, but I was not disappointed.

Other than the unexplained notes of nutmeg, this was a lot like baked macaroni and cheese without the macaroni. If you really like cheese, you will love it. And as we previously noted, the best mac and cheese has multiple cheeses in it. So why not buy a cheese assortment and put it all in the food processor (easier than shredding all those toothpick-appropriate cubes) for a savoury?