Side Quests: Easy (and effin delish) Garlic Bread

As promised, here is the recipe for my easy garlic bread. I make two other fancier, more work-intensive varieties- but those are posts for another time ;) This bread will kick any Italian meal up a notch- heck will kick it up for any other meal where bread is required!! My advice is to purchase a nice fresh good quality loaf of bread, it makes a difference. If you have a bakery, or shop at a grocery store that has a bakery, great. Otherwise I bet Panera loaves would be a good choice.

Simple cast.

Ingredients:
1 loaf French or Italian bread, split lengthwise and cut into  four pieces
garlic salt- to taste
Italian seasoning-to taste
crushed red pepper- to taste (I like my bread to be of the lip numbing sort yeehaww!)
grated Parmesan- about 1 T. per piece of bread
1 stick of butter, softened

Place bread on cookie sheet and spread each piece  with 1/4 stick of the butter. Sprinkle garlic salt next, followed by the Italian seasoning, red pepper, and finally the Parm. Now- take your knife and blend the spices and Parm into the butter on top of the bread until it looks homogenous. This is the trick to get the cheese nice and nuttily toasted, and the spices distributed evenly. No one likes an overly salty bite, yuck.

Forgive my ugly cookie sheet lol.

Pop into the oven set to broil until as brown as desired. Certain members of the fam like theirs blackened but I prefer mine more like so:

Get in my mouth!

This is simple but soooo delicious. The cheese toasts up, and the innards of the bread get soaked with delicious butter then they crisp as well. The red pepper is realllly the secret oomph it needs. Gosh. Could gnaw on those crunchy edges every damn day. And (shhh) sometimes I skip the pasta and just spread my spaghetti sauce right on the bread. Like a fat kid. Enjoy!