So normally I warn people to stay away from my cooking, but today’s experiment was decent enough to warrant another try at making it (and thereby improving upon it). When I went shopping Sunday, I picked up pesto, tomatoes, and mushrooms for a chicken pasta dish I haven’t made in a while. While I was at it, I thought, “Hey, I’ll grab a baguette or something and some Camembert and make like a sandwich thing or something with these.” I can’t say that’s exactly what I was thinking, but I had a nebulous idea of what I wanted to do with these ingredients. Following is a general description of my cooking attempt.

The baguette which I meant to use earlier in the week but didn’t, was hard as a rock (because that’s what baguettes do over time) so I tried rehydrating it a bit by sticking it in the oven at a low temperature with a glass bowl of water. After a while of that not working, I gave up on that and instead focused on fixing the food-thing I wanted to eat. I ought to have made an attempt to cut the baguette in half lengthwise, but didn’t and instead just slathered the top with a lot of basil pesto. Then I cut up slices of Brie (cutting most of the rind off since I know the husband isn’t a big fan of the rinds of soft French cheeses) and laid them across the top of the baguette. Ian sliced a tomatoe and I put those slices across the top of the cheese. I had just fried up some sliced white button mushrooms and put those on top after the tomatoes. I drizzled some olive oil over the whole mess and then ground some pepper and sea salt over that. We put the cooking sheet with the baguette on it into the oven for a while at a low temperature, and when it was kind of starting to warm up a bit, we decided it was going slowly so we cranked up the heat a bit and left it in there a little longer. The wait was boring, so once the tomatoes were warmed through and the cheese was melty (well, meltier because Brie is pretty soft as is), we pulled it out and ate it. The crunchy bread made it kind of hard to eat, but the flavor was good and we both agreed it would be worth trying again. I had had the epiphany earlier when I got home that it’s getting close to grilling time, and this could be made on a grill too. We’re thinking of using Italian bread next time because it’s wider, and we’d definitely want to split it in half first because it’ll be easier for the flavors to seep into the bread. I’m pretty excited that a food idea I came up with was neither poisonous nor horrible. Woot!