GARLIC BREAD FAIL!

My boyfriend and I decided to make garlic bread while watching Commando the other night. Yes, that Commando with Senator Arnie and Alyssa Milano. Anyhoo, a little about my thoughts on garlic bread. There are some people who love garlic bread so much that they'll eat those slices of bread slathered with butter, green flecks of who-knows-what and a tinge of something that is similar to garlic. Yknow...the types you get in those chain restaurants on the side of your platter of from-frozen pasta. Then there are those who know what roasted garlic smells and tastes like when the tops have been cut off and drizzled in olive oil and when you smush it all over a piece of toasted baguette....oh man, that is good.

So anyway, I can't remember the last time I made homemade garlic bread. It probably a baguette, a drizzle of olive oil and copious amounts of fresh garlic. It was probably in the kitchen of our current house and I was probably being helped by my mother who, back in the day when we were little, loved to cook with me and my two brothers.

Being that I couldn't remember the last time I made garlic bread, I couldn't really remember how I made it and so Sean and I concocted a recipe that we thought would be suitable: half a whole wheat baguette, copious amounts of fresh garlic and a bunch of margarine. I say a bunch only because I can't really remember how much he used. The boyfriend peeled and chopped the garlic and then mixed it up with some margarine in a bowl. We slathered it onto our baguette that had been sliced in half horizontally and put that sucker in the oven at 350C for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes barely anything had happened so I figured it wouldn't hurt to leave it in for another 3 minutes and this time at 375C so the garlic isn't totally raw. Well...I was SUPER wrong because this is what resulted:
Words cannot begin to express the amount of epic fail that occurred in the above photo. Not being one to waste food, I told the boyfriend, Sean, that it would still be good if we just sliced off the edges and so he did and so garlic fingers were born. Yum!

But since we did have another half of our whole wheat baguette left, we decided to try again. This time I mashed the garlic with a little bit of salt in a mortar and pestle and then mixed it into the margarine, though this time not as much. We slathered it onto the last half of the baguette and stuck it into the oven for 15 minutes at 350C. What resulted was this:
It was good but there was still something missing, I just can't put my finger on what it was. Anyway, that was the epic tale of garlic bread and it also taught me about just how finicky each oven is. You see, I know my oven. I know it's 25 degrees over what it actually says. I know that when I bake something I have to lower the temperature 25 degrees despite whatever it says in the recipe I'm using or not. I also know that there's a hot spot in the back to the left so I have to rotate the pans or whatever it is I've got inside the oven. Sean's oven though...I have no clue how it functions. That was a lesson I had just learned.