My Mum's Toasted Cheese

Check this out and tell me it doesn't look like the most delicious thing you've ever seen with your own pair of eyeballs...

The other good news apart from the fact that it looks so damn good and tastes like Jesus and Santa have just butterfly-kissed your tongue is that there is absolutely no horse in it... whatsoever.

Now, when I say Mum’s Toasted Cheese I really mean Granny’s toasted cheese as my mum was given this to eat by her mum.  It’s a real teatime classic, the kind we used to eat in front of saturday telly when the final scores were rolling in but I think you could do it easily as a dinner party starter. 

Due to it's unbelievably high cheese content and the enormous wall of 40 that my life is hurtling toward I probably only have a few years left of eating this before my cholesterol level and furring arteries scream for me to stop.  This is not diet food.  Here's how you work this piece of culinary magic.

Ingredients

1 onion

A lot of a hard strong cheese like cheddar or Lancashire Tasty

Parmesan

Milk

Chop the onion and soften gently in butter, you don’t want to colour the onion but fry it until it takes on a glistening translucent quality.  Grate the cheddar or Lancashire Tasty and then layer in an oven dish alternating the cheese and onion.  Pour in a little milk, enough to come a quarter the way up the cheese.  Season with pepper and then grate the Parmesan over the top.  Put in a hot oven for about twenty minutes or until the cheese has melted and the top is lovely and brown.  Cut up a French loaf or grab some hunks of bread, dip in the fondue-y, melting, deliciousness and enjoy.

One family variation is to top the Toasted Cheese with sliced tomatoes before you place in the oven.  My family likes a green salad with it just to give some relief to the relentless richness.  My mum says that she even remembers having crispy, grilled streaky bacon with it, although how she is still alive if she ate this I do not know.  Enjoy.