Tray baked triple cheese toast : perfect for brunch

In my book cheese is always good, for tea as well as breakfast and brunch. Continuing from my last post, let me tell you about one of my favourite brunch food. The genesis of this recipe is part Nigella Lawson's triple cheese strata and part my need to create tasty dishes using the supermarkets marked down buys, which means stale baguettes and cheese thats at its end by date. This is a very flexible recipe, so feel free to adapt it to your own liking. The following quantities makes very generous portions for two people.

Ingredients

1 onion (Nigella's recipe uses spring onions, I use whatever is available, which more often than not, a red onion)

1 baguette

Choice of cheese (Mature cheddar is a staple, the rest depends on what I buy)

Sour cream (two generous dollops)

3 eggs 

Coriander (for garnish)

Method

Preheat your oven to 170 Celsius. 

First I melt my cheese over medium heat. Once the cheese has melted, I take it off the gas. If I am using mozzarella, I just cut it into bite size chunks and add it to the hot cheese, it will melt anyway once in the oven. Nigella blitzes all of this in a food processor, I tried that a couple of time, but find melting the cheese works more for me. I then whisk up three eggs, add pepper, a bit of cumin powder, and a bit of sea salt (the salt quantity depends upon the kind of cheese used. Sometimes I skip this step altogether).

I then cut up the stale, slightly hard bread into medium sized round slices and arrange it in a baking tray like so. And sprinkle finely chopped onions or spring onions over it. 

Next, I add the sour cream and egg mixture to the melted cheese which should have cooled down by now. 

And then I pour the liquid over the bread and pop it into the oven for about 25 mins. I add a bit of coriander on top for a fresh hit and there, its done. 

This dish is easy to make but is a real treat. Its part toast, part cheese omelette in the best possible way. The original recipe is assembled overnight and kept in the fridge, I prefer mine this way as the bread  gives a very satisfying crunch. And it really works well as a lazy brunch, as you can see from the empty  tray.