Stuffed Pizza Bread

I love a good cookbook, and if you were standing in my kitchen right now, you would see that my collection is growing out of its space.  I not only love new cookbooks, but also have a habit of rooting through flea market bins to find those old spiral bound church, school, or society recipe collections.  Those are the best, you know those dishes that ladies would bring to church for potlucks, yeah, those recipes are in there.  One of the best ones that I have in my collection is actually one that my husband brought home from work.  The man truly knows the way to my heart, and it is not flowers or chocolates, it is books, especially cookbooks (ok, and occasionally Chinese food).

If you invite me to a party and I need to bring food, there is a pretty good chance I'm going to show up with this.  The most difficult thing about this recipe is cutting the bread, you want as many criss cross cuts as you can get so that the ooey gooey cheese, butter and toppings get down into the bread. I would urge you to actually cut and prepare it on the baking sheet you are going to cook it on, transportation of the uncooked product gets kind of messy.  If you are taking this to a party or potluck, place a large piece of aluminum foil over your baking sheet and prepare the bread on that as well.  That way, you can wrap up the bread in the aluminum foil as it comes out of the oven, and there will be no fussing around with getting it transported.

You can go wild with your topping selection for this, you are limited only by your imagination and how much stuff you can cram in between the cuts of bread.  If you are not in a hurry, you can take the whole, uncut loaf of bread, and pop it in the freezer for about 5-10 minutes, I find that doing this really helps me not squash the bread as I am cutting, and if there was ever a time to get out your bread knife, this is it.

• 1 Loaf French or Italian Bread (whole, not sliced)
• 1 lb Mozzarella Cheese, shredded 
• 1 8 oz Can Mushrooms, drained 
• 1 8 oz Can Sliced Olives, drained
• 1 Package Pepperoni-sliced

Garlic Butter:

• 2 sticks butter, melted (unsalted or salted works here)
• 1/2 tsp. Garlic Salt
• 1/2 tsp. Ground Mustard 
• 1 tsp. Minced Onion
• 1 tsp. Lemon Juice
• 1 tsp. Seasoning Salt 

**Optional--Place bread in freezer for 5-10 minutes to stiffen it up a little bit.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees

Prepare a baking sheet, either by just spraying it with cooking spray, or with aluminum foil if you are planning on traveling with it.

Remove the bread from the freezer if you remembered to pop it in there, and make several criss-cross cuts in the bread, taking extra care not to go all the way through the bread.  You want a somewhat blooming onion effect here, you want the bread to spread on the top, but not come apart completely at the bottom.

Start stuffing the cuts with the olives, mushrooms, pepperoni, and cheese.  I rotate these as I stuff, I do not put them in any particular order, I want every piece of the bread to have something yummy going on.  Stuff until you either run out of ingredients or room.

Mix or whisk together the garlic butter ingredients in a bowl. Slowly pour the garlic butter mixture over the bread.  Make sure to take your time, the goal here is to get the butter mixture to soak in as much as possible, not have it run off the top and onto the pan.

Place the bread in the oven, and bake for 20-25 minutes until the cheese has melted and your house smells like heaven.

Serve with Spaghetti or Pizza Sauce.

The leftovers, if there are any, reheat really well in a toaster oven or just in a 300 degree oven for 5-10 minutes.

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