As Rachael Ray's website states:  two guilty pleasures under one roof: steak smothered with onions and cheese, housed in toasty garlic bread.  The best thing about the toasty garlic bread, though, is that there is no butter involved.  Just olive oil, rosemary and garlic.  Delish.

Not a particularly cheap dish, however.  The sirloin had to be specially sliced at the meat department so I had to select an unpackaged, higher grade (and thus more expensive) cut.  So the bread loaf and meat together were about $12 already.  Plus the mushrooms and a bottle of wine.  I did use the leftover processed swiss cheese product (that Derek purchased recently instead of real swiss cheese--"you said swiss cheese and this package says swiss cheese") from a previous recipe to save on purchasing the provolone.  And it worked okay.

My only problem was the amount of filling versus the size of the bread bowl.  One layer using half of the filling filled up the bowl.  The bread loaf was not particularly large so my advice is to reduce the filling amounts by 1/3 to 1/2 or make sure you purchase a LARGE peasant loaf.  Or use two smaller ones.  And make sure you cut the top off towards the top of the loaf so that the dish is as deep as possible.

The pluses to this were the unused croutons which made for a quite scrumptious little appetizer and the next day's lunch of the leftover filling on garlic toast.

Recipe and photo courtesy of Rachael Ray

Ingredients:

• One 1-pound loaf peasant bread
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
• 1 pound onions, thinly sliced
• 1 pound sirloin steak or sirloin tips, very thinly sliced
• Salt and pepper
• 1/4 cup dry red wine
• 8 slices provolone cheese

The marsala and sage give this dish its excellent flavor.  Marsala is a sweet dessert wine available in a sweet or dry form.  We chose the cheapest bottle which did not specify sweet or dry but I would assume for cooking you're more likely to want the dry version.  Derek tried a glass of it with dinner but it was so syrupy sweet that he threw most of it out.

I also made a few changes to the recipe based upon my frugality and my supermarket's selection.  I purchased only white mushrooms so skipped the whole simmering of porcinis with the chicken stock step.  To correct for this, I sauteed all of the mushrooms together and then removed half of them to be finely chopped and then returned them to the pan to simmer with the marsala.  And as usual I used my trusty frozen container of shredded parmesan in place of the pecorino-romano.

I always run into this issue with heavy cream, but my sauce never gets very thick.  I let it boil twice as long as the recipe suggests and if it was any thicker I think it probably had to do with the fact that most of the liquid had evaporated.  I'm going to have to figure this little problem out.

Despite all of these cheap fixes it was delicious.

Recipe courtesy of Rachael Ray

Ingredients:

• 3 cups chicken stock
• 1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms (a generous handful)
• Salt and pepper
• 1 pound fettuccine pasta
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO)
• 1 pound cremini mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh sage or 2 teaspoons dried sage
• 1/2 cup marsala wine
• 1/2 cup heavy cream (eyeball it)
• 1 cup grated pecorino-romano cheese, plus more to pass around the table