Casatiello

this bread is a wonderfully rich, brioche-like bread stuffed with italian salami and provolone cheese. the recipe is from reinhart's BBA, but it needs help. sorry for the terrible photo, but one thing you can tell in the photo is that there's not enough salami. i'm going to double it next time. i made this yesterday thinking it was the perfect super bowl bread (what a great game), and i was right. speaking of yesterday, i also made the "cornbread" recipe in BBA that reinhart included even though it's not a yeast bread, because he thinks "it doesn't get any better than this." he's wrong. it tastes fine, but it's not "cornbread." corn pudding maybe, or corn cake, or spoonbread at best, but you can't call something with 1/4 c. of granulate sugard AND 1/4 c. of brown sugar AND 2 Tbsp. of honey in it "cornbread." (it also has bacon, but the addition of bacon never bothers me.) i can eat it, but it's so sweet that it's almost a dessert. i also made chili yesterday. this is an emeril recipe. i chose it because it was simple, i had the stuff (except the hasa), and it didn't look terribly spicy (the other residents of this house have new jersian tastebuds). i doubled (at least) the spices anyway because it was really bland (my mother-in-law still thought it was a little on the spicy side, but i thought it was still pretty mild). the really odd thing about this recipe is the 8 CUPS of beef stock for just 2 lbs of meat. beef stock is kind of an odd ingredient for chili anyway, but 8 cups?! i stopped at 4 and still thought it was a little on the soupy side. i'd make it again, cutting down on the stock and adding some chipotles. and i always use pinto beans rather than kidney beans, but i do prefer beans in my chili (sorry, purists).