Frenchy name again (after my recent post), but this isn't particularly a French dish. I've just made up the recipe and its title just to make ham and cheese sandwich look and sound fancy.
You can't really see what it is in the picture, but it's just a savoury bread and butter pudding with cheese and ham. My son turns 17 in a few months' time and, my goodness, he eats! His appetite is a bottomless pit. Black hole. He is just over 180cm tall and quite thin, and I'm wondering where all that food goes.
I've recently heard something about food (sugar) and brain. Apparently brain weigh only 2% of your body weight but it consumes half of the sugar you take. I'm not saying that my son eats a lot because he is using his brain a lot. Playing Xbox shouldn't take that much brain power... In contrast to his lifestyle, I'm hungry all the time because I work hard. It means that my brain is in overdrive all the time. It's true. That's why I need a nap like I talked about in this post.
Anyway, what I was going to say is that you have to somehow keep the cost down if you live with someone who's got a black hole in his/her stomach. This 'Gratin' is very filling, cheap, and delicious. It's very easy, too. Eat this with some salad or fruits afterwards to balance your diet.
Ingredients (for 2 people and for 1 very hungry person):
5 slices of white bread
butter
150g Gruyère cheese, grated and divided into 100g pile and 50g pile
4 slices of thinly sliced ham
3 eggs
150ml milk
Preheat oven to 190C.
Cut the bread in half diagonally and butter half of these halved slices. Cut the ham slices in half diagonally.
Get an oven-proof dish of about 15cm square or a round (or oval) equivalent size dish. Lean one buttered slice of bread against the dish. Lay one slice of ham and sprinkle some cheese out of 100g pile. Repeat the layer with everything leaning against each other.
Mix the eggs and milk really well to make a custard and add salt and pepper. Pour this mixture into the dish over the bread. Squish a bit from the top. Leave for about 30 minutes, if you can, for the bread to absorb the liquid.
Sprinkle all the cheese from 50g pile on top of the bread and custard and bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown.