The best thing since sliced bread is...

....three-cheese sliced bread from Panera!! Our usual bread is a whole grain, HFCS-free bread by Sara Lee. It became 'our bread' because of those qualities and because we can find it at the bakery outlet and get it for half the grocery store price, which means we don't spend close to 10% of our grocery budget on bread every week.

It's a good bread, but it gets a little tiresome every now and then. And it's not really the right bread for certain things, like french toast. Well, we had Monte Cristos on our dinner menu one night this week, which is basically a ham and cheese, french toast sandwich (I know, not the healthiest choice, but we replaced an egg with 2 egg whites we had in the freezer...) So, since we've been doing really well with our grocery budget lately, coming in under budget every week, we decided to splurge (but not go over budget!!) on some 'fancy bread' this week.

That's where the Three-Cheese bread from Panera comes in. It is very tasty and HFCS-free (actually free of any sweetener) although not whole grain, but that's fine by me since it's not all-the-time bread. We've used it in our Monte Cristos, as a breakfast bread with an egg scramble on top and for cold ham and cheese sandwich. I can't decide if we should eat the rest or freeze it so we can enjoy it sometime down the road...

If you told me a few years ago that I'd be this excited about a loaf of bread, I'd call you crazy. But I'm really happy for us that we've been able to stick to this grocery budget and even work in ways to 'splurge' every now and then. And it's just plain tasty :-D