Since Heather won't be sitting next to me at work any more (she's leaving for other pastures), this will allow us to continue our conversations. It'll be tough, but hopefully I'l persevere.
Grilled cheese was the topic today - Heather favors the apple-turkey bacon-sharp cheddar variety, while Morgan espoused the dijon mustard-chives-sharp cheddar or the pepper jack-salsa on top variety.
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Variations on grilled cheese sandwiches most traditionally fall into the filling category: sharp Cheddar versus American, or luncheon meats versus vegetables. These arguments, valid as they are, leave out the variations to the essential aspect of the grilled cheese sandwich: the grilled part.
Now, I grew up with the idea that grilled cheese sandwiches were made by using either butter or margarine to coat the outside of each slice of bread, and were toasted on a dry, hot skillet. As time and society progressed, the dry skillet was replaced with a skillet covered in non-stick spray, but if you were going to really make a grilled cheese, you used either butter or margarine.
Fast forward 10 years, and necessity has demanded that I try different methods of achieving grilled cheese perfection. When I first moved to Pennsylvania (and made as close to zero income as I ever wish to be), I couldn't bring myself to spend valuable grocery dollars on butter or margarine. Instead, I used non-stick spray directly on the bread, and utilized the infamous George Foreman grill to speed up the grilling process. The result, while palatable, left much to be desired: the cheese never completely melted, and the bread just didn't seem to release that yummy, buttery goodness that I remembered from my childhood.
After leaving Pennsylvania and moving to New York to live with Michael, I introduced him to grilled cheese sandwiches. (Given that he's not a big cheese person to begin with, I had to add in the apples and turkey bacon to make it appealing. This resulted in one of my all-time favorite grilled sandwiches.) These were a hit, but it wasn't until I came home late from work one night that I began to get an inkling of the monster I had (inadvertantly) created. Michael had taken a stab at making grilled cheese, but instead of using butter, he rationalized that olive oil would be a much healthier substitute. This initial foray into olive oil may have actually been more closely related to frying, but time has shown that by just brushing or drizzling the olive oil onto the bread, this can make an incredibly grown-up grilled cheese sandwich.
This, of course, leads me down the path of:
Rye bread (olive bread?)
Goat cheese
Baby spinach
Fresh cracked pepper
in an olive-oil based grilled sandwich.
Does that still count as grilled cheese?
Absolutely.
Goat cheese + bread + olive oil + heat = grilled cheese
(Love the spinach use here, too...I'm ALWAYS looking for ways to use more spinach!)
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