It's time to fire up the panini press

April is National Grilled Cheese month and Wisconsin is leading the charge with this great website showcasing WI cheeses. They've got a bunch of different sandwiches listed including some pretty interesting ingredients like cauliflower and pineapple.

Does the grilled cheese sandwich deserve it's own month? For me the answer is a resounding YES! Grilled cheese and tomato soup are like salt and pepper or peanut butter and jelly, but I think that grilled cheese by itself has a deeper connection in our psyche. At least it does in mine.

Below:Asiago+Cheddar+oven roasted tomatoes=deliciousness!
For me it was the first thing I was allowed to cook on my own. My mother taught me how. I would get up on a stepstool and toast them in a skillet that had been liberally buttered. It was the perfect food. Warm, toasty, melty, gooey, salty and buttery. On nights when my mother was working late I would make grilled cheese sammies for my brother and me. We would sit in front of the television like zombies, him on the couch, me in the recliner eating our sandwiches and for a brief moment in time, I wasn't the older sister who tortured him and he wasn't my "stupid-head" "smelly" younger brother.

As I got older I expanded my culinary repertoire, but kept the grilled cheese sandwich in my top ten. And why not? It's a ridiculously easy to make lunch/dinner/hangover cure and is gentle on the wallet as I learned in college. To me, cheap ramen noodles could never be tastier than a grilled cheese made with an illegal hotplate and a cast iron skillet.

In culinary school the grilled cheese kept me going. When cramming for a bakery final that's going to start at 2am you need brain food. Grilled cheese to the rescue. The dining hall is closed and you're starving? Grilled cheese comes through once again.

Nowadays I work in a cheese shop. I feel it's my personal duty to find out which of our cheeses melt well, what they go well with and of course, how they taste. I use my hours of dedicated research and pass it along to our customers. Even though I love the stinky punchiness of Grayson I can tell you that even though it melts nicely, if you apply heat to this cheese your apartment will smell rather funky for several days. Fresh chevre may not melt quite the way Cheddar does, but you get a warm, squishy, goo that makes eating it messy, but immensely satisfying.

So what's your favorite grilled cheese? One of mine is pictured above. Asiago, Cheddar and oven roasted tomatoes. Who needs soup?

-AA