Designer Grilled Cheese Night

After a busy day of Apple Picking and whipping up some Apple and Pear Crisp, we knew that some unpleasent weather was on its way.  Rather than venturing out in the rain to a restaurant, we stopped in at Savenor's before the weather turned and got the supplies for an evening of designer grilled cheeses!

Grilled Cheese!

Since there is an impressive cheese selection at Savenor's, we chose a variety of hard cheese from both cows and goats.

CHEESE!

In addition to cheese, we had a a freshly-picked apple, an avocado, some pea tendrils from our CSA, pancetta and some fresh ciabatta bread.  All in all, some amazing components in my book.

Designer Grilled Cheeses

Nick started building the sandwiches by cooking the pancetta in a cast iron skillet.

Cooking away

Meanwhile, he set to work slicing and grating the rest of the ingredients.  Nick sliced up the softer of the cheeses and grated the harder ones.

Prepped and ready

After buttering the bread he assembled the tower of ingredients.

Apple and Cheddar

Avocado, pancetta and cheese (one half with gouda, one half with an alpine cheese)

Using the greased up cast iron skillet, Nick fried up the sandwiches until they were a golden toasted brown and the cheese was melted.  Cooking towering sandwiches made us realize that a panini press would come in handy for these things!

"Grilling" Away

A look inside

I have been wanting to do one of these grilled cheese nights for quite some time and am so happy we (and by we I mean Nick) did it!  It was the perfect way to spend a rainy evening and to indulge for dinner.  The toppings were fun, and its nice to have basically one food (grilled cheese) but get to taste in in different ways in the same meal.  Nick liked the avocado sandwich with the alpine cheese the best, but I loved the apple and cheddar.  The crispness of the apple next to the gooey cheese was perfection!

There are so many ways to make a grilled cheese more than the traditional sandwich we had growing up.  I'm definitely looking forward to trying other combinations soon.

What are your favorite grilled cheese additions?