Eat 'em Up, Yum!

I recently acquired an electric griddle.  This is possibly the greatest appliance since the toaster.  A marvel of culinary engineering, it sits atop the kitchen appliance hierarchy.  Basically, I've been making a staggering amount of pancakes.

Grilled cheese is my favorite thing to make and to eat, and I'm quite good at it.  Now with the addition of my griddle, I have an easy way to make them en masse.  I found this great website devoted to the art of grilling cheese... The Grilled Cheese Academy.  So, I've been busy with recipes, making some of theirs, and creating some of my own.  The following are mine.  Not sure if you could call them truly unique... but I don't really care.

I use BeefSteak deli style hearty rye bread.  It makes lousy toast, but great grilled cheese.  The slices are a little longer, and firmer than normal supermarket sliced bread.

The Gorilla Cheese:

• two slices deli-sliced ham (as thick or thin as you like)
• two slices deli-sliced pepperoni
• one slice cheddar
• one slice swiss

I don't butter anything, the griddle is "non-stick", the non-existant buttering is probably a healthy choice.  On this sandwich, it probably doesn't matter, because the ham and pepperoni will kill you anyway.

RICOLA!

• two slices Swiss
• Onion (a few thin slices browned ahead of time)
• Spinach (a few leaves wilted on the grill)

The name is kind of dumb.  I can't be clever all the time.  The spinach idea I stole from the Grilled Cheese Academy.  The different tastes of the three ingredients go well together.  I found if I cut the onion and don't break it into rings, I get a wheel of onion that is easy to flip on the griddle and sits in the sandwich much like a slice of tomato.

Tom Is Awesome:

• one slice Swiss
• one slice deli-sliced ham
• one slice cheddar
• one slice tomato

My favorite.

Dead as a Doornail

The Crocodiles

Sleep Forever

2010, Fat Possum

produced by James Ford

I bought this used. Amazon is a great place to buy music on the cheap, especially if you like a hard physical copy of the album, and not just digital files. I discovered The Crocodiles on another blog. This is my hipster purchase of the year. Not only has no one heard of them, but the sound is very indie and drone and pretty much reminds me of the Cure, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. They are classified as "noise pop" and "lo-fi", whatever that means, generally music genre classification is bogus anyway. Pitchfork gives it a 6.8. I'm going to put my scarf on now and ride my bicycle to buy a soy latte.