Thu 6 Apr 2006
Team We Aim To Cheese was primed for the 2nd 3rd Annual Grilled Cheese competition. We had gone through a very successful practice session without a hitch. We had participated in vigorous exercise to keep ourselves alert and ready. We had named Rob’s fresh mozzarella/French toast entry (normally called mozzarella in carrozza) “The Breaded Pirate Roberts” in an obscure nod to The Princess Bride and my cheesecake-like quesadilla “Requiem for a Cream . . . Cheese.” We had completed complicated math equations involving cross-multiplication to make sure my recipe fulfilled the minimum 60% cheese requirement. It was 72. Victory seemed near. And then we entered the 2nd 3rd Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational through this industrial-but-artsy door:
What Team We Aim to Cheese found at the Grilled Cheese Invitational was an outdoor grilling area (much to Adam’s short-sleeved shirted dismay) with roughly twenty stations, a grilled cheese roster with three heats and sixty or so competitors and even cheerleaders to cheer on a friend’s sandwich (or cheeseleaders, as they prefer to be called):
Also, there was one leprechaun:
The first heat of the competition involved only standard grilled cheese—no fancy bread, no crazy cheeses, no additional ingredients. People grilled four sandwiches, cut them into quarters, put a wedge of sandwich on a paper plate with a voting document already stapled to it, lifted a flag, and a runner would whisk the plates to the taste-testing station to be judged by the crowd.
Team We Aim to Cheese wasn’t so interested in this heat because we had no one competing in it. But we, like the rest of the crowd, got to judge the sandwiches on taste, presentation, originality (less important for this heat) and spazziness (for ridiculously awful sandwiches.) Sandwich eating was no easy feat since it required standing in a line that ran the length of a very long building all to get a quarter of a sandwich that may or may not taste very good. When you got to the front of the line, you were directed toward a sandwich quarter and voted on the spot, and then went back to the end of line to wait about twenty minutes for another quarter of sandwich. Here’s the taste-testing station:
Next came the second heat for savory alternative sandwiches with Rob and Maggie representing We Aim to Cheese. Competition included a Lucky Charms sandwich, which was coated in blue crystals on the outside and tasted surprisingly good, though it seemed to have little to do with Lucky Charms. There was also a brie, grilled chicken and marmalade sandwich, which was, uh, fine. There were numerous sandwiches, though I can’t seem to recall many of them right now. But here’s Rob and Maggie cooking up a storm in the grilling arena:
Will Team We Aim to Cheese be victorious? Will the best grilled cheese win? Will the leprechaun find his pot of gold? Stay tuned for the next installment of “Who Will Be the Grilled Cheese Champion?” coming soon (most likely tomorrow but no promises.)
Photos by Leslie Limerick, Jim Sutherland and Brandon Oropallo.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:08 am
I don’t remember many of the round two sandwiches, either. Perhaps those sandwiches were memory loss-inducing grilled cheeses?
October 24th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
If I burned as much premo cheese as you peaple my memery might just be cloudy as the inside of your 1975 AMG Grimlin.