The Cooking Critic

In The Lord of the Rings fashion, I’m going to begin the second part of “Who Will Be the Grilled Cheese Champion?” without a recap on the previous part. Instead please read part one of “Who Will Be the Grilled Cheese Champion?” by clicking here.

Back to “Who Will Be the Grilled Cheese Champion?” part two…

Next up was the third heat for sweet sandwiches. Shayna, Shahan and I took care of this leg, creating the most efficient grilled cheese assembly line ever known to man. It went like this: Shayna grilled the quesadillas, flipped them off the grill onto a plate, then put a new quesadilla in the pan, while I cut the quesadilla into wedges with scissors, then drizzled raspberry sauce on them. Next Shahan shook the powdered sugar, I added a dollop of whipped cream on each, Shahan raised the flag to alert a runner and Shayna was already taking the next quesadilla out of the pan. If there’s a grilled cheese zone, we were in it. Sadly, our flag and half of Shahan’s face got cut out of the picture, but here’s what we basically looked like in all our grilled-cheese making glory:

Not that we didn’t have some minor glitches. The hosts of this event informed us butter would be available for all. I had a sneaking suspicion that when they said “butter,” they meant “margarine” and had intended to bring my own butter since margarine will never ever do. Happily, my sneaking suspicion was correct. Sadly, I forgot to bring the butter. Still, when an enormous slab of real butter magically appeared in front of me, I determined this must be the secret communal butter stash and picked it up. As it turns out, this was not secret communal butter because it was whisked immediately out of my hands by another contestant and placed out of my reach. Luckily, a man to our right, making grilled cheese sandwiches in cube form, gave us his whole container of creamed butter when he was done making his sandwiches. Butter at last!

Another minor glitch–we nearly ran out of raspberry sauce and got stingy with it, as you can see here:

As for sweet sandwiches, one was made with slices of bread pudding and had a vanilla sauce and was nice and mild, but the sandwich had little to do with cheese. There was also an unusually sharp sandwich with dark bread, feta, cooked pears and a very tangy caramel sauce.

Finally the votes were tabulated. Team We Aim To Cheese waited anxiously for our name to be called . . . but we weren’t named winners of the standard grilled cheese competition, which made sense since we didn’t enter that field. Then came the alternative sandwich champions . . . and sadly, no glory for We Aim to Cheese. The sweet category finally arrived. The emcees called the third place winner . . . not us! Then right before they announced the second place winner, the emcee said, “This is my favorite sandwich name,” and we knew it was Requiem for a Cream…Cheese Quesadilla. Indeed, it was. I went on stage to receive the second-place trophy, and Brandon doused me in champagne to celebrate the victory. I was very cold but pleased the rest of the night.

Then the emcees called out the first place winners, and two girls in bikinis ran up to the stage, squealing with excitement. They looked something like this:

Picture that times two.

For some reason, we thought we could win looking like this:

The lesson we learned: team aprons are certainly not bikinis. Also, bring digital cameras, so we don’t have to worry about crooked, scanned images later.

I’m not even sure what sandwich the girls in bikinis made since ingredients were not announced during the award presentation, but I suspect no one knew what sort of sandwich they made. What happened to the good old days, when grilled cheese competitions were about the grilled cheese and not about the girls in bikinis?

At least we know what we have to do next year.

Recipes: Here’s a variation of Rob’s Breaded Pirate Roberts/Mozzarella in Carrozza , and here’s the family recipe for Cream Cheese Bars that inspired my quesadillas. For the quesadilla variation, I cooked the cream cheese mixture described in the Cream Cheese Bars link like a soufflé in a greased 8 x 8 pan for 25-30 minutes, then stuffed the cream cheese mixture into folded tortillas (roughly 1/3 cup per tortilla), cooked the tortilla on both sides on the stovetop (in butter), removed from heat, drizzled this super-simple Raspberry Sauce on it, sifted some powdered sugar over top, then finished with a squeeze of whipped cream. Here’s what Shahan has to say about Requiem for a Cream…Cheese Quesadillas: “It is good.” Now if that doesn’t convince you to try these, I don’t know what will.

Photos by Jim Sutherland, Leslie Limerick and Ezra Freedman.

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