Grown-up Grilled Cheese: White Cheddar, Bacon, Pickles on Sourdough

Usually when I have dinner for my friends (who I've put in charge of helping me eat all this food I'm making), I try one recipe. Maybe two, if one is a dessert or drink.

What did I do this week?

Five new recipes.

Five.

At one meal.

I might be crazy.

But really, the grilled cheese sandwiches share ingredients, I made dessert the night before, and we needed something to drink.

I still might be crazy.

For this grilled cheese, the only ingredient I needed to buy was white cheddar cheese. I had bought a loaf of sourdough maybe a month ago with a coupon, so all I needed to do with that was take it out of the freezer.

I made the dessert the night before, so the first thing I did when I got home from work was put the bacon in the oven to bake. We've been over this before. I hate frying bacon.

I cut up all my white cheddar cheese, and started buttering my bread. Well, actually it was margarine since it spreads so much more easily, but who uses margarine as a verb?

Mine didn't look this nice. But then again, I was making an effort to evenly distribute the ingredients.

When my friends showed up, I put the grilled cheese on. Margarine side down, put on the cheese (although I forgot to factor in the fact that the slice of bread was larger than what I was used to so I should have had more cheese), then the bacon, then the pickles. And I totally used the kosher dill slices that I had picked up to try the "fried pickles" again. Martha's picture shows hamburger dills. Which I'm sure folded into the sandwich better (as they are floppier), but I love me some kosher dills.

Then I burnt the bread.

It still tasted fine, but I shouldn't have had the burner on high, I guess, and I should have tried to put three sandwiches in the pan. They were more difficult to flip.

I didn't burn the other side. Thank goodness.

Mmm, tasty.

The three of us who ate the bacon-pickle grilled cheese liked it. It might have been better pressed to melt all the ingredients together, but the bacon gave a good crunch and the pickle made it tangy. It was almost like a Cuban. Almost. Not quite. The pickle probably folled us into that.

And I don't like my grilled cheeses super cheesy, but this could have used a little more.

Conclusion: Press it. And use more cheese is the slice of bread calls for it.