Weekend Cooking: Grilled Spinach, Pepper Jack, and Bacon from 150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches by Alison Lewis

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Weekend Cooking is a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Click here to check out Weekend Cooking posts from other bloggers.

book cover imageI won 150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches in a blog giveaway just a few weeks before one of my adult daughters was diagnosed with celiac disease, so the cover photo that had looked so appetizing before, strikes me as a little suspect now. We will do a complete gluten-removing sweep before her next visit, so in the meantime I wanted to try out both the new cookbook and the cute little panini grill my husband got for Christmas. (Our spring weather, so far, is still chilly enough for grilled cheese.)

There’s something about grilled cheese (probably the grilled-in-butter and dripping-with-melted-cheese parts) that says “comfort food” to many people.

Additionally comforting to mediocre cooks, it’s really hard to mess up a grilled cheese sandwich! To try the recipe for Grilled Spinach, Pepper Jack, and Bacon, I used pesto made from the end of last summer’s basil that I had in the freezer. Once you know the name of the recipe and that it includes pesto, you pretty much know the ingredients for this sandwich. (The recipe suggests this sandwich be made with multigrain bread.)

Grilled Cheese 1
Spread pesto on both sides of the bread. Layer one side with cooked bacon, sliced cheese, and baby spinach.
Sandwiches ready to be grilled
Having both sides of the bread buttered before putting the sandwich together is the trickiest part.
Sandwiches after grilling in panini maker
Grilled and ready to eat!

Published by a Canadian publisher, 150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches lists ingredients in both U.S. and metric measurements. The cookbook itself doesn’t lie flat when opened, but the recipes don’t require you to refer back to the cookbook frequently while cooking, because you basically put the sandwiches together and then grill them. The index is very basic. For example, Easy Meatless Quesadillas is only indexed under “E”, not also under “Q”. But the cookbook is divided into sections that make it easy to find what you’re looking for and the design of the pages is very attractive. You can preview the cookbook on the publisher’s Web site.

I found lots of inspiration in 150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches for sandwich combination ideas – from the simple (e.g. Classic Grilled Two Cheese) to the more complicated (Three-Cheese Grilled Sliders with Compound Herb Butter). The cookbook includes recipes for condiments called for in other recipes such as Peach-Ginger Chutney, Sweet Pepper Relish, and Caponata Spread. The cookbook even includes ideas for sandwiches as appetizers (e.g. Grilled Brie with Chutney); breakfast (e.g. Muenster-Stuffed Raisin Bread); or dessert (e.g. Open-Faced Blueberry and Almond Sandwich). There are many vegetarian sandwiches, but there are recipes that include meat or fish, as well. This is a good cookbook to have on hand to make a quick and easy grilled cheese sandwich meal more interesting.

150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches includes some recipes from the author’s first cookbook, 400 Best Sandwich Recipes. Author Alison Lewis blogs about food, travel, and health at Ingredients, Inc.

150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
Lewis, Alison
Robert Rose
October 2012
978-0-7788-0412-3
$24.95 USA, $24.95 Can., softcover

Disclosure: I won 150 Best Grilled Cheese Sandwiches from the publisher through a 1000th Blog Post Celebration giveaway on Heather’s Books and Quilts, a blog I probably discovered through her links to Weekend Cooking on Beth Fish Reads.

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