Beyond Grilled Cheese: Pickles and Peanut Butter

Earlier, I’d written about our experiment with grilled cheese sandwiches, using olive oil and broiling them rather than butter and grilling. The other night, my same friend was over and I was making grilled cheese sandwiches again, and using up some leftover soups and chili as well. He’d stopped by the store for some American cheese, which the kids like, and wine for us. I’d already pulled out my jar of sweet butter pickles, which I remembered he liked as much as I did. I had slices of bread laid out on the cutting board and my griddle heating up. I got one batch going on the griddle and then he said:

“Gee, some peanut butter and a dill pickle inside one of those would be good.” Now, peanut butter in a grilled cheese would, quite frankly, have never occurred to me. But when the first sandwich came off the griddle, he opened it up and slipped a dill pickle slice inside, then smeared some peanut butter on the outside. It was actually quite good! The kids were too hungry for us to continue experimenting and they all declined to taste the experiment. But he and I started brainstorming a whole list of things we could add to future sandwiches. The first step, we agreed, would be to put the peanut butter on the inside before grilling. Other ingredients we were thinking about included capers, applesauce, other cheeses of course… maybe some sauteed apple slices…