Grilled Cheese without the Butter

One of my favorite dinners is grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. I personally prefer my grilled cheese with a mixture of cheese, Jack and Cheddar being my favorite. I also like to pry it apart and put a bit of sweet pickle relish in the sandwich. Mmmm! Or to serve some sliced bread and butter pickles next to it, taking a bite of each.

My kids think a grilled cheese sandwich has to be on white bread with American cheese. I’ve converted them to sliced sourdough bread, infinitely better than plain white sandwich bread. I’m still working on the cheeses. My eldest likes the cheese mix but prefers Colby. Lots of it. She also likes quesadillas made with Colby. My youngest likes just the thinnest slice of some mild cheese, preferably American, but the main point being “not too much.”

So dinner tonight was some split pea soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. We had some company over and my friend is trying to watch the old diet. Soup was fine but the grilled cheese was questionable.

While we were talking before dinner, I remembered that my ex-MIL, whom I learned a tremendous amount of good recipes from, used to make toast for dinner by taking sliced sourdough bread and brushing it lightly with olive oil and then sprinkling some crushed oregano on it and broiling it. So we took that idea and merged it with the grilled cheese. We brushed the slices of bread with olive oil instead of spreading butter on them. We sprinkled a bit of oregano and rosemary on the bread, after putting some cheese between the slices. And then we broiled the sandwich rather than frying it on my griddle. We overdid the herbs a bit but in general it was a very satisfying sandwich!

Olive oil is generally considered to be healthier than butter. (I don’t even deal with margarine, personally. No taste. I’d rather have dry toast! And since “they” recently have been dissing margarine for various health reasons I feel totally justified in shunning it on the basis of taste for all these years.) But current thinking says olive oil is healthier than butter. You could play around with some different cheeses, maybe a little Parmesan mixed with something: sort of the grown-up grilled cheese. But the olive oil/baking idea is a definite win!