Procrastination is the Key to a Good Grilled Cheese

Where: Home Sweet Home

With: My shadow

Rating: 8.5/10

Details: Dubliner cheese on thinly sliced ciabatta bread

Count: 5/5000

I am out of the dorms for good! I finished moving home yesterday and figured today would be the perfect day for a celebratory Grilled Cheese! I set out to make my Grilled Cheese and realized the only bread we really had in the house was the ciabatta my dad had bought for our spaghetti dinner last night. It wasn't really ciabatta, since it was bought from the local grocery store, rather it was more like a cross between italian and ciabatta bread, no where near the holiness you get when you make it yourself, which made it perfect bread for Grilled Cheese! I figured I would use my Dubliner cheese, which I treated myself to during finals, since ciabatta does have a flavor of it's own and I wanted a strong cheese flavor to counter that and it worked out very well actually. The bread browned beautifully and was incredibly crispy. I used thin slices of cheese, because it is so strong, which was definitely the right choice. It was a bit odd, because ciabatta and Dubliner didn't go perfectly together, but with the addition of my homemade tomato "soup," it was absolutely perfect!

I really wanted tomato soup to go with my Grilled Cheese once I had thought up what I was going to do, but I didn't want that processed Campbell's crap we keep on hand. This was going to be a baller sandwich, it deserved a baller soup. That and my 12 page paper I still have to finish was getting very tiresome and I wanted to prolong my time in the kitchen. My dad had just come back from the store with a thing of tomatoes, so I quartered four of them, threw some evoo in a pot, tossed in the tomatoes in on medium heat, added salt, pepper and basil to taste and voila! Fresh tomato "soup!" I say "soup" because I was too lazy, in spite of my looming paper, to pull out the blender and puree it, but the chunky worked out fine. The freshness of all the flavors worked out really really well, and if I were to rate the meal it would be a 10/10, but the sandwich alone was sadly only worth the 8.5, I guess I am still hunting for perfection.

Rachel's Quick and Easy Tomato and Basil "Soup"

Serves one bowl

Prep Time: 50 seconds

Cook Time: As long as the Grilled Cheese takes

4 medium tomatoes

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Basil

Pepper

Salt

After quartering the tomatoes, cover the bottom of a medium sauce pan with EVOO and turn on medium heat. Add the tomatoes and season with basil, pepper and salt to taste. (If I weren't so lazy today, I would have seasoned more and thrown in some garlic and a little bit of onion). Cover and let simmer until the tomatoes are soft and the skins fall off. Crush the tomatoes and continue to simmer for another few minutes. Remove from heat and either serve as is, which will be more like a sauce (in fact you could easily use doctor this recipe for a quick and easy marinara), or puree the soup until desired consistency. If you don't want to puree at the end like me and you want yours less chunky, you could dice the tomatoes or remove the skins when the tomatoes soften.