Grilled Cheese With Pickled Hot Wax Peppers

This ended up being the healthiest most fun dinner we've made in a while. Hungarian hot wax peppers for the win! One of my favorite things in the world is eating food as soon as it comes out of the frying pan and is piping hot. So digging into this grilled cheese while it was still all melty and super crispy was awesome in itself. The extra kick that came from the layer of peppers in there took this whole sandwich up to top-notch status. Not to mention that it is the easiest thing in the world to make - all signs are pointing toward the need for more fancy grilled cheese in my life.

These sandwiches were a slight variation of this Jalapeno Popper Grilled Cheese on Simply Scratch

Used From Our CSA
Hungarian hot wax peppers

Thoughts on the Recipe

The grilled cheese was part of our dinner last Friday night. But preparing for the meal started on Thursday evening, because we had decided to pickle our peppers. To do that, we followed the instructions on this page. However, since we only had six peppers, Steve cut the ingredients way down while keeping the ratios intact (1 part salt, 4 parts vinegar, and 12 parts water, by volume). We also skipped the corn oil part of the instructions, and just left them in the vinegar solution for the few days it took to work our way through them. Aside from the fact that I neglected to wear gloves while slicing these up (which trust me, I definitely regretted for about the next 16 or so hours), it was a quick and easy process and we stuck the whole bowl in the fridge to sit overnight.

As far as the sandwich recipe goes, grilled cheese is a hard thing to screw up. So the recipe was a perfect catalyst to helping us use our peppers, even though we didn't follow it exactly. For example, no jalapenos were involved, and we didn't grill the peppers that we did use. Also, I don't usually do the "stir the minced scallions into the cream cheese" thing, when I could just as easily sprinkle the onions over a smear of cream cheese and thereby not have extra or make up too little of the mixture. I'm in favor of keeping it simple wherever possible.

But speaking of cream cheese - adding it to grilled cheese is a genius move. I never would have thought of that.

It took me almost a week to write this post, and I've craved another one of these grilled cheeses every day that I've worked on it - torture! We are all out of peppers, so I think I need some other delicious grilled sandwich ideas to help distract me. Any suggestions?