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Monday, November 5, 2012

The laziest grilled cheese ever

Lately, quick and easy meals are getting more important for me. Yeah, grilled cheese is easy enough, but it still requires standing at the stove for a while. But when a grilled cheese can be as easy as toast - well, why not?

Quite some time ago I got a pack of Toastabags during some online promotion. I remember getting them. I remember putting them ... somewhere. I might have tucked them into a cookbook. Yup, they're pretty thin and I put them somewhere and haven't seen them since.

Recently, I got more Toastabags directly from Boska, and I decided that this time I'd give them a try before I misplaced this set. The idea is simple. You make a grilled cheese sandwich, slip it into the bag then put it in a toaster to do the toasting and cooking. Easy peasy.

It works, with one caveat. It depends on your toaster. the first sandwich I made was a little bit too fat to fit into my toaster - it doesn't have super-wide slots like some toasters do. So I sort of had to jam the sandwich into the slot and it got just a tad over-toasted. But the cheese melted nicely. It would have been more successful in a toaster with a wider slot. Or, if I would have smashed the bread before putting the sandwich in the bag, or sliced the bread a little thinner.

On the plus side, you can shave a few calories off the typical grilled cheese sandwich because you don't have to use any butter on the outside. Then again, that butter adds to the ... grilled-cheeseness of a grilled cheese sandwich.

But I gotta say that shaving a sandwich into the toaster and walking away is actually pretty cool. I just need to figure out exactly how thick to make the sandwich so it fits the toaster right. And besides grilled cheese, I can see how this would be useful for warming other sandwiches as well.

The instructions say you can use the bags for heating pizza slices, but I haven't tried that. I'm fine with cold pizza. I did use it for a quesadilla, though, and that worked just fine.