The Best Grilled Cheese

A grilled cheese sandwich is one of those foods that, when done right, can make you feel just a bit better about life when you are having a bad day. Below I will show you how I create MY perfect grilled cheese sandwich and I hope some of you find it as good as I do.

Ingredients

The bread, to me, is the most important part of the sandwich. If the bread is too sweet or does not crisp up right it can ruin the sandwiches flavor, texture, and appearance and all three are required for good food.

I like using one of three kinds of bread:

  • Sourdough for its sour flavor which adds a lot to the overall taste of the sandwich.
  • Fuchsia because it crisps up nicely while still being soft in the middle.
  • Rye (marble or other) for the strong rye, and depending on the type herb, flavor that it has.

The cheese can be any kind of cheese, except for the fake cheeses like american and Velveeta. I prefer to use either a good aged cheddar or a dubliner cheese. The key is that the cheese needs to melt relatively easily so hard cheeses like parmesan don’t work well.

You will also need butter, lots of butter.

Prep

  1. Cut bread to desired thickness, if you like it crispier than cut it thinner and if you like it softer in the middle then cut it thicker.
  2. Grade 1.5 times more cheese than you plan on putting inside the sandwich.
  3. Butter both sides of each slice of bread.
  4. Heat a pan that is large enough to fit both pieces of bread in it side by side and put about 1/8 stick of butter into the pain.
  5. When the butter in the pan is fully melted put the slices of bread in side by side.
  6. When the bread is at the desired crispness on one side do the following:
    1. Flip one slice.
    2. Put the cheese you want to use for the inside on the cooked side of that slice.
    3. Put the cooked side of the other slice on top of it.
    4. Add some more butter to the pan.
    5. Put half of the remaining cheese on the top slice so that the cheese is facing out.
    6. Flip the full sandwich and do the same to the new side.
  7. You are now frying the cheese that is on the outside of the sandwich in the butter making a nice fried cheese crust on the outside of the sandwich.
  8. When both sides have been cooked and the cheese on the outside is crispy you are done cooking my perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

After the sandwich has cooled down a bit it is ready to eat; or you can add something to make it that much better. I like to add my homemade Sauerkraut, tomatoes and/or bacon.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

March 7, 2014 Personal, Writings No Comments on The Best Grilled Cheese

Sauerkraut

For the past year or so I have been fermenting my own sauerkraut and in that time I have had a few inquiry into my process and recipe so I figured that while it is a standard process and recipe I would post about it anyways.

Items I use:

  • Sharp knife (http://amzn.com/B008M5U1C2)
  • Potato masher (http://amzn.com/B00004OCJK)
  • Big boll
  • A big cutting board
  • Some kind of weight that will fit in your fermentation pot, if you get a Harsch it will come with some stones that fit inside.
  • and the most import item, a fermentation pot. There are a number of different types and sizes, I have a 10 liter Harsch Fermenting Crock Pot, but you can get something cheaper that works just as good, for example you can pick up a Pickle-Pro vegetable Fermenting top and a canning jar with the correct sized top. I haven’t used the Pickle-Pro but you can read a review of a number of different fermentation pots at nourishingtreasures.com

My recipe is very basic, I use salt (I like to use Himalayan salt), caraway seed and cabbage, that is all. I plan on making my next batch with cumin seed and I also plan on making a batch using juniper berries but as of yet I haven’t used anything other then caraway seed.

My Steps

  1. Peel a few of the big leaves off the cabbage and save them for later use.
  2. I cut all the cabbage up into thin slices and put it in a bowl (I use about 5 big green cabbages to fill my 10 liter pot).
  3. After all the cabbage is cut I put a handful in my fermentation pot, I add salt (about 2 tablespoons, it is safer to add more then not to have added enough) and some of the caraway seed (about 1/2 tablespoon).
  4. I then use my hands and mix it up.
  5. After the salt, seed, and cabbage is mixed up I use the potato masher to pack the cabbage to the bottom of the pot.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5 tell the pot is about 3/4 to 5/6 of the way full.
  7. Put the big leaves you set aside in step 1 so that they cover the cabbage in the pot and then put the weight on top of them.
  8. At this point, depending on the type of cabbage you used, you may have enough water, from the cabbage, to have covered the weight by about an inch. If you don’t have enough water in the pot then add enough cold water to cover the weight by about an inch and add more salt.
  9. Scrape any floating debris off the surface of the water and discard.
  10. Seal the pot and put in a dark cool place and let sit and if your pot has a sealing well then keep it filled with water.

I let my batches sit for 4 to 8 weeks.

August 27, 2013 Writings No Comments on Sauerkraut

Teaching Children about Death

How do you explain the gravity of death and killing something/someone to a 7 year-old in a manner they will understand?

Today my oldest (just over 7.5 years old), while somewhat upset, told his mother that he wanted to “kill himself”. Killing one’s self is not something that has ever come up in conversation or been something he has been exposed to, even with it being one of the top ways people die today (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide#Epidemiology), and after talking with him for a little bit, with relefe, I realized that he didn’t understand what it meant.

I sat him down and tried to explain how much it would hurt the people around him if he was to die and how death or killing one’s self has a permanent outcome that would prevent him from ever doing anything ever again, whether it would be playing with Lego’s or fighting with his brother it was the end-all-be-all to what he does and knows today.

Having this conversation with him I realized that in today’s society children are exposed less and less to death and what the outcome of killing something is. When I was a kid I had pets that were killed by other animals, I had killed fish after fishing and had seen birds of prey injure other birds to the point that they were suffering and the falconer had to kill them by hand, so while I didn’t truly understand what death was, if anyone ever does, I had seen the outcome of death and had an appreciation for it.

So now I am trying to figure out humane ways to give my son the experience of death, I will take him fishing and maybe hunting and I think I will send him with his grandfather to see how falcons catch their food but I can only hope this gives him some perspective on life and death.

How do/did you teach your kids about death or have you done so or even thought about doing so?

August 5, 2013 Personal, Thoughts, Writings No Comments on Teaching Children about Death

Anti-Virus Test

Today I decided to test out a number of the anti-virus scanners that are floating around the internet. I didn’t do a very in-depth test, just gathered a archive of 3765 viruses and tested each anti-virus scanner to see how many of the viruses it found and how many files it scanned.

Note: Some of the viruses had files archived in side of them so the scanned number will sometimes be higher then the number of files I listed above.

Microsoft Security Essentials (Scanned: 3799, Found: 3668)
* Quick scan.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 (Scanned: 3851, Found:3680)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Slow scan.

Sophos Anti-Virus (Small Business) (Scanned: 3772, Found: 3631)
* Is designed for a management environment (10+ systems) and not a SOHO environment.
* Bad scan reports.

Sunbelt Vipre (Scanned: 190, Found: 13)
Don’t know what happened with this but it wouldn’t scan more then 190 files.
* Quick install.
* Requires reboot after install.
* By default it doesn’t scan inside archives.
* Can’t scan archives inside other archives.

F-Secure Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3757, Found: 3698)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Minimal interface
* If system has low memory it disables email scanning and other advanced process monitoring by default.

Avast Pro (Scanned: 3796, Found: 3644)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Quick install.
* Really quick scan.

Panda Cloud Anti-Virus
I stopped the scan after letting it run for about 10 min. and it had only scanned 233 files and only found 150 infections.
* Quick install
* High CPU usage.
* Requires network connection
* Very very slow scan.

ESET NOD32 (Scanned: 3739, Found: 3622)
* Quick virus database update.
* Very fast scan.

ClamAV for Windows (Doesn’t support scanning one file or directory)
* Easy install
* Can’t scan individual files or directory’s

Avira AntiVir (Scanned: 3773, Found: 3716)
* Quick scan.
* Bit high on system resources

AVG Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3774, Found: 3702)
* Somewhat slow install.
* Low system foot-print.

May 22, 2010 anti-virus, Tech, Thoughts 3 Comments on Anti-Virus Test

What Came First the Chicken or the Egg?

I was thinking today about the common question, what came first the chicken or the egg? Now this is a question that many people have heard and many have jokingly argued about so in this post I will show you my answer to what came first the chicken or the egg?

First off I don’t think the question is as simple as one or the other came first I think it is going to depend on your beliefs. You have to ask your self one question before you can start to analyze what the answer to this basic yet profound question could be. That question is do you subscribe to Darwinism or to creationism? If the answer is creationism then the answer in my mind would be one of two answers the first one being the chicken for God created the chicken and the chicken lays the eggs. The second possible answer would be both for God created everything.

A Darwinist could say that the egg came first. A bird very similar to the chicken but not evolved to be what we know now as a chicken laid an egg. In the possess of that egg embryo forming into a baby version of what ever bird laid it there was a mutation of some kind. The mutation changed the embryo enough that it grow into what we know now as being a chicken, therefore the egg came first, right? Well maybe not by using the above argument you could stat that the chicken came first for the egg was the egg of a deferent bird so therefore was not the egg that the question refers to. My argument ageist this is that once that mutation took form the egg became the egg of a chicken, not laid by a chicken but the protective home for the new chicken embryo, letting it grow and thus became a chicken egg.

A deferent view could be that the question refers to the first egg ever to come into existence if you look at it by this point of view then you would have to analyze life from the beginning and that again would depend on if you are for Darwinism or for creationism. Sens the creationism answer is relatively simple and is the same as the above stated answers I will look at it from the Darwinist’s point of view. If the question refers to the first egg ever to show up in life then sens chickens have been around a relatively short period of time compared to life and the chicken was not the first animal to lay an egg then the answer would have to be the egg came first.

Now the last point of view that I will cover is the egg and the chicken came to be at the same time. Now how can that happen? The idea is that as soon as the embryo changed in the egg from growing into the deferent type of bird and instead growing into a chicken the egg changed from being an egg for the deferent kind of bird into being a chicken egg, not the egg of a chicken but a chicken egg for it was housing the evolution of the first chicken. Therefore the egg and the chicken came into existence at the same time.

August 4, 2008 Personal, Philosophy, Thoughts, Writings 1 Comment on What Came First the Chicken or the Egg?