Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe. Today’s recipe is pretty straight-forward: an original grilled cheese sandwich in honor of the holiday, So today let’s have ourselves a sinful little peek into French practices, and whip up something in honor of their amour.  If you wanna skip all that, and just get to the sandwich, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Grilled and Girdled

Today is National Grilled Cheese Day, according to one website I checked, and Googling the phrase “national Grilled Cheese Day” to double check. (Research!) And April is definitely Grilled Cheese Month, as we talked about a couple years ago right after we made Grilled Cheese Dogs.  So in the spirit of Grilled Cheese Month, I asked Mom and Nate if there was any kind of Grilled Cheese they wanted me to make…and my mom’s answer was sufficiently complicated that we ended up not making it for today. Maybe we’ll hit it up as the end of the month. But Nate’s idea was interesting, and SEXY.

Nate wanted a Grilled Cheese inspired by cinq à sept, which is a French phrase with TWO potential uses: In Quebec, it refers to a social gathering, often akin to a “cocktail hour” or “happy hour”: a time for people to meet up, chat, have a couple drinks and some light food. The kind of thing you do before an art exhibition, or as a way to get to know new work colleagues. In FRANCE, the term refers to a rather different kind of social gathering: cinq à sept literally translates to “Five to Seven” and refers to the hours after you get off work, but before you are expected home for dinner, during which you can go hook up with your mistress/lover.

Behold, the most G-rated picture of someone’s Mistress I could find on the internet.

Yes, the French version of “Happy Hour” is “Hookup-Time”. France is famous for this sort of thing, of course, from the often-misunderstood ménage à trois (It does not simply mean “a threesome” as it is often used in America, but rather refers to something that would, in the modern world, be more closely understood as a polyamorous or polygamous household: a house consisting of three adults, where at least one member is romantically or sexually involved with the other two.) to a semi-recent poll showing that less than half of the French populace think it is “unacceptable” for a married person to have an affair, compared to 40% who think having an affair is “not a moral issue”.

The Cream Team

We’re not here to kink-shame the French (…today…) but the phrase has stuck in Nate’s mind, and so when it came time, he decided he wanted to commemorate it in a sandwich. Some quick discussion targeted some ideas for the sandwich

- Option 1: Just use “whatever we’ve got in the fridge”

- Option 2: Use 5 to 7 French Cheeses

-Option 3: Use ‘adulterous’ cheeses, which Nate defined as “any cheese normally made by one animal, made by another one”.

That was a very adventurous idea, but with the news Thursday, the health scare Friday, and a visit from my other brother Saturday-Sunday that I wasn’t told about until Friday, I ended up having to run to the store Sunday and grab the supplies in a hurry. So the Cheeses we wound up using were:

AOP is a left-wing Swiss politician who received their own Cheese line.

Emmentaler (“Of Emmental”) cheese, which plays with the definitions of “French” and “adulterous”: Emmental itself is a Swiss city, from the Canton of Bern, which played a big part in the Helvetic Republic, a 5 year span when Switzerland was controlled by France. Indeed, while simply “Emmentaler” is a protected term (AOP, as we’ve discussed before, being a legal designation meaning it MUST come from around the Emmental), there are two French ‘bastards’ in Emmentaler de Savoie, and Emmental Français Est-Central. So I felt it could be squeezed in, and definitely did NOT misread and grab the wrong type of cheese.

A Tragedy what happened to that French Cheese factory. All that was left was de brie.

Brie is, in many ways, the quintessential French cheese, so I felt it had to be included. It’s not very adulterous, but hey, sometimes you gotta include the classics. Which is officially my defense for why I included that terrible old joke there.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think my picture of Brie is actually the wedge I cut out of this.

Camembert is a very similar cheese to Brie, made in Normandy rather than…Brie. (Look, a lot of French Cheese names are just “where this is from”.) It’s another soft cheese, and honestly, I was heavily debating whether I should use a Gruyere or other French cheese (like a Neufchatel) instead, but when I got to the store, they didn’t have any other ones, so it’s what we used. Because if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

Awful lot of metal in this cheese. Must be for the anemic

Boursin was another cheese I knew I wanted to include once I learned it was French, for a very simple reason: goo. Specifically, when you’re making a grilled cheese with a lot of different cheeses, since you’ll be dealing with different melting points and different reactions to heat, I’ve found it’s almost always advisable to work in a bit of extra ‘goo’ somehow. Velveeta, Cream Cheese, hell, even Peanut Butter can all work as a binding agent to absorb the heat and conduct it to the harder cheeses, while permeating the bread.

The Boursin would also serve another purpose: see, Boursin is based on fromage frais, or “Fresh Cheese”, a sort of French take on cream cheese, and, like with cream cheese, it’s often mixed up with flavorings as a spread or dip. So the Garlic and Herbs built into the cheese would help cut the richness of having both Brie and Camembert.

Dis one goes out to ma provence!

The last cheese was another one of our “adulterous cheese”, but not for the reason Nate mentioned. Toma is an Italian variety of cheese, this one studded with Herbes du Provence. So we’d be bringing more herbs to cut the richness, while also having an Italian cheese sneak in because it’s wearing French clothes.

We debated adding a Gouda, but since the other sandwich was going to use it, we decided against it. So, with our cheeses selected, we tossed them in a small bowl, and stirred them thoroughly into each other, to ensure that we didn’t have huge clumps of one cheese in the sandwich.

Building A Stable Foundation

Given the richness of the filling, we went with a wide sourdough bread, so the bread would be able to stand up to the cheese a little bit (I also liked that using the wider bread meant that two people cut eat from one sandwich, which felt apropos given the ‘adulterous” vibe we were going for.

HOT STEAMY BREAD ACTION.

We also smeared some Dijon mustard on the top slice of bread, because I personally felt we probably STILL hadn’t cut the richness enough. (Spoilers: We probably STILL underestimated it.)

Once you have your cheese mixed, it’s really just a matter of slapping bread on a stove, dabbing it with blobs of cheese, and griddling to a toasted outside and a gooey center.

Flowing, glistening, wet cheese
A WHOLE NEW WORLD

The results were…quite impressive. Some might call them “universally beloved”. We’re talking “Nate threatened to harm me if I attempted to use the left-over cheese mix without including him” levels of success here. It’s not QUITE perfect: as I noted in that spoiler, it’s probably still a little too rich, and needs something to bring it down a little (maybe a bit of Arugula, or using whole-grain Dijon instead of smooth) but overall it was a smash success…unlike its brother.

Oh, yes, did I not mention? Like a classic French melodrama, there has been a secret brother haunting this post the entire time! See, I actually made TWO Grilled Cheeses on Sunday, but in providing the context for why I found the second one so fitting, I accidentally ate up all the space I would need to DESCRIBE it. So I’ve torn out every mention to it from THIS post (leaving it sadly somewhat shrimpy), to unveil the complete construction on Thursday! But for now, let me tell you: a quick trip to the store and 15 or so minutes of effort can make you a hell of a fine grilled cheese, before Thursday, when you get to see…the Trainwreck.

THURSDAY: OVERLY BROWNED BREAD, BARELY BURNT ONIONS, AND BOOZY BROWN SUGAR BACON ALL SLAM TOGETHER LIKE A DERAILING LOCOMOTIVE. AND ALSO, JON COMPLAINS FOR LIKE, 800 WORDS.

MONDAY: I’M FEELING PUSHED TOWARD SCHNITZEL, MAYBE ROSTI BUT I’LL CHECK IN WITH THE FAMILY, SEE WHAT THEY’RE INTO. I WROTE A LIST OF LIKE, 9 THINGS TO TRY IN THE NEXT MONTH AND A HALF, AND I’VE ALREADY LOST IT.

Cinq À Sept Grilled Cheese

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

2 oz Brie, rind trimmed

2 oz camembert, rind trimmed

2 oz Boursin Garlic and Herbs

2 oz TomaProvence, or an herbed Jack cheese, grated

2 oz Emmental, grated

2 large slices sourdough bread

1.5 tsp Dijon mustard

4 tbsp butter

Preparation

1. Combine all the cheeses in a medium sized bowl, stirring/mashing together with a fork until well distributed.

2. Melt 1 tbsp butter in a large skillet over medium heat, and spread another tablespoon onto one of the slices of sourdough. Place, butter side down, in the pan. Spoon the cheese over the grilling bread.

3. Take the remaining piece of bread, and spread the Dijon on one side, and another tbsp. of butter on the other. Place on top of the sandwich, butter side up. Cook 3-4 minutes, then flip, adding the last tbsp. of butter around the flipped sandwich.  Toast until bread is golden brown, and cheese is sufficiently gooey. Remove from the skillet, cut into 2 or 3 pieces, and serve.