Why Hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where today we’re tackling a second recipe and an emotional outpouring that was too hot for Monday night…Internet? That bit doesn’t really track. I’m your Critical Content Creator, Jon O’Guin, and today we’re doing a bonus Catastrophe! If you just want the recipe, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

A Mess and a Half of a Fortnight (and a half)

You want a very quick insight into how messed up I am? I used the wrong ‘fortnight’ in that title when I first wrote it. And while I do spend a lot of time online, I think I’ve played maybe 4 total games of Fortnite.

I assure you, I am BARELY less lost than you with this image.

Also, side note: I’m probably mostly going to be whining/explaining the last couple weeks in this section, so if you’re not into cooking blogs for the personal stuff (as I see people posting about at least once a month on FB. Which is both fair, and also kind of rude. I don’t post about how I hate the only parts of your job that make you feel like a person actually doing something, rather than a cog in a vast machine. Probably. I think I’ve only done that to like, 4 professions. And I don’t apologize about doing it to the chandlers: Candle-making isn’t a real job anymore, you’re just an essential oils salesperson with extra steps.) then I’d jump to the next one, though you might miss more comedic gold like “fuck the candle-stick maker”.

You’ve had it TOO GOOD for TOO LONG, MR WAX-MAN. Oh, excuse me, “Mrs Wax-Man”. I just got into the pun and didn’t look at the pic.

So, you might have noticed that for the last two weeks, we haven’t had posts on Thursdays like we normally do, and while I apologized about it the first week, the second week was radio silent. Well, I gotta say: I’m just straight-up not having a good time, bro. Something has twisted in my schedule that has burned my stability and contentment to ash. Like, mentally, I still want all these posts to come out around 2-3 PM. But that has NOT been happening for MONTHS now. For fuck’s sake, this is now a FRIDAY post. (editor’s note: A Friday EVENING post, because you spent all morning dead-brained from allergies) It’s incredibly frustrating: almost every week it feels like I’m pulling fucking teeth getting the food made, then pulling more teeth to get time to write/edit, despite knowing that all of this fit in my schedule for the last year. So I’m constantly ‘behind’ making every message or email from a friend  both a desperately needed social connection and also a rage-inducing interruption into the eternal backlog of what I need to get done. I wake up tired, I hurt all the time, I’m constantly anxious some new sensation is the sign of my impending death, and I keep losing therapy appointments because some other asshole has the bad manners to be WORSE OFF than me! (Ah, yes, the ‘comedic gold’ promised!)

And, being generous, that may sound like a heck of an emotional breakdown, but oh no: that’s the baseline experience I’ve been having for months now, and became relatively resigned to as the “ongoing-pandemic panic” I’ve got to live through until we hit herd immunity. No, the last two weeks got to be EXTRA fun: as noted on the 5th, I had three separate (relatively minor) emotional breakdowns the week before: Thursday’s was because I had, in the spirit of April fool’s, written like, 3/4s of a post pretending to be a Table-top gaming blog…but after a family dinner and a digital play reading, I got back online to discover I realized that I was actually probably closer to 2/3rds done, because it was a little too “let me explain a bunch of details about a game without many jokes”…and it just wasn’t in me. The idea of having to write 600 more words just emotionally DESTROYED me for no apparent reason. I don’t want to get too deeply into Friday’s and Saturday’s: Friday’s because I frustratingly don’t recall it (though I do recall thinking “we should definitely talk about this in therapy next week”…so that’s a great sign. Then again, appointment got cancelled, so I have 3 whole weeks to try and remember!) and Saturday’s because…well because it’s more embarrassing than the others: I gave myself a panic attack by eating an edible and getting drunk off of two beers, which combined two sensory issues into an inescapable loop of fearing that I was, at that moment, dying.

Very enjoyable. Would recommend.

Then, last week, after being mildly frustrated that I didn’t finish anything to really focus the Thursday post about, I watched half of a Netflix series, figured out I couldn’t finish it in time, and it didn’t really relate to anything we’d been talking about, and decided to instead write up a grab-bag post, discussing some smaller topics, got about 1200 words in, and was trying to figure out if I needed one last story to wrap it up when the house got a phone call from my Aunt at 9 PM stating my grandmother had just been taken to the ER with heart troubles. She went into open heart surgery the next day, and ended up being intubated Friday night. Now, as of Saturday, she was off the ventilator, and was awake, sitting up and talking, so we’re happy to hear she’s doing better, and hope she makes a full recovery soon. But that news slammed into my system, given my standing anxiety and panic attacks connected to medical issues, even probably triggering a brief medical scare for myself Friday night: I became dizzy, without any obvious explanation, for about 3 hours. Which, given my OTHER grandmother’s history with strokes, is a worrying issue to develop…but it can also be caused by allergies, stress, anxiety, dehydration, etc, which, given that I am constantly suffering from low-grade allergen exposure, and the previous description of my ongoing existence, means I checked a lot of boxes for “probably not a stroke”

So BOTH of the last two Thursday posts I’ve missed MOSTLY exist, just without pictures or a good ending, both smacked out of my creative space by emotional turmoil. Humbled and frustrated by this experience, what did I decide to make after learning about a family member’s heart issues? Some decadently rich grilled cheese sandwiches, of course!

When Three Become One

In my defense, I committed to the recipes before the news, so it was more a “failed to back out of grilled cheese sandwiches”. (And if you skipped the last section, no, you DON’T get to know what news made me want to back out of sandwiches! You made your choice, and I can definitely prevent you from scrolling slightly upward to read the last paragraph.) So, what drew me to this sandwich? Well, honestly, the name, and the ingredients. This is the “Trainwreck Grilled Cheese”, invented by Olivia’s Cuisine, and damn it, I just realized I haven’t actually technically made the whole thing. Now I’ve got to do THAT.

“I guess we just wait here, then?”
Lovely day for it, eh, Russell?
”You know that’s not my name.”

While we wait for Future Jon to have fixed his flawed fixings, let’s talk about what we DO know. Which I have to confess at this exact second, is very little. From my perspective, the Jedi are ev-sorry, force of habit. What I meant was “I discovered this recipe by Googling “weird Grilled Cheese”, and ending up on a list of Grilled Cheese options on Delish.com. I saw the picture of the Trainwreck, clicked the link, and ended up on Olivia’s blog. It’s been going since 2014, and she clearly puts a lot more effort into taking great photos of her food and organizing her site than I do. So once I get the emotional stability to learn technical skills, it is OVER for her. Joking, of course. Cooking isn’t a competition. Except on TV. And in, you know, like, Church potluck situations. Oh, they SAY those aren’t competitions, but deep down, we all know we’re judging. Some people we WANT to be making the cake, others…well, a wouldn’t plates and napkins be so THOUGHTFUL?

Anywho, the basic components of the dish aren’t insane: it’s a Grilled cheese with added bacon, caramelized onion, and a sauce to cut some of the richness. As such, this is, very technically, 4 recipes merged into 1. Why then, did I title this section “Three become One”? Because A: I wanted to reference the lesser known Spice Girls hit “When Two Become One” in order to trigger someone’s deep-seated memories of a simpler time, and when I first made the recipe, it had been such a chaotic day that I completely forgot the sauce; hence my statement in the first paragraph of this section. Right after I learned of my grandmother’s heart troubles, I also learned that my brother would be visiting that weekend, in a kind of classic “Mom and Nate have previously discussed this at some point while I was downstairs, so I’m the only one who didn’t know” situation. So we had to juggle making two recipes between a couple visits, a dinner plan, and so on. Except, as I just noted, this one recipe is technically multiple. So what’re the components we have to assemble?

The Bs And Cs of Grilled Cheese

First thing we gotta do is caramelize some onions. This is a complicated process, for which I suggest you get a mandoline. No, not the instrument. That’s a mandolin. Just because “thinly cutting a whole onion” can be a bit of a pain with normal kitchen knives. 

Do NOT attempt to strum this. That is, EXPLICITLY, how it cuts things.

Next, you toss them in a pan, with some melted butter, and just wait for 30 minutes, stirring the onions every now and again. They’ll breakdown, shrink up, and get brown. Or, if you’re not great at stirring, a little black in spots. But since you take the pictures, just hide your shame from the world. (Also, they’re ending up inside a sandwich, so it’s not like looks super matter.)

While that goes, it’s time for the OTHER time investment of the recipe: The mega-bacon. Specifically, you’re going to make some Whiskey-and-Maple-Glazed Bacon. Which might sound complicated, but really isn’t. First, you make a glaze by whisking some maple, whiskey, and brown sugar together. And then you toss some bacon in it.

Just whisk that meat in there.

Toss to coat, and that’s it. Bacon’s glazed. The only potentially complicated part is that you then want to oven-bake your bacon, which, while very popular with restaurant chefs, isn’t the most common home method, because it’s just a little more complicated. We’ve done it on the site before, but as a reminder: you get a baking sheet and line it with foil to catch the bacon fat. Then you place a metal baking or cooling rack on top of the sheet, and lay your bacon on it. Pop in a hotter oven, and let roast. 

This is preferred by restaurants for a couple reasons: Firstly, because it’s less dangerous. There isn’t a pan of hot bubbling oil exposed to the air, throwing around searing droplets of pork fat. Second, because it’s more consistent/easier: As bacon cooks in the frying pan, it cooks somewhat unevenly, with the meat crinkling away from the hot pan, making it harder to get the entire piece cooked at the same time. You can make a piece of bacon that is both burnt AND raw, a trick normally reserved for poorly seared tuna. The oven, since it’s cooking from all sides, doesn’t have that problem. Further, since the heat is less direct, the bacon cooks slower, which has an upside: it means there’s a longer window for ‘correct’ cooking: you can ‘miss’ the perfect moment by say, 2 minutes either direction, and be fine. In the pan, that window is closer to 30 seconds or less, depending on how hot you’re frying. Lastly, for the very reason we’re doing it at this moment: it’s hands-off. We pop our bacon in the oven, and for the next 20 minutes, we just stir caramelized onions every minute or so while chatting with our visiting family. The bacon is taking care of itself.

The onions, on the other hand, need a gentle but present hand.

Once the bacon is browned, and the onions caramelized, it’s time to make the sauce. Which I did TODAY, since I forgot it the first time: It’s a simple sauce of Dijon Mustard and mayonnaise, used to cut some of the richness of the assembled sandwich. Especially given that the cheese for this endeavor is not your standard American or Cheddar, but rather gouda. Which I did not feel like cleaning the grater to grate, so instead I chopped it into little squares before tossing it on the bread.

Do you know what a square is, Jon? Because these are not squares.

That done, I placed two broken up slices of bacon, about a tablespoon maybe 2 of caramelized onion, and… Man, 2 tablespoons of mustard? That seems excessive. Oh, no, the recipe says SOME of the sauce. That makes sense. It’s a fairly wonky ratio (1/3 cup to ¼ cup) so I guess it’s just a matter of “there’s no easy measurement for the ‘correct’ amount in the US imperial system.” In the spirit of that confusion, however, I did put what I felt was an excessive amount of mayo sauce.

The classic “too much is just enough” approach.

Plop that on top of of the onion, and cook for about 3-5 minutes a side, until browned. At this time, I realized I could use a cooking utensil that I bought MONTHS ago, but keep forgetting to find projects to use with: Food presses. Weighted metal units that evenly apply a moderate amount of weight in order to press down things like sandwiches or meat. I took a picture of the process, but honestly, we don’t ahve time to talk much about it. right now, I just added this section so that there was a bit of visual space before that picture of the mayo, and the finished reveal.

A picture That was initially held WAY too vertically, so I had to rotate the picture, hence the missing top left corner.

As I noted, the one you’re looking at now is a repeat, because the first one didn’t get the sauce, AND I felt didn’t get the balance of ingredients correct: the one I made on Sunday was a Caramelized Onion sandwich with cheese, not a Grilled Cheese with caramelized onions. This one was…better, but I think that’s because the molten mayo tricks your brain into thinking there’s more cheese than there is. The result is good, and especially when you’ve pre-made the bacon and onions a breeze to make: the Thursday version of this dish was MAYBE a 12 minute endeavor. My mother prefers the Cinq à sept, which was to be predicted, since she doesn’t actually like onions. I also personally prefer the Cinq, but I think with a little more attention to detail/proper execution (I think the caramelized onions didn’t have time to properly heat up/through in the Thursday version)  this would be a worthy contender.

MONDAY: FUN FACT: I WROTE OUT A LIST OF 11 DIFFERENT POTENTIAL FOODS TO MAKE OVER APRIL AND MAY, AND FUCKING LOST IT. SO FUCKED IF I KNOW. LIKE I SAID AT SOME NEBULOUS RECENT POINT, I HAD THOUGHTS ABOUT SCHNITZEL, OR CHICKEN CUTLETS OR SOMETHING. I’VE GOT MOST OF TODAY TO FIGURE IT OUT.

THURSDAY: MAYBE I’LL FINISH THAT SHOW I WAS WATCHING. OR BE INSPIRED TO COVER SOMETHING ELSE.

Recipe

Trainwreck Grilled Cheese

Makes 4 sandwiches (Can be scaled down)

Ingredients

                Caramelized onions

1 yellow onions, thinly sliced

1 tbsp butter

Salt and pepper

                Whiskey-Maple Bacon

2 tbsp good maple syrup

1 tbsp good whiskey

1 tbsp brown sugar

8 slices bacon

                Dijonay

1/3 cup mayonnaise

¼ cup dijon mustard (the original recipe calls for whole grain, which I didn’t have, so I mixed whole-grain garlic with smooth Dijon)

                Rest of the sandwich

6 tbsp room temp butter

8 slices good wheat bread, or other ‘firmer’ bread.

6 oz gouda, grated or thinly sliced/chopped

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In a large skillet, melt the 2 tbsp of butter over medium heat, add the onions, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 25-30 minutes until caramelized.

2. While onions cook, make the bacon: whisk together whiskey, brown sugar, and maple syrup together in a medium sized bowl. Add the bacon, and toss to coat. Then, line a baking sheet with aluminum foil, top with a baking rack, and lay out glazed bacon. Place in the pre-heated oven, and cook 15-20 minutes, to desired crispness.

3. Stir together mayo and Dijon to make sauce. Move caramelized onions to a bowl, season with salt and pepper. Clean out skillet, and return to medium heat. Take bacon from oven, drain on paper-towel lined plate, and cut in half to easier fit on sandwich.

4. Butter outside of bread. On bottom bread slice, add gouda. Top with two pieces of bacon, 1/4th of caramelized onions. Spread Dijonay across inside of top slice, and place on top of sandwiches.

5. Move buttered sandwiches to skillet, and cook 3-5 minutes per side. Cut in half and serve.