Italian Grilled Cheese Sandwich

We love grilled cheese in this house! Ever since I found out I was pregnant, my grilled cheese addiction has only gotten worse. Part of this reason is that the only things I could seem to keep down during the first trimester were hamburgers, French fries, macaroni and cheese, and grilled cheese.

So the other day when I was looking around Pinterest (yes, that is a daily occurrence by the way), I found this recipe for grilled cheese and it just looked so scrumptious. It also looked like a good way to sneak in some eggs!

So today, while my husband is at a water park and everyone in the States is celebrating the 5^th of July with barbeques and get togethers, I decided to try this recipe out. 

I couldn’t even wait until lunch time to make this recipe because I woke up starving so I wound up making this recipe around 10 am!

Here is the link to the original recipe that I am “following:” http://trickschefs.com/showthread.php?tid=154 Note the quotation marks because I had a few substitutions due to what we had around the house.

Italian Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Ingredients:

*3 eggs
*2 tablespoons milk
*2 teaspoons garlic powder
*2 teaspoons Italian seasoning (I used Mrs. Dash’s Italian seasoning for this)
*2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
*2 slices Cheddar cheese (yes, the recipe calls for American cheese and I would have used it, but our local supermarket did not have any American cheese and therefore I decided to use the cheddar slices that they did have)
*4 slices sandwich bread (I used wheat bread for this because I don’t normally buy white bread, but I feel like this is a recipe where white bread might be a little better!)

NOTE: The egg mixture could have been made smaller since I used a lot less cheese and bread than the original blog post, but to be honest, I just didn’t feel like dealing with measurements or anything like that and decided that even if I had extra egg mixture, it would not be that big of a deal. Feel free to make a smaller amount of the egg mixture though if you can’t stand to waste!

Directions:

1. Whisk eggs, milk, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, and Parmesan cheese together in a bowl.
2. Place each cheddar cheese slice between two pieces of bread to assemble 2 sandwiches. (Note: Your number of cheese slices and number of sandwiches will vary depending on how many sandwiches you are making at the time. Next time I make this, I am sure my husband will be around so I will have to make at least 4 sandwiches.)
3. Heat a non-stick frying pan or griddle over medium heat (Note: I have stainless steel pans so I sprayed a little bit of Canola oil in the pain while it was heating up. I hate cleaning up egg messes from the pans later! I also put that you could use a griddle here because if you are making more than a couple of sandwiches, it would save you a little time to make them all at once on the griddle.)
4. Dip both sides of a sandwich in egg mixture. (The original blog says to dip each sandwich in, but I didn’t want to make a mess with the second sandwich while cooking the first so I did this one sandwich at a time.)
5. Place dipped sandwiches in the hot frying pan; cook until golden brown and cheese is melted. (The original blog post says about 3 minutes per side, but this will vary depending on your stove and pan and all that!)

Here’s a picture of my completed sandwiches:

So what did I think about this recipe?

I thought that the extra ingredients added a bit of a different flavor, but to me, this is not something that I would make all the time. I would like to try this recipe again with smaller white bread (we generally only get big loaves of wheat bread here) and American cheese. I also would make it on the griddle because this made a huge mess of my pan!

Some tips that I have for you:

*Make sure that you get the sandwich cooked really well. One of my sandwiches was a little soggy and I couldn’t get past the sogginess to actually eat the sandwich.
*You may want to add a little more milk to the egg mixture to help keep the sandwich from sticking to the pan as well.
*This sandwich is not one that you can make and let it sit for a couple of minutes before you eat it. It needs to be eaten right after taking it out of the pan because it does tend to get soggy again if it sits for a little while.
*This recipe can get messy with the egg mixture so plan on dirtying up a few dishes to make these sandwiches.
*Using a pie pan instead of a bowl to mix up your egg mixture helps you make sure that you get an even coating on the bread of your sandwiches.

If you think the original recipe looked good, I say try it for yourself and do not let my experience deter you from it! If you have a really good experience with either this recipe or the original recipe, please leave a comment so I can know about it!