Jalapeno Popper Grilled Cheese
Closet Cooking had some stroke of genius when coming up with this recipe. It's a grilled cheese sandwich whose existence makes perfect sense—we're surprised no one thought of it decades ago.
The basic idea was to incorporate the flavours and textures of jalapeno poppers in a grilled cheese sandwich and the first step was the jalapeno peppers themselves. I really could not see biting into a perfectly grilled sandwich with all of the melted gooey cheese and hitting hard raw jalapeno peppers and although pickled jalapeno peppers would likely have done the trick I decided to take the extra step and I roasted the peppers first. In addition to softening the peppers up, roasting them would add a nice hint of smokiness. Next up was the jalapeno poppers filling and I spread some cream cheese on one slice of bread and then I stuffed in as much jack and cheddar cheese as I could. One of the things that I like about jalapeno poppers is the crunchy bread crumb coating and although the buttered bread would get nice and crispy when fried, I was looking for something a little more. My first thought was to just add some panko bread crumbs to the inside of the sandwich but I did not think that they would still be very crispy by the time that I got to eating the sandwich. This one stumped my for a while but then inspiration struck, I could use crumbled tortilla chips!
