I always thought that any grilled sandwich with at least a 2:1 ratio of cheese to meat/veggies/etc. could be correctly defined as a grilled cheese. Currently 44 percent of voters on Serious Eats disagree. To this majority, grilled cheese is nothing more than bread, cheese and heat. Are they right?

Think of Campanile’s Grilled Cheese Night, and how it might offend this group of purists with it’s weekly nightmare of “grilled cheese” dishes like burrata with capers, both versions of Croque and Ahi tuna. None of these fit the literal meaning of grilled cheese as defined by this group. (I picture the purists huddled in a picketing pack outside of the restaurant, holding signs depicting sandwiches with big red Xs drawn through them.)

If we continue accepting only literal meanings, then many playful spins on certain culinary words wouldn’t quite work. Any reference of the word “steak” that doesn’t apply to actual meat would be wrong (one example that comes to mind is Marcel’s watermelon steak with tomatoes on season 2 of “Top Chef”). I’d also argue that the only true grilled cheese is just the cheese itself, like a grilled Halloumi or queso fundido. Being rigid in definitions takes the fun out of creating new dishes, doesn’t it?

Serious Eats reader Pavlov sums it up best with his comment: “A grilled cheese is whatever I say it is!”

That’s perfect. A grilled cheese is defined by whatever you say it is. It can be classic or have all the bells and whistles of a Campanile grilled cheese.

So today, my definition of grilled cheese has marinated onions, Dijon mustard and skirt steak — a personal homage to my favorite offering on Campanile’s menu. If you’re inclined, you can serve it with watermelon steaks for a truly non-literal meal.

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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There’s this story of a famous journalist who started his career at a daily paper in a town so tiny, that there was no real news to write about. I mean, we’re talking daily AP photos of squirrels on skis and a whole lotta bake sale stories.

But he refused to settle for those ho-hum tales. Instead, this guy would throw a dart at a city map that was hanging on his wall, and wherever the dart landed was where he was going to find his next story. It didn’t matter if the dart pierced the middle of an intersection or the corner of an open corn field. He would find a story.

Using that method, he met all kinds of interesting people, and equally interesting stories ensued. Now, he’s a big-deal reporter in a metropolitan city. Bake sales be damned.

I never learned the name of this guy – and that detail alone makes the tale scream fiction over fact. But real or not, it reminds me to think creatively when developing recipes: Pick an ingredient and develop the flavors around it, just as he picked a place and developed a story around it.

The tale also helps when choosing one recipe over another to try. But instead of using the dart method, I close my eyes and mix up all the cookbooks on my office floor, then point a finger at a page. There. Done.

It was a similar situation when I made this Gorgonzola and leek crème brulee. It was one in a handful of recipes that we testers at Leite’s Culinaria had to choose from in order to fulfill our monthly testing duties. I closed my eyes, and with finger poised at the computer screen, I made a selection.

Only, as luck would have it, my fat, sausage-of-a-finger landed on three recipes instead of one. Of course, I thought. Just when this dart method of choosing was proving to be foolproof, this happens.

But fat finger be damned. I made them all.

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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In fourth grade summer school, I met a girl named Vanessa, the first person I had ever known with a Spanish accent.

The minute she opened her mouth, her foreign accent trumped my ordinary American one: she was instantly prettier, smarter and funnier than me – and boy, was I jealous. I hated her, yet I still had this strange urge to be her friend. (The term frenemy would be coined almost 20 years later to describe this phenomenon.)

Since I knew not a word of Spanish, I practiced speaking English the Spanish way – Vanessa’s way. “S” sounding words were replaced with a “th”: “Sour Patch Kids” became “Thour Path Kidth.” “Hey Vanessa, push me on the swing” became “Hey Vane-tha, puth me on the thwing.” My heavy American tongue proved useless in producing an enviable accent, and instead, words sounded swollen and lethargic. But as usual, Vanessa would flit about, speaking in that singsong voice of hers, and I swear if we had been in a cartoon there would have been a forest, birds and Disney animals hanging onto her every syllable.

But I would learn that her accent had an Achilles Heel. There was one word she couldn’t really say: “chips.” I laughed the hardest at her expense when she asked to share my bag of potato “ships.”

“Ships?” I would ask incredulously. “You mean chips. Say it again!”
“Ships.”
“Ahahahahahahahaha!” I cackled. “Chips!”
“Ships.”
“Ahahahahahahahaha!”

I tried to make her say the word in front of boys we liked in a desperate, fourth-grade attempt to embarrass her. (In addition to frenemy behavior, the second social lesson I learned that summer was that all was fair in love and war.)

But, as life would have it, my plan backfired. Boys still thought she was charming and lovely, despite the sound of her voice mistaking a popular snack food for a massive watercraft. Soon, everyone was eating ships. It was enough for me to finally give up sabotaging her – and it would be the last lesson I learned that summer: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

I never saw Vanessa again, but I’d like to believe she’s maintained her charming accent and is still eating ships. In fact, if Vanessa were an avid cook who wanted to make her own ships, I wouldn’t expect them to be of the Russet variety. They would be familiar yet foreign. Like these sweet potato chips. They’re familiar enough, but with fresh rosemary plucked from a backyard shrub and a sprinkle of sea salt, they become elegant and extraordinary. Like her accent was.

Click on this link for the recipe, from Leite’s Culinaria.

– Cynthia Furey