Grilled cheese on New Year’s

Grilled cheese on New Year’s

Posted on January 6th, 2009 by Tyler Samien

It was the common grilled cheese dilemma. As with most fried foods, if the temperature is too high, the bread will burn while the sandwich’s contents remain cold. If the temperature is too low, well, it takes forever to cook. I wasn’t in the mood to wait.

It was New Year’s Eve and I had stayed home to work on this sandwich. I cooked with maximum efficiency. While I sliced the onion, mushroom, and tomato, the first piece of bread and slices of American were already in the pan.

I nibbled on the extra pieces of mushroom and tomato and picked up the Kite Runner to try and escape my hunger into Afghanistan, to waste time. It didn’t work.

I stopped reading to peek in the pan — the sandwich wasn’t done. Forget the Afghans, I’m hungry! I turned up the heat and picked off a piece of lightly-grilled bread.

With spatula in hand, I evaluated the situation, deciding to eat one fourth of the sandwich in its incomplete and uncooked state. I figured if I cut the sandwich into parts, it would cook faster (more exposed surface area), and I wouldn’t be so hungry.

I put the small piece onto my plate and carried it to the dining room, noticing how firm and unmelted the cheese remained, how the vegetables were still plump and uncooked. As I lifted the first bite to my mouth a fluttering tinge of guilt questioned my level of will-power and patience. Why didn’t I just wait until the whole sandwich was done? Have I become this impatient? The voice of guilt grew as it pulled support from common proverb, academic research, literature, and my own psychology:

Good comes to those who wait…
Delayed gratification in children is a predictor of later success…
“It’s like sour apples…Mother said if I had just waited for the apples to ripen (Kite Runner)”…
Is this how my mother raised me?

I took the bite.

It was delicious! What foolish, depriving advice. I was eating! Screw patience! How little it mattered that the cheese wasn’t fully melted. I went to the kitchen to get another piece.

By the time I had finished the first half, the cheese had fully melted and the juice from the tomato and mushroom had properly blended and soaked into the bread. I was able to enjoy the food — a pleasure only heightened by the inferior, yet greatly appreciated, foreplay of the first sandwich half.

And it made me think: Are we not ready for a new folk wisdom? A new moral perspective? Are we any closer to appreciating the nuanced grays of our existence or are people, in general, so hopeless that generalities disguised as wisdom still help more than they hide?

Is there anything else to eat around here?

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Tyler Samien

Tyler Samien has a BA in English/creative writing from the University of Tennessee. He enjoys writing everything from scathing online reviews of companies that displease him to nostalgic memoirs of childhood experience. His blog, ReluctantChauffeur, is about to get interesting as he travels the United States with his wife and goofy-faced puppy.