Grilled cheese fail (testing Pinterest).

I'm sure you've all seen some variation of the above image on Pinterest or elsewhere online by now. It's always captioned with something along the lines of, "Turn your toaster on its side to make easy grilled cheese!" Now, I saw this, and thought, "wow, genius! Why didn't I ever think of that?"It looks so simple. The only drawback I noticed at first was that there was no excuse to use copious amounts of butter like I do when I fry my grilled cheese (and I suppose that could be thought of as a good thing, it's just that I sort of have a love affair with butter).



Well, last weekend I was craving grilled cheese, and I finally got around to trying this idea out. Let me tell you, the lack of butter is not the only problem with this method. My first indication that all was not well was the smoke that started to seep out of my toaster. At first I just thought it was from some crumbs hanging out in the bottom that had fallen onto the heat coils when I tipped over the toaster. Then the smoke got heavier, and blacker, and stinkier. That's when I decided to abort, so I hit the cancel button on the toaster. Bad idea.

My toaster sits next to my kitchen sink, and when I tipped it over the open slots faced the sink (do you see where this is going?). With the toaster on its side, hitting cancel is like hitting the eject button in a Bonds car. That grilled cheese went flying, and it splashed down into a frying pan full of dirty dish water. When I fished the soggy bread out, I discovered where all that smoke was coming from. While the top of the bread and cheese was barely even warmed from the toaster, the bottom edge was black as the night. I'm not sure why this happened (any toaster engineers out there that can enlighten us?), but after looking around online a bit I found that this has happened to others who tried this method too.

Sad, soggy, burnt bread with half melted cheese... I think I'll stick to my traditional, lots of butter, frying pan method from here on out.

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