I Don't Know How to Feel About Grilled Cheese with Mayonnaise

Today was a bit of a culinary experience for me.

The braised chicken with artichokes came out better than before, but I think I'll skip the artichokes next time I make it. (Really just because of the price of the artichoke compared to the flavor it adds.) I'm also pretty sure I could mix the two recipes in the book so that it's more of a one-pot meal and takes a little less time cooking.

Then I made a cake because the wife got some kind of honeycomb cake pan. Conveniently, there was a cake recipe attached to the pan for a lemon cake with a honey-lemon glaze. I've never added sour cream to a cake batter before, but the batter turned out pretty good. The only problem was I only had 1 lemon and I think I needed a bit more zest than I put in. It's still a pretty tasty cake...somehow with sour cream in it.

And, today, the New York Times posted a recipe about making grilled cheese sandwiches with Mayonnaise. So, after soccer, I made them. Well. I made some version of them. Basically, now that I'm actually reading the recipe, I made them wrong. Firstly, I didn't spread the butter. Instead, I just put a chunk of butter on a piece of bread. This made the middle of the sandwich a bit soggy, which was a bit problematic because I just bought some enameled, cast-iron pans with some panini sandwich thing that kindof goes with it. And I wanted to try it out. Well, not probably how it was intended to be used.

You're supposed to heat up the pan and heat up the panini press thing and then mash them together -- cooking on both ends. I figured, "just putting the thing on there will cause it to compact." And it did. And then I couldn't seem to get it back out of the pan for awhile to flip it and the middle of my bread kindof split open. Turns out, I just needed higher heat (and to not mess up the butter).

Long story short, I kindof followed a recipe while kindof using some equipment in a way one might imagine it could be used. And it came out alright. :)