This past Saturday, Jess, Chris, Adam and I went to the 4th 2nd Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational, hosted by The Ministry of Unknown Science and Mutaytor. This event is a little hard to describe in words, because it is really quite odd. Dozens of teams signed up to make the best grilled cheese sandwiches that they possibly could, as judged by the crowd in attendance. There were rows and rows of gas burner camp stoves, each one manned by a different team. As each sandwich was completed, it was served to the overly lengthy line of people waiting to judge them. You would wait in line, get a sandwich, rate it on the provided scorecard, and move along. There were so many hundreds of people there that we did not get to eat too many sandwiches at first, but then we figured out that the place to go was the ‘exhibition’ tables, where they were cooking some seriously awesome things and serving them to whoever was standing right there. The best one I had was “The Creme Brule”, a grilled cheese beyond description. It was incredible.

If I were to change one thing about the event I would recommend that the sandwiches be judged relative to each other. It was pretty much impossible to rate a sandwich on a scale of 1 to 10 if you don’t have a basis for comparison. I think a more ideal judging scenario would be one where you got two randomly paired sandwiches and you had to say which was better than the other in the different judging categories, then tally the votes and perhaps have a runoff. Regardless, I am now ruined and will never be able to have another grilled cheese sandwich without raspberries or lox. Yeah you read that right.