This evening I had the brilliant idea to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. Not just any grilled cheese sandwich – a vegan grilled “cheese” sandwich. After all, I’d been making grilled cheese all summer – grilled cheese with Kale, grilled cheese with tomato, grilled cheese with honey mustard – I had finally gotten it down to a science. What could go wrong, right?
Well, for starters, I began my summer on a health food kick. I went to Trader Joe’s (aka heaven) and stocked up on fruits and veggies, purchased the phenomenal Fifty Shades of Kale from Barnes & Noble and worshipped the Food Network. The first few tries were unsuccessful, and eventually I got the hang of it.
What I didn’t realize when I went vegan was that now my cooking skills have reverted back to square one :(. Vegan cooking is an entirely different ballgame (that, or I am just an awful cook). So when I set out to cook my simple 4-year-old-child dinner, I didn’t think it was going to be hard at all.
And then the cheese didn’t melt. For some reason, my fancy schmancy new vegan cheese was staying solid. And the bread was burning. And my mom was asking me why there was smoke in the kitchen. So my dinner consisted of two burnt pieces of break and some pieces of fake cheese. Well, I thought I could fix that! Plop that in the microwave, that’ll do the trick! Right? So I did. And the cheese melted. Apparently it had been just on the verge of liquifying, and the microwave just exaggerated that beyond belief. So now I had two pieces of burnt bread and some cheese soup – yummy!
Looks like I am restarting the learning curve, but I can assure you that I am racking up the first round of failed vegan dishes: grilled cheese, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, cupcakes, mac’n’cheese…
On the bright side, I just bought some badass vegan Vans!
Anyone got any great tips for melting vegan cheese?
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