Pear and Shallot Grilled Cheese

Eagle-eyed readers might notice some similarity in ingredients between this recipe and Wednesday’s. Even more eagle-eyed readers might notice a common theme between this recipe and last week’s lentil soup recipe.

Shallots.

Yes, I’m in a shallot rut. When I bought the ingredients for the lentil soup I had never cooked with shallots before; so when I saw “3 shallots” on the suggested ingredient list, I bought three physical root vegetables. Turns out, shallots are a bit like garlic and have bulbs inside their tricky physical exterior. So I’d bought triple what the recipe called for, whoops!

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the excess for a while. Caramelizing it alongside garlic worked amazingly well, but I still had a giant bulb leftover. Looking into the depths of my refrigerator, I decided to play my favorite cooking game – namely “what will happen if I toss all these random ingredients together?” So I grabbed a pear my mother had sent me from our last trip to Lyman Orchards, the dreaded leftover shallot, a cooked chicken breast I had prepared in case the power went out (and then didn’t bother to eat because my power stayed on), some cheese, and began to ponder.

Grilled cheese immediately came to mind and since I’m a relatively lazy cook I decided to give it a whirl. And man was I lucky. This turned out to be a pretty great sandwich that comes together very quickly.

Pear and Shallot Grilled Cheese

This is a sandwich born of typical ingredients in my refrigerator – whole-wheat sandwich bread, sliced deli cheese, and some leftover chicken breast. A truly fancy grilled cheese sandwich would likely feature better bread (this would taste great on sourdough!) and fancier cheese or cheeses (I imagine brie and mozzarella would taste amazing against the shallots and pear). A regular onion would be a perfectly acceptable substitution, but as mentioned above I’ve been trying to get rid of the lingering shallot in my veggie drawer and thought it might work in this sandwich.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon butter, plus a bit extra to spread on to one side of one piece of bread

2 slices of bread

2 slices cheese

1 small pear, cored and sliced thinly

1/2 shallot, sliced thinly

Optional

1/2 cooked chicken breast, sliced thinly

Equipment:

2 small pans

Melt 1/2 tablespoon butter into a small pan over medium-high heat. Once golden add in the sliced shallots and cook for 2 to 4 minutes until tender. Add the slice pear and cook together for about 5 minutes.

Butter one side of one slice of bread and set aside. On the other slice, assemble the sandwich – one cheese slice, the sliced chicken breast if using, the pears and shallots, top with the other slice of cheese, and finally add the other slice of bread with the butter face-side up.

Melt 1/2 tablespoon butter in a new small pan over medium-high heat. Once golden add the sandwich and cook for 2 to 3 minutes before flipping and cooking for another 1 to 2 minutes. If it doesn’t look like your cheese is melting, cover pan with a lid for 15 to 30 seconds.

Enjoy!

Serves 1