Strawberry and Arugula Grilled Cheese is a food-love inducing recipe. Start with buttered, crispy bread, fresh mozzarella, the juiciest strawberries, and finish with peppery arugula. Eat and repeat.
I’m writing you from the beach this morning. I can see the ocean from where I’m sitting at the couch! Sorry to be making you jealous.
I’ve been here just two days, but the rest of my family has been at Emerald Isle, NC, all week. In fact, Mom has been here three or four weeks. So that is the real jealousy-inducing information.
Mmm… a morning latte on the beach!
Now, to make you un-jealous, I will tell you that when I leave this couch and leave my view of the ocean, I will leave this condo, and the whole island, and that will happen as soon as this blog post is finished and ready for publication. Maybe that’s why I can’t get my creative juices flowing. Perhaps, subconsciously, I’m fighting it.
Can I just blog all day, pretty pretty please?
I am however, happy to get back to my cat.
Although, not sure if she’s ready for my return. That face is hard to read.
And I’m happy to get back to my refrigerator, which is full of healthy things, including the ingredients for this sandwich.
And this sandwich is gooooood. It’s my new favorite sandwich. It’s a sandwich to beat all other sandwiches. It’s the sandwich of America and the sandwich of foreign international lands! It’s the Queen’s sandwich.
Okay. I’m getting a little too carried away. Just a little though. Maybe not the Queen’s, but the princess’s for sure.
More honestly though, here are the high points:
- First of all, who doesn’t like grilled cheese. It’s one of the most basic comfort foods.
- Second of all, we all are hard-wired to like sweet + salty. (No scientific evidence for this… there might be some in existence, but I didn’t bother to search. I’m just speculating based on personal and unprofessional experience.)
- Third of all, look at how pretty the thing is, with its red fruit and its green vegetable. These serve to make the sandwich prettier, a little healthier, and more importantly, more flavorful and food-love-inducing.
Food-love (noun) – the fluttering feeling in your heart and the rumbling in your belly that occur when you look at pictures of food or imagine delightful food tastes
If you’ve never felt food-love before, Carpe Diem! Today is your day! It starts with some very lightly, buttered and grilled Italian sandwich bread. And that by itself is capable of inducing food-love. I’m normally an open-faced sandwich kind of girl, but this — this white Italian sandwich bread which has been lightly buttered and grilled — is staying on both sides of the sandwich.
And if that isn’t enough, fill it with the freshest mozzarella and the reddest, juiciest strawberries from the market, and a handful of peppery arugula, and you’ve got yourself a food-love worthy sandwich.
Strawberry & Arugula Grilled Cheese
Ingredients
- 2 slices sandwich bread
- 2 teaspoons light buttery spread I like Brummel & Brown Spread made with Yogurt
- 1 ounce part-skim mozzarella cheese thinly sliced
- 1/3 cup arugula
- 1/2 teaspoon olive oil
- 1/2 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
- pinch ground black pepper
- 1/3 cup diced fresh strawberries
Instructions
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Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Lightly spread butter over one side each of the sandwich bread and lay the buttered side down on the skillet. Top with sliced mozzarella. (You can add the mozzarella to one or both slices. I prefer both slices so that the strawberries and arugula with both stick to the melted cheese).
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While the cheese is melting, toss the arugula in a small bowl with the oil and vinegar. Add a generous grind of black pepper.
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Once the cheese is melted and the bread is grilled, add the strawberries to one slice of bread and the arugula to the other, then close the sandwich and serve!
