Davis James Edward - Grilled cheese & beer: recipes for the finer things in life

W elcome to Grilled Cheese & Beer. If youve come to have this book in your possession, it might be your 21st birthday. Maybe youve just moved into your first apartment. Or maybe youre just a connoisseur of well-crafted culinary tomes. Regardless, we welcome you and we hope youre as excited as we are to go on this gooey and effervescent adventure. However, for that to happen, we might need to prep you on how this book happened and what we are all about.

This book started as a joke. Eddie and I used to make jokes about working at my future fictional (but still completely possible) restaurant Cheesy Beerds. As you can probably tell, we have been big fans of puns right from the beginning. This hypothetical brewpub/grilled cheese shop prompted us to start developing a fictitious menu, comprised of some hilariously named sandwiches wed been coming up with (at least, we thought they were hilarious). Hilarious enough to be in a book? Maybe. Crazily enough, we met a publisher who thought so, too. A few different ideas came to mind. Dillas and Daquiris. Wine and Wieners (everybody knows wine goes well with hotdogs). When the pure novelty of the whole thing wore off, we realized exactly what we wanted to make a book about and how special this project could be. So, we went to work. Eddie on the sandwich designing vocals, and myself on the beer pairing drums.

Grilled cheese and beer. Needless to say, we feel very passionate about these things. For us, cheese and beer make the world go round. I make my living off of brewing beer, and Eddie spends his days whipping up outrageously delicious sandwiches and other foodstuffs. We believe in making these sandwiches into more than just college dorm room fodder. Theyre an American classic, updated for a foodie dominated era.

Not only do we aim to elevate the grilled cheese, but we want to give it a companion. A best friend. A comrade. A brother in arms. A parter in crime. A pairing worthy of the perfection that is melty cheese slapped between two delicious pieces of perfectly toasted bread. And that is the malty, citrusy, piney, chocolaty, fruity, sour, dry goodness that is the immensely varied selection of beers now available to everyone. There is something for everyone and everything. Every cheese and ingredient combo has a perfect beer out there to send it over the top. We took on this arduous taskit simply had to be done. So we did the research, crunched the numbers andnot to toot our own hornwe nailed it. Now, without further ado, we give you our masterpiece. Our piece de resistance.

Puns are hilarious. In fact, we find them to be so much fun that weve based our whole book on them. Nothing is more rewarding for us than coming up with a media reference-induced pun and then reverse engineering it into a delicious treat. Its kind of the whole point here.

To be completely honest, our sense of humor is probably pretty corny. And seeing as how this book is an extension of our very beings, it, too, is probably a bit on the corny side. But for us, thats whats so amazing. We go through our daily lives spewing puns and babbling about movies. So it seemed only natural to let this book just be us.

So what makes a good pun? Were not really sure. Some people would argue that never been cheddar is not a terribly good one. They might say its lazy or self-indulgent. We say its awesome and totally rad. For us, puns are mostly just about owning itbeing proud of who you are and letting that freak flag fly. Were nerds who love puns. But we also just wrote a book on grilled cheese and beer. What have you done lately?