Grilled BLTs Spice up an Old Favorite!

I have been dreadfully neglectful of my blog for the past several months. It was close to abandonment, but over the last month I've actually had several people who I didn't realize were reading it mention it to me. So, with my greatest of apologies, I am going to make a more concerted effort to keep things coming!

Now that the business of apologizing is out of the way, Grilled BLTs!

This time of year we have fresh tomatoes on our plants, to the point that we can barely eat them fast enough. Making salsa, using them in salads (particularly the tiny ones), used as a burger condiment - these are all great uses and viable options for disposing of our tomato stockpile. My personal favorite, and the one we have been doing the most lately however is BLTs.

Ah, the classic BLT, just bread, bacon, lettuce, and tomato - with a little bit of mayonnaise smearing on the crusty ends is a summer classic. It's really sort of hard to mess up a BLT unless you burn the daylights out of the bread or bacon, or use spoiled veggies.

Don't bother doing the bacon on the grill

Well, I have heard about making grilled sandwiches before, and I figured this would be a great one to start with since it's so simple to make. I also took it a step further and actually fried the bacon on the grill itself. Let me tell you friends, this step is wholly unnecessary. The product resulting from bacon on the grill in a frying pan is virtually indistinguishable from the product on your stove top. It also takes longer - so skip it all together.

First things first - preheat your grill. Truth be told, I'd limit this exercise to gas grills only, it's a tasty change from the standard sammy, but probably not worth the time and expense of going the charcoal route.

Get the grill marks right - like the one on the right!

That said, get your bacon fried up inside (you can substitute turkey bacon for a healthy alternative - but it doesn't quite have the "shazaaam!" that normal bacon does) and slice some tomatoes and lettuce. I prefer Red Leaf lettuce with thinly sliced tomatoes. Alicia likes her tomatoes sliced thick. Slather on some mayo, grind some peppercorn onto the mayo on the bread, and build the rest of your sandwich.



Now your sandwiches are ready, you are basically using your grill as a big toaster of sorts. Make sure the keep the lid open so you are doing one side at a time. once your bread starts to slightly brown and it's toasty, flip it. The whole process only takes a few minutes and produces a product far superior to your standard toaster or toaster oven. Enjoy!