cheesy poof

For a few years, one of my favorite events every year is the Grilled Cheese Invitational. Its had some good and bad years, and definitely changed drastically in recent years. Saturday's edition was good, though it may have lost its fun by just getting too big (not really faulting the organizers for that; I mean what can they do?) The beer garden got a much needed expansion (though the non-IPA options were pretty scarce) and the non-competing vendor area selling cheeses expanded dramatically. The biggest change this year was in the judging - for the first time you paid extra to judge (not a bad idea,) but they also limited you to 2 chances to judge per person. So for $20, you got to judge two grilled cheese samples. Hmmm. Still, we did fine. We managed to buy some cheeses from vendors before the lines got long and even stopped for beer while others mobbed the judging area. We jumped to that later, so luckily by then, we had had enough cheese to be fine with just the two samples. While not the fun of last year or three years ago, it was by no means the nightmare year they had two years ago. While the crowd was huge and lines were everywhere, they mostly went pretty fast. Will I go again? Hell yeah! After all, its people like me raving in blogs and social media about the event that made it so big, I can hardly give up on it because of that. Luckily for me, it was the precursor to my main event for the day. What better appetizer for fun than grilled cheese? more on that tomorrow...