Your Lunch Needs This Gooey Grilled Cheese

This pesto-laced sandwich sports a perfect golden crust - without the grease

This post is brought to you in partnership with PAM.
We didn't know we needed a day to celebrate grilled cheese sandwiches - in our book, every day is worthy of celebrating the perfect simplicity of golden brown toasted bread with rich, melty cheese. But we'll take any excuse to make a grilled cheese for lunch, so for National Grilled Cheese Day, we're whipping up this Italian take on a classic American comfort food.
Mozzarella takes top honors in the meltiness awards - think of that perfect pizza slice with its stretchy, stringy cheese strands - so it makes an especially glorious, gooey grilled cheese. And to offset mozzarella's mild, milky flavor, bright green pesto brings a two-in-one punch with bold basil flavor and an extra hit of cheese from the grated Parmigiano Reggiano. It's a great way to use up leftover pesto, or an excuse to splurge on a jar of imported pesto genovese (make sure its list of ingredients is short and sweet: just basil, olive oil, cheese, and pine nuts).
Instead of flooding your pan with butter to make sure your bread toasts evenly, a few pumps of PAM's Olive Oil Pump Spray achieves the same flawless coverage with way fewer calories. The result: You get a crispy, golden brown crust all the way across without the greasy fingers. To amp up the crunch factor even more, press a pot lid smaller than the circumference of your pan down on top of the sandwich; it'll work like a makeshift panini press and compress all of that gooey, glorious cheese and toasty bread together into one work of art. Now that's a sandwich worth celebrating!