While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Stuck between soft bread and a cheesy place - August is National Panini Month!

Like most Italian imports into our food culture, Americans have gone all melty inside for pressed panini. If you can imagine it together, you can stuff it in a roll and warm it up on the panini grill.

In Italian, panino is the word for sandwich. Typically made with ciabatta bread, the loaf is sliced in half, stacked high with salami, ham, cheese and other sandwich fixings and then pressed until it's warm, inside and out.

When we imported this magical sandwich, we also began mistakenly calling any pressed sandwich a "panini."  New York restaurants picked up on the trend after the stackers became popular in Milanese bars, or paninoteche, in the 70s and 80s - and we've never been hard-pressed to look back.