"Bebuk!"

[mrissa]

Apparently spuddragon says this word when he means "Wake up!"

I am less nauseated than I was, and I feel popular. Also I am incognito as Mike Ford. I'll bet you didn't know that's what a Mike Ford sweatshirt does! It makes you indistinguishable from Mike Ford. Or so I assume; obviously it wouldn't work from the inside, and this sweatshirt is too small for anyone else in the house to demonstrate for me. markgritter suggested that he could tell me from Mr. Ford readily, but I think this is because I have a key to the house and am much more likely to take out our recycling.

I would blame this on weariness, but I started proclaiming myself incognito when I first put the sweatshirt on around 11:30 this morning.

Someone wanted me to talk about cheese. I'm not sure that's a good idea, as we may have finished off the Dubliner with supper, and I'm almost sure we don't have anything better. I have previously been a hard, sharp cheese person (the hardness and sharpness are traits of the cheese, not the Mris). What I really want right now is a 9-year cheddar. A 6-year would do. Aged gouda would do. Roomano would do. But in general, times that are not the middle of the night, I am starting to like squishier, stinkier cheeses than I used to do. Gorgonzola was always the wedge in the door, because who can dislike gorgonzola? (Answer: C.J. I went overboard with the gorgonzola the first time I made gorgonzola-mushroom risotto, and something tasted funny to Ceej, so he reached for the Nice Cheese to dampen the funny taste. And found the three of us staring at him, astonished that this dish could be insufficiently gorgonzolaed for even the most ardent admirer. He took a bite and understood our expressions, and now he will not eat gorgonzola.) (He used to claim not to be a picky eater, but then he started eating at my house and discovering all sorts of things he doesn't like. It's very easy not to be picky when you do all your own cooking and buy things you know you enjoy.)

Anyway, after gorgonzola, there was cambozola, which is not precisely nice but certainly its own kind of good, and I am not always attached to nice when it comes in opposition to good. And then allochthon took us out for dinner and bought a brie thing that was crusted with nuts, and while I thought I knew I hated brie, I also knew that I love nuts, and that turning your nose up at food without trying it is silly and rude if you don't have some good reason to know you don't like it. So I tried it, and apparently I do like some brie. I even bought some brie of my very own last month.

When we lived in California, I could never find sharp enough cheddars at the grocery store. It was very sad. We had to go to TJ's to get cheese at all, and even then -- well, when you go to a store just for cheese, you want it to be Surdyk's. And while TJ's has some advantages over Surdyk's (chocolate raspberry sticks! walnut gorgonzola ravioli!), the cheese was not on a par.

I do not eat gjetost. Lappi is like mozzarella for me: useful as an ingredient, not for munching separately. I bought a five-layer wedge of British cheeses last month and devoured it on slices of Granny Smith apple. Usually I would hum to myself during this process, because it was so good, and there were five! different! cheeses! All in one! Oh, it was good. Also I like manchego, and the kind with the ashes in the middle. I forget whether I like drunken goat. I think I should try it again now that I am not so opposed to smooshiness in a cheese.

Comments

Cheese for everyone!

[aet.livejournal.com]

I guess that having insufficient sense of taste and smell, I love cheese and fish for their ability to get thorough to me smell-wise most of time.

When feeling down I often go into the most posh supermarket and spend half an hour sniffing at different cheeses I can not afford to buy. The smell of cheeses makes life feel good again for me.

Smell of fish does the same, but no one would allow me to sniff fish without buying it.

Re: Cheese for everyone!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's not very nice of them, on the fish front I mean.

Mmmm, fresh fish.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

What do you mean, it won't work from the inside? Turn it inside out!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Then the Sidhe can't see Mr. Ford?

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Ashes in the middle of cheese??? And you EAT IT? Ashes mixed with fat become SOAP. Ashes mixed with milkfat become CHEESE? *puzzlepuzzle*

You've thoroughly blown my mind, and I have hacked up the 40% of lung I have left laughing at your post. Thank you, I think :)

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I think you're referring to morbier (http://www.cheese.com/Description.asp?Name=Morbier). It is good. The ash layer is thin and you truly cannot taste it.

Though oddly, I had remembered it as a hard, sharp cheese and yet really it is a softish cheese. Not as soft as brie, though.

I like hard, sharp cheeses and soft, mild cheeses. I adore toasted cheese on bread, especially Gruyere or Dubliner (though a nice cheddar is fine, and mozzarella is always good). I think Toasted gjetost is wonderful on whole wheat, except that the bread gets burned to a crisp before the cheese melts properly. Though this may just be because I don't have a proper toaster oven (the last one we had developed an electrical short and went PFFF! and let the magic smoke out one fine day when it wasn't even on! and I haven't found another that didn't feel flimsy and shortable so it never got replaced. It's been seven years, I think.), and so I melt my cheese by putting it in the real oven on "Broil". I know, I know, it's terrible overkill.

My husband is a big fan of brie.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that.

I grew up without a toaster oven, so I never got used to toaasting cheese on bread that way. We made grilled cheese sandwiches on a griddle, which is different.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Never heard of it before, but thanks for the link; from what I read there, it sounds like it would indeed be a tasty cheese (at least to me). I am one of those ghastly unadventurous types who really prefers American cheese when it goes on my burgers, mozzarella on my Italian dishes, and snacks on mild cheddar. The most adventurous I get in the cheese department is Monterrey jack. I've never even tried brie. I had a terribly, TERRIBLY unfortunate experience with some Stilton cheese and mint jelly on a cracker, cruelly foisted upon me by Jason and my grandfather, and I must say, I pulled a scene reminiscent of Tom Hanks when he bites into the caviar in Big. UGH.

But anyway, thanks for the info.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

I am convinced that American cheese is not really cheese at all. In fact, I don't think it's really even a food. I think it's a petroleum byproduct or something, and a toxic one at that...

[brooksmoses]

There is American cheese that comes in proper blocks and gets sliced and is basically a very very mild Cheddarish thing. This is rare.

The stuff that comes in little plastic-wrapped slices is cheese food -- which, as everyone knows, is what you feed cheese. Not what you feed people.

(Of course, it takes a really well-aged Gorgonzola to be up to eating the stuff, but when you do have a Gorgonzola that old on hand, you'd better have food for it!)

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

It is an affront to both "American" and "cheese" (concepts that I love, when faithfully executed) that this product continues to manifest itself under this name.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, maybe...but it's a yummy one. ;oD

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not my personal yummy near-cheese food, but my appreciation of radioactive cheese dust in Kraft dinner makes me a lot more understanding of some people's love of American cheese.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was raised on nothing but processed foods and artificial colors and flavors, so it's "normal" to me. It wasn't until I was in college that I began to know there were people out there who didn't eat the way my family did. I grew up eating Lucky Charms for breakfast, and Kraft dinner and some sort of meat for dinner, and grilled American cheese sandwiches on white bread for lunch. Quite unhealthy, I'm sure, but it's all I knew. Old habits die hard. ;P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

greykev has talked about this, too, about adjusting so that the flavors of fruit actually connect to the terms in his head, because the taste of a strawberry is very different from the "strawberry-flavored" he grew up on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Now that I am awake: no, not that. But that sounds good.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

miz_hatbox is correct: there is a very thin ash layer between the goat cheese half and the sheep cheese half, and you can hardly taste it.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Hm. I guess some morbiers could have goat cheese and sheep cheese halves -- and it sounds pretty good to me -- but the traditional morbier, I'm told (http://www.cheesesupply.com/product_info.php/products_id/70), is made from morning and evening milkings of cows. (Supposedly people can taste the difference, but I didn't notice anything.)

Am I ever craving some good parmesan right now. Mmm.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, now that I am awake, it is clear that we're talking about different ash-divided cheeses.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

I have never had any sort of cheese made from a creature that was not a human or a cow. Someday I might get that adventurous, but it will likely be after much imbibing and with the promise of a monetary reward or on a bet.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never had human cheese, come to think of it, but I suppose narcotic cough syrup will make funny things like the above statement issue from my keyboard. I have had human MILK, you see, and cow's MILK, and have not had any milk product from animals besides these two. Sorry if I hurt your brain briefly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was wondering, I have to say!

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Oh, trust me, there are far more puzzling things that will come from me. Nobody who knows me well escapes without brain-hurt on occasion. I have a bad habit of not thinking before I speak; *I* know what I mean, but the subtleties are often left behind and don't make it to the reader/listener, and the end result just sounds like I've lost my mind. Which, you know, I pretty much have. But that's beside the point :)

do not waste ...

[aet.livejournal.com]

When lactating it DID bother me that there was too much and the excess milk went waste. Had I been more enterprising person, I might have tried to produce human dairy cheese.

Re: do not waste ...

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Months ago I actually had proposed it to my husband and he thought that was the most intriguing yet disgusting thing he had heard of. I'm still breastfeeding, though, so who knows? ;oD

There are milk banks for sick babies, and I tried to donate extra milk there, but they wouldn't take mine because I was on (baby-safe) medication. They feed the milk to very sick preemies and said they can't even handle the baby-safe meds; it has to be no medicine at all, not even Tylenol. :( I wonder, though, about the breastmilk cheese; someone somewhere has to have tried making it by now, eh?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sheep cheese can be extremely mild. I am not the sort of person who feeds her guests trick substances, but I'll bet I could feed you a sheep cheese you couldn't distinguish from mozzarella.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

I thought what made a cheese sharp was that it was the OPPOSITE of mild.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I like sharp sheep cheeses better than mild ones. But there are mild ones out there.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Yay! I was the one who requested cheese. I would blame the oddness of the subject selection on automatic writing, but it is more likely the result of my husband playing an Alton Brown episode in the background.

Glad you got some mileage out of it, invisible or not. And I can't eat gjetost either. But then again, its taste has been compared to peanut butter, and I hate peanut butter.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't want to make things carefully anonymous and then go saying who had asked in case they didn't want to have it said.

I have the opposite problem with gjetost: I love peanut butter.

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I hope you didn't mind me un-masking my cheesy self!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not at all! I just didn't want to do it for you.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

My tastes in cheese seem to be evolving. It's hard to say with much certainty because I'm not a big cheese lover and don't seek out new and interesting cheeses to try. But I used to hate feta and now I like it. Plus, blueyeddevil brought some very complex fruity tasting cheese over for a NASCAR race (there's an image for you!) and I really liked that.

The problem with cheese for me is that every now and then I try a cheese that reminds me that cheese is, effectively, molded milk, and then that mental association puts me off the whole product for a week. :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I Don't Like Feta.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the cheesy goodness.

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

I have never found a cheese that I disliked. (Well, I'm not fond of the processed "American cheese" stuff, but that doesn't count anyway.) And yes, I've had gjetost--when I was a child, my father would buy it to eat with apples after dinner. We have no Scandinavian ancestry that I know of; he just liked all kinds of cheese too. Took me a while to like it, but I did. (I've also had Limburger. Wasn't crazy about it, but it wasn't bad.)

Current favorites are the drunken goat cheese stuff, and Swiss Lorraine.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I thought "incognito as Mike Ford" meant "not very incognito." Sort of like "subtle as an overexcited puppy." Mr Ford is reasonably well known, in some circles.

I don't eat cheese that is significantly cheesey, for reasons that started as migraine related. Aged cheeses are very strong, very obvious, migraine triggers for me. They've felt dangerous to me for almost 30 years, and they eventually started smelling more dangerous than good. Cheeses like mozzerella and ricotta are still safe, but they're different enough that one can argue they aren't really cheese, but something more akin to milk or yogurt. I've had american cheese that wasn't bad...it's essentially mild colby, grated fine, mixed with milk, and cast in blocks. It might not be what you want (if you want gorgonzola, it almost certainly is NOT what you want), but it's fine for what it is.

I also lived for years without a toaster oven. I make toast in a regular oven, under the broiler. I love toast.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My mom is like this with fish: she's allergic to most fish, and the ones she's not allergic to are mostly just not appealing any more, with a few minor exceptions, because they're too close to "this made me feel really terrible" smells.

Toast is a great goodness.