Braddy Loves Cheese

It’s been a while since I’ve had so many free evenings to myself – at least since the start of Taming of the Shrew out at the Empress. Since then, I’ve been able to spend my nights doing… well, whatever I want. The other night, I went grocery shopping, worked on some new poems, watched some cartoons, studied for the GRE… I even cooked myself dinner.

Despite evidence to the contrary (rail-thin arms, concave gut, absent chest), I REALLY love food. Don’t know that I could say that the way to my heart is through my stomach (my one and only reference to Valentine’s Day today), but I’ve developed quite a taste for fine flavors. I attribute most of that to my mother, who, as my best friends can tell you, is one of the best cooks extant.

(On an unrelated note, I never realized how big a deal it is that my mother so often fed my friends. Food’s a pricy luxury)

Now, I said that I COOKED dinner… well, I’m not exactly an amazing cook. My definition of “cook” is to grate cheese over noodles and stare at them, saying, “Melt!” A typical day’s diet consists of oatmeal or Pop-Tarts for breakfast (if I have breakfast at all), a Hot Pocket for lunch, and a can of Campbell’s soup for dinner – unless I have buffalo wings in the freezer. Basically, I eat enough sodium, carbs, and preservatives that I should be either a salt lick, a Mr. Potato Head, or a bloomin’ Twinkie by now.

I’ve always wanted to develop a more “refined” taste. I’ve slowly been expanding my culinary horizons – picking up foods I’ve never liked before to discover that they’re really not as bad as my seven-year-old self had led me to believe. I used to hate onions; now I can’t get enough of them. Tofu can be good in the right dish (re: my dad’s Hot and Sour Soup). Today I’ll be getting lunch from a Thai restaurant for the first time, and I must say I’m EXCITED.

Most of all, though, I actually work at being an appreciator of good cheeses. I’ve always wanted to taste a wide variety of cheeses, ever since I first watched Wallace and Gromit. Time was I couldn’t stand any type of cheese other than American cheddar. Heck, I’d even eat E-Z Cheese over provolone. Of course, time was that I actually enjoyed the musical stylings of Nickleback, whom I now consider to be basically the E-Z Cheese of the music industry.

But, no more. I’ve since learned that mozzarella is amazing on pasta, pepper jack makes for amazing hamburgers, and you just can’t have Chicken Cordon Bleu without swiss. Of course, that’s still not enough for me. See, by nature I’m still pretty much a snob – I have to balance all of my “pedestrian” tastes with something resembling sophistication. For example, I have to keep my love of rock in check with an interest in musical theater (and I’ll leave it to you to determine which of the two is “pedestrian” and which “art.” I can argue both ways).

I served a mission for the LDS church in the Czech Republic, where those simple American cheeses I know and love are a scarcity. One Christmas, my companion and I received a block of cheddar cheese from a friend – real cheddar, which was real pricy. We sat down at the breakfast table and ogled that lump of cheese like a hot redhead. By the end of the hour, we had the whole thing devoured. I’m pretty sure eating a block of cheese for a meal is never healthy, but it was WORTH it.

Without the usual availability of cheddar, I turned to other cheeses to get by. Edam was plentiful, but it doesn’t really lend itself to melting. Makes it hard to enjoy a good burger with Edam on it. Niva’s a great cheese – I don’t even know if we have it in the states. Curse you, FDA! Closest I’ve found is bleu cheese (which, as most of you know, is amazing on salads and buffalo wings), but that’s not quite right. Niva looks, smells, and tastes a little like death. Wonderful, delectable, salty death.

Man, I miss that stuff.

The Czechs also have a cheese called tvaroh (in German, I think it’s called “kwark” or something equally Star-Trek-ish) used in making desserts. The tvaroh gets mixed in with a bread dough, which you wrap around pieces of fruit. Boil the dough in water, and serve with butter and powdered sugar. Bam! Fruit dumplings.

(And if I ever channel Emeril again, shoot me in the bleedin’ head!)

My absolute favorite cheese I discovered in Europe can’t make it across the Atlantic, either. Bryndza, a salty goat cheese, is a staple of the national dish of Slovakia: bryndzové halušky. It’s a simple recipe: grate up potatoes into a starchy mush, add flour until the spoon you mix it together with can’t fall over in the dough, and cut the dough into small, round noodles. Boil the noodles until they float, drain, and add bryndza and cubes of bacon (not strips – cubes. Big, fatty dice of bacon). The whole concoction rests like wet cement in your stomach (and who knows WHAT it does to your arteries) but, man, that stuff is good.

So my dinner that fateful night off the other night actually meant something special to me. I’ve started exploring the world of cheeses again. I added some bizarre Greek cheese (myzithra, I think it’s called) to my noodles rather than boring old cheddar. It’s good, really – a hard cheese, salty, with a texture like chalk (Wikipedia describes the texture as “grainy,” but I’ve got to go with my first reaction here). The only thing that could have made me feel more cultured would be a glass of wine, but the equation “me + alcohol” probably comes out to something unsettling.

Speaking of unsettling… I’m pretty sure I just inadvertently made a horrible, horrible cheese pun… I’ma go put my neck in a noose now.