Quels Fromages!

...you may ask. To which I reply, “Why the hell not!?” The fact is that I consume cheese every day. Nutrition-wise, I'm not a big milk drinker, and so it is one of the ways that I can add calcium to my diet. But mainly, I just love it.

I once spent a fortnight in Paris where my diet consisted of various cheeses, preserves, mustard, cured meats and fruit on bread, drinking wine straight from the bottle. Yes, I was eating like this because I was on a miniscule budget, but there is not a single thing that I would change about the gastronomical delights of those two weeks. When I was in graduate school, and also poor(are you seeing a trend here?) I would often trudge home from hours in the studio or library, stop at the grocery store to grab a baguette and a hunk of cheese on the way and situate myself in my decades old, mustard-yellow, velveteen rocking chair to gnaw my way, exhausted, through dinner.

But my love affair with cheese began long before studying and living abroad, before frugal grad school living: The first dish I learned to cook, you know, after boiling water and toasting of toast, was macaroni and, you guessed it, cheese. And we're not talking about that orange powdered crap that comes in a blue box(though college did teach me the joy of Annie's mac and cheese). We are talking about melted butter, roue based, cream added, freshly grated cheddar cheese sauce over perfectly al dente ziti. The recipe varied from that point through the next decade and a half of my life, but it remains a constant recipe in my wheelhouse that I know I always have the makings of in my fridge.