IKEA Cheese

I had some plans for my birthday this year, but they had to be put on hold so that I could drive to Rockville, Maryland to see my parents.  I ended up spending my birthday driving from Raleigh, NC to Rockville, the second leg of my long trip.  I realized when I was almost to 495 that I would arrive in Rockville way too early, so I decided to stop at IKEA and fool around for a while.  Now, I love IKEA, I really do.  But I'd never before gone to IKEA by myself with a baby in a stroller on a very busy Saturday.  It was a not entirely unpleasant experience, but it wasn't entirely pleasant, either.  I grabbed the plastic cups my mother had requested and a picture frame and then realized after checking out that we hadn't purchased anything on a whim, which is the entire POINT of going to IKEA.  I thought to myself that I'd maybe get a weird snack, maybe some tiny jarred fish or whatever else those Swedes like to eat.  And lo and behold, there was a selection of fancy cheeses in the deli!!!
I purchased a block of what was labeled as "Scandic Vasterbotten."  I also purchased  these little crispy whole wheat bread/cracker halves to have with it.  It was firm and a little mealy, and reminded me of Manchego a little, probably due to the fruity aroma.  I would definitely eat this cheese all the time if I had an IKEA in town, and I'm going to keep my eyes open for a local purveyor of this lovely cheese.
The internet tells me that this kind of cheese is a traditional celebratory cheese for Sweden.  I love the idea of celebrating with cheese!

In the car after purchasing the cheese from IKEA, I turned on NPR to the Splendid Table, and the lady was interviewing the world champion cheese monger!  Serendipity, I think.

New Years Resolutions and Grilled Cheese

So I think that somewhere there is a date where "they" say that most people stop with their New Year's Resolutions.  I googled it and didn't see anything on the first page, so I gave up and all I can tell you is that the average was about halfway into February, I think.  I think that sounds about generous for most of my past resolutions.  Most of mine make it to about January 12th before I forget I made them.
I do much better in Lent.  In high school, for example, I gave up boys for 40 days.  That's hard for a teenage girl!  Many times I've given up meat, that one tends to be sort of fun, you can act superior to people and it's a great excuse to eat two large servings of fries and a frosty instead of a spicy chicken sandwich combo.  I know I've given up alcohol before, that's another good one for acting smug.  But anyway, back to New Years.
My New Years Resolution this year was to eat more cheese and then keep up with a blog about it.  I did three posts then I forgot about it for a week.  I think, actually, that there's also a statistic somewhere about how long people generally remember to keep up with their blogs.  It's longer than two weeks though, I can tell you that much.  Anyway, I'm trying really hard not to permanently forget about this blog, and I've been paying more attention to the cheese  in my life but the truth is that I just haven't had any cheese for a couple of days!  Today at Lizard's Thicket, my friend's kid had a grilled cheese and it looked so good, but I had a BLT instead because I made a bad choice.  Not that there was anything wrong with the BLT, it just wasn't cheesy.  I felt like I missed a serious opportunity to write about grilled cheese.
On the other hand, how many grilled cheese memories do I have stored away in my taste memory bank?  I know what a grilled cheese tastes like.  It tastes like lunch, it tastes greasy and salty and creamy and crumbly.  I can look at a grilled cheese and know almost exactly what it will taste like.  Predictable but never unwelcome.
I remember grilled cheeses that my mom used to make, on 9 grain bread, slathered in real butter with real cheddar, which almost never melted all the way.  I used to love it as a kid, of course, and would ask for "girl cheese," (which only girls ate while boys ate "boy cheese.")
Then there were the grilled cheeses we ate in Estonia, when I studied abroad.  We got semi-dense white bread from the corner store, and butter, and these processed cheese slices that weren't really "American cheese" but weren't any sort of real cheese either.  We ate them by the dozen, dipped in Heinz ketchup because it was the only thing in Estonia that tasted exactly as it did in the States.  Even tomatoes tasted European.
One game night in our little jewel box apartment in Raleigh, Steve made grilled cheese to order for a dozen people with muenster, swiss, cheddar, or mozzarella, (plus tomato and onion, if you wanted it) on bread from a delicious French bakery in Cary.  He made tomato soup, too, with heavy cream and butter, and had a toppings bar with roasted garlic and grated cheeses and sour cream.  It was incredible.
In college, I ate grilled cheese all the time in the cafeteria, it was the only thing on the grill that didn't look dreadful, and it was predictable and perfect every time.  Enough grease to feel like I was being irresponsible in eating it but not enough to make me stop.  I could dip it in soup or mustard or just eat it by itself whilst sitting in the side room off the cafeteria where all the dorky music kids ate together.

The grilled cheese that was eaten today by my friend's 12 year old was on Texas Toast.  The cheese was two slices of American and the bread was soaked in butter.  It was sliced diagonally and when he separated the halves, some of the bread wasn't cut all the way through so it tore, showed even more of the slick yellow-orange expanse of cheese at the center of the sandwich.  He ate it all and I know what every bite tasted like but I was still so jealous of that grilled cheese.

Jarlsberg

Today we're eating Jarlsberg.  We got it at Food Lion.  It has big old holes in the side, which made Steve say that it was Swiss cheese, but the internet claims it is Norwegian.  I'm usually not a huge fan of Swiss cheese, I don't care for the artificially sweet taste.  This Jarlsberg isn't bad though.  It still tastes artifically sweet, but this time I imagine it coming from a cow and not a machine.  I'm pretty sure that the cows that make the milk for Jarlsberg cheese look like this:

I'm pretty sure because the internet also told me that this is something that answers the question "What are some Norwegian cows?"
Other things the internet told me about Jarlsberg include that the cheese's bubbles are called "eyes" which makes me sort of hate it, and that our particular cheese was probably made in Ohio.  I guess if that's the case, the cow would look like this:

Which really just looks like an all American cow to me.  So, if Swiss cheese is really Norwegian cheese, and my cows are Ohioannite, does that mean that Norwegian cheese is really just American cheese?
Wait, how much did I just pay for American cheese?  Crap.

Cream cheese

I don't remember why I used to hate cream cheese, but I do remember very clearly the moment I started to love it instead.  My mother had enrolled me in some hippy dippy sciencey summer school in which I was the only girl for half a summer.  I don't think she did the gender thing on purpose, but that half summer was one of the more formative summers of my life.  We played Capture the Flag in a big city park in the Salt Lake City heat and did jumping jacks to practice being astronauts (who need to be in peak physical condition, of course.)  We drove in this big van all the way to Jordan River (River Jordan?)  and fished, and we looked at the eclipse through holes in pieces of paper.  My mom used to pick me up by bus to take me home at night, she'd arrive at the school and we'd hop on the bus together.  The bus stop was in front of a school, I think, and my mother had a bagel for a snack and nothing else.  My half still  had strawberry cream cheese clinging to it, despite my mom's efforts to scrape it off.  I was famished from a long day of being Queen Bee and playing archeologist, so I ate it anyway.  I remember how it made the sweet taste less sweet, how it made me want more and more.  I'm pretty sure I made my mom trade with me so I could eat the cream cheese off the other half too.  Or maybe I just tried, my mom does love cheese.

Anyway, today I had some cream cheese from Publix.  I put it on the leftover pumpernickel from earlier this week and it was divine.  Just like it should be: predictable, simple, grand.  It makes me mad to have real cream cheese after having some light cream cheese recently.  Although light cream cheese is better than no cream cheese, it's only barely, and is really just an insult to regular cream cheese that it even exists.  Always go with regular cream cheese.  If you're trying to cut calories, spread it on celery, for Chrissake.