March 2nd

Picture-A-Day:

Say "Cheese!" Ha ha, get it? It's like I'm telling the cheese to say cheese. I came up with that all by myself.

Aaaand, moving on... I bought this 6-ish pound log of cheese at E&S bulk food store in Shipshewana (I don't know what E&S stands for, maybe somebody's names?) Anyway, I love that store. Shipshewana has a high concentration of Amish people, who give the impression of being kind of old fashioned. In a lot of good ways. For instance, they do a lot of their own baking and cooking from scratch. At the bulk foods store, you can get huge bags of flour. Some are 5-10 pounds, and some are more like 50 pounds - like you'd need a giant barrel in the cellar to store it in. They have just about every basic ingredient you could think of - oats, flax, wheat germ, sugar, spices, corn meal... you get the idea. They also have some home made breads, jams, salsas, things like that. I've been going there for a couple years to get honey. They have a gallon jug of honey that comes from Middlebury (right next to Shipshewana). I started using local honey because I heard it was good for seasonal allergies, and several in my family have them. And now I just love the flavor so much, I don't even like regular packaged honey that comes from who-knows-where. (Man, I'm becoming SUCH a food snob!) Anyway, I went to E&S a few weeks ago to get some honey, and I also wanted to see what I could do with one of these cheese logs. This log was $2.49/pound. At a regular deli you can get cheese for $6 a pound! At Aldi it's about $3.50-$4 a pound, which is a decent price. $2.50 is much better. Especially when you go through cheese like we do. So I got this 6.5 lb. log for about $16. Once a week or so I just cut off a handful of slices and store them in a Rubbermaid container. I also shred a handful and store that in another Rubbermaid container. If you're a hard-core green person, I know plastic containers are bad. But honestly, I don't know what else to store cheese in. I'm trying to become better at doing right by the earth, but we live in such a culture of convenience, that it's hard to find alternatives. And plastic containers are better than baggies, right? I use baggies as little as possible. But that's another story. Really, I just wanted to show you how I cut my cheese. Man, I'm hilarious today! ;)