A Life Without Cheese is No Life at All

 


        Lately I've been watching a vegan cooking channel on YouTube. I started watching it because the content creator had a lot of good tofu recipes. There recipes mostly have ingredients that I already have or could easily obtain if I wanted to. 

        I look at a lot of things that she cooks. On her channel, eating a plant based diet seems to be pretty simple and affordable. Everything looks so good, especially the kale salad that you can customize with all kinds of things. (The secret is massaging the kale.) I could see myself adopting this type of eating. Except for one thing.

        Cheese. Well actually the whole  dairy category. I like milk and yogurt, but I love cheese. I love almost all cheese made from cow's milk. Cheddar cheese, cream cheese, cottage cheese, asiago cheese are all good things in my opinion. 

        Maybe it's because I have some Wisconsin roots. Maybe it's because I've fallen for the ads from the dairy industry telling me how healthy milk is. Mostly, I just like how these products taste.

        I grew up eating cheese. One of my favourite snacks was and still is cheese melted on Triscuit crackers. I used to put cheese on broccoli and cauliflower because it was the only way I would eat them. My two favourite foods growing up were tacos and pizza which both have cheese. In fact I really like the cheese pizza from Costco's food court. There are few things better than good melted cheese.

        When C and I go to The Melting Pot to have fondue, my favourite course isn't the dessert. It's the cheese course at the beginning.

        I know that cheese, yogurt and cream can be made from plant based milk, but I just can't imagine how they would taste. I've drank soy milk before and I can taste the soy. The only way to cover it up is to put chocolate in it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine that almond milk and coconut milk based products would have similar issues.

        I'm sure the content creator would be appalled at the fact that I make her buffalo tofu salad recipe with Duke's mayonnaise and greek dairy yogurt. She doesn't have to know. I'll keep enjoying the best of both worlds.

       

        

        

       

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Barnaby's New "Toy"

           Now that we are back home and have re-established our routine with the cats, Barnaby has discovered a new "toy". The word is in quotation marks because it isn't really something to play with. However, one thing I have discovered in my many years of living with cats is that everything is one of two categories: food or toys.          I discovered this new interest a day or two after we got home. I was in the bathroom washing my hands when Barnaby jumped on the counter. He watched the water coming out of the faucet with great interest. I turned the water down to a thin trickle to see what he would do. He continued to watch it for a little bit and then started to bat at the stream with his paw. I let him do this for a few minutes and then turned the faucet off.          I started turning on the water for him anytime I was in the bathroom. Pretty soon it became obvious that this was a mistake. Now he e...
Read more

Second chance

           Three years ago we "ate" dinner at a restaurant in Door County that we like a lot. It is on the fancy side and has an English manor theme. I use the word ate in quotations because looking back at the column I wrote at the time, all we had were bread and salad. We were there for an hour and a half and never got our entrees even though tables around us had and the place wasn't overly busy. It was the worst experience I had ever had at a restaurant. We decided we were not going back there again.               After three years of driving past it, we decided it might be time to try it again since another restaurant we do like had no open reservation times. We made the reservation and it was confirmed. As before we chose and early time, right after the restaurant opened for dinner hoping that it would be less busy.          I was a little nervous when we drove up to the restaurant a few ...
Read more

Goodbye Mom

           We have come to the end of another year and some of us will be celebrating the end of this year and the beginning of a new one. Yesterday brought another ending for me and our family, my mother passed away.          Mom and I had a complicated relationship starting in junior high. I was the strange middle child, bookish, shy and socially inept. The only thing I did that pleased her was to make the honor roll consistently.           She hoped that I would go to a liberal arts private college and become a professional writer or become an interpreter. I was of a more practical bent and chose a career that paid well and would allow me to be help people. For many years she made sure to let me know that she did not approve of my career in "the sciences" even though she knew I liked it and was good at it.          That is not what I want to write about though. She was a real...
Read more