Say Cheese

 This is a reprint from January 2008. The end of Lent reminded me of meatless Fridays as a kid, and I had already written about that, so here it is.

I have never liked going to church, even as a little kid. It’s boring, dull, and most of the stories don’t make sense to me. However, living in my fathers house, it was a requirement that you go to church and even worse, you go to the Catholic School. During my childhood the Catholic Church didn’t allow the faithful to eat meat on Friday. This caused my mom to be resourceful. Every Friday evening she had to come up with a meatless dinner that pleased the horde. My favorite was pancakes, because what kid wouldn’t want their favorite breakfast for dinner. Another Friday night meal in the rotation was grilled cheese sandwiches. Not bad, a thick slab of Velveeta melted between two pieces of white bread, fried in a puddle of Oleo. Once again, a kid favorite.

The bad thing about Fridays was lunch at school. Mom would usually make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but sometimes she would get inventive and come up with something completely off the wall. You might open up that brown sack to find a delicious brown sugar and banana sandwich, or the refreshing and tasty, peanut butter and lettuce combination. The one sandwich that I dreaded, was the Velveeta on dry white bread sandwich. Just bread and Velveeta, no margarine or Miracle Whip (which I hated) or mayonnaise (which I had never tasted). It was like a mouthful of alum powder, it had the ability to suck every last molecule of moisture out of my tongue.

My Velveeta experiences made me leery of cheese for most of my life. Unless it was melted on a hamburger or in macaroni, I couldn’t stand the thought of just eating a piece of cheese. Thanks to Mark, over the last ten years, I have been introduced to real cheese. Not the crap that’s wrapped in single slices and has the name Kraft on it, but real stuff made in foreign countries like California and France. I now find myself eating brie, goat cheese, and other exotic fromage.

I’ll bet if I had to eat one of these foreign cheeses when I was a kid, I’d be writing about the horrible French cheese my mom forced on us. So the question is, ‘is there a place in our kitchen for Velveeta‘? The answer is yes! When I crave one of those grilled cheese sandwiches frying in a puddle of margarine, or as plumbers putty under the sink.