Every once in awhile I wonder what the twelve year old version of me would think of my current life. Would she be excited by where I’m living? What I’m doing? Would she think I was cool?
If she had seen me this Sunday the answer, I know, would have been a resounding “NO!” probably combined with an “EWWWWW GROSSSS!” Because this Sunday was the Seattle Cheese Festival and twelve year old me deeply, emphatically, desperately hated cheese.
What can I say? When I was twelve it tasted like grossness wrapped in vomit.
But now that I’m older I find that cheese has grown on me. There are so many different kinds, different varieties, all with their own flavors and histories that I can’t find a blanket statement that captures them all. And there are certain moments when cheese is the perfect accompaniment to a dish: burritos, garlic bread, gnocchi. Or my own personal, heaven in a bite, brie on fresh baked french bread. (mmmmmmmmmmmm)
So while there was a time in my life where I would have turned up my nose and cried at even being in the same block as a cheese festival when my friend Angie told me about the one down at Pike Place Market I eagerly agreed to go.
Although when I got there I had a bit of second thoughts. Let me be frank here, this was not some little three booth affair. No. This was the cheese gauntlet. Everywhere you looked free cheese stared back at you in all its hues and shades, on bread, on spoons, on slabs and on an entire forest of sharp little toothpicks.
The day was dark and dreary for May, even in Seattle, but there was still enough booths and toothpicks with little creamy lumps of aged milk to make my soul quail in expectation. But I was here, early, on a dreary Sunday morning. Deus avertat that I give up. So I waded in, hands delicately cradling the soda I had grabbed to cleanse my palate between bites.
There were sections of cheeses. Here were the goat milk cheeses with their cousins formed from sheep, there were the mozzarellas and bries, the cheeses with things like bacon/brown sugar/carmelized onions/chives mixed in, the spreadable cheeses.
Sometimes they had stories attached them, the exploits of those who had discovered the sacred alchemy that resulted in the flavor before us, the precise mix of ingredients, time, and storage carried down through the ages by those devoted to the craft. Others carried recipes, still others demonstrated said recipes, and at one notable booth I learned exactly how one goes about making mozzarella. (spoiler: it’s surprisingly easy).
Everywhere, though, were the farmers and families and chefs that had made cheese such an integral part of their life, giving samples and selling their wares and explaining the fine points of cheesedom, when they weren’t trying to keep up with the horde of sample grabbers.
We emerged with opinions. I knew that I liked mozzarella, but I had discovered a predilection for goat cheeses… interesting since I had entered the festival barely known that there were any goat cheeses besides feta. I also learned that just because something has “bacon” in the name doesn’t mean it has to taste anything like bacon, and that smoked cheeses were something best avoided. And both Angie and I realized that, to us at least, gouda is seldom very enjoyable.*
But we walked away from the booths with our hands encircling our bellies, full of free cheese, grateful that we made it through the gauntlet in its entire. And I had a heart to heart with my inner twelve year old, insisting that cheese really wasn’t all that bad if you gave it a shot.
Although she had the final word, as I ended up curled around the toilet that night, my body rejecting the strange substances I had so heedlessly ingested.
*just barely sidestepped a pun here.