Kya cheese hai!

For the last couple of weeks, we have been looking at cheese. No, not as an investment option or to add more to our diet, but for a story I have been asked to do for a newspaper. While I can do it without going through the wanderings and the research, having searched for decent cheese almost all my life that I have been eating it, the sheer pleasure of exploring a favourite subject kept me going quite happily. And it took me for a little stroll down that lane they call Nostalgia, peeking into a past that was, deliciously, nicely punctuated with cheese of various kinds.

But way back in time, I was not too discriminating. I know I am likely to get hung, drawn and quartered for this, but there have been days that I have eaten cheese powder mixed with milk and spread on sliced white bread and toasted crisp. It was absolutely fabulous...then. Now, the very thought makes me shudder, though why it should I am not sure, since the concept is essentially sort of cheese deconstructed without a fancy label attached. Soon after, I found that gustatory bliss could be translated into cubes of processed cheese stuck on a fork (they fell off a skewer - I know, I tried) and held in the flame for a few seconds. the outside would be blistered and crisp, while the inside would be a little warm; for some reason, it never melted like I thought it would. Then I graduated to cheese pakoras - also made with processed cheese, I thing, a deep-fried dream that would be any nutritionist's nightmare. Of course, hot on the heels of this one came the mozarella sticks and arancini in Italian restaurants in the US, which often had me skipping the main course and concentrating on the appetiser and, without fail, the pudding. In college, I would make a vegetable pulao-rice concoction and, just before serving it, stir in vast amounts of cottage cheese and eat it hot, melting into gentle though strangely tasteless strings that were almost as soothing as a dish of tairshaadam or instant mashed potatoes (with grated cheese, of course). I soon developed a serious addiction to crunchy toasted bagels with cream cheese, especially the cream cheese, and found myself using it in almost everything, from tuna turnovers to tortilla wraps. And, then, nothing ever sank to my hips or made my T-shirts tighter than they should have been.

Today, life has changed. Everything I eat goes straight to where I don't want it, from my hipline to my waist to my...never mind where else. But a little cheese every day is fine, my doctor assures me, women my age and stage in life need the calcium. So, I figured, I may as well get the best available. So I troll supermarket counters and speciality delicatessens for favourites, bringing home sharp cheddar, briney feta, hole-y Swiss, even a rather squishy Brie one time. I buy my cheeses wherever I can find them, be they in Pune, in Delhi or at the new store just down the road from the house. It may not be the ten pound wheel of mature Farmhouse Cheddar that we once had in our fridge, but it keeps us going until the next time I go shopping, a vaguely fanatical gleam in my eyes as I look for some interesting cheese, please!