My husband and I both grew up with Velveeta, which is not really cheese at all. I remember my father loving blues and sharp cheddars, but my brother and I were fed toasted cheese sandwiches made with horrible pre-sliced white bread, Velveeta, and margarine. That “cheese product” melts like glue. I am embarrassed to admit how much we each loved these sandwiches when we were little.

We grew out of that. Our sons, as far as we know, never tasted Velveeta.

Tillamook cheese was a major step up in adulthood, and we bought the large five-pound blocks of Tillamook cheese, usually “medium” sharp. The special black wax white cheddar is not too bad. But no, we do not buy Tillamook cheese anymore. We use Dubliner as our basic cheese, but there are three or four others in my cheese drawer at the moment.

Last year we considered ordering an entire wheel of Stilton or even of organic Rogue River Blue as a gift to ourselves, but backed off at the last moment. The cost is equivalent to a large grocery cart from Whole Foods.

This morning I have been reading recipes for koiugn amann pastries and tortelli [darn that auto-correct fixing what ain’t broke] with a sweet/salty filling and soups with lentils and sweet potatoes and caramelized onions. One of the recipes called for an Italian hard cheese I had never heard of, Grana Padano, and that is how I found myself looking at wheels of blue cheese.

Do we want to spend over a hundred dollars for five pounds of cheese?

We might.

There are worse things than buying expensive foods. What passes for a “good meal out” often disappoints. There are plenty of foods from our childhood we hope never to taste again: Hi-C, KoolAide, French’s mustard, Wonderbread, Hostess “bi-products” (Gary’s name for Twinkies and the rest of the line), canned (dyed black) olives, canned stew, canned chili, canned baked beans (all the canned main dishes that saved time), sweet salad dressing (yes, Catalina dressing, I am talking about you), tinned ground pepper, fake maple syrup and fake vanilla (yes, the flavors are different, Mom), instant potatoes, and Jello.

My grandmother baked everything from scratch. My own mother learned to bake her weekly four loaves and everything else, but was eager to adopt all the modern conveniences in the 50s and 60s. I am a throwback. Real olives and real vanilla and real maple syrup were revelatory. While I was still eating meat I learned to roast a beautiful chicken stuffed with sliced lemon and onion, beef bourguignon with red wine, chili verde with pork shoulder.

I like playing with flavors and I love to both bake and cook. A friend sat at our table and asked me with suspicion what was in the dish I set before him. I told him and he was a bit put off, but then he asked for seconds so I guess the combination was not a failure, though I can’t recall now what I put on his plate.

My combinations are not always successful, but experimentation is how I found mango slices on spinach and cheese tortellini and grated parmesan over the top, cumin in most soups, and good french tarragon-dijon mustard on toasted cheese sandwiches made with two kinds of cheese.

Food is good.

Though I wrote this blog post instead of focusing on the novel, I have over 23,000 words this morning.