A riveting post about cheese

I love cheese! Cheese, cheese, CHEESE!!! It is one of my biggest dietary downfalls (along with fresh baked bread covered in butter, chocolate and anything potato)! Whatever you are is always a million times better when it's covered in cheese! As long as I have some sort of cheese in the house I can and will make a meal!

So this past week I grabbed some feta when I was grocery shopping. I like buying feta in brine because I find it stays fresher longer and you often get more for your money. The store I was in did not sell the make I usually go for, so I tried something different. That can't be bad, right? It's good to try something different and new, sometimes that is how you discover THE best stuff! Well a couple of days later I cracked open the feta - the first thing I noticed was that the liquid was less brine-ee and more milky. Is that bad? I didn't let it bother me, I carried on. I attempted to crumble off a few bits to give it a taste and it was like no other feta I had tried before...not in a good way...or a bad way. It was NOT a crumbly feta, it was soft and mushy, not what I expected. I gave it a taste, not bad, but whoa boy, was it salty, like seriously SALTY! Definitely not the type of feta to crumble into a salad!

Not one to waste food (especially precious cheese!) I figured I would have to find some way of using it. So Wednesday night, while whipping up a quick pasta dinner, I tossed some of the feta into my veggie spag-sauce right at the end. It kind of disappeared, just melted in...and do you know what? It tasted friggin fantastic! It did up the salt levels for sure, but as I was expecting that from my earlier taste test, and scaled the salt levels in the sauce down.

My next feta experiment was last nights dinner. I combined the feta with my dear friend the potato! I made mashed potatoes as usual (but keeping the salt down) and in another pot caramelized some red onion and threw in some frozen spinach - I always try to keep some sort o frozen veg on hand, and spinach is one of my faves! After the onions and spinach were cooked down, I mixed them in with the mashed potatoes along with about a 1/4 cup of the feta cheese. Everything was mixed together and served with spicy Italian sausage and roasted tomatoes and it was another success! But it was not the prettiest, I did not grab a photo...but there was leftover mash for today's lunch!

Fried up mash with an egg - hell yes! Yeah, this also doesn't look the prettiest, and I cannot fry and egg without busting the yolk to save my life - but this mess tasted good!