The Swiss Cheese Incident

I've been cooking with swiss cheese a lot recently. You know, a little cordon bleu, a little casserole, a little this and that. Cheese fetishes run in cylces, I think, and recently I've been feeling a little Swiss.

Saturday was one of those days when nobody should've been messing with a big block of swiss. Up late the night before, I was cooking for 25 people, suffering a work crisis that threatened to (and did) last for 36 hours, and helping my neighbor move five years of living into a 18-wheeled moving truck. There was no time for messing around with any kind of cheese, let alone one as haphazard as swiss. And yet I was. For lack of better sense, I was grating an entire block of swiss for a monster cordon bleu-y pasta salad I was whipping up to go with the grilled fare. In the end, I got a little carried away and grated the whole damned block. Work was pinging me on the IM machine, the moving truck guy was idling in the cul-de-sac, and the wife was giving me a look that said, "I love you, but if you don't put down the damned cheese, I'm going to put it in a hole you don't even know you have."

I had too much grated cheese.

My keen eye noted this as I filled up a bowl with enough pasta salad to feed 60 people (that eye wasn't so keen) and started cleaning up my work area.

"Something is wrong with the garbage disposal," the wife said.

This, as I have noted before, is my wife's verbal cue that something isn't working for her. Nine times out of ten, whatever it is works just fine. This time though, she was spot on.

Something was wrong with the garbage disposal. Flipping the switch produced a sound a lot like you get when you...ah yes, jam up some sort of motor. It was a strained "I'm about to burn out like a motherfucker" sound.

And this was a bad time for such a thing to happen. I had scraps of just about everything I'd been cutting that morning. Egg shells littered the countertop. Not to mention all the cheese.

Wait, where is all the fucking cheese?

Well, it's in the garbage disposal, of course.

Now, I don't fault the wife for putting about two cups of shredded swiss in the disposal. I would've and have done the same thing. However, this timing was especially bad.

After two minutes of using the old Garbage Disposal Reboot trick, I finally just shoved my hand in the small hole and felt for the problem Sure enough, the whole of the blades was gummed up with melted swiss cheese. It was a decidedly non-neutral situation.

Eventually, with the help of a spoon, my wife's smaller hands, and a lot of hot water, we got the thing running again. The crisis, however swiss, was over.

Later, after the work debacle, the move, the BBQ, and a few too many beers, I got to wondering about the swiss cheese. A simple sentence kept running through my brain:

You eat that stuff.

Now, given, I rarely eat two cups of cheese at a time, so my chances of gumming up the works to the same degree are slim. With that acknowledgement, I also don't have sharp blades spinning at several thousand RPMs in my gut.

Methinks it may be time to switch cheese for a while. It just might be time for something in the way of a Stracchino or Teleme.