Cheese on the Cheap

June 15, 2004

You know, I can post all I want about triple creams from France with soft-bloom rinds and nearly unpronounceable names or bandaged-wrapped cheddars from the UK that make my life worth living, but I have to make a confession to you all: underneath all this gourmeting, I am at heart a cheese whore. Meaning, I will give it up for cheap cheese if the craving strikes.

Don't believe me? Right now in my kitchen I have five cheap cheeses: a block of Philly cream cheese, a package of Kraft singles, two kinds of macaroni and cheese, and a plastic zippable bag of Sargento's shredded sharp cheddar. To me, Kraft singles mean childhood lunches of classic grilled cheese, sometimes with stuffing, sometimes without. And while I may have graduated from white bread and now see the healthy light of whole wheat, you will have to wrest my Kraft singles from my cold, dead, stinky hands. I could give the snobby reason for sticking with my processed pieces of plastic cheese, in which I would claim you really can't make a grilled Manchego cheese sandwich and then dip the crisp corners in Heinz ketchup, right? I mean, every feeling revolts against adulterating $25/lb cheese in that way, but not so with Kraft cheese. Mmm, Kraaaaft. I will not eat these singles raw or alone, they must be stashed firmly between two pieces of bread (exterior buttered for the pan) and grilled on the stovetop until maximum oozing occurs. Sometimes, I might even slice some Claussen (they MUST be Claussen, no limp Vlasic for me!) dill pickles and shove in those wet disks pre-grilling. Tomatoes and slices of bacon are also really nice additions.

Next on my Shelf of Shame is the classic silver "foil" package of Philadelphia cream cheese, tattooed with that unmistakable blue writing. The uses for this sort of cheese are endless, so I'll start with the normal and get progressively base and debauched. I love a toasted morning or afternoon bagel spread with cream cheese, with each half topped with a single, perfect tomato slice and sprinkled with pepper. In fact, I'm eating that right now. The more perfect the tomato, the better, and after my yearnings of last night I got a very exciting email from a reader who told me that perfect California tomatoes might be two weeks to a month early this year! That works on a sliding scale for the rest of the country, so ya'll be thrilled as well. Anyway, back to the cheap cheeses and the many uses of the stuff from Philadelphia. Very likely my craving for it will propel me to take whatever crackers I have in the house and spread them Philly silly, sometimes adding chopped red onion on top. My mother used to buy thinly sliced rounds of salami and roll them into tubes with smears of cream cheese in the middle. I'd take these 70s party snacks and dip them in French's yellow mustard and when I used to keep Fritos or Doritos in the house, I'd take those venerable chips over to a fresh block of cream cheese and scrape them across the top. The drag collected quite a bit of the stuff on the chips as well as leaving orange powder behind on the cheese block, rending it useless to anyone who came after you. It was just the tastiest trash I ever came across.

When speaking of shredded cheese, I should allow the cheesemonger in myself to come out and lecture about how you should never buy pre-grated or pre-shredded cheese because it's not at all fresh. However, that warning pertains to real Parmigiano-Reggiano, Grana Padano, or other such ritzy cheeses. "Freshness" is really not something I'm worried about when buying Sargento's Ziplock bag of sharp shredded cheddar, you know? Aside from using it on our tacos or as a necessary garnish with sliced scallions on top of a quickly zapped-up bowl of refried beans, shredded cheese has one place in my life: late night snacking. Many is the night I'm up watching my tapes of Jeeves and Wooster, Mapp & Lucia, or repeats of David Suchet's Poirot when the noshing mood hits me hard. It's much too late to make something fabulous, but I am perfectly happy to settle for something quick and trashy. All it takes is a pile of Triscuits carefully arranged on a microwaveable plate to maximize their cheese coverage, which are then sprinkled with large handfuls of the pre-packaged shredded cheddar. If I'm feeling expansive, I will even toss some scallions or red onion on top before irradiating the plate for about forty-five seconds.

For the fake fromage finale, I will address the mystery of why I have two different kinds of macaroni and cheese in my little kitchen. Although I know I've mentioned it, I don't think I've ever properly expanded on my great love for the frozen fantasy that is Stouffer's Macaroni and Cheese. Again, like many of my culinary loves, my adoration for this dish can be traced back to my childhood. I can't pinpoint when it started, I can only say that the ever-present orange boxes in our freezer were a delight to behold. In fact, as much as we probably ate, we never seemed to tire of this mass of elbow macaroni and ivory cheese. In the beginning, the cooking packages were made of hearty tin and were placed in an oven for about an hour. By today's standards, to wait more than fifteen minutes for a frozen dish is an eternity, but it was a simpler time when ice cube trays were made of metal and had a removable plastic insert that served as the forming mechanism.

Making Stouffer's in the oven meant you were certain to get that crunchy, crispy layer of brownly toasted cheese. It was a layer to be fought over, and my older sister and I often did just that. "Mo-om, she got more crunchies than I diiiid. It's not faaaair!" Then there was the fight to lick the bottom of the tin that was marginally more violent than the fight to lick the bottom of the chocolate pie bowl. You understand that we didn't actually put tongue to tin, don't you? Good, because it was more like we'd run our fingers along the tin crevasses and pick up the pasty cheesy goodness. Gross? Maybe, but you know you've done it. Maybe not today, maybe not with Stouffer's but soon and for another food.

In today's impatient and microwaveable world, we don't get tin trays any more. We do get plastic. However, it is now nigh impossible to microwave a Stouffer's and get the desirable delicate layer of brown crunchies. You might ask why, if the crunchies are so important to me, I don't go back to using the oven, but that would mean you didn't read the above about being impatient. Crunchies or not, I still love the velvety creamy goodness of Stouffer's macaroni and cheese because try as I might, this culinary school grad cannot manage to mimic that perfection on her own.

The final nail in this cheap cheese confession coffin is what comes out of that little blue box. Dry it's only some elbow macaroni -- thinner than the above rendition -- and a thin packet of powdered cheese, but wet it's like nothing else. Some might say they're quite glad that it's like nothing else because they are not True Followers of the Kraft. It briefly supplanted our favored Stouffer's version for a time until my sister and I realized that there was room for both kinds of processed mac 'n' cheese in our lives. One simply had to realize that they offered two completely different tastes. The Kraft variety seemed to be the teenager of the two macaroni and cheeses. It wore intensely bright make up, made in a slap-dash manner, and probably played its music way too loud on its headphones. Stouffer's was subtle, quiet, and aged. When my sister got old enough to babysit, it was fairly traditional for her to "cook" a box of Kraft before we positioned ourselves in front of the television to watch The Love Boat on Saturday nights.

We once tried cutting up hotdogs and sticking them in among the noodles, but it didn't take. We liked our hotdogs firmly on the side and in their own buns. Pepper was introduced at some point and made us feel quite swanky, as did serving slices of tomato along side the pile of Agent Orange covered pasta. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was my mother who introduced that concept as a way to shove more vegetables down our picky and resisting throats. Still, it stuck and to this day that's the way I prefer to eat either version of macaroni and cheese. It's delicious to take bits of the tomato on your fork and pile some macaroni on top of it.

I will end this treatise to trashy treats by reminding you that although I might eat this stuff in the privacy of my own home on a semi-regular basis, I would never go to a cheese counter such as the one I monger and ask them for cheese of the Kraft singles variety, complain about the price of the cheese stacked high on the barge, or look askance at the notion that there are cheddars that aren't actually orange, from Wisconsin, and squeezed into plastic-wrapped blocks.

Continuing on the bay shrimp kick I'm currently on, for lunch today we will be champing on cold, steamed artichokes stuffed with the little pink sea bugs and again drizzled with a citrus vinaigrette containing macerated shallots. But dinner tonight will be a completely different fish: pan-seared halibut drizzled with walnut oil and white corn roasted in their husks before being painted with chili-lime butter.