Christine's Cheese � � � Monday, Aug. 04, 2003 * 22:10

I think I just ate moldy cheese.

Sweet Jemima on a Biscuit, I hope I didn't just eat a piece of moldy cheese.

I was pondering these possibilities as I stood in the kitchen, deciding what to make for supper. I had definitively chosen spaghetti with tomato and cheese sauce, but the only cheese I have is pepper jack cubes. I've had them for a while, but the expiration date says December 17th, 2004. This seems like an insanely long time for pepper jack cheese to keep, to me. So I smelled it. It smelled fine to me. But then I recalled the time I had some 'fresh' spinach in a bag last summer at our old house, when Rachel lived with us. To me, the spinach smelled wonderful, if not a little unusual for spinach. So I brought it to Rachel to smell. She was sitting at the computer, and I told her to see if it was okay to eat. She stuck her nose in the bag and turned green and retched and snarled all at once. It was a beautiful sight; but I digress. She flung (flinged? flang?) the bag at me and asserted that it was not, in fact, at all edible.

The point of all this is that I can't tell rank spinach from chopped suey.

It really doesn't help that the pepper jack cheese is covered with little green pepper flakes and little red pepper dots and little orange pepper flecks. These could easily be mold.

How did I resolve this quandry? Did I call Kraft and question them concerning the proper smell of their various cheese products? Did I boil the cheese for 10 minutes, thereby rendering it harmless? Did I feed some of it to my guinea pigs, and wait to see if they made disgusted faces? Did I whip out my chemistry set and conduct an experiment using flasks and bunsen burners and cold fusion? Did I simply throw the cheese away, hence protecting myself from any possible disease?

No...

I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, mindlessly pressing buttons on my It's Time for 409! kitchen timer, staring at the circuit breaker on the wall, and ate approximately 15 of the pepper jack cheese cubes while my spaghetti boiled-over.

Sometimes, I think I missed my true calling in life.

I should have been a retard.