Here’s a conversation C-boy and I had in the fall:
Me: You have snack day this week. What should we send?
C: How about banana chocolate chip muffins?
Me: Muffins? I don’t think we’re supposed to send muffins. I think your teacher prefers things like fresh fruit, or cheese and crackers.
C: But A-girl brought in muffins!
Me: Maybe it was her birthday, and that was a birthday snack.
C: No, it wasn’t. It was a regular snack.

So I agreed to email his teacher and ask for the low-down. She approved muffins, and that’s what we sent (after all, our recipe has considerable whole wheat flour and wheat germ, plus bananas, to counteract those chocolate chips!).

Fast forward to this month. Z-boy and C-boy had snack duty for their respective classes, on consecutive days. We had some bananas going beyond the pale (and into the brown spotty), so I was cutting them up for the freezer.

Me: Hey guys, how would you like to take banana chocolate chip muffins for snack this week?
Z-boy: Yeah, that’s a great idea!
C-boy: I’m not sure… We’ve had an awful lot of birthdays and half birthdays this month.
Me: But it’s not like we’d be sending cupcakes, these are healthy muffins.
C: But they’ve got chocolate chips in them!

I acquiesced, but goodness - is this my child? He’s never had as much of a sweet tooth as his brothers - in fact, he used to turn down candy as being “too sweet”. The first time at the neighborhood egg hunt (~18m), he opened his plastic eggs and fed us the candy. But there was one time, around age 2.5, when he surprised me. He fell down on a sidewalk, and cried as the goose egg started rising. I hugged and rocked and soothed him, and asked what would help him feel better. “Chocolate!” he responded. Once I got over my initial shock, I laughed and told him “that would make me feel better, too.”

I recently learned from the enjoyable Chocolate & Zucchini blog that they sell Dark Chocolate Special K in France. And this weekend I heard on the radio numerous stories about Kellogg’s 100th anniversary celebration. So I have a plan: we make a bunch of placards and march on Battle Creek, picket all gala celebrations, and demand our Dark Chocolate Special K! A petition drive can be set up outside Cereal City USA. Especially with all the emphasis on the health benefits of dark chocolate these days, this seems like a no-brainer. They did a low-carb version in 2003, why not jump on this gravy train?

Oh look! The 100th anniversary site has Chocolate Scotcheroos in their 25 favorite recipes. That’s my favorite, too - in fact, I’d rather have a pan of Scotcheroos over birthday cake any year. (Basic idea: peanut-butter enhanced rice krispie treats, with a frosting that mixes semi-sweet and butterscotch chips.)

On Friday, Z-boy requested a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. My chance for cheese-sandwich-blog redemption appeared! I could try again, after the previous night’s flavor failure! We even still had some Zingerman’s sour dough on hand. Of course, Z-boy does not in any sense qualify as a foodie (except, perhaps, when it comes to his passion for radishes), so his sandwich was made with ‘Not Butter’ and ’spotted cheese’ (aka colby-jack).

A quick search of the freezer did not turn up any pesto or grilled sweet red peppers (frozen during the bounty of late summer and early fall), but I did find some chiles from our garden. I sliced off the top, split it open, removed the seeds (easy to do with a frozen chile), and warmed it up on the griddle. I added that to my sandwich, along with ordinary grocery store muenster, and the result was quite zingy and tasty. Jonski Papa’s sandwich had pastrami, muenster, and Plochman’s honey dijon mustard. He was quite envious when I mentioned my chile - not sure why i didn’t add the second one to his sandwich, except that I was feeling pressed for time and grilled theirs while I prepped the chile (5 hungry children - Z-boy, T-boy, and 3 guests - were awaiting their lunch).

About two years ago, we started planning a kitchen remodel, and - since it turned into a DIY project - we’re still in the midst of it. One of our more controversial decisions (to the common kitchen design mindset) was to move the sink so it was no longer under the window. Instead, we have a lovely long run of countertop along that wall. I spend more time doing prep than washing dishes, and I really love how the light comes in on my work - even on a cloudy day as this was.

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A few summers ago, C-boy and Z-boy wanted grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch every day. Every….single….day. It was enough to make me stir crazy. Even though we used Zingerman’s bread, and good enough cheese, it made me crazy.

About one week into this food jag, I had an “aha!” experience: I realized I should just jazz up my own sandwiches. Homemade pesto, a thick slice of fresh tomato from the farmer’s market, slabs of grilled red peppers - it was enough to keep me cheerfully grilling cheese sandwiches for weeks on end.

Imagine my shock when two - at least two! - cookbooks showed up with Grilled Cheese sandwiches as their focus. Here I was being trendy and I didn’t even realize it! But hey, you don’t want to know what I ate for lunch - especially since it was 3 or 4 years ago (back when the main point of blogs seemed to be to post what you’d eaten for lunch, come to think of it!). In the time since, blogging about what you eat for lunch is as boring and trite as cheese sandwiches. Blogging now requires passion and focus and purpose (and consequences!). Or it needs to provide some sort of aggregator - say, all the worthwhile cheese sandwich experiences in the blogosphere. Now that would be a valuable service (according to Pete Wells).

I do think he makes some good points. Someone who is intentionally writing for an audience needs passion, purpose, and unique voice (although i’m not getting the ‘consequences’ part). Someone like me, who just wants to play around with some technology but doesn’t feel the need to make it private - I probably won’t meet those criteria. Well, maybe I am unique: my purpose is to store random snippets from my brain. Nobody else shares those snippets, so I’m unique and purposeful. But like Catherine wrote in Foodmusings:

In fact, many blogs aren’t really trying to do anything but entertain their creators and a handful of readers. They are, by their very definition, navel-gazing undertakings.

I’m much more of a hypertext theorist than a food blogger (go read my disssertation if you don’t believe me). I spent a few too many years gazing at the boys who’d grown under my navel, so I got out of touch with the tools of my trade. And most of my recent writing has been in the academic vein. But I like to read food blogs, and play around with technology, so here I am.

Now on to tonight’s dinner. While musing about my contribution to today’s celebration of cheese sandwiches as I walked to work this morning, I was trying to decide whether or not to make my pesto-muenster-grilled red pepper sandwich. My mind started drifting, and I thought of people who combine cheese with fruit preserves. I’ve never actually tried that, but we’ve currently got a jar of awesome homemade apricot butter in the fridge. And then I thought about halloumi - a great sheep and goat’s milk cheese we first encountered in Cyprus. I wondered how the tang and intensity of the apricot butter would do against the mellow yet salty halloumi.

So when I found myself eating dinner alone - the boys having gone out while I was writing evaluations at the science fair - I decided to try grilled halloumi and apricot butter, on Zingerman’s sourdough (bread of the month! quite the bargain!).

I can’t say it was a success. It pains me to admit this, but I think the problem was the bread. C-boy and I share a love for this bread, but it was too much for the halloumi. The bread is sour and tangy. Halloumi is mild but salty. It needs something with much less flavor, like a pita or one of the other selections at local Arabic markets. Seems obvious in retrospect! And I know some of you don’t care for my rambling reflections on why it didn’t work, but for anybody who rushes out to try halloumi, I want you to know the best approach.

I also grilled a slice of the halloumi by itself - the common treatment for halloumi, in fact, especially in our house. I tried that with a dollop of apricot butter. Much better! Now I understand the pairing of cheese and fruit preserves.

(By the way, I still haven’t mastered the art of food pictures, so I won’t shoehorn any into this post.)

If you’ve never heard of halloumi, you’re probably not alone. We have a friend who grew up in Beirut, whose parents still own an apartment in Cyprus. We travelled there together in 1994, and he introduced us to grilled halloumi. The cheese is made from sheep and goat’s milk, with a touch of mint. It’s soft yet kind of chewy. It’s commonly grilled (cooked on a stove top griddle), but it’s not stretchy or oozy after grilling and doesn’t really ‘melt’ per se - instead, most of the liquid gets cooked out and it gets kind of chewy, and it squeaks when you bite into it. A few years after our Cyprus trip, we found that many of the Arabic groceries in town sell it. More recently, it’s been available at Zingerman’s. Other large grocery stores are selling this Keses brand, but it’s much more expensive than what’s available at the Arabic markets. At a local grocery, I talked to a rep from the company that is importing and selling Keses in this area. He gave me some compelling reasons why it should be better than the cheese at the other markets. So I bought some of each, tried them together - and couldn’t really tell the difference. So I keep buying it from the Arabic markets - besides, they’re a more intriguing shopping experience! But to be honest, all of it pales in comparison to the cheese available on the island, so if you want an authentic halloumi experience, you’ll need to book a flight to Cyprus.

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I needed to use up the whipping cream I’d bought to make the truffles, so I made another batch of caramels. I made two of the changes I’d considered: toasted the pecans, and used dark brown sugar. No welsh sea salt, though! And my thermometer wasn’t as precise, so I might have cooked them to a higher temperature. And it was a different stove, and different cookware (the wrong pot - too deep - but I digress!). Since it wasn’t a controlled experiment, changing only one variable, I wouldn’t know what to attribute the success to. And since we didn’t save any of the other batch I can’t say for sure, but I did like these without question, so I think they might be better. More caramelly. Darker - more like brown sugar than butter. We’ll definitely add them to the holiday gifts repertoire.

Unfortunately, I noticed another chipped tooth (an inner corner) the other day - I suspect the caramels are at fault….

Chocolate used this time: a mixture of the remaining Callebaut, a “single origin” chocolate bar from Trader Joe’s (Sao Tome - I didn’t like it very much as a candy bar, but figured it would do fine in this context), and Ghirardelli bittersweet chips. The Ghirardelli chips really are great - very silky, nice taste, a very nice finish. The Callebaut has both an oily and chalky mouth feel - how can that be?? The bar from Trader Joe’s has a bitter finish, that’s why I didn’t like it.