Cheese and other things

I am slowly making my way through all the cheeses at Trader Joe's (from cheapest to most expensive), and I recently tried Dubliner cheese and Comté. It turns out that I don't particularly enjoy either :(. Although both taste delicious melted, from my experience, ALL cheeses taste good melted. Even the free giant wedge of some sorta fancy cheese we got from Costo in 2006 that reeked of some kinda herb or mushroom or ... I dunno. Even that was n-fold zillion-fold uh, better heated up.

Dubliner cheese: Specially made in awesome Ireland, this cheese has a firm texture, smells pretty good, and is rather crumbly like parmesan. It also tastes crumbly and sour, and has a bite that kicks like Swiss cheese (I'm not a fan of the...hard/translucent (huh, weird adjectives)... taste of Swiss cheese although it looks absolutely beautiful). It tastes good melted though, and is super stringy.

Comté cheese: This French cheese is also hard and has a waxy rind that is crumbly and extremely smelly. To me, this cheese smelled like E. coli on petri dishes. Urg. It may just be me as a Bio lab person, though, because once I walked into my boyfriend's dorm and it smelled like yeast growing on petri dishes (he had just had a certain brand of cheese pizza). Lab smells do not entice me. The cheese itself is hard, dry, and tastes a bit off.  It is, again, delicious when melted, but the parchy E. coli sensation is still there.

I went to Whole Foods and tried their hot food/cold food for $7.99/lb. As this was my first time, I asked the guy giving out gazpacho samples about how the system works. Basically, you grab a box (small cardboard "~1-pound-sized", large cardboard "~2-pound-sized(?)", and large compost-able cardboard (~2-pound-sized(?)") and fill it with hot and cold foods from the trays. You can ask the people at the deli to weigh your box if you want. When you pay, the box and contents are weighed, and you can ask for utensils! I ended up getting around $6 of delicious food, which I ate while reading Grimm's fairy tales right outside the Whole Foods (they have chairs/tables). Unfortunately, this demonstrated that I can hypothetically eat some 3 pounds of honey mustard vegan chicken and still have a raging appetite afterwards. I also really liked the Asian tofu salad thing. The mushrooms were a bit too sour for me. I don't know whether the boxes are recycle-able; they have a waterproof coating on the inside, but it was easily tear-able, so I recycled it anyway...

I also have decided to make dinner by putting all dinner ingredients into a pan and baking them for around 20 minutes at 350 F in an unpreheated oven. As I have a LOT of cilantro (doing pilot taste tests), I baked that too (I am NOT a fan of raw cilantro). So far, I've had three or so of these dump-and-bake dinners. The one below has corn tortillas, topped with sliced eggplant, Comté cheese, soy ground beef mixed with a whole onion, and cilantro.
Also, instead of ice cream, I bought 680 g of frozen mango, ~400 g of which I ate on the way home from Trader Joe's. It is absolutely gratifying, and DOESN'T MELT! It's a great treat.