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.

Honey Mustard and Onion Pretzels

I'm not a huge fan of pretzels, but there is ONE huge exception. I can easily DEVOUR Snyder of Hanover's Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel pieces (and the Cheese ones...I've yet to try the others). They're $3 for a pack, and because I inhale them extremely fast, I rarely buy them (unless it's Finals week. Then, I eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And snack). Last week, after I ran to Trader Joe's, it started storming, so I was stranded for an extra half an hour. I ended up buying twice as much food as I would've (not that it's a terrible thing, because I've been stress-eating even though it's summer). Stores should hope that flash-storms occur more often, especially when their customers' modes of transportation are legs or bikes. So, while languidly prowling the store, I came across the Trader Joe's brand of honey mustard and onion pretzels. I jumped with glee, bought them for $2.29, and strolled out into the glorious, rainbow sunset, as the storm had abated.
(Actually, it was still extremely gloomy and the trees cried rain, and the thin ropes of the drawstring bag cut into my shoulders)


The pretzels were sweeter than the Snyder of Hanover ones. They were okay. I would buy them again, but they only offer about 80% of the satisfaction I get from when I eat Snyder of Hanover Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel pieces.

In other news, this is the smallest take-away container, ever! It's the size of an apricot! It contained about two pieces of bak choi and one chunk of Chinese mushroom. I got it from Han Dynasty, at 37th and Market St., where our lab group had lunch. The food there is delicious, but a tad spicy for me. The servers are non-Chinese and speak  American English well, whereas the chefs are Chinese and...just do splendid cooking.

Also, 7-11 decided to have its free Slurpee day on the 23rd of May, as opposed to the 11th of July.