Default Cheese

Captain's bLog: 12 weeks.

So far we've spent four weeks in Italy and eight in France. Observation: there is a nearly endless variety of cheeses available, at a nearly endless variety of cheese shops, counters and market stalls. The variety in cheese is matched only by the varieties in bread (France), pasta (Italy) and wine (both). These meltable multitudes come in nearly every shape, size, smell and flavour imaginable - honestly, it's rather intimidating. I have no clue what I'd like to buy, or even to try, so I mostly grab something I've heard of before and scuttle away in gastronomic shame. (Chevre again? Tsk tsk.)

Would you like to know what I haven't seen here? Electric-orange cheese. And according to the 10,000 or so cheeses I have seen, electric-orange is not actually a normal colour profile for cheese. Blue, yes; grey, sure; and anything from winter white to bloomy beige to creamy yellow, absolutely. Does anyone know how it came to be that SO many of our cheeses/cheese-adjacent, dairy-derived food products (in Canada and the States, anyway) are so incredibly orange?

I honestly didn't know that I felt this way until about a month into our trip, and if you had suggested it to me I would have denied it and supported my argument with a tour of the typically well-stocked cheese drawer in our fridge, but in my heart of hearts I believed that cheddar was the default cheese. The perfect, all-occasion, stand-alone or pair-with-anything, One True Default Cheese.

I also thought it was... well, usually way more orange than I now know it really has any right to be.

I was wrong on both counts. 

This has taken a bit of getting used to. (Not the 'wrong' thing, but the 'orange' thing.) (Okay, fine, also the 'wrong' thing, just a bit.) Small Fry is obviously missing some things from home, and Default Cheese - in all its many applications - is one of them. Its orangeness is part of its homey appeal; it just doesn't feel the same to eat white mac & cheese or white grilled cheese. (Or, as he calls it, girled cheese, which we have never bothered to correct 'cause it's so darn cute.) And non-orange nacho cheez?! I just can't even.

Honestly, of all the things we could be missing from home, I would not have guessed it would be orange cheese/cheez products. I might have guessed Slurpees, or maybe peanut butter, but I would have missed the mark because les sirops and Nutella have handily replaced those important kid commodities. If I don't find some secret French source of KD soon I plan to buy food colouring and try my hand at producing a pot of properly orange mac & cheese as a nostalgic treat for Small Fry. And perhaps a pot of properly orange nacho cheese as a PMS treat for me.

Not a Travel Blog?!

Captain's bLog: 10 weeks.

It has come to my attention that my blogging habit is predicated, at least somewhat, upon my being unhappy in some way. Specifically, I seem to be at my creative best when I'm suffering from a smidgen of insomnia-induced mania. However, I've been sleeping really, really well on this trip. Like, eight or nine hours a night - sometimes ten! That is literally double the amount of sleep I usually get.

I can also be creative during bouts of overwork - my brain is always on the lookout for productive ways to procrastinate - or hormonal rage. But I'm not really working much at the moment, and my frustrations seem to fizzle out harmlessly on vacation, even during my regularly scheduled week of elevated anger levels. I did get pretty upset with DH after he finally read The Handmaid's Tale and then had "nothing to say" about it afterward, but I have filed that offense for some future date when I'm able to work up a proper lather again - I just can't be bothered with it right now. Passe le vin, s'il te plait.

So, yeah, like I was saying, unfortunately (??) it seems I've simply been too content to have much to say here (have I discovered the inverse Anna Karenina principle?). I try to inject my writings with a certain amount of real-ness, but I'm essentially living in a fairytale dream sequence at the moment, which makes everything I have to say fundamentally rather unrelatable. This is exactly why I hate travel blogs (... and Instagram).

Yet here we are.

I may, against my better judgement, be forced to sortof maybe actually write about traveling stuff in this sacred space, just to keep it from atrophying another six months. I'll do my best to be unhappy in some way, and thus thwart my reverse Anna Karenina problem, but the sun is shining and life is good and darn it, being this happy is just not conducive to blogging in my usual way.