The Cottage Cheese Conundrum


I have been wanting to introduce a good protein source into my daily diet for a while now. It's important that I mix up my Weight Watchers activity by ways other than cheating sometimes, you understand...

Cottage cheese is excellent source of protein and calcium and so on and thought this would a simple way to reintroduce this into my life without having to use up a lot of daily points. The problem is that cottage cheese looks like cottage cheese and it tastes like cottage cheese and it IS cottage cheese.

I could find something else but really I just have this freakish thing with food. It really goes back to Julia taunting me about an imaginary list that she and her family thought I had. It was a list of 17 things that I would eat -- and only those things because they were the only things I had ever eaten in my life. So, sometimes when I encounter foods that I am not fond of, I feel the need to prove to an imagined audience that I AM willing to eat other things, and that I will even grow to like them -- much to my own surprise. (Frankly, there are many circumstances where I am not willing to test this theory, but this is mostly to do with the portion of the vegetable family known as The Greens. Collard, mustard, kale, in most cases spinach... You get it. And you can have it when you get it, because I'm not going near it.)

Such has become the Cottage Cheese Conundrum.

Because of this thing, I have recently focused my radar on wanting to eat cottage cheese. I think about it more than is normal. (I really need to get a hobby.) I ask people how do THEY manage to eat cottage cheese. And let me tell you, people do STRANGE things with cottage cheese, and I'm not even talking about that really weird sight I found on the internet... No, I have a friend who eats hers with Catalina dressing. I wasn't even willing to consider that.

Here are a couple that I was willing to attempt in my first few attempts. Salt and pepper was suggested and I thought this would play up the cheesy aspect of the situation. Turns out, I must have gotten too free-handed with the salt packet and it just tasted like salty cottage cheese with a dash of pepper. No good.

An earlier attempt almost cured me of the pursuit entirely. Scott had been required to eat mushy food during his early post-operative days, and I had purchased cottage cheese as one of those items. A short time after, I decided to try the cottage cheese and a friend had suggested dried fruit was a good mix-in. I couldn't find that, but I thought blueberries might be a good complement. Turned out that it was more than a short time before when the cottage cheese had been purchased and the last time it was put in the refrigerator, the lid wasn't exactly put all the way on. Let's just say that while I at least finally figured out where that awful smell coming out of the refrigerator was coming from, I was turned off of cottage cheese for a while.

My latest attempt was at the suggestion of a WW friend. Now, I should have taken the suggestion with a grain of the excess salt from my last cottage cheese experiment, but I'm not that smart. (She's given me past suggestions and swore they were so amazing and they were not as much so.) She suggested the direction to go is sweet. Put a dash of vanilla and a bit of splenda and blend it up. It's the best thing ever, you will swear you died and gone to Heaven -- this is what she promised.

Huh, if that was what Heaven was like, think I'll stay on Earth and stick with Heavenly Hash. Granted, the first bite was pretty good but not quite sweet enough so I added a dash more vanilla and that turned out to be too much and then it was a balancing act (add MORE cottage cheese, add more Splenda, etc) to get back to the first almost okay bite... But, who wants to work this hard to eat something that was only moderately okay??

So, that experiment basically used up the last of the tiny experimental container that I purchased.

And then tonight I learned that in order for a serving of cottage cheese to count as a daily serving of dairy (one of WW's good health guidelines is that you should have two servings of dairy a day) you have to consume 2 CUPS! I mean, Jesus -- are you serious? I can barely gag down 2 tablespoons and they're saying I've got to come up with 2 cups? Just the thought makes me want to hurl.

I'm afraid that cottage cheese is going to be headed the way of collard greens on my list of acceptable foods.

hugs,

Heather

PS -- One of the reasons for the long delay is that we just got back from a week long vacay to California. We got to sit like THIS close to Bruce Willis at Koi in LA and I got a tattoo in Venice Beach... I will put up a picture once it heals.