EAT IT !

Atty Bob from Puget Sound, seaweed-gather, writes:

Hey Dave!

Thanks for the well-wishes on my fill-in job as a seaweed-gatherer while my legal practice is down. Things are going pretty well, and I've even recently found another barnacle-covered Japanese fishing net float in a tide pool I was working. Since I've been harvesting seaweed I've found two of these treasures! Buffeted by the vagaries of wind and current, considering the vastness of the Pacific, it is as though someone were sprinking these floats like easter eggs closer to home.

I noticed the piece in the here popular (Puget Sound area) Sewer Raccoon News about your consumption of smelly cheese. By golly, there's another thing we have in common! For me, the rancid-er the better! You are on the same track regarding storing the smelliest of cheeses in a glass jar in the refrigerator.


I sacrificed a perfectly good radish-buncher rubber band around a cardboard box of super ripe liederkrantz. The band and the container crumbled after about a week in the icebox and I had to throw away the entire "contaminated" contents of the fridge, in observance of my wife's peculiar nose-sensitive edict.

The truly smelly cheese habit can be costly. JAR STORAGE A MUST!

As (n)ever,

Bob

***********

Bob,

Glad to hear from you, and that the seaweed-harvesting is keeping seafood on the table.

As to the "horrendously offensive" cheese habit:

I picked it up as a child observing my parents and my Uncle Lee and Aunt Frances consuming it with beer, in the 1940's. Sometimes my dad would make me eat a lob of ripe limburger on a cracker after he had gotten merry, and they would laugh and laugh at my gagging. Eating o'r ripe cheese was an re-enactment, I think, of a WW II assault for Dad and Uncle Lee, and their wives were solid Dixians by marriage.

Dad fought the Germans and Uncle Lee was back from New Guinea, and they had, while surrounded - in Dad's case -, eaten rats cooked in US helmets, had been to the woodshed and seen (and eaten) some things pretty nasty. Eating buzzing cheese was just some more of the hair of the dog that bit them. It was like beating one's chest in defiance of natural laws.

Then I grew older and came to appreciate the essence of smelly cheese on my own. Voluntarily. Everything in it's own (or past its own) time, Bob. I ate the foisted, wicked cheese from my temporarily-torturous father's hand gradually more at ease, and by gosh, even got into the raw oysters he would order me to swallow. Pretty soon I was hooked on these foods, and even some others..........eventually I was just pretending not like them!

Now when I break open a jar of limburger - with rubber gloves if MY wife is near - I think of my parents and those ribald evenings at 623 Arcadian.

David

Ed.