Say Cheese!

I have the Glass Nickel Pizza Company in Madison, WI to thank for destroying my last major non-vegan hold out: cheese. On Monday, I took the megabus to Milwaukee for work meetings and rode back to Madison with colleagues. By the time I got to my hotel in Madison, I was famished and looking forward to dinner. I ordered the Mediterranean Lasagna featuring noodles, spinach, mushrooms, tomato sauce, pesto, mozzarella and feta cheese. When the lasagna arrived, it quickly became obvious I was about to have a cheese overdose. The serving size was enormous, but even more so, the ratio of cheese was easily 4:1 over all other ingredients in the dish combined. I don't think I found a single mushroom or spinach leaf. I even had a hard time discerning the noodles from the cheese.

photo: Keik's & Fud

One thing that I've come to notice now that I don't eat cheese as often is how hard it is to chew melted cheese. It's kind of like gum in that it doesn't really breakdown; rather, your teeth and tongue sort of pack it into something swallowable. It's also really, really greasy (or if that grease remains locked in the cheese, creamy) and salty. I think that's what we crave about it. I will tell you that you will no longer crave it if you get the Glass Nickel's lasagna. Now it haunts me. I was hungry because I'd been traveling and running to meetings all day without eating, so I valantly tried to eat the lasagna. Digging through what must have been at least a pound of melted cheese to find the morsels of noodles or veggies, I realized just how unappetizing cheese can be. Thankfully, the lasagna came with a garden side salad.