Dead Goats

In an attempt to combat the dullness of German food, we deep-fried some cheese the other night. Ordinary German cheese is good but bland: Gouda, Edam, the occasional unripe Camembert or Brie. They even manage to make mozarella and feta dull. It's sort of like going to Baskin-Robbins and finding out that all 31 flavors are vanilla. You might learn to appreciate the subtleties, but when all is said and done, you're still eating vanilla.

We occasionally stumble across a stronger cheese. These come under such innocuous names as "butter cheese" and are often quite potent. I'm always trying to find something new and interesting for Karin, so I try a lot different cheeses. I seem to have a knack for finding the smelly ones.

Now, the cheese in question was smelly, as in smells-like-somebody-disemboweled-a-goat-and-left-it-under-the-tropical-sun smelly. It had already taken over the refrigerator and established a solid beachhead in the kitchen. An assault on the front room was imminent, so we had to do something. Karin was cooking tempura and there was batter left over, so I suggested deep frying the cheese.

At first, we didn't notice anything. This was presumably because the cheese hadn't yet gathered enough strength to overcome the smell it caused when we opened the package. But then Karin started wrinkling her nose. About the time she started gagging, I caught a whiff -- I'm a bit hard of smelling -- and by the time the cheese threatened to overwhelm me, Karin had already fled with the tempura to the front room, the door firmly closed behind her.

Suffice to say that it was wonderful deep-fried cheese -- mild when hot, stronger when cooling, deadly when cold -- and that we still haven't rid the apartment of the dead-goat smell. In spite of near-freezing weather, we left the windows open all day yesterday. I've run the ventilation-system filters through the dishwasher twice and intend to scrub them tonight with industrial strength grease-cutter. If that fails, our options are taking them to the car wash or buying new ones.

I can't wait to find out what the deli section offers next.