I've always eaten my grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup. Been doing that since I was a kid. Of course, what I was eating in those days wasn't technically "grilled cheese" because it was Velveeta, which legally speaking isn't cheese.

The FDA has a legal definition of "cheese" and Velveeta doesn't qualify. If you look at the package Kraft doesn't claim that it's cheese. They used to call it "Pasteurized Process Cheese food", and then "Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread", and the FDA issued a warning letter, so now it's called "Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product", which apparently the FDA doesn't mind. Bureaucrats will be the death of us all.

Now my Grilled Cheese Sandwich is really cheese, however. My cheese is Tillamook Sharp Cheddar. I've tried Vermont cheddar and I've tried Wisconsin cheddar, and to me they just don't measure up. Tillamook is an area on the Oregon coast which is nearly perfect for raising dairy cattle, and the Tillamook County Creamery Association is a farm cooperative that all the dairy farmers belong to that processes their milk and sells it. They do all the things you expect from a dairy (milk, cream, butter, ice cream) but cheese is their main product.

Tillamook sharp cheddar makes good sandwiches. And it's good for everything else that cheese is good for. (I add it to my lasagna.) I grate a pound at a time and keep it in a plastic box in my fridge.

As to the ketchup, a lot of people tell me that's "really weird", but I like it, so to heck with what other people think. (When did I ever care about that?) One of the big problems for me about living in Massachusetts was that I couldn't get Tillamook cheese there. One of the reliefs when I moved to San Diego was that I could get it there. And of course, back here in Beaverton it's readily available.

If you like that sort of thing (I don't) the fields there are also a good place to find Psilocybin mushrooms, or so I've been told.

UPDATE: Around these parts, Tillamook is also famous because of the "Tillamook Burn", one of the largest forest fires in Oregon history. In 1933 350,000 acres went up in smoke. My mom was a kid in Salem at the time, and she said the smoke made it look like night-time.

Starting in the 1950's, there was a massive effort at reforestation, and that finished in the 1970's because they had reforested it all. The area is now known as the "Tillamook State Forest" and they've started logging in it again.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 02:49 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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