Oh man, it started out as such a good idea and ended up being such a goat-cheesy no-no. I made my first quiche this morning. Consulting Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (my favorite cooking "reference" and not "recipe book", this is relevant, just wait), I pulled out everything in my refrigerator that Mark Bittman told me would likely go well together in a quiche and got to it: steaming broccoli florets, "gently warming" milk on the stove-top, adding dried marjoram to my beaten and room-temperature eggs, chopping up a couple rounds of herbed goat cheese that had been hiding in the back of the fridge, bla bla bla. I was so proud of myself. And the quiche turned out looking pretty good, have a see for yourself down below:
Pulling it out of the oven, it smelled good, too. Well, at first. And then, just as I put my nose to its surface to better savor the aroma, I was immediately overcome by the most horrendously vivid olfactory memory:
I loathe foods cooked with goat cheese. Like, the smell/taste/texture of cooked goat cheese kind of makes me gag. Fresh goat cheese -- in a salad, on a cracker, by itself, whatever -- is fine and great and I love it. But all warmed up and cooked with other things and I just think it's really, really gross.
The problem is, just like this morning, I forget this all the time. I have made the mistake of cooking with goat cheese -- of finding a recipe and being honestly, earnestly, excited about cooking with goat cheese -- more than once. It probably happens every 12-18 months.* Just enough time goes by for me to completely forget about how revolting I find cooked goat cheese, and I don't remember how awful it is until I've used up all the ingredients and the food's been cooked. 6 local, free-range eggs; half a bag of organic broccoli florets; and the last of the also organic milk gone. Not to mention perfectly good goat cheese I would have enjoyed fresh and cold and un-cooked.
Part of the horror is that I won't let it go to waste. I'll hate it -- and Jason, too, by the way, will hate it -- but we'll eat it all in the end. We'll smother it in hot sauce and hold our noses and agonize and torture ourselves, but I'll make sure we don't throw any of it away.**
Looks like we have just enough for two more servings each.
In better news, I'm taking the rest of the afternoon to enjoy a couple new books I just bought. WHY NOT: Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears was on sale, as was Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Some texts that you refer to again and again really are worth just investing in. The Halberstam I've had checked out and repeatedly renewed from the library for YEARS. I'm sure there must be some person part of the campus community who would like to stumble across it at the library again. The Asma I've been reading online through Amazon.com's "Look Inside!" (don't judge me) for quite some time as well. I'm looking forward to having them both to enjoy and reference at leisure, without feeling guilty. The final book is the latest Oxford edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, collected with "Other Tales", which I purchased in order to read a collected short story in particular: "Olalla" (1885). The story was recommended by Carlos, and I aim to read it, contemplate it, and write on it soon. More on that to come.
* Now that I think of it, the last instance was the "Summer Squash with Baked Eggs" fracas of summer '11.
** Jason says, by the way, that he would have remembered. Not very helpful unless he's cooking, though.
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