"monterey jack" news and stories

OK, your guess is as good as mine.

I've been searching the interwebs, but I can't find anything that explains what this day means. I've found several sites that mention that it is indeed National Cheese Sacrifice Day, but none that go into detail as to what it is. When Wikipedia doesn't have something, you know it's odd. I guess we are left to speculate.

Does it mean that we buy some cheese and sacrfice it somehow, or does it mean we aren't allowed to eat cheese today, as a sacrifice?

Wikipedia does have a long page on cheese, so knock yourselves out. And here's out cheese category to browse.

Update: As a reader pointed out in the comments, it's actually Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day. I've changed the headline but not the URL.

So one of my duties this Christmas at my sister's house (I'm also making this) is to make a cheese and cracker platter that folks can munch on before and after the main meal. I've done them before, but they always turn out to be just very basic cheese and cracker snacks: a couple of different blocks of Kraft cheeses and a few different crackers. A very basic, low-cost type of thing, and it's OK.

But this year I want to do something different. I want to get a really good selection of nice cheeses and several different types of crackers to place around them. So I need your help! What kinds of cheeses and crackers would make a good selection for my family? Any tips or tricks you can give me to make it just a bit more than the usual "cheese and Ritz cracker" affair? Anything besides the cheese and crackers you'd put on the platter too? Fruit? Chocolate?

That pic on the right looks like a cool presentation.

The penne pasta is al dente and hanging out in a colander on the counter. When I was growing up, my mother whipped me with a wet noodle if ever I forgot to rinse cooked spaghetti under cold water. Only recently have I found out that this is actually a bad idea (thanks, Mario, though I'm not exactly sure why it's bad), but still, I feel a little weird about leaving my penne unrinsed.

Now begins the sauce part, but here is where I have learned lesson #648 about Holiday cooking. Never assume that the satellite kitchen in which you're going to cook the Holiday ham ("satellite" meaning not your home base) is going to have all the equipment you need.

But in the deep recesses of my mother's "tupperware cabinet," I found a Benriner, the Japanese version of a mandoline. I grated a block of medium cheddar and Monterey jack that had been shoved in the freezer for a half hour to make it easier to grate to make 5 cups of shredded cheese. On the Benriner, the cheese actually came out looking more like long, flat noodles.