“Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese.” Robert Louis Stevenson

I would like to say I know this quote because I am so well read, but in fact I became aware of it because we now live in America’s Dairyland and this quote is printed in letters several feet high on the wall of our new grocery store.  I should also mention that they have an entire freezer section dedicated to bratwurst, and hold beer-tastings on a semi-regular basis.  From what I have heard about Packer’s fans, I envisioned them more as the beer-guzzling rather than beer-tasting types, but this could be the work of undeserving stereotypes being propagated by fans of other teams like the Chicago Bears.  However, I will say that there appears to be some truth to the cheese, beer and brat stereotype of Wisconsin.  Cheese curds and all of their squeaky variations (curds squeak when you eat them) have now become a part of our diet.  But to be honest, cheese curds are not that exciting, except perhaps when they are deep fried or added to poutine (one of the fattiest foods of all time and the subject of a future blog entry), and I am hoping that we will soon be able to try many of the locally made cheese varieties.  In the Maryland-Virginia-Pennsylvania area where I grew up, the only native option was “American cheese” which came in individually wrapped slices, and the finer points about it came out only in heated debates between people from Baltimore and Philadelphia about whether it should be white or yellow.  So we’re not expecting the south of France, though it would be lovely to discover some new stinky cheese with big hunks of mold in it.

When I asked Melissa if she would like to add anything to this blog entry, she replied “We love cheese!”  By “we” she is certainly talking about me and her, but I think she means Everett as well because she has become finely attuned to his dietary preferences.  He would often have food cravings while in utero, like chips and pickles and Goetta, and Melissa did her best to accommodate them.  One craving she resisted was soft cheese because of the risk of listeria.  But since none of those bacteria are passed through breast milk she is now free to eat just about anything, and the timing couldn’t have been better because all this talk about milk and cheese has really just been a stepping stone in preparation for…