I have found a new meaning to life — cheese making.
After spending the past several weeks watching political Kabuki kooks find ways to be silly and not govern, I needed some relief.
After a couple of sleepless nights, my own personal, political Lorax popped out of a tree stump in my bedroom looking all grumpy and rumpled.
“The secret to getting elected is finding friends to pound signs into the ground … then comes governing,” he said. “All those weird rules about being open and transparent. Seriously, it makes my tummy hurt.”
Then the Lorax repeated some line from the ‘60s — make cheese, not words … or something like that. He was chewing Cocoa Puffs for his tummy ache, and I couldn’t quite understand him.
I rolled out of bed and checked out some cheese-making websites. I discovered a whole world of cheese making.
I remember my grandmother used to make cheese and butter. I can still see a white, cheesecloth bag hanging on the porch with whey dripping out from it.
My grandmother always made the best-tasting meals for me.
One of my favorites was grandma’s wild blackberry pie, right out of the oven with her homemade vanilla ice cream on top. Of course, her crusts were perfect, and made with buttermilk, butter and lard.
One reason is grandma’s pies were perfect was she had real buttermilk, made from our cows on the farm.
And that leads me back to the point of this column and the meaning of my silly life.
While researching cheese making I came across the recipe for making my own buttermilk. When I read it I got all warm and fuzzy and had an out-of-body experience.
All I recall from the recipe is to get some raw milk, four or five gallons, I think, set it on the counter until something gets lumpy and glumpy, like floating balls of … never mind.
Now that sounds like real food. The chefs on food TV always talk about multiple textures, and this is milk with variable textures and some chew to it. One cannot ask for more out of life than that.
I will now be able to magically create buttermilk, cheese and many globs of glump that reveal the secrets of the universe and solve annoying grammar questions that God hid from mankind after Adam ended a sentence with a preposition.
Today I am feeling much better about the governing glad hands who are wrestling with these weird rules.
There is a solution, floating somewhere … on top of old buttermilk.