If you’re like me, you love Grocery Outlet, a party in every store. I stand there, staring at the shelves, amazed at the new stuff I can find to experiment with. One of their best departments is cheese. The only drag is when I find one I love (chile pepper cheddar, spicy blue), only to find next visit it’s all gone; that everyone else must have loved it too.
The one cheese I can always find is one I personally am not crazy about. A little round of Brie, hard as a jack cheese, unlike the ripe ones I prefer. But the Dear Husband likes it, so I usually pick one up and put it out on the cheese platter the day lunch is fresh bread, cheese, and salad (with maybe an opened can of sardines, maybe some salami, maybe some smoked salmon, who knows?).
The Husband generally stops by the store and gets one of these rounds for his camping trips, too.
Last time he came home from a trip, he unpacked the Brie, untouched. Strangely, it stayed untouched through two or three lunches. I asked why. “I didn’t want to be the first person to cut into it!” (The Dear Husband is very polite that way. English.) The result was, by this time, the cheese had started to dry out, and I was even less likely to eat it than before. I hate waste, as you know. So I gave some thought to the problem of making an almost dried out Brie into something delicious rather than penitential.
We were having our dear friends Cindy and Drew over for a meal. A clam and sausage arroce. Garlic mayonnaise. Brownies. Cindy’s Earl Grey tea bread. I figured that was special enough for me to risk an appetizer failure.
What if I heated the cheese up? What if I heated it up with some jam on top? I had crackers. I had a jar of Cindy’s blueberry jam. I have a little cast iron skillet, just big enough to hold the cheese in comfort.
So this is what I did:
— Heated oven to 375 degrees.
— Nestled Brie in small skillet.
— Lavished blueberry jam on top of Brie.
— Baked for fifteen minutes.
— Put out next to crackers.
Spectacular success. Brie gone in fifteen minutes. People getting up from comfy chairs to have seconds and thirds. I wished I’d done two rounds. I would have if I’d had them.
So it’s yet another lesson: never waste something when there’s the possibility of an imaginative, and totally delicious, save.
Next time, I’ll buy two of them. And make sure I have some jam.