From today's TIMES and NEWS-STAR
As
a concession to age, about five days out of seven for the past 10 years I’ve
eaten, for breakfast, cottage cheese and yogurt mixed up together.
It’s
starting to get on my nerves. Not happening for me.
It
is not cottage cheese’s fault and it is not yogurt’s fault, though they are
each be easy targets. Cottage cheese is good for you but it couldn’t run out of
sight in a day and a half. So much for it being “healthy.”
Cottage
cheese is supposed to be just about the most perfect man-made (no offense to
cows) food there is. A fistful of it is packed full of protein. It is low in
fat and has carbs, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron ore and tin, and a
four-ounce serving contains more than 12 percent the daily recommended helping
of cottage.
When
I am eating it I try not to think of the word “curd.” Curd does not sound good
but, well, there is no getting around that those are the little things half
floating around in the other stuff, which is, I suppose, curd runoff.
It
is not an especially ugly food – it is lumpy and white, like good homemade
mashed potatoes – but it will win no beauty contest for you either.
Never
until I started eating cottage cheese and yogurt together had I eaten cottage
cheese alone. It doesn’t taste like anything really, but if you had to say it
DID taste like something, you would think of something bad.
That
is just my opinion.
But
mix cottage cheese and yogurt together – say a vanilla or strawberry yogurt,
whatever you prefer – and bingo!, you have a healthy combo that does not taste
bad at all. Drop some blueberries or bananas and/or granola in there and you’ve
got a most decent leadoff hitter.
Good,
and good for you.
There
are only two drawbacks.
One,
after a while, curds and yogurt lose that sensual BAM!, you know, the one they never
really had in the first place. After a decade, you have an excuse for waking
each morning and crying over spoiled (spoilt?) milk.
The
second drawback: cottage cheese and yogurt is no bacon and eggs. And bacon and
eggs is the flagship of the breakfast armada.
You’ve
got your French toast. Your waffle. Even your morning pork chop or sausage,
patty or link. Outstanding all.
But
if the go-to breakfast foods were lined up and we’re choosing team captains,
bacon and eggs would be my first selection. Cottage cheese is the kid who does
not get picked.
The
multi-talented egg needs no introduction, and just smelling a home where bacon
fries makes you feel like you can make it one more day, no matter how tough the
sledding.
Bacon
is to meats what brown sugar is to sweets: it just makes everything better.
Bacon
makes people smile. Bacon beats cottage cheese in a footrace 10 times out of
10. I wish my name were Sir Teddy Bacon.
My
second draft pick: biscuit. The chef is key, but even a buttered canned biscuit
will at least look at you in the eye.
Third
draft pick: grits. But only if someone who knows how to make them are in
charge. Bad grits might as well be cottage cheese.
Now
you can come in with all your fillers, your pastries, Stuff With Syrup On It,
fruit and hash browns. (I love hash browns.)
Chocolate
milk. Orange juice. Coffee. Eat all that and your day is made and you haven’t
even left the house yet.
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