Supermarket checkout lanes ruined cottage cheese for me. Back in the seventies, cottage cheese diets were the rage, the little pamphlets shoved into counters at the check out line extolling the latest cottage cheese-quick weight loss diet.
I couldn’t resist purchasing them all. Low in fat, and high in protein and calcium, incorporating this loosely packed curdled cheese into one’s diet is certainly a healthy life-style choice.
But back then (anxious to shed pubescent pounds) I’d eat cottage cheese with everything and produced some regrettable concoctions. For instance, I’d buy a container of fat-free cottage cheese and mix it with saccharine and cinnamon – that was “dessert”. Understandably, I grew to detest cottage cheese and would assuage my offended palate with gooey chocolate brownies topped with ice cream.
At an early age, I determined fad dieting was no fun at all, and produced the opposite results intended. In retrospect, cottage cheese dieting was a good life lesson for my health and overall well-being.
Today I need to dress up cottage cheese to love it; it’s bland to my palate. But spiced up and served with summer tomatoes, it begs a second helping.
