Remoted - Hybrid” – Day 573 (Sunday)

The mild sniffles continued today, along with a heavy cloud of “just can’t.” I wasn’t sick, but also not fully well. It is best described as BLAH. Winston and I slept a little late. That was followed by coffee on the couch with whatever mind-numbing show I had started on Netflix and then an entire day of feeling just blah. There was a nap. 

The supreme accomplishment of the day was the seeking of comfort in a baking dish in the form of baked macaroni and cheese, which also led to the opening of a new Nancy Drew mystery. Earlier mysteries this week include seven days of “why do I smell cigarette smoke when there is none?” in the return of last fall’s multi-week olfactory hallucination.

Baked mac and cheese.

Cheese was rounded up. There was a bit of a block of sharp cheddar, sliced American, and grated Parmesan in the deli drawer and two opened bags of Mozzarella in the freezer. It was on. The butter, flour, and milk sauce was mixed and brought to boil. The sliced cheese was diced into tiny squares, the block cheese was grated, and it was all added to the boiling milk mixture and stirred. It seemed all melty and creamy and stretchy from the Mozzarella. It was poured into the cooked macaroni in the baking dish, topped with parmesan and paprika, and baked.

After cooling to a temperature slightly less than that of molten lava, lunch was served. It was delicious and creamy except for the appearance of mysterious tiny squares of the hand cut Aldi American cheese. This is the same cheese that didn’t melt in the grilled cheese sandwich the other day. What is the melting temperature of the Aldi sliced American cheese? Clearly, it’s not the 212-degree boiling temperature of the milk to which it was added, nor the 350-degree oven temperature in which it baked for 40 minutes. Is the stuff even actually a food product? Heck, I’ve accidentally melted plastic cooking utensils in the few seconds it takes to drain noodles.

Now that the case of the mystery cheese is opened with two verified non-melting events, it seems there are two choices. The first is easy, and it is to just avoid the mysterious non-melting Aldi American cheese slices. The second is potentially more challenging and fun, and it is to buy more of the stuff and continue using it in recipes to determine at what point it actually melts.