CHEESE MAN: the melting of a star-bellied hippie cheese-bot

VEGANS BEWARE!!!!!!

LACTOSE INTOLERANT BEWARE!!!!!!

much talk of dairy to follow

This past Saturday the Gastronauts had a CHEESE MAN/fonDUDE celebration where everyone ate at least ten times the recommended daily serving of dairy products. And boy oh boy, did we all feel it the next day.

Why a CHEESE MAN/fonDUDE celebration? Well, July 29 is Cheese Sacrifice Purchase Day. And how do we know that? The Nibble. And why even to think of food holidays? A couple weeks back, New Orleans Menu Daily (by Tom Fitzmorris) had this:

Food Almanac For July 19
It is reported widely on the Internet that today is National Daiquiri Day. The daiquiri has evolved from a good, slightly sour drink (rum and lime juice, shaken with ice and something sweet) to a frozen slush for adults, flavored with almost anything you can think of. Drive-through daiquiri stands have become a commonplace, against all conceivable logic. The answer to the question, "Where's the best daiquiri in town?" is "False."

The daiquiri is named for a spot on the southern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where the drink is said to have been concocted around 1905, after the American invasion of the island.

And of course, I had to celebrate July 19 with a daiquiri from the pink place on Elysian Fields and St. Claude next to Gene's Po Boy.

I sent a list of the other July food holidays to the rest of the Gastronauts and Liz responded with "what the fuck is cheese sacrifice purchase day?!" We did some research and found this:

Despite the day being a day of purchasing cheese and sacrificing some to a mouse trap in order to have a mouse-free home, we made the day our own. We focused more on the sacrifice part instead of the purchase part and imagined Burning Man but with cheese, thus Cheese Man. And then Jennifer suggested melting him in fondue, thus fonDUDE.

In preparations of the celebration I found a foundue pot and fondue skewers at some thrift stores. The pot was a lovely 70s green. Oh man, the 70s had some great color combinations - green and orange and white (like the wallpaper in my parents' kitchen).

Before we sacrificed Cheese Man, we fondued (not fonDUDE) some gourmet cheese with some red wine. That purple stuff on the piece of bread is the melted cheese mixed with the wine. We probably should have used white wine. Oh well. We did have some white wine but it was mixed in a white wine sangria, a sangria blanco.

Cheese man was made of the finest cheeses available - Velveeta, Easy Cheese, and string cheese. I started with Velveeta for the body and head. Next, string cheese was used for the limbs. Part of a Triscuit was the neck. The string cheese limbs didn't stay very well in the Velveeta so I used some angel hair pasta to hold him together. I gave him an Easy Cheese face and star on his stomach and some string cheese for hair.

Here are some pics of the assembly of Cheese Man. Actually, it turned out to be a star-bellied hippie cheese-bot.



Jen Leslie made a Velveeta cat and I also made a bread chair for him.

Finally we put him in the fondu(d)e pot for the start of the evening's sacrificial activities.

We added some salsa and add he became a wonderful queso dip. Mmmmmm...cheesey.

Liz made a pie for desert. I put some cheese on it, some Easy Cheese. Hey, why not? Travis Bickle does it. Maybe not Easy Cheese though.

            "I had black coffee and apple pie
            with a slice of melted yellow
            cheese." - Travis from Taxi Driver

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure you were thinking it - we did cut a lot of cheese. I even found at a thrift store Fart: The Game. We didn't actually play the game, but we did make armpit farts. (At least some of us did. Some of us couldn't quite master the technique. See Ben trying to help Gulu with the underarm flatulence.)

The evening ended at Storyville for a Defend New Orleans party. There was some left over Easy Cheese which became graffiti.

where to begin?

Maybe I should first retrace the beginnings of baking (and drinking) night at the Purple Palace.

Back in April on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter), after an afternoon of thrifting on the Westbank Jen Leslie, Li, and I decided to break in my then unused new Kitchen Aid mixer. We made a cake to take to the Circle Bar for the final show of local band Brain Rex. Large vodka tonics were consumed during the baking process.



The cake was chocolate with strawberries and chocolate icing. It was a little dense but I think it was finished off by the end of the night at the Circle Bar.



More drinks were consumed at the Circle Bar including PBR, Jager, tequilla, and who knows what else. Ratzinger closed out the evening (quite blurry at this point) at the Circle. And afterwards, I believe that we had a dance party in my living room for a while.

Baking and booze - what a combo.

So that was the birth of the baking adventure. Next came Red Velvet night about which you can read in the June Oh Seven archives. And that brings us to Cupcakes night, July 13.

The evening was to consist of baking cupcakes in celebration of Friday the Thirteenth and Bastille Day. Both sweet and savory cupcakes were to be made. Before folks arrived, I started on cheese-jalapeno cornbread muffins made from Jiffy mix. Ok, they are not technically cupcakes but we needed something to eat before we took the dive into a sea of sugar. I also started on a tomato soup cupcake recipe that I found on a blog called Vanilla Garlic. I decided to add fresh basil to the recipe of what I thought would be savory cupcakes. The tomato soup cupcakes were tasty but turned out more sweet than savory. They tasted like something that would be served as a dessert at Thanksgiving. My third and final batch was a peanut butter batter that was mixed with Jennifer's chocolate batter to make dark and tan cupcakes. Unity!




With the oven going and 12 people, the kitchen got pretty hot. So we went through several bottles of wine, quite a bit of rum, and a special surprise of a gallon of chocolate daiquiri from Daiquiri Place Cafe on St. Charles.




Of the many many photos taken that night, there were only a few pictures of the cupcakes. And of all the photos that I took, none had flash so they are blurry or, as I like to think, arty.

So, did I mention the daiquiris already? And if you didn't know, Friday is Daiquiri Day or more succinct, Daiquiri Friday. The gallon of chocolate daiquiri was the tipping point of the evening. After the gallon of frozen goodness arrived, soon came painting and dancing and shirt off o'clock.




Apparently folks were still hanging out on the porch talking and smoking cigarettes until 5 a.m. or so. By that point I had "fallen asleep" on a couch as did some other folk.



Here are the remains of the wine and rum that was consumed.



And daylight pics of the painting party.



Did I even mention that we had TWO Kitchen Aid mixers whipping up cupcakes?!!!!! And at some point Saint was wearing a pet t-shirt.