Cheese Smuggling

Continuing the January theme of my new year resolutions, onto food. I have the honour of cooking my friends who are moving to Africa their last meal in this country tomorrow night, before they head off to Nairobi for two years on Saturday morning. [Something went wrong with that sentence there, but you get what I mean, right?]

So mrs househusbandnot and I were talking about what you miss eating when you live abroad, and what food to cook tomorrow. Having dismissed the new English Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall fox fritter or badger pie cuisine (we figured there will be ample opportunity for road/bush kill food in Kenya), we tried to think of a quintessentially English meal that would set our dear friends off on their travels. This got us both talking about when we have both lived abroad (Russia, Belgium, France, Italy) and what food we have missed most.

It's cheese in the end of the day. Good old bog standard cheddar from a supermarket. No other country seems to have figured this one out. The French make fuck off cheese (but not the sort you would stab between two bits of white bread with some Branston pickle). Russian cheese tastes like wood (actually it probably is wood). Belgians just fuck all food up (because they can't decide if they are French or Dutch or German in the kitchen [ or anywhere else]). And Italian cheese just doesn't taste of anything (presumably so that they can get back to having sex without the disruption of a quick tooth brush on the way to the bedroom).

So between now and tomorrow evening, I will have to thing up a few cheese-related recipes. In amongst all that, I will also be really really sad to see my friends going away. Having lived abroad myself, I absolutely refuse to go down the Why Are You Going route. I really respect them for going to take on a new challenge when they could quite easily sit back and maintain the status quo. And can't wait to see if I can smuggle some cheese through Kenyan customs when we go and see them some time in the next year or so.

Incidentally, was sent this article this morning by a regular hhn reader (and - he claims - contributor, but that's another story). I never knew they had computers in Germany, well apart from those blokes in Kraftwerk anyway.