I Smell a Rat

Friends, there is only so much organic oatmeal a girl can eat. Personally, I've eaten enough of the stuff that I could probably consume an entire pig-sty worth of bacon in one sitting and my cholesterol would still be enviably low.

But even with my special delicious add-ins --chopped dried tropical fruits, wheat germ, flax, turbinado sugar-- there comes a time when a girls soul (and by soul I mean stomach) yearns for something that doesn't look like something out of an all-Carmen Miranda production of Oliver Twist.

So you see, I NEEDED cheese. In fact, as I perused the fancy fromage section of my local prohibitively expensive market, I discovered that I needed SIX cheeses.

First I needed some Blue Stilton. Aside from haggis, Stilton was the only good food I had in England and I had been craving the stuff since setting foot back on American soil. Unfortunately I couldn't find just plain Blue Stilton, so I picked up a Huntsman (pictured above) which is like a layer cake of Blue Stilton and glorious Double Glouscester.

I also picked up a gorgeous pot of ewe's milk soft curd cheese from France, a sort of Spanish triple-crème Brie, a bit of a Pecorino Toscano, some Camembert/Gorgonzola and a gorgeous slice of cave-aged Roquefort, still covered in leaves.

The handsome checkout man from Istanbul rang them up, along with the French rolls and dried apricots to go with it, at $50.00. Yikes.

My plan, because I am above all a Girl with a Plan, was to set the cheeses up on a nice plate and eat off of them with whatever fresh fruit and bread I brought to lunch that day. There was no reason that plate shouldn't last me 10 days. So, feeling slightly better about my budget (I'm perfectly willing to spend $5 a day for a gorgeous lunch) I headed back to work, arranged my cheeses nicely, took a bit of each and wrapped the plate, slapped my initials on in big green letters and tossed it in the fridge to wait it out until lunchtime the next day.

However, when lunchtime the next day arrived, there was something amiss. Someone had unwrapped my plate, and …wait for it…cut out all the Double Glouscester from the Huntsman, leaving the Stilton sitting there like a debutante without a date.

Can you believe the nerve? I've had problems with people stealing my food in the past, but that was when I forgot to label it, so I could only get so mad. But THIS time not only did they know it didn't belong to them, they didn't even have the decency to appreciate what they were stealing. It would have been one thing to steal the $30/lb Roquefort or the unusual Spanish triple-crème but NO, they just went for the yellow cheese. They probably thought it was Velveeta.

So, today I typed out a small sign, mounted it on cardboard and taped it on top of the plastic wrapping:

Please Do Not Steal Any More of My Cheese
(I have licked all the pieces, anyway)