March 6: Cheese balls

See that book up there? That's the Charlie Brown cookbook. I owned it when I was 10. The book showed you how to make your own bread, mayonnaise, and all sorts of sandwiches. It also had a recipe for cheese balls.

The cheese balls had four ingredients. One of them was cheese. You also needed flour, butter, and salt. Water too but that's not really an ingredient. It's only an ingredient if you have to pay money for it.

Here is the recipe for cheese balls.

1. Shred cheese.
2. Mix flour, water, butter, and salt together.
3. Add cheese.
4. Blend cheese in with dough.
5. Roll cheesy dough into balls.
6. Bake balls.

Voila. Cheese balls.

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This note title was given to me by my friend, butt_hair. His real name is not butt_hair. At least I don't think it is.

Today, butt_hair wrote a parody of my note-a-day thingee and I am cutting and pasting it below and I hope he doesn't sue me for copyright infringement (because he might be a lawyer.)

Here is the parody:

I used to know a girl who worked at the pizza place near my old apartment.  Whenever I picked up a pizza, she always looked sad.  One day I decided I would make her smile.  I brought my deck of cards into the pizza place and offered to do a magic trick for her.  She said she was too busy taking orders and it would have to wait.  I went in another time and it wasn't so busy.  She didn't ask about the magic trick.  I hope she smiles once in awhile.

The name of this note-a-day is Cheez Balls.  Cheez Balls go well with a Dr. Pepper.  They don't go well with milk.  I recommend cheez balls as a snack but you should always keep a paper towel handy.  Cheez ball dust gets everywhere.

I've always been curious what the Pope would have to say about cheez balls.  He must know what they are.  He would probably recommend wearing a robe with an orange pattern so he could freely wipe his fingers after eating them.

Prince has a song called Little Red Corvette that reminds me of a girl I knew in Alberta.  She loved the song but the only lyrics she knows are "Little Red Corvette" so she would just sing that part over and over.  I should have sung the lyrics with her.  We could have had some cheez balls.

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Butt_hair didn't come right out and say he wanted me to write a note about cheese balls. He just decided that his parody version of me, in note-a-day, should write about them. In doing so he has identified a number of tropes that keep popping up in my narcissistic navel-gazing writing.

I am a Prince fan. I do magic tricks at inopportune time. Pretty much everything reminds me of a girl I used to know. And I like Dr. Pepper.

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I googled cheese balls and the first hit was to a site that gave me a number of cheese ball recipes. Most of them look revolting. Take a look at this:



That is a tuna cheese ball. I think it is made by taking a tuna, killing it, putting it in a blender, adding cheese, and turning it on. (You probably don't have to kill the tuna before you put it in the blender but it's more humane that way.) After that's done, you add walnuts and little green things (probably parsley or the stuff you scrape off your shoes after spending six hours on a golf course) and then you have a cheese ball.

Yuck. Shteevie won't eat it.

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I also won't eat pizza if it has cheese on it. Cheeseless pizza is the way to go.

Pizza people are bad. Here is why: When you order a pizza with extra cheese, they charge you more money. When you order a pizza with no cheese, they don't give you a discount. This is wrong and it is greedy. Pizza people who don't give me discounts should adore me because I am giving them extra money.

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See, I thought cheese balls would be as readily available as Cheezies or Cheese Puffs or Cheetos. But they are not. Cheese balls do not fall into the category of unhealthy vaguely-cheesy flavoured snacks.

Swiss cheese is very bad and no one should ever eat it at all.

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Kraft singles are also very bad for you but they taste good in grilled cheese sandwiches. That is all they are good for. If you buy Kraft singles and you don't have bread and butter at home, you are bad.

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I do not understand when people cut cheese into cubes. Those corners can be sharp and hurt you.

We have ice cream scoops. Why not cheese scoops? Just stick the scoop into your block of cheese and pull.

Voila!

Cheese ball!