Cheese, cheese, cheeeesssseeee – The ducks are quacking

Get up and get me some cheese, man!

It’s quite ironic, really. I’ve been working on this huge pre-move freezer stock-up plan and just days before deciding we are cutting out all dairy for a while, I had a hay day with cheese.

Like this much cheese:

Each of those is an 8 ounce block of cheese, so 30 blocks x 8 oz each / 16 oz in a pound = 16 pounds of cheese. Unfortunately, it’s cheapest for me to buy the small blocks than it is to go to another store for slightly larger blocks of cheese, so it kills me to go through that much packaging, but such is life.

Hole-y cheese!

So what did I do with all that cheese?  I shred it, of course!

Okay, so not always perfect…

I love my Kitchen Aid mixer and all the attachments make it a huge time saver. It took longer to open all the packages than it did to turn it into all beautifully shredded cheesy goodness.

Each kind of cheese produced a huge bowl of cheese.

And then I sorted it all into lovely little sandwich bags. Each one contains about 2 or 2 1/2 cups of cheese, or roughly just under a block of cheese.

Then came the gallon sized freezer bags….

And the Sharpies…

As for the ducks quacking, it’s from an inside joke that no one else will find hilarious, but years later, every so often, someone will still blurt out “The ducks are quacking. I must melt cheese!”  I’m repeating it for no other reason than to have it recorded somewhere so I don’t forget in 20 years. Here’s Mom’s explanation of how it started:

I was making mac and cheese. My pasta was boiling in one pan and in another one, I was melting cheese and putting in milk and such. One of them said, “Oh, cheese! Why are you melting cheese?” and I said “Because the ducks are quacking.” And that’s all there is to it. That’s it.

I don’t know which is more random….that she answered that way, or that the standard silly randomness carried over to being a common thing now. Hmm. Off to go melt cheese now…I can hear the ducks quacking….