Feta cheese!

We can all agree that cheese is nature's perfect food (unless you are vegan, because then you eat soy cheese, which is not so perfect and maybe not even much of a food.) Think about how to describe what cheese tastes like to someone who has never had it. Can you think of any word other than 'cheesy'? If you can, shut up and let me make my point.

There are many kinds of delicious cheeses, most of them not only extremely expensive but also pretty awful for you. If you buy an expensive enough cheese, then they no longer list the nutritional information, which leads me to believe that rich people don't care what they weigh. Good for them. I probably wouldn't care about anything other than lying in a bathtub full of diamonds and calling people who were mean to me in the past and saying, "Guess what? I'm lying in a bathtub full of diamonds."

But I digress. Another nice thing about cheese is that it makes things that otherwise don't taste good, taste delicious! In fact, it makes them taste like... cheese! So today I will be reviewing a very handy and healthy cheese product with which to make bad things taste good.

Athenos Reduced Fat Feta Cheese

Mmmm, feta. How great thou art. Use it in pasta, potato salad, regular salad, chocolate cake, etc. I find that feta is a great addition to anything that doesn't taste good, actually. You know how they say a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down? It could just as easily be feta. And it would fit into the phrasing of the song, too.

I was a little hesitant about reduced fat feta cheese, as cheese crumbles tend to be made delicious by the amount of fat they contain. Think bleu cheese. But since the words 'reduced fat' mean more to me than 'sale' or 'Jeffrey Dean Morgan kissing booth', I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I tried it out on my usual salad of spinach, feta, and olive oil viniagrette and am happy to report that it is absolutely a good substitute for the real thing. I can taste just an ever so slight difference; it is maybe a little less tart than the regular fat kind. I must include the caveat that the salad dressing I use is quite overpowering and may account for some of my satisfaction. But other members of my family have also eaten the reduced fat feta and I have gotten no complaints.

The Athenos Reduced Fat Feta Cheese packs 90 calories for 1/4 cup serving, with 35 of those from fat (4g total fat, 2.5 saturated.) The regular kind also has 90 calories per serving, but 60 from fat (7g total fat, 4g saturated fat.) I actually don't generally care about calories from fat unless it's something astronomical like 76% of your daily fat needs- I'm usually more into total calories, period (though the low fat versions generally have fewer calories than regular, just not in this case.) But if you care about that kind of stuff, the reduced fat feta is the bomb.

That's all for today. Comment and tell me your favorite cheese!