aging and cheese
A few thoughts on turning 37 + a link to my most recent published story, about the Mars Cheese Castle
Lately: Thanksgiving! Cooking took over my week, in the best possible way. I was solely in charge of roasting a turkey for the first time ever, and I did what I think was a decent job thanks to Alison Roman’s methods. My main takeaway: Fennel is the answer to all your turkey woes. (As a reminder, though: Fried turkey is the best turkey.) … Another highlight of the meal for me was the rolls. I used my usual sourdough roll recipe but added a bunch of dill to the dough, then parbaked them in the morning, finished baking right before dinner and slathered them in a garlic-herb butter. … And yesterday, I turned 37. More on that below …
As a kid, I saw no pitfalls to having a birthday that fell right after Thanksgiving — sometimes the day after, smashed up against my favorite holiday and all its requisite carbohydrates and gluttony. Mashed potatoes were my favorite food. Stuffing was a close second. And I always got to consult on the dessert selection, sometimes requesting a cake in addition to all the pies but more often asking for a candle stuck in a chocolate-glazed cheesecake. I got to celebrate with my extended family. I got a long weekend off school. There was no better day to be born than November 29.
As an adult, I tend to agree. Some years, I’m home in St. Louis and get to start the day sitting at my parents’ kitchen island, feeling 17. Others, I’m back to work after the long weekend, still getting over the post-holiday emotional hangover. Still full. There’s benefits to that, too: Instead of dressing up and spending too much money at a popular restaurant with a hard-to-get reservation, I usually find myself craving comfort. Last year, my husband I ordered Domino’s and opened a good bottle of wine. This year, last night, we went to dinner three blocks from our house, at a restaurant that looks like a dive bar but serves heaping bowls of the best mussels in D.C. We were home by 7:45. I woke up before dawn today and felt grateful to be in my late 30s.
The past year, 36, was a doozy. I quit my job and in doing so quit the industry in which I’d spent my entire career. I questioned my work ethic and second-guessed too many long-ago decisions. I lost the ability to drink more than two servings of alcohol in a day without going into total body malfunction. I lost the desire to ever drink more than two servings of alcohol in a day. I stopped highlighting my hair, stopped looking so hard for perfection with every glance in the mirror. I started waking up at 6 a.m., then 5:30. I set down my phone, deleted apps, unfollowed. I started taking vitamins and talking to a therapist. I stopped wearing heels and threw away the last of the Nike shorts I bought when I was 15.
I can’t remember an age when I changed more.
There were no milestones, and in the quiet sameness, I grew up. Looking back at 36, it feels sudden, this change. It feels as if I was one person from, say, 28 until now — habits entrenched, wants consistent — and then she bolted, carrying away an armful of unnecessary vanity. But I’m sure it was more gradual than that. I didn’t open my eyes one day and think: I like waking up in the dark, and I want to focus more on my mental and physical health and resilience, and I’m worried social media is rotting my brain. I’m still awkwardly (painfully, begrudgingly) getting to know this new me.
A bad habit of mine — or maybe it’s better categorized as an annoying tic — is that I search everywhere for meaning, particularly around age and birthdays. On Wednesday, the bar where I’d made a reservation for a birthday drink texted me: Sorry, we’re closed Friday. Your reservation has been canceled. Immediately, I cast it as a bad omen. Then rational thought prevailed: A bar messed up its Resy scheduling algorithm. That’s all. But here’s the thing about conjuring significance out of thin air: You often trade in nonsense, in math that doesn’t always add up.
When I turned 36, it felt like a tidy age — 18 years since I was 18, life cleaved in half between childhood and adulthood. Thirty-five was the midpoint of a decade, 34 the end of my early 30s, 33 a perfectly symmetrical number, 32 the age my mom was when I was born. (That last one felt like I real brain teaser: She’d birthed a human, signed up for a lifetime of responsibility, and I was newly single and recently unemployed. Two weeks later, I met my husband.)
Meaning is meaningless. For me, though, it’s often a comfort: Here’s what I’m staring down this year, and here’s how I’ll embrace it. Here’s how I’ll give it the middle finger. But when I looked at 37, no matter how hard I tried to parse, all I saw was a clunky prime number, indivisible, insignificant. And then I thought about all that change, the person I was 365 days ago and the person I am now, and I thought: Good. There’s so much I want to achieve this year, and here’s a blank canvas to paint on.
Enough about me.
If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a reward, and your reward is cheese. Or, more accurately, a story about cheese. For the Washington Post’s Travel section, I wrote about the Mars Cheese Castle, which is in fact a castle full of cheese, right smack on the side of I-94, just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border.
When I lived in Chicago, I stopped at Mars once or twice a year, whenever I passed it, picking up cheese and Spotted Cow. It felt like an exit toll: You can go back to the city, but I dare you not to spend $50 on dairy products and alcohol before you do.
So when I was planning a trip last month to visit family in Chicago, I pitched the Post on a story about Mars. That meant a trip up on a Thursday morning to meet the owners and stare down a few tons of cheese, and I learned a lot about the history of the place — and how a Disney-esque castle wound up on an inconspicuous service road on the outskirts of Kenosha. The story published last week. Here’s a short excerpt:
KENOSHA, Wis. — On a flat, straight stretch of Interstate 94 just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border, a tan, turreted castle rises up against the horizon. Across the highway, there’s a Culver’s and a Dairy Queen and a bustling BP gas station, and down the frontage road sits a towing company’s squat garage. It’s a speed-through section of flyover country, but every day, hundreds of cars stop and signal. Mars Cheese Castle beckons.
Mars is the Upper Midwest’s most medieval — and perhaps most eye-catching — roadside attraction: a landmark, a specialty grocery store and a bar, all in one. It’s a 46,000-square-foot cheese (and sausage, souvenir, sandwich and liquor) store, where a shopper can pick up 15-year aged cheddar, gummy worms, a case of local beer and a polyurethane foam cheese hat in a single, rapturous trip. There are stained-glass windows and two ornate thrones.
Keep reading here.