Mullins Cheese

As you pull onto the sprawling Mullins Cheese property it is easy to be overwhelmed by all of the activity and shear magnitude of the compound.  Mullins is the largest family owned cheese factory in Wisconsin and they produce an astonishing 500,000 pounds of cheese every day. There are giant silos, huge warehouses and trucks delivering farm fresh milk from any one of 900 dairy farms for processing, but you will be looking to follow signs for the retail store.  Once inside you can sample a dozen or so different cheeses while looking at recipes and reading about their operation. Additionally, they have any number of cheese related goods for sale. Luckily, you can also order hot food such as deep fried cheese curds for the bargain price of $4.25.

There are no frills with the display of the curds as the heaping pile is served in a paper boat, evoking pleasant thoughts of summertime activities, with your choice of ranch or marinara.  The delicious white cheddar is covered in a lovely light brown batter that provides a grease free grip and allows the cheese to do the heavy lifting. They are uniform in shape but, much to my amusement, a few of the chunks were extra large and contained a seemingly impossible amount of cheese.

What was so unique about these curds was their extraordinary freshness. They somehow retain their squeakiness (caused by the presence of air bubbles trapped within the cheese) after being deep fried which I didn’t even realize was possible.  This might not be a sensation that suits everyone since it is in stark contrast to the customary gooeyness but I appreciated the novelty of it. Mullins is an impressive place and these are a must try for any cheese curd junkie. They look good and taste great, plus it will be very difficult to find a better value for a top tier product.

4.5 curds out of 5.0

 

 

Cheesy Fact of the Day:

This fact is brought to you by the literature they have on display at the Mullins Cheese Retail Store.  Swiss cheese is traditionally made in 200-pound wheels and this practice began in the Middle Ages when the Swiss government taxed cheese makers on the number of pieces of cheese they produced – not on the total weight.

 

 

What’s O-Curd to Me:

Imagine leaving work on a rainy evening and trying to plan the dash to your car; keys at the ready in one hand and the other shielding your head from the downpour, in order to minimize the waterlogging.  Once safely inside the vehicle you slosh your way across town to your friend’s place to hang out. Upon entry you immediately notice several buckets strategically positioned throughout the living room playing “catch the raindrop” and offer up your condolences to your friend about the leaky roof.

They say something like, “Yea, my floor kept getting wet every time it rained, so a couple of months ago I set these buckets up and it’s made a big difference”  Unable to fully process what was said, you’re stuck looking like the blinking guy meme as they continue, “The dog really likes having giant water dishes all around and sometimes I put a little Dawn in that one and let the pots and pans soak…really saves on the scrubbing later.”  Coming to grips with the situation you offer, “Brilliant, and if you ever need to interrogate anyone just strap ‘em down in one of the drop zones and they’ll tell ya everything you need to know.”

This is an example of your friend treating the symptom of their problem, wet floors, rather than tackling the root cause, holes in the roof.  If your friend did something like this you would clown them and send a Snapchat so your other friends could see how big of an idiot this one is.  But, in reality, we are all guilty of doing stuff like this way too frequently.

Everyone has stressors and demons that impact their lives with varying degrees of ferocity.  We are able to negotiate some of these obstacles without skipping a beat and others can be swatted away with a little more difficulty.  Humans are natural problem solvers, deftly managing hundreds of tiny conflicts every day, however in our haste to carry on with our busy schedules we sometimes put down metaphorical buckets in our living rooms rather than fixing our internal leaky roofs.  We treat the symptoms and not the disease.

When professional basketball scouts evaluate the defensive ability of a player they may find the individual’s performance to be unsatisfactory.  Contrary to popular belief, very few players can succeed in the NBA without being, at a minimum, adequate defenders. It is imperative to determine the root of an athlete’s deficiencies – essentially whether or not they can be improved through coaching – when projecting the future value of a prospect.  The scouts will diagnose the shortcomings and attribute them to one or more of the following simple designations: can’t, won’t or doesn’t know how. The first category might suggest the player has a physical limitation such as being undersize or has the lateral quickness of a park bench. The latter two hopefully can be mitigated by connecting with the player and coaxing effort out of them, in the case of “won’t”, or through drilling technique and teaching principles for those who don’t know how.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of scouts to alert us of potential areas of improvement or coaches to facilitate our personal growth.  If you are feeling dispirited or unsatisfied in some aspect of your life – a job, a relationship or something else – then you need to self-scout.  When we face challenges it is easy to use a Band-Aid fix and worry about finding a long term solution another day. Having a big bowl of ice cream or buying a new outfit might cheer you up but those positive feelings are fleeting and are unlikely to be a sustainable solution, that’s treating the symptom.  Instead think deeply about whether the dilemma is something you can’t tackle alone, a deeper issue that you won’t admit to yourself or something you don’t know how to deal with. It is critical to understand that you owe it to yourself to do some introspection and plan out a course of action for upgrading your sense of fulfillment.

It might seem overwhelming but the build-up to big decisions is often much worse than the act itself and you will likely be filled with relief, wishing you had done something sooner.  You wouldn’t treat your leaky roof by catching the rain in a bucket so why should you settle for ineffective solutions to life’s biggest problems? Don’t play defense against your own happiness, get to the core of the matter and have the courage to resolve it, because your well-being is the most important thing in the world.