I've never considered myself a picky eater, but there are a few things I don't eat. Among these: Turnips (vile, vile vegetables!), fish (except for canned tuna, which really does not count) and cottage cheese.

I do try. Recently, I removed baked beans from my veto list and just put it on my "eh, not my favorite" list. Or, say, if I am taken to the Striped Bass and there is nothing on the menu but fish (OK, so I just looked at their current menu and see they've added, like most seafood restaurants, a few meat items, but at the time I went, there was not a single non-seafood item on the menu) I will order something mild like halibut and smile and pretend that I like it. Because that's what you do when someone else has offered to take you out to dinner and only informed you of their restaurant selection as you are headed to the place. (Well, maybe it's not what you do, but if an extended family member you don't see so often is offering to take you, and you are but a poor college student who has never been to a restaurant that only offers entrees over $30, and, perhaps most importantly, if you are me, you feel too silly to explain you have weird feelings about fish. So you eat.)

Last year, I was foolish enough to try buying one of those cottage cheese and fruit combos at the deli, thinking that maybe enough time had elapsed for me to get over my childish fear of it. It hadn't. Even doused in sugary fruit syrup, cottage cheese has a texture that I can only describe as deeply disturbing. Curds? Aren't those what happen to cheese that has gone bad? I love cheeses -- even pungent ones that Fresh Direct describes as "not for the faint of heart" -- but cottage cheese just seems wrong.

Or so I thought.

Then one night, Jesse made me pasta. With cottage cheese. And though the combination deeply disturbed me, once I took a bite, I found that cottage cheese can be perfectly reasonable. As long as it is melted, those gross, disturbing curds are not really noticeable, and the result is a very mild cheese that can sort of substitute for any number of creamier, more-bad-for-you cheeses. In my the Mexican lasagna/casserole thingy I sometimes make, it sort of tastes like sour cream. Melted with pasta, it makes a decent mac n' cheese. And the other night, when I was in the midst of making my french bread pizza and realized that someone had eaten all the sliced cheese in the fridge, I found it actually tasted OK when melted on top. (It still tastes nasty when it's cold, though.)