I have long known that the best way to defeat temptation is to not place oneself in tempting situations, so we can assume I was hoping to be lead astray when I purposed to go to Whole Foods. The excuse was yogurt cultures, because I had killed mine. Again. And then I wanted buttermilk cultures, so I could try my hand at eradicating propagating that as well. And since they were both cheaper than I expected I wandered the tempting aisles of wondrous, semi-exotic sounding foods, looking for a little something to splurge on.
Only, readers, I found nothing.

Self-control exercised, I was just about to leave without anything extraneous when I strolled past the cheese counter. Cheese, of course, is too expensive for a mere whim. If you’re sharing with someone then yes, but by yourself . . . not so much. Yet, recently I had tried to tell someone about a very special kind of cheese with a name so impossible I had never bothered to learn it. Idly I looked for it, and then intently, and then insistently. Until finally I asked the nice cheese jerker if they had any “brown cheese that tasted somewhat like peanut butter.” And lo and behold they did. And so I did.

All in all a successful day: I have my first attempt at buttermilk on the counter, almost two quarts of yogurt in the incubator, and a cube of delightfully different cheese to nibble on. Perfection is an oddity.