We may be rationing the cheese...

But, we're still using it as a dinner ingredient.

With the price of cheese 50% more than what we were paying last year (and sometimes that's even when it's on special!), and the fact that the common sized blocks are now released in 800gm instead of 1kg, we have cut out all uses except dinners. The kids used to eat it as grilled cheese on toast for breakfast about 3 times a week, we'd have it grated with our lunches several times a week and occasionally I'd do slices of cheese for the kids as a snack - but no more.

I used to buy 2kg's of cheese in my fortnightly shopping, now I buy my one 800gm block and make that last 2wks.

We're doing well, it's lasting and nobody is missing it (I did explain to Nathan why he couldn't have cheese on toast anymore and he was willing to forgo it and hasn't put in an order for it once). Not that the price of gluten bread or cereal is much cheaper in comparison by the time I've offset one food against the other...

This afternoon as I was pondering what to have for dinner as I was blog-surfing, I caught up on a few days reading at BeanSprouts and saw that Mel had made a lovely looking vegetarian meal a few days back - Roast Vegetables and Goats' Cheese pasta. We have had combinations of this type of dish many a time, but never together. So, since I had all the ingredients (except goats cheese, which was substituted with colby cheese and instead of pasta I used rice noodles) it made a delicious meal that the kids gobbled up. I enjoyed picking my fresh herbs from the garden for making up the tomato sauce (and as usual I add some silverbeet to my tomato sauce for the "green" factor for the kids). They're not fooled, but some slips in there somewhere.