Remember Tupperware?

Remember Tupperware?  

Tupperware never vanished, it just keeps reinventing itself. I’d forgotten about it until a trip to the farmers’ market near my apartment. There was a booth selling Tupperware and I stopped to check it out.  

Years ago, I was invited to a different kind of Tupperware party and came home with an Ikea-sized bag of products, most of which were given away or donated. One of the few pieces I kept is a Tupperware container with a corrugated bottom that’s used to keep berries and fruit fresh. It’s in constant use, works beautifully and keeps blueberries looking great for at least a week, if not longer. When I have other berries, I just layer them in the container—or used to; yesterday I added 2 smaller containers to house the strawberries and cherries that are just coming to market here.  

Then I spotted 3 white domed containers and asked what they were for. “Cheese.” It’s their CheeSmart system and if it works, I’m going to be their best customer. It’s supposed to keep your cheese fresh, without wrapping it and keep your refrigerator from being overwhelmed by a fragrant fromage. My warped mind immediately wondered about its effectiveness on stinky cheeses. When I asked Jim, he said it was great on blue cheeses and mentioned the Rogue River Blue, so I knew he knew his cheeses.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s worth hunting down. It was voted the world’s best cheese a couple of years ago, and it’s well deserved.  

The cheese containers come in small, medium, and large. Since I’ve been participating in a bunch of webinars sponsored by Culture Cheese Magazine, cheeses are overtaking my fridge. There are easily 20  currently in residence, so the large one would have been a no-brainer, except that it’s very large and will take up a lot of space in kitchen or fridge. I opted for medium, figuring I could always go back and get (or order) more. It fit 2 nice wedges of Compte, another wedge of Parmesan and a Grana Padano. These were chosen because they’d all been opened and tasted.    

We left town for 3 weeks and when we came back it was a month after I’d put the cheeses in the Tupperware. All of them look, smell and taste as good as the day I put them in. Once I finish with these, I’m going to go search out a real stinky cheese and give it a shot, but I think the days of “we’d better finish this cheese because it’s stinking up the fridge” are over.