Fondue for the February Blues

It started to overcome me in much the usual manner. First it was intermittent grumpiness, then cravings of rich foods (every night) which all culminated into the whining from the couch one Saturday afternoon, "I'm soooo bored...I don't want to do anything...I want to do something, but I don't know what...what can I dooooooooooo?" Jeff, at which point dragged me off to the gym and pointed to my favorite elliptical machine and insisted I get on it.

Of course it didn't help me feel better, we both knew it wouldn't, especially after Jeff said in an unassuming manner, "It's February." That was it. February. The longest month of the whole year. It sucks. It always has. Every year I make the rule that we must do SOMETHING in February and we always forget, then I'll hit the mid-February wall and we look at each other and wonder how we forgot once again. I have now named this condition I have, it's officially called "Mid-February F-ing Sucks Disorder" or MFFSD.

Aah, so you're curious now as to where the fondue comes into all of this, aren't you? So it was a connection that I would have never made in my mind. But independently one of my friends suggested that we go out for fondue at Artisanal (famous for fondue). We set the date and on a very very very cold February eve we met for our fondue.

Everyone knows fondue, right? Classic is the Emmenthal (at least as far as I know it is), all melted and gooey in a pot. We ordered two pots, a bottle of wine and all the fixin's (including the totally untraditional but most delicious kielbasa! yum! what polak wouldn't go for that!) Who doesn't love cheese, and even more so, melted cheese. So we indulged to our cheesy hearts content and topped the evening off with cheesecake. A perfectly cheese-filled affair. Wine, cheese, cheese, and cheesecake; good friends and conversation too. We even scraped down the pot at the end of the meal and ate those delicious golden cheese bits stuck to the bottom. Thank goodness we had a real-swissman with us to show us how to properly extract every bit of goodness from that pot. (is someone from Switzerland called a swissman? doesn't sound right to me, but I don't know how to search that one on google) I was absolutely perfectly satisfied after the meal. No February blues at all, in fact there was even a hint of happiness, or at the very least, contentness. Did the cheese have a magical potion freeing my February bruised soul? Perhaps....

So my theory goes something like this: it's cold and sad outside, cheese is hot and gooey inside, the bread even transforms from a sad hard nugget to a delightful warm soft morsel. The cheese can transform anything! Maybe all I'm saying is that February makes me a hard piece of bread, but I don't care, because Fondue Saves All! So I did a little research on this (well, just fondue research in Wikipedia) and it all started in Switzerland in the winter out of necessity, food was scarce in the winter so they had to melt cheese to make it edible (seems like you could just eat the cheese hard, but whatever). Perhaps I'm just getting back to my swiss roots (of which I have none), or maybe everyone has a little bit of swiss neutrality in them, clearly the swiss knew what was up when the winter time blues hit. This is how the swiss stay so peaceful all the time, they have fondue when the bitter winter sets in. Those smarty pants swiss.

I have yet to make my own fondue, mostly for lack of a fondue pot (and lack of a place to keep a fondue pot in our itsy bitsy kitchen), but all you out there with the means to do so - please, dig in to the fondue pot! Solve the MFFSD once and for all! Or head to Florida which is warm and sunny, that'd do it too.