Is Cottage Cheese a Side Dish or a Condiment?

This might be a "things that make me go mmmmm instead of hmmmm"! I realized recently that I eat a lot of cottage cheese. In fact when I'm cooking at home I eat cottage cheese with more meals than not. This is a family trait that goes back to my grandmother. At any lunch, supper or dinner meal no matter whether we were having chicken, pork or beef, we ALWAYS had three items. 1.) Buttered bread or toast 2.) Iceberg lettuce with her home made dressing (oil, vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper) and 3.) Cottage cheese.

One family dinner when I was about 10, my cousin and I decided that we would start to mix and match some food items...why? Who knows, we were 10. My grandmother was also famous for her home made dumpling noodles...oh my, I'm craving them right now! Well my cousin and I decided that noodles over cottage cheese sounded interesting and so we tried it. It was really tasty and from then on I always had it together.

Now, years, well decades later, I realize how much that one food experiment changed how I eat a lot of things. I add cottage cheese to broccoli and cauliflower, I add it to tuna, I use it as a side for almost any pasta or potato item, I eat it on crackers and I almost always have it as a topping for my salmon. About the only thing I don't like it with is fruit...eeeew. I eat it alone too :)

I got to thinking that 20+ years ago salsa started to be considered a condiment. I wondered if cottage cheese was the same for me. I feel like it practically goes on, in and with anything! So is it just a side dish of sorts or could it be considered a new condiment? Then I got to thinking if it fits in the same category as other condiments...so what would be my criteria. Wlle one thing I considered is that it needs always be refrigerated. Does that in and of itself dis-qualify it as a condiment? Maybe. But...after mayo and salsa are opened they too need to be refrigerated. Hmmmm.

Well - not to be decided today, but I am interested to know what you think and more importantly what you do with cottage cheese that I haven't thought of yet??