Dear Folks, No doubt you're getting tired of the exciting adventures I've been having in cleaning out my freezer but because I can't seem to keep my mouth shut at this hour, here's another "exciting adventure." One thing I managed to claw out of the bottom of the freezer almost out of reach was an expensive brick of racklette cheese. Of course it's so old that I may consider putting it up for auction on E-Bay. Picture the year 1979 when I was the almost-guest of my Swiss friend Fred in Switzerland. He was determined to treat me to all of the typical delicacies of Switzerland; one of them being the traditional Racklette late-evening snack. Fred had told me what the basics of the snack were. What sounded best to me was that it had to do with melted racklette cheese toasted brown over or under a "thingy." We were joined by two of his Swiss cousins and as the four of us sat around the small table in front of a warm open fireplace in a most picturesque Swiss chalet restaurant, I was ready to dig in and so I did. The entire traditional snack consists of scraping off the melted cheese with a utensil of sorts, putting it on your plate, adding plain boiled small potatoes and topping it all off with small pickled onions. Well, I don't know about you but in the first place I found the taste of the racklette cheese difficult to swallow and the addition of the plain boiled potatoes didn't seem to cleanse my pallet much either. But when it seemed that I was obligated to top it all off with some pickled onions, that was about the last straw. I've never liked pickled onions and even now my mouth is still all in a pucker just thinking about them. Now how did I eventually end up with a brick of racklette cheese in my freezer? Well no doubt Fred had bought it several years later after he returned home from Switzerland and when he went back to visit the country again a couple of years later, I ended up with it to "preserve" it. But there was another much smaller expensive block of Swiss cheese that I fished out of the bottom of the freezer that I at least looked fondly at and with a healthy appetite. It was a block of Appenzeller cheese. I vaguely recall that Fred had bought that to use in a Swiss Fondue but somewhere along the line he left me without Emmentaler and Gruyere cheese to go along with it. The combination of the three Swiss cheeses in a fondue was to die for. Will I ever taste test the Appenzeller cheese after at least 20 years? Who knows but at least it's still in my freezer. vee