I am super excited guys! You want to know why? Well, I’ll tell you anyways.

I am so excited because Cheddar cheese has come to Chile!

As most of you know, there are certain things that just aren’t available where I live and cheddar cheese has been on the top of my “miss list” since my family and I moved here. It’s not that you can’t find any in the entire country. We have seen it at the larger grocery stores here but it’s outrageously priced. Because they have to import it, usually from Wisconsin, it’s always expensive and the brands are the ones that we wouldn’t even have bought if we still lived in The States and they were on sale.

We’ve also seen cheeses advertised as being cheddar but have always been disappointed when it turned out to be like heavily processed American cheese instead. Now one of the local dairy companies are producing it here and it’s really cheddar. It’s more of a yellow color than the orange that is typical in Cheddar but did you know that Cheddar isn’t really orange? It’s been dyed for generations using a seed called annatto.

It started when people realized that the richer the color the better the flavor and cheddar was becoming popular. Cheese makers raised the price of their cheddar and started adding color to it in order to sell more and it has evolved into a bright orange cheese.

Sorry for the history lesson, I just find food history very interesting. So this recipe is the first thing I have made here with cheddar and it made me so happy to put it in and watch it melt into my sauce. Oh, and the flavor, the flavor, oh my goodness! How have we survived without cheddar?

I’ve made gnocchi from scratch before but this time I used store-bought that my mom found at our local market. I usually like to do things all the way but I was kind of secretly happy that this was such an easy meal to make with the pre-made.

Does that make me a cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater? I know, could I be any more corny? Well, actually, I probably could but I won’t put you through that. Besides, you don’t have time to sit there and read my attemps to be funny.  You’ve got some cheddar cheese to grate because this is definitely a recipe worth trying!