Ode to Cottage Cheese

Yummy yummy in my tummy! Do you love cottage cheese? Do you eat cottage cheese? Ever had cottage cheese? I’ll admit, I’ve never had cottage cheese until early last year when I had just begun my healthy journey. When I just started to buy it, I wasn’t sure what to do with it because it didn’t make sense to me in the cheese sense. I mean, I couldn’t put it in between two slices of bread and make a sandwich so…what am I to do with this curdly, salty, looking-like-spoilt-yoghurt-thing? I remember I bought it because of Instagram, of course, where I saw a post with a recipe on using cottage cheese as a salad dressing. I’m used to salad dressing being creamy, I wasn’t a fan of vinaigrette back then so I decided to give it a try.

I googled recipes to see what else I could do with cottage cheese and tried a variety of sweet and savoury recipes. Some of them were touch and go but the more I try, the more I find ones that are a go! Last night when I came home from the gym, I had another hit and decided it was time to sing my cottage cheese praises, especially after realizing I had had cottage cheese twice in one day! My current diet throughout a weekday looks something like this:

Green Smoothie –> Nuts and green tea —> Salad/Oatmeal/last night’s dinner for lunch —> mid afternoon snack which is usually yoghurt and berries, a sandwich or oatmeal (if I didn’t have it for lunch) then dinner.

I bought some canned pink salmon recently and decided I needed to have something healthier with it other than bread or crackers (ok I didn’t have any bread and still wanted my salmon.) So I sliced up some carrots and cucumber really thinly to use as crackers. This was a genius idea that I should have been incorporating since day one, switching out the amount of bread and processed carbs that I consume. So again yesterday I decided to utilize these veggie crackers and wanted to try a different topping. This time I also sliced some tomatoes to go with the leftover veggies I had in the fridge. I had a little bit of Solomon Gundy (you know I’m obsessed) in my fridge that I usually have with regular white cheese but again I was all out. This is usually when people get creative right? I thought, why not mix it in with some cottage cheese? Boom! Spicy, creamy crack! It was SO good, especially with the tomato. I. Was. In. Heaven. I’m definitely doing that again.

Seriously good. Up until this point, I had reserved cottage cheese as simply an addition in my smoothies or in my yoghurt and berry snacks for myself and the munchkin. The Solomon Gundy that I favour comes in a tiny 4oz jar so this is definitely a huge plus to me! Now I can stretch my gundy! So anyway, as I was saying, I read on Instagram that cottage cheese is also a great after-workout snack because of it’s high protein content. According to the IG post I saw:

Cottage Cheese is one of the top 5 foods for muscle recovery. 8oz of non-fat cottage cheese has 28 grams of protein. It is naturally a rich source of the muscle building amino acid Leucine, more than eggs or yogurt. It is recommended to consume 15-25 grams within the first few hours of a work out.