I really resent the intrusion of pomegranate into everything. Artificial pomegranate is not a flavor I much like, and it seems like you can’t even buy underwear these days without it coming in pomegranate flavor and advertising its value as a superfood that will grant you immortality and the ability to see the future in goose poop. ("This splatter on the windshield tells me that you will meet a dark, mysterious stranger…")

However, there’s this Persian place in Chapel Hill that does a walnut-pomegranate chicken that’ll knock your socks off, so I wasn’t quite writing the whole fruit off, and then Kevin and I were watching FoodTV one night, and Alton Brown showed this amazing method of cleaning pomegranates that didn’t involve all the picking and red death. (You score the pomegranate in several places, put it in a bowl of warm water, and break it apart, then scrape the seeds out with your thumbs. They don’t burst, and the waxy bits float to the top of the bowl, so you can just skim them off and then drain off the water. Takes about five minutes to separate all the seeds that way, as opposed to picking them grimly out of the fruit with your nails for an hour.)

Then he dumped them over cottage cheese. This struck me as madness, but Alton Brown has written some damn fine cookbooks, so in the spirit of science, and with a vague craving for fruit, Kevin and I bought two pomegranates and gave it a whirl and oh my god, they are AWESOME on cottage cheese. It sounds insane, but it’s delicious. I see why Persephone wound up in the underworld. If they’d offered her cottage cheese, she’d never had returned, and Demeter would have sulked her way into a new Ice Age.

I have to go buy more cottage cheese.