Plastic Cheese and Eggs

I asked someone to pick me up some cheese at Dollar Tree a while back because I only had a few dollars and I wanted to stretch it. I know that sometimes they have little blocks of cheese and that was all I needed because I was planning to shred it for a recipe.

Well, when they brought the items back, I didn't get two blocks of cheese; I got two packs of cheese food slices, the kind wrapped in cellophane. Not always top quality, but generally edible. Still, they weren't what I wanted because they don't melt all that well, these Dollar Tree slices. But, I thanked my friend and put them in the fridge.

Well, we're pretty much out of cheese except I had a very few slices of white American and these two packs of "cheese" food. I split the white American to make two grilled cheese sandwiches with the white cheese surrounding the yellow "cheese" between the two pieces of bread. They turned out decent, but I had a piece of cheese that broke off left over, so I tossed it into the pan by itself to melt it into a crispy something to go with the sandwiches.

Except.......

That damned piece of "cheese" refused to melt. Literally REFUSED to melt! It bounced and skipped and sizzled, looked like it was blistering, but when I put the spatula under it, it didn't stick at all to the pan. When I flipped it over, it was hardly even discolored. A few attempts to scorch in some spots, but no melting, no change in shape whatsoever. It looked and felt like plastic. Both sides were nice and hot, but no discernible change in structure like real cheese should have had (or other cheese "foods" I've had, for that matter). It stayed entirely intact as it had gone into the pan. And, the pan was hot because it had just cooked two sandwiches and the fire was still on.

So.....THAT was the "cheese" I had in my scrambled eggs, broken up into little pieces to simulate melted cheese within the eggs, and topped with salsa. I've had worse.