If you know me at all, you know one of the main reasons I’m not skinny is because I LOVE CHEESE. So, needless to say, when Whole Foods Market announced this nationwide event for February 27, I was drooling:

Of course, as fate would have it, February 27, 2010 was the day we in Hawai‘i experienced Tsunami Warning Saturday. Both Whole Foods stores in the state closed. When they reopened, I called to see whether they planned on holding the parm-cracking at a later date, and they said “NO!” I was sad. Not devastated – come on, my life isn’t that awful – but sad.

Later this week, though, the Whole Foods Kahala Twitter diva posted that they would, indeed, be holding the parmigiano reggiano wheel-cracking – this Saturday! I was ecstatic.

Then I came down with a cold.

But fear not, the sore throat was over with by Friday night, and congestion alone wasn’t going to keep me away from the cheese!

Cheese master Chae gets ready for the big event.

Scoring one side of the 85-lb. wheel . . .

. . . then the other . . .

. . . then jamming that other thing into the middle.

The finished product!

Sure, it probably wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen in my life, but that was pretty darned cool, and I would’ve been sad if I had missed it. Because of my cold, I didn’t stick around for any of the related free demonstrations going on that morning, but I did take home some fairly fresh parmigiano reggiano to snack on.