You did what with the pampered chef zester..? Really?

One zest or two?

You know I've mentioned before that the pampered chef zester can leave me a little light-headed with excitment.  But you'll never guess what I did with it yesterday. No, honestly, you wont.

You see a friend came around with her two small grandchildren.  A spot of lunch was required before a feeding the ducks session.  So the little ones were attended to and I made a pizza for those of us over three, as per a cooking show; packet of pizza mix, chop an onion, handful of chopped olives, three tablespoons of tomato paste etc etc, blah blah.

Now. Cheese.  My natural instinct is to cover said pizza with a heavy duty layer of whatever cheese I have around, mainly because I like cheese far more than is sensible.  But, inspired by a cooking show by Clare that I watched a couple of nights before, I opted for feta. To crumble or not to crumble?  Because feta is at the best of times a delicate soul.  And a tad damp. It is, after all, a brined curd-style cheese and since 2005 the EU has insisted it must be from Greece to be 'feta' and made from sheeps milk - or at least 70% sheep and 30% goat.

 But blobs of non-melting feta scattered willy nilly didn't sound like a plan.  So it was at this point that a blinding flash of creativity overtook me.  I'll grate it.

Now, grating cheese is hardly a new concept and not something that will prompt letters to The Times, but feta is a bit, as stated earlier, damp.  You can see the problem can't you?  Show feta to a box grater and it will collapse in fear all around at the coarse setting or systematically clog the small gratey bits on the other side with a pulp.

Eyes were on me, with raised eyebrows. This was a stunt too far and humiliation just seconds away.

I turned to the 'p chef' zester.  With a medium sliced piece of feta in my hand and a gentle touch, white slithers like coconut drifted down onto the pizza topping. There were the occaisonal crumbs granted, but basically I zested feta, enough for a pizza lunch and to prove yet again that my zesting friend has a multitude of skills up it's sleeves.

The only problem is, I'm now wandering around the house looking for other new things to zest. Grapes might be pushing it. Or might it..?