I have a confession. I have trouble throwing food away. I blame my mother. When I was a kid my mother used to say, “It’s starting to go bad. You have to eat it.”

So I’d eat it.

It’s not like we were poor. My father is a pediatric cardiologist. We were “well-off” to borrow my mother’s colloquialism. So if a piece of fruit was bad or starting to go bad, you’d think we’d have the freedom to simply toss it.

My mother’s attitudes about food were most definitely passed down to me. Including this near paranoid fear I have of letting food go bad. Not just the food in my refrigerator, any food. Anywhere.

So all these years later I am living in an affluent part of the Hollywood Hills, oh heck, let’s just be honest, every part of the Hollywood Hills is affluent. I’m not saying we are rich. In fact things are quite difficult financially at the moment. But we have done well with what money we have made and are grateful for a beautiful home in a cool part of Hollywood.

I have probably mentioned casually that I like to take walks in the wild open spaces of the hills behind my house. I often forage for food in those hills. I have written about the mustard greens I collect every spring several times.

I want to talk burrata today. Burrata is a soft Italian cheese. It comes in balls similar to mozzarella, but it has a soft interior that oozes around inside its cheesy casing. It is one of the 7 wonders of my culinary world. It’s an Italian cheese and a specialty of Puglia, a smallish region in the heel of Italy's boot. It is as close to perfection as anything that exists.

Though oddly, it is rather new gastronomically speaking. Being an Italian product, you might assume it was part of some ancient cheese making tradition. But actually it is a modern invention. Lorenzo Bianchino Chieppa developed burrata in the 1920s; the source I read says that "[He] had the idea to create a kind of flask of cheese for preserving a mixture of cream and cheese in the center."

Despite it’s might, burrata is not commonly found outside of Puglia, even in Italy. Though it seems, as its popularity here in the United States grows, there has become greater demand for the cheese all over Italy.