Sex, death and cheese? This is a film I can get behind.

Update: contest closed! The judges are conferring

Competition is heating up for our Grilled Cheese Photo Contest. Folks are sending in photos of themselves with their master- or monster-piece grillies, competing to the grand prize: a stylish Romano grater, fabulous cheese curler, and innovative partyclette from Boska USA:

Five runners up will also receive Boska's no-fuss, sandwich-ready toastabags, which can make grilled-cheese in your pop-up toaster for near-instant grilly satisfaction:

Over at the coupon-crazy FrugalDad.com, Jason, the eponymous dad, did a bit of research and came out with this helpful infographic on the delicious pairings and salubrious effects of beer.

Consumed in moderation, and with the force-multiplier of a good piece of cheese, beer can be quite the frugal beverage, turning a modest investment of money and a small amount of preparation into an outsize portion of happiness and health.

This joins FrugalDad's many other helpful and money-saving hints, ranging from the basics of beef selection to the importance of preventative dental care.

Okay, holy smokes. Apropos of lambs, here's something you don't see every day: a pair of baby lambs paling around with a whistling tupperware nest of little goslings.

The lambs are pets of Alex Komechak, whose website Camels and Friends has dozens of sweet videos of her menagerie. (You may have seen her racing her pet camel Nessie on the Today Show.)

In the wake of the California Artisan Cheese Festival, publisher Stephanie Skinner and I took a trip out to visit Joel Weirauch at his eponymous Weirauch Farm in the hills of Sonoma County, California.

Joel's holding Irene, who was bottle fed at home for the first month—her mother had udder problems, so Irene got very comfortable around people. She's one of the older lambs: some of the wee ones in the barn were only a few days old, but they all have names that start with "I"; Irene, Iris, Ivy, etc. Nex year, every lamb will have a "J" name, and so on.

Joel and his wife Carleen are making humane, organic, farmstead sheep cheese in an old-fashioned, new-fangled way: bootstrapping their way into the business, renting land and using recycled schoolhouse trailers for aging caves. Never throw anything out, eh?

April is National Grilled Cheese Month, and in honor of the great grillie, culture is teaming up with Boska, and asking you to show us your sammich!

Entries are pouring in. Click to see our proud grilled-cheese eaters!

Everyone has one perfect way to make a grilled cheese... and we want to see it! Send us a picture of yourself brandishing your favorite grilly and you could win fabulous Dutch-design cheese tools from Boska Holland.

Is it a simple white-bread & American-slice traditional? Is it made with Grandma's secret-recipe home-baked bread? Tomatoes, bacon or Worcestershire sauce? Dipped in soup or eaten straight up?

Manhattan local news site DNAinfo spotted this goat dining with a couple at Famous Famiglia's pizza parlor.

Correspondent Leslie Albrecht gathered customer's reactions:

“Get out of here. That’s insane,” said Ed Sullivan, 37, a construction worker from Long Island. “It’s not sanitary — well — I guess it depends on the goat."

Read the full story here.

Update:

The goat is apparently a minor Passaic, NJ celebrity named Cocoa, whose companion Cyrus Fakroddin occasionally takes her for a trip to the big city.

'Nuff said!

Found via Houston Dairy Maids. Thanks, ladies!

This advertisement for lactose-free dairy products from Arla is built on a grain of truth. Apparently, like our web editor Eilis, hedgehogs are lactose intolerant. It's debatable whether they'd actually enjoy a "really cheesy cheese pizza," though. I'm thinking grubs. Bugs and grubs.

Tough choices as usual!

We didn't give you all a lot of time to dream up fresh rhymes for this year's contest (just a week or so), but we still saw an outpouring of casienated love.

Poems tended strongly towards the sweet (who win Briar Rose Creamery's goat cheese and chocolate truffles) with fewer works addressing the spicy (who win a selection of Virginia Chutney Co.'s tasty cheese lubricants). The field also tilted heavily towards submitter Lisa, who crushed the competition with sheer volume.

The Winners

♥ A top pick from our lovelorn staff was Jaclyn Stevenson's travelog in free verse, with our expatriot "foreign girl" falling for the charms of an open-air market. Sweet is the word.