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Untraditional Topped Flat Breads at PS7 with Cheese

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Started out at PS7 in D.C. (777 I ST NW; blocks from Chinatown metro) for happy hour. The bar is probably the quietest room in the restaurant, and they have good happy hour drink specials — and surprisingly appetizers that included crispy dough and cheeses:

Untraditional Topped Flat Breads:

Mad Chicken: Buffalo chicken, celery, carrot, blue cheese; (nice and spicy sauce).

Sundried & Roasted: Eggplant, pesto, sundried tomatoes, feta.

(The Artisan Cheese Selection with house made accompaniments included: Red Hawk, Cow, California; Midnight Moon, Goat,  Holland; Barely Buzzed, Cow, Utah; Cashel Blue, Cow, Ireland — but since they kept their red wine too cold, I assumed they treated cheese selections the same way.

I was there with K for a Balvenie’s single malt scotch whiskey tasting. The 21-year-old stuff was good, but I liked the feature the best: Available in very limited quantities, the new addition to The Balvenie 17 Year Old range is finished in casks that once held Madeira Wine.

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New Cheese Accessories

It was so nice to get a hostess gift on Columbus Day from the As.  We didn’t have a cheese tray this size, nor did we have the Oxo cheese slicer. (sturdy like other Oxo products; dishwasher safe; but you do need to have the cheese nice and cold — not eating temperature).

For Saturday night dinner, I decided buy everything at the Kensington Safeway, and they do have a fairly large grocery store cheese selection — there were some aged cheeses just sitting in the case for $22 a pound. I chose: Aloute Baby Brie, because I had a rebate up to $6.49 through the end of 2009. For a grocery store brie, it was fine tasting, but not particularly creamy — could much more see it as a baked brie rather than room temp on the cheese tray.

I also got  Stripey Jack–Five layers of cheese in one, giving a striking display of red and white layers of traditional regional English cheeses–just because I knew it would look pretty on the cheese tray. Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, white and yellow Cheddar and Lancashire. Last: Denmark’s finest blue cheese — crumbly and good for salad, but probably not the best cheese plate selection.

New Cheese Tray
New Cheese Tray
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Pizza for Columbus Day

The A’s were in town for Columbus Day, so we had to do Italian. One of the six pizzas: Spinacholi — spinach, broccoli, fresh mozzarella cheese. M has the crust down just right. All the veggies from the local farmer’s market, and the cheese (and prosciutto from the Cleveland Park Special Pizza — prosciutto, mushrooms, spinach, mozzarella) were from Vace’s. Turkish Coffee included a period of calm before craziness and another giraffe.

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Old Man Highlander with Fresh Figs from NC

Figs n Cheese
Figs n Cheese

Old Man Highlander is a Gouda-style cheese produced in 8 lb wheels and naturally ripened for 6-9 months from Calkins Creamery, Honesdale, PA. I picked it up with a friend, KK, who had never been in Cowgirl Creamery DC. Nathan, our cheesemonger, could not have been nicer. KK loved the place, and I got my CounterCulture coffee, too, along with this cheese of the week (though still $24.55 a pound — KK didn’t know there was cheese that cost that much). But it was hard to say what I liked better — the cheese or the fresh figss WWT brought from North Carolina. They might be a bit better with a soft cheese like blue or brie, but, mmm… still very tasty — soft figs with a bit of hard cheese.

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Aged Cougar Gold

aged cougar gold
aged cougar gold

Due to the recent family reunion, we asked JT to courier Cougar Gold from WSU. She brought one can of regular, and one of specially aged Cougar Gold. TT really liked the aged version. When it got back here, we tried it, but weren’t able to do a side-by-side comparison of the regular vs. the aged. Anyway, it was very good.