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cheese from feast!

feast_cheese
We finally got a chance to stop by feast!, a cheese shop in Charlottesville, VA, and what a shop it was! The proprieter, Kate, was very knowledgeable and helpful on choosing the right cheese. We wanted local cheeses, and had the usual criteria: one brie/triple-cream, some sheep, and not much goat. Well, Kate certainly supplied us with what we wanted, and we ended up with this:

Delice de Bourgogne
milk: French cow
a very nice triple-creme cheese

Everona Piedmont
milk: Virginia cow

Grayson
Meadow Creek Dairy
milk: Virginia sheep
Very smelly. Did not get better with age. Creamy texture.

McClure
milk: Virginia cow
type: similar to Tallegio
Yes, very much like Tallegio (very smelly). NA liked this a lot.

Roaring 40’s blue
milk: Austrailian cow

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Angela & Ken’s B-day

buy-jan-09

We drove to Burlington for the January birthdays (Angela and Ken).  We stopped by Harris-Teeter, which has a good selection of cheese (for a grocery store), and got Manchego (of course), and a blue that we hadn’t seen before.

Butter
Angela gave me a “cookbook” for Christmas, The Home Creamery, by Kathy Farrell-Kingsley. It describes how to make butter from whole cream, which we did, and it was delicious!

Goat Brie
Angela got this at Brookville in Cleveland Park. It was a hit, and everyone (but me) liked it. Well, I thought it was very good for goat cheese(!).

Manchego
Always a favorite.

Amish Blue
Actually it was from Wisconsin, but was a good blue.

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Cheese and Landscape Photography

We went to hear Frank Gohlke, a landscape photographer and subject of the exhibition Accommodating Nature Now through March 3, 2009 at the American Art Museum, presented a selection of readings from his catalogue essay entitled Stories in the Dirt, Stories in the Air. Learned more about Wichita Falls, Texas than I ever knew — his hometown. Both black and white and color photos. Cowgirl Creamery sponsored the reception afterward, and they did an excellent job. Very cool cheese cutter — and they had to change the wire several times. They had Mt Tam (Brie like — one of our favs from there) and St George (parmesan like). The photo is after I started eating it, but they had a nice combo of the 2 cheeses, some nuts and a toasted fruit/nut bread. Much prettier than other cheese events where they just let people dig in — and the cheese gets messy. The usual cheese foursome attended this free program.

Mt Tam and St George from Cowgirl Creamery
Mt Tam and St George from Cowgirl Creamery

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The Cheese Quiz

One time we were at a restaurant talking to someone, and they said “I like cheese”, but we doubted them.  Well, as you can tell from this blog that we really like cheese, so we decided to develop a quiz to see just how much someone really likes the stuff:

  • How many implements in your kitchen (plates, knives, serving trays, forks, etc.) are solely devoted to cheese?  (about 15)
  • How many pounds of blue cheese have you purchased at one time? (3 lbs)
  • Have you ever smuggled cheese into the country? (yes)
  • How far have you driven just to purchase cheese? (maybe 15 miles)
  • Does your cheesemonger know you by name? (well, not by name, but they recognize us)
  • Do you have rennet in your refrigerator? (yes)
  • How many cheese books do you have? (3)
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New Year’s Eve Cheese

Parmesan, Romano and Triple Goat Brie
Parmesan, Romano and Triple Goat Brie

New Year’s Eve before the Kennedy Center. Frigid weather, so cheese had to be easy. W got Italian cheese, Romano and Parmesan from our favorite Bethesda Italian deli, Cornucopia with owner Ibrahim “Ibo” Selmy. As an impulse item, I picked up a Triple Goat Brie Cheese in a cute little box from DC Brookville. For about $5, it was pure heaven to N and me — though is just not a goat fan. Fabulous texture. From a Canadian Dairy, Woolwich Dairy, that now makes some cheese in Wisconsin. Last week we saw it in Safeway.

Champagne complemented it all.

Only goat brie issue: it stained my stainless steel knives and our wooden cutting board. I emailed the dairy who told me that was new to them, but they took the numbers from the box to check into it.

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Cheeses for a Desert Island

Must-have cheese
Must-have cheese

Video From J in Washington State: Owner of Vinotique Wine Shop in Lakewood, WA from Tacoma News Tribune 1/12/2009

The 3 cheeses the owner would take on a desert island:

Saint Agur: A French blue cheese. “It’s so creamy. It’s the creamiest blue cheese ever. You have to eat it at room temperature.” ($26.99 a pound)

D’affinois: A French cheese. “It’s like brie on steroids. I love pears with it.” ($16.99 a pound)

Iberico: A Spanish cheese. “It’s made from sheep, goat and cow milk. The sheep’s milk gives it a nutty flavor, combined with the goat milk it’s… pungent. And the cow’s milk makes it so smooth.” ($22.99 a pound)

For beginners she suggests: gouda, danish havarti and Italian fontina.

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Christmas Eve, ’08

I was in Silver Spring, so I went to Whole Foods.  It’s not the best (they don’t cut the cheese off of the wheel like they do a real cheese shops, but it was the best I could do at the time).  We also had Coffee Egg-nog with it.

Bel Paese
milk: Lombardy, Italy cows
Semi-soft, mild cheese. Nice.

Manchego
milk: Spanish sheep
As they say on Splendid Table, when you want to try out different cheeses, there’s more than just Manchego. But as I said, I was at Whole Foods, so I had to do my best.

Stilton
milk: English cows
A very good blue; we’ve had this before. I lost the label, so I don’t know what creamery this one came from.

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Thanksgiving at Burlington

Was in Bethesda the other day & went by Ibo’s shop, Cornicopia. As it is an Italian shop, I got 3 kinds of cheese to take to N.C. for our Thanksgiving trip.

Piave messano
Italian cows
very good, was hard & was fine for grating on soup

Sardo
Italian sheep
very good, soft

Pientino
Italian sheep
very good, soft

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New Jersey Cheese


Amram
Bobolink
milk: cow

We went to visit NJ and went to this dairy in Warwick, NJ. They make several kinds of cheese, and we were able to taste a very tiny portion of them. Amram was closest to brie; we got several others.

Shepherds Logue (0.55 lbs, $24 per pound, $13.20 total) Cave aged 4+ months. Brick shaped with an external rub of herbs de Provence.

Oldwick Shepherd (0.53 lbs, $22 per pound, $11.66 total) Cave aged 3-6 months. Mold ripened. Earthy aroma, nutty smooth finish. Pyrenees style sheep’s milk cheese.

Crema de blue (0.48 lbs, $20 per pound, $9.60 total) Raw mixed blue cheese. Aged 60 days. Creamy, with a smooth rich flavor.

Shepherds Cushions (1.00 lbs, $2.50 a pound, $2.5o total) Brie style cushions; Aged to perfection; creamy and runny. Not shown in photo.

Valley Shepherd
all raw sheep

Three from the dairy where we made cheese. I think the difference in Shepherds Logue and Oldick Shepherd was the kind of rennet used. All very nice.

They gave very detailed receipts — weights and descriptions of cheese.