Cheese for a Wednesday, pt. 13 I've got the Blues!

Unlucky #13!  Sigh.  It has been quite a week.  I have been eating cheese, and taking notes, but between team meetings for class, late nights at the office, and a Basset Hound puppy visiting for the weekend drooling on everything and amping up the energy, I just haven't been able to share.  I've missed you guys!  Hope the feeling has been mutual.

Anyway,  I have been meaning to share with you the joys of Blue Cheese (again!).  I picked up my favorite Roaring 40s from Australia, and decided to compare it with Bleu de Bocage from France.  This was a crazy "Pepsi Challenge!"  The Roaring 40s, as you know, is a sweet blue that comes in a pretty blue wax shell.  I don't have to go on about that one again, other than to bore you with my undying love for it.  Blah, blah, blah.

Bleu de Bocage, on the other hand, was not an immediate love.  In fact, if you are a fan of CheeseDreaming on FaceBook, you might have seen me comment on how I had finally found a cheese I didn't like.  Egads!  This cheese is really unique.  It is one of the few goat cheese blues out there.  Obviously Man Who Sneers at Goat (Cheese) wouldn't be a fan.  I didn't even ask him to try this one.  My first taste made me tear up.  It is really "assertive."  I put it down and ran!  Embarassed, I went back to try again.  And again.  And again. It really grew on me.  There was a really interesting crunch to it from the salt crystals (I think that was the source).  There was a complex minerally sweetness underneath that tang that made me cry.  This one is not for the faint of heart, but give it a try!

So, in the "practical application" department, I put some crumbled Roaring 40s on my steamed Brussels Sprouts last night with some fresh ground pepper.  Yum!  The Bleu de Bocage on a cracker went really well with a Cosmo made by Darling Husband this evening.

Don't be afraid!  Get the blues.  Sometimes its ok.

Cheese for a Wednesday, pt. 3

Yes, it's Wednesday again. And I sure hope your day was better than mine! But you know what? While any and every day is a good day to eat cheese, cheese for a Wednesday is a special thing. Its a cheese that you can think about all day, while you are busy dealing with tedious book keeping, a pile of essays to read, saxophone lessons, whiny volunteers or misbehaving experimental bacteria. (Shouts out there for some of my loyal readers - you know who you are!). This has to be a special cheese.

Tonight, that special cheese is is Roaring 40s Blue from King Island Australia. (The other cheese on the board that looks a lot like cantaloupe will be discussed later. I promise!) I know I've raved about this before, but tonight, it really was the right cheese for a Wednesday night. This creamy blue cheese is just blend of sweet, salty, creamy and spicy. We had it tonight with a little Zinfandel and it was just love on a cracker! The minute it hit my tongue, all the thoughts spinning through my head just slowed down and I was really home.

The grass the cows eat on this remote island comes with a great legend. One story goes that the straw mattresses from all the boats that wrecked off the coast floated ashore and the seeds inside the mattresses grew into the lush grass the cows snack on, when they aren't indulging in a little kelp snack down by the beach. Really.

I love this story. And who knows, it might be true. This cheese is really something special. Something to make any Wednesday more than just a Wednesday. Enjoy your cheese any night, but don't forget Wednesday!

More Goat Love

As you may or may not know, I think goats are some of the cutest critters out there. They aren't the most efficient milkers - approx 1 gallon/goat/day vs. 10 gallons/cow/day. This is not to say that I don't also think that sheep and cows aren't pretty awesome, because I do. I just think there is something sprightly about goats. I don't specifically seek out goat cheese. I always aim to be "fair and balanced."

Last night, I shared some tasty cheese with my friend TS at Cube on La Cienega. We put ourselves in the capable hands of our waitress, who didn't disappoint, bringing us four amazing cheeses (and four incredible salami). I knew we were good when I realized that one of the cheeses she brought us was the Roaring 40s blue cheese from Australia that I'd had before and loved, loved, LOVED. Such a great, crumbly, mild, cow's milk blue that I could just eat all day.

Anyway, in addition to this gem, we shared a washed rind Mosur Cru Blanc from Switzerland which had just the right amount of "stinky." Without the rind, it was just delicious. A little mushroomy, but still tasting like grassy mountains. The rind made it a little more aggressive, which wasn't that much of a bad thing! We also had some Wildspitz from Switzerland - a semi hard, mild cheese made of cow and goat's milk with a hint of mushroom. Delicious with the pistachios and craisins it came with.

The big surprise of the evening, though, was a TRIPLE CREAM GOAT CHEESE(!!) from Coach Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York. Who knew? I have always thought of triple cream as being the provenance of cow's milk cheese, but the extra cream (have also never thought of goat's cream as something to use...small mind expanding quickly!) makes it taste so rich and buttery, but unlike some triple creams that just taste like butter, this one tasted like butter, but with just a little tangy-ness that gave it a little more depth. Just amazing. Served with dried apricots. YUM!

So, back to the point, I guess that I tend to root for the underdog, the one who makes the least amount of milk, the one who's cheeses get stretch marks, the ones that for some inexplicable reason my BFF just hates, and I guess learning about triple cream goat cheese just opened my mind. It's times like this that I really realize how much more I have to learn. It just makes me excited for the future of my cheese education!

Sweet goat cheese dreams to all (except Jordan - if you're reading this! You can dream about sheep's cheese)!

(photo courtesy of the State Library and Archives of Florida)