Artisanal Cheese Club, Month 4

Here are the four cheeses we received this month.

Nancy's Camembert--  This cheese from the Hudson Valley of New York has a very smooth and buttery texture.  It's somewhat unusual, as it's made from a combination of cow and sheep milk.  The taste has varied throughout the sample we got.  The outer areas seemed very mild, but it seems to be getting stronger as we get farther in.  This is also kind of unusual, since most cheeses are strongest on the outside.  I like it, but my husband says it tastes like grass and won't eat any more.

Zamorano--  This is a sheep's milk cheese from Spain.  It's your standard hard white cheese.  I'm running out of different things to say about these!

Comte-- This is a very nice cheese from France.  In texture it reminds me something of Swiss (but without the eyes).  It tastes very much like the Seven Sisters that we liked so much a few months ago.

Berkshire Blue--  Once again, the picture on the Artisanal website does not do this cheese justice.  It has even more mold on the outside than the Selles Sur Cher we had last month.  (If you're interested, you can see some better photos at the Berkshire Blue website.)   It is a very mild and smooth tasting blue from Massachusetts.  Artisanal says it tastes of "hay and hide," but I say it tastes like a barn, but in a good way.  (Only a farm girl could get away with saying that, right?)

Artisanal Cheese Club, Month 3

Here's a rundown of the four cheeses we got this month.

Selles Sur Cher--  This goat cheese from France is covered in protective blue mold.  The picture at the Artisanal link doesn't do it justice; the piece we got was totally fuzzy and looked just like something you would normally throw out of your refrigerator.  (Here's a better picture on Wikipedia.)  The mold is supposedly edible, but I didn't like the way it tasted and picked it off.  (My dog loved it!)  Inside, the cheese tasted a lot like Brie.

Raclette--  This Alpine cheese is meant to be melted on a plate and eaten.  I'd actually had it before and knew how good it was, and this example did not disappoint.  I was a teensy bit disappointed, however, that I ended up getting a cheese this month that I was already familiar with.

Toussaint--  This cheese is from New York.  It was your standard hard white cheese, nothing really special.

North Country Blue--  This Minnesota cheese was good, but not as good as the blue we had last month.  That one was very smooth, while this one was a little sharp.

Overall, we were less impressed than normal with our shipment this month.  I'm not sure if it was just an off month or if we're becoming jaded to the pleasures of fancy cheese.  Tune back in next month to find out!

Artisanal Premium Cheese Club, Months One and Two

A few months ago, I realized I was tired of the kinds of cheese available in our local stores, so I decided to join the Artisanal Premium Cheese Club.   For $55, you get approximately 1/2 lb. each of four different cheeses each month.  That sounds kind of pricey, but when you see how expensive these cheeses are bought separately, it's not really too bad of a deal, considering that the flat fee also includes overnight shipping anywhere in the continental United States.

I was all set to blog about our selections each month when I got hit by an unexpected development.  Apparently I am one of the many people who get severe headaches from eating too much aged cheese.  Two of the cheeses in the first month's shipment left my head throbbing, so I had to give up on them after a while, and I was worried the whole experiment might turn out to be a costly mistake.  Fortunately, I've had much better luck with the cheeses in the second shipment, and I've also discovered that taking a probiotic tablet immediately before eating iffy kinds of cheese helps to moderate the headaches I get.  So, without further ado, here are the cheeses we've gotten and what I thought of them.  (I didn't take pictures, but I'll include a link to each of the varieties on Artisanal's website, and I'm sure their pictures are much better than mine would have been anyway.)

Month 1:

Coupole-- This was a nice goat cheese from Vermont.  What Artisanal calls a "slightly wrinkled skin" looked to us just like the folds and crenellations of a brain, leading to cries of "Brains!  Brains!" whenever we brought this variety out.

Seven Sisters-- This was a wonderful cheese from Pennsylvania.  Artisanal describes it as mild, but the wedge we received was quite strong (and apparently very well-aged according to my headache meter).  It tasted a lot like Parmesan, and we all loved it.  I just wish I could have eaten more of it. 

Hittisau--   This was a hard, mild cheese from Austria.  Artisanal describes it as bold, but it was actually much milder than the Seven Sisters.  Sometimes I wonder if they mixed up the labels on those two!

Four-Year Gouda--  This was wonderful.  Too bad even a tiny flake of it would give me a headache that lasted for days!  Fortunately, a co-worker of my husband's took it off our hands.


Month 2:

Purple Haze--  This is definitely the most unusual cheese we've gotten so far.  It's fairly standard goat cheese from California, with one difference-- the top is sprinkled with fennel and lavender pollen.  I absolutely detest lavender and don't like fennel much either, but I loved this cheese, which had a mild licorice flavor.

Royale-- This is a sheep's milk cheese from Spain.  It reminded me a lot of the Hittisau, hard and nutty, but not particularly interesting.

Quicke's Cheddar--  This tasted like no cheddar I've ever had.  It was so sharp that it ceased to taste sharp at all, and instead it had a very complex flavor of many things, including Grandma's basement.  The men in my life thought this was the best one so far, but it's a little too strange for my taste.  But I have become totally infatuated with the Quicke family's website, which gives all the details of their farm in Devon, England.

Crater Lake Blue--  If I had any doubts about continuing my membership in the club, they vanished the minute I tasted this cheese.  I didn't really think I liked blue cheese before, but this wonderful specimen from Oregon has changed my mind.  I may have to order this one again in the future!

The sea and the wind

Although I'm often very late to notice these things, I have felt a strange wind calling to me in the last few days. Perhaps spring is soon on its way!

Rememberance of things past

This morning I was lamenting to my husband that, outside of our cozy little bedroom chats, I don't have a safe space in which to speak.  When I try to air my views on Facebook, it seems that there is always someone there to take offense or try to convince me that I'm wrong.  And while I have often said that what our society needs right now is more debate, not less, my impulse at the moment is to get some things off my chest, not to form a dialogue with others.  Right now I need a place where I can explore my views, because one cannot debate with others until one has a firm idea of how one feels.  And then I remembered this blog.

I'm sure that by now no one is reading this thing, but perhaps that makes this the safest space of all, one where I can explore my feelings freely without any fear of being slammed down by others.  So I'm going to start writing here again, starting today.

What's really bothering me today is the sense that the world that I grew up in no longer exists.  I'm not talking about a simple nostalgia for LP records and typewriters.  Those types of material things have always changed and will always change, and our modern alternatives are usually far better, anyway.  Likewise, ever since I ended my first year of college and came home for the summer, I've had a feeling that the town I grew up in was going on with life without me, but I think this is entirely normal as well.  I always knew that if I wanted to move back there, it would be like catching up on a soap opera one hasn't watched in 10 years; some faces would be the same, some would be different, and different storylines might be at the forefront, but with some effort, it would be possible to catch up and at least understand what was going on at the present and the broad outlines of what had occurred in the past.

This is different, because now my very childhood home is gone.  Ok, so it's not literally gone.  We still own the house and can still enter it if we choose.  I could even bring a sleeping bag and camp out in my old room if I wanted to!  But all the contents have been sold off at auction.  My yellow piano isn't there anymore, and neither is Buster Brown on top of the kitchen cabinet.  Of course I salvaged the most important things to me and have brought them here, where I'm trying to find a way to fit them into my new life.  But the whole fabric of that old life has been irreparably damaged.

Again, I guess this is something that happens to most people eventually.  (Although not to my husband, who is living in his childhood home surrounded by his parents' things and complains about that too, that he feels the past enveloping him like a shroud and not allowing him to move on.)  But I'd always thought that if and when this happened, I'd be able to make a new home for myself if I chose, to find a different farm in North Dakota with trees and grass and a river and live there instead.  But now I'm realizing that is never going to happen.  As this article in the New York Times made clear, the old North Dakota that I knew is gone and never coming back.  Whether the oil boom continues and North Dakota becomes another Texas, with everyone living in McMansions and sporting bling, or it busts and things empty out again, it will never be exactly the way it was when I was a child.  It will never be so unsullied again.  And that I something that I mourn.

Et tu, Breyer's?

So I was very happy to report a few months ago that Edy's is now making real ice cream instead of frozen dairy dessert, but it seems that good news has been balanced out with some bad news. Breyer's is now apparently making frozen dairy dessert instead!

A few weeks ago, I decided to branch out a little bit and try a new Breyer's flavor, butter pecan. To my surprise, it just didn't taste right, and it had a sort of a sticky texture, so I finally looked at the box and noticed it said "frozen dairy dessert"! Most, but not all, of the other flavors in the black box line are still ice cream, but I guess this just proves that you always need to read the label, even with brands you think you trust.

Blue Bunny

Blue Bunny has always been one of my favorite kinds of ice cream.  As a teenager, I knew it only from the small dixie cups available at Pizza Corner in Valley City.  Later, when I moved to Iowa, where the Blue Bunny plant is located, I became entranced by all their unique flavors, and it was the only brand of ice cream I ever considered buying while I lived there.  Now that I'm here in the Mid-Ohio Valley, it's once again become a rarity for me, as the only place it can be found here is at Wal-Mart.  However, I'm starting to wonder if that's really such a bad thing.

I've had a couple of bad experiences with Blue Bunny lately.  The first was coming across a flavor that I absolutely hated: homemade turtle sundae.  I picked up a carton of this when we were recently at Wal-Mart, and it sounded like something the whole family would like.  But I was very disappointed, as the ice cream had a very artificial taste to it and the little turtle candies were extremely waxy and unpleasant.  I can be kind of an ice cream snob, but when my husband and 6-year-old stepson also refused to eat it, I knew we'd hit upon a clunker.  And looking at the long list of ingredients, it's not surprising it's either artificial or waxy, is it?

I still thought this just might be a bad flavor until I attended my nephew's birthday party this weekend.  They served bulk Blue Bunny ice cream in the pail, both chocolate and vanilla.  It didn't taste too bad, actually, but one of the little kids decided not to eat his ice cream and it just sat on the table for hours.  Although I could tell it had melted, the little scoop held its shape and didn't spread out.  That is not the sign of a natural kind of ice cream!  I know it's got to be full of all kinds of stabilizers to do that, and it kind of turned my stomach to think it might be doing similar things inside of me.

I'm not saying I'll never buy Blue Bunny again, but I do think I won't go out of my way to buy it from now on.  It just isn't that special anymore.