Cheesed to Meet You

So what’s with me and cheese?

Well, I’d like to tell you about my twenty years’ experience as the Herald Tribune cheese correspondent. Or the artisan mozzarella I perfected from my alpaca herds fed only on wild chervil on the slopes of Pen y Fan. I’d love to regale you with the years I spent building up my global restaurant franchise ‘The Big Cheese’, which I sold for millions, enabling me to retire to the Cotswolds. I would so like to impress you with my credentials and experience and general all-round cheese-expertise. But I can’t. Sorry about that.

I just love cheese. That’s it really.

I love the grainy tang of mature cheddar with a smear of chutney in thick white doorsteps of bread.

I love the salty slabs of burnt halloumi that you pick off the barbeque at the end of the night when you’re a bit sozzled.

I love the kind of blue cheese that runs off your knife half-way to your plate. And the kind of brie that sticks to your knife in a big gloopy blob.

I love smoked cheese and cream cheese and goat’s cheese and nutty cheese and the floppy cheese that you can take out of your sandwich and chase people with.

I even love the cheese-with-no-name that you buy at a French market but have to keep in sealed Tupperware in the outside toilet.

But I’m stuck in a rut. A cheesy rut, admittedly, all lined with Cheddar and chevre and Parmesan, yumyumyum. But it’s still a rut. I have even taken a picture of my cheese rut for you via the current cheese contents of my fridge:

All nice but could do better.

So this blog is about cheese in all its glory. I want to find out more about cheese, to try different cheeses. I’ll post some recipes. I might try making cheese (with no doubt hil-a-rious results).

I’ll try and answer some of the burning cheese questions of our times. What makes the perfect cheeseboard? How come mouldy cheese good/mouldy bread bad? Is cheese and chicken ever right? What’s the difference between brie and camembert? Can you make human cheese (just in case anyone’s excited by that, I am not going to try)?

And I’ll look at the weird cultures (cultures – geddit?!) and subcultures that exist around cheese. After all, what other food can inspire sporting events, art forms and just about a million sayings and aphorisms?

Look, I’ll even find an excuse for some videos of funny goats.

And you can’t say fairer than that, can you?