About this time of year, hedgehogs begin to stir, shivering their bristles and stretching out a little foot or two, in readiness to wake up after their winter slumber. All of which serves as a handy metaphor for this blog which, having snoozed through the dark, short days of December and January, is now ready to spring back into action. (I could at this point have just confessed to being busy, knackered and neglectful but, well, everyone loves a hedgehog, don’t they?)
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I’m sure you have all been on the edge of your seats, waiting to hear of my progress up the allotment waiting list. Well, big news here, I have a plot! I’ve been pretty lucky to inherit a patch that’s been well-cared for until recently, compared to some of the weed forests that are also up for grabs. In fact I’ve been pretty lucky full-stop, considering that I live in London where some waiting lists are 40 years long and people even put their children down to secure an allotment for their future middle age!
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This week brought the exciting news that I have reached number six on the allotment waiting list and so should get my soft city hands on a plot in the next few months. Usually in London, to get an allotment you have to: a) wait for two decades; b) bump off the 73 people ahead of you on the list; or, c) sleep with at least seven senior figures from the borough council. Fortunately for me, one of my local allotments got funding a couple of years ago to regenerate some disused land to create about 70 new allotments and so the waiting list is short and the turnover relatively high.
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Well, it looks like the summer holidays have certainly taken their toll on my blog. Museum visits, cricket in the park and excessive ice-cream consumption (not to mention the small matter of doing some actual work on top) left little time for writing about cheese. And the more you feel guilty about not doing something, the harder it becomes to actually do it after a while. Fortunately, the schools have opened their doors once more and, at the same time, the cheddar-makers at Barber’s asked me if I’d like to develop a new recipe for their flagship 1833 brand. It was just what I needed to get back on the cheese-horse again.
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This weather is crazy. Just when you think it’s time to live on watermelon and salad in your flipflops, hailstones the size of conkers start smashing up your greenhouse. It’s important to be prepared for all eventualities and this includes having comfort food and a slanket to hand. This lasagne is easy to make, fools small children into eating vegetables and is perfect for sub-zero summer afternoons. I used Highcross from Wildes Cheese which is matured in a vat of salt, water and lemon. It’s salty and crumbly, a bit like Feta and its sharpness goes well against the sweet squash.
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It’s been a while since I posted a cheesy recipe on here but the lovely chaps at Wilde’s Cheese sent me away with such a mammoth cheese doggy-bag that I had two choices: use all the pieces to build a cheese igloo, or get my cooking cap on. As well as cheese, they also gave me a gorgeous bunch of wild garlic, the last of the season. I can only find wild leeks round here so this was a real treat. Searching for inspiration, I came across and slightly adapted this recipe, which seemed the perfect way to wed up some of my ingredients. The result was lovely, gritty cornbread, studded with melty bits of curd cheese. I halved the quantity of wild garlic in the recipe but even so it packs a punch, so probably not a great first date food. Fortunately, I am old and well past all that malarkey.
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You know you’re advancing in years when a) you get excited by the thought of buying a mandolin (the chopping, not the Captain Corelli variety) and b) you then get enraged because it turns out it doesn’t slice thinly enough for your liking. So, all ideas of conning my children by making vegetable crisps out of the window, I was left pondering what to do with my new toy so that I didn’t hurl it against a wall. As fate would have it, I was also pondering what to do with the remains of last week’s Nuns of Caen that the kinds folks at The Cheese Market had given to me in abundance. This recipe is therefore the coming together of some too-thickly-sliced vegetables, a luscious cheese washed in perry and – it only seemed fitting – some pears. It was eaten with pork chops, also cooked in perry with shallots and sage.
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I am fascinated by natural yeasts and like to grow a sourdough starter in my kitchen. It was given to me by an Italian friend who got it from her in-laws in Italy who got it from a bakery. So it feels a bit like a pedigree pet, one of those long-haired hamsters or something that needs food and attention or it starts to smell. The problem is that if it was a hamster I’d be in big trouble with the rodent obesity protection league as I feed it far too much and end up with a giant Kilner full of starter:
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The problem (admittedly not a very serious problem) with buying lots of cheese in one go is that you suddenly have an awful lot of cheese to eat. ‘Stop it!’ wailed the Other Half last week. ‘Stop buying so much cheese, I have to stop eating so much cheese!’ Whilst the obvious retort would be ‘Well, stop eating so much cheese then’, I did have some sympathies and so, with a lunch visit from the in-laws on the horizon and a mammoth chunk of the bluest cheese in existence in the fridge, I decided to cook something up with it. Obviously by taking this approach we are still, in real terms, ‘eating so much cheese’, but it doesn’t feel like it. A bit like when you eat the whole box of chocolates at once and therefore consume less calories than if you ate three a day for the next fortnight. Honestly.
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As I wrote last week, I was lucky enough to be sent a truckle of Wookey Hole Cave-Aged Cheddar to try and, although we have been gobbling it non-stop throughout the festive period and beyond, it stands undefeated. I swear it grows back overnight. So, I thought I’d use some of it to cook up something suitably troglodyte-friendly. I pondered about what cave-people would eat (probably not mature cheese, to be fair) and the basic principle I came up with was: MEAT.
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Fromage Homage 