Well, this cheese is a first. Usually I don’t write about two cheeses made by the same producers in quick succession because I find that I don’t have enough to say (same cows, same milk, same people making it in the same place…) But this week’s cheese was described as ‘exceptional’ by the Other Half and ‘oh blimey, THAT is something VERY different’ by me. So, I give you the cheese that broke all the rules, Paddy’s Milestone:
Category Archives: cheese
Hebridean Blue
Call this post a Burns Night hangover if you will. I wanted to write about Scottish cheese last week and, given that a) it’s not always easy tracking down far-flung cheese and b) I was too busy working to leave the house for extended cheese mooching trips, I decided to order my chosen cheese online. And everybody knows that if you’re mail-ordering, it pays to order in bulk, right? So this week I present Scottish Cheese II: its name is Hebridean Blue. And if you are afraid of blue cheese, you might want to look away now:
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Traditional Ayrshire Dunlop
It’s Burns Night on Sunday and so what better excuse to mail-order a mahoosive haul of cheese explore another historic Scottish cheese? This time last year I plumped for Caboc, which even its own producer describes as having ‘a taste which should stay in the 1970s’. I have to say I couldn’t disagree with him and so I was hoping for something a little less…ahem…idiosyncratic this time around. The big question though of course remains: will I be able to shoehorn a mention of Robert Burns into this week’s post? So, settle down on your hurdies and get a load of this week’s cheese down your weel-swall’d kytes: I bring you Dunlop.
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Old Ford
Today’s cheese drew me to it like a fossil in a bed of pebbles. Lurking in a cheese shop, I was disappointed to find that they’d reduced their usual selection to less than a dozen. I was grumpy. I’d tried them all before and, although some of them were great cheeses, that wasn’t going to help me find a new one to write about. I was about to flounce from the shop when one cheese caught my eye. It wasn’t labelled and so I’d overlooked it but it had one of those beautiful rinds that made it look like a millstone or an ammonite. I asked the lady in the shop what it was and, sure enough, it was new to me and one that I’d been wanting to try. Praise be! So here it is, the cheesy siren on the rocks that is Old Ford:
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Wookey Hole Cave-Aged Cheddar
Happy New Year everyone! Okay, I realise I’m a bit on the late side for that but I’ve been so busy lazing about, scoffing festive cheese, that this poor old blog has been a bit neglected. But here I am, pushing away the tumbleweeds and blowing off the cobwebs, ready to start the year afresh. And what better way to leap back into action than with a great big bear of a cheese?
Most cheeses on this blog I forage for but I was lucky enough to be sent this week’s. I received it a week before Christmas, then my parents arrived and my dad took a serious fancy to it, along with the Other Half who hasn’t stop guzzling it. Or indeed myself. But the cheese lives on. It’s like the tardis of cheeses. So here it is (and I must apologise to any cheese pros for the photo as so eager was I to get to the cheese that I cut it in half before I read the label on the bottom telling me not to do just that. Whoopsie):
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The Great Big Fromage Homage Christmas Cheese Quiz
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks what with one thing and another and, sadly, for the first time ever I have had to neglect the blog (and reading everyone else’s too – apologies). New Year will see me return full of cheesy vim and vigour but, in the meantime, I thought I would lead everyone into the festive spirit by sharing the cheeses I have bought for Christmas. And – as if that wasn’t exciting enough – now is the time to see who has been listening and who has been sitting at the back of the class flicking rubbers and writing rude verse in the back of their exercise book. Cheese quiz!
So, here are nine cheeses. Seven of them are British, two of them are foreign interlopers. Eight of them have featured on the blog before in one way or another. Seven of them I’m going to scoff myself, two of them I bought for a friend (just so you don’t think I’m a complete pig). Score yourself one point for identifying the cheese and a bonus point if you can get the producer, where one is named (the most you can score is sixteen points). It’s just for fun so have a bash and I’ll reveal the results when all the cheeses have been guessed or during the boring bit between Christmas and New Year, whichever comes first. Have yourselves a very Merry Christmas. Ready…Steady…Guess that Cheese!
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Dunsyre Blue
It’s been a heck of a week. Not in a bad way, just in a ‘How much work? And I have to hand in my Masters project (which is about cheese, of course)? And try and keep two offspring alive? Eek.’ So I nearly, very nearly, decided to forget the blog this week. But then I remembered that it’s St Andrew’s Day this weekend and I had recently tried a Scottish cheese and so fate stepped in, thwacked me sharply round the back of the head with a rolled-up newspaper and said, ‘Get on with it. Tell them about Dunsyre Blue.’ So here I am. And here is Dunsyre Blue:
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Posbury
Earlier this week I had my fifteen minutes of fame on a radio show called The Dirt, which focuses on gardening and food. Should you be at a very loose end and wish to hear me wittering on about disastrous home-cheesemaking and how people should be able to eat nasty cheese if that’s what they like (fence-sitter, moi?) then you can find it here. I turn up about three quarters of the way through. One of the topics we got on to was ‘cheese with bits in’ and I did at this point declare that I am, on the whole, not a fan. All of which leads me neatly on to this week’s cheese, Posbury. My slab of Posbury was kindly sent to me by a friend who tried it, liked it and thought I might too. My initial thought was ‘Eeek, cheese with bits in!’ So, here it is: Posbury, pre-nibble, with its bitty-bits glittering at me evilly:
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Young Buck
I confess: I bought this cheese because I thought it was another cheese made by someone else. And also because I’d been sent out to buy blue cheese. But then, rather excitingly, not only did I find out that it was a totally different cheese, I also found out that it was to be the first cheese from Northern Ireland to feature on the blog and the only raw milk cheese made there. It was also being feted as ‘the next big cheese thing’ by top-end delis. So it must have been cheese fate. Here is Young Buck, masquerading as a cheese made by someone from Buckinghamshire (duh, more fool me): 
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St Endellion
It’s not every day that you find a link between the name of a cheese and a British prime minister. (I tried very hard here to come up with some suitable puns but I’m afraid that Stilton Churchill, Anthony Edam and Gouda Brown was the best I could do. Apologies. I lay down the gauntlet for anyone to do better.) I stress that I didn’t buy this week’s cheese because of its connections to the Tory party, which would be a bit weird; I only discovered it afterwards. I bought it because it looked good and gooey, so here it is, looking a bit buttery and lovely:
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Fromage Homage 