Fromage Homage

September 3, 2014 · 8:52 am

Cheese, Please! – a challenge for September

Cheese, Please! is back and this month hosted by the lovely Garden Deli, so do go and check out this beautiful blog 🙂

I’m excited, honoured, and hugely nervous to be hosting this month’s Cheese, Please! blog challenge. It’s the first time The Garden Deli has been let loose with a blog challenge. But Jane from the brilliantly written blog Fromage Homage has trusted me with her cheesy challenge, so let’s see what we can do…

Plums

First up we need a theme. Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching trees full of fruit edge towards ripeness and pondering over what to do with it all. As a result, a theme of cheese n’ fruit springs to mind. Right now I’m looking for ideas to use apples, plums, pears and greengages. But don’t feel you need to limit yourself to these, or indeed just to autumn fruit… if you’re reading this in the southern hemisphere and have a glut of lemons on the tree why not share your recipe ideas. Or if you’re…

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September 2, 2014 · 1:27 pm

Suffolk Gold and Courgette Fritters

I’ve been away from the blog for a while but never fear on the cheese front; a holiday in Italy ensured that I could eat my own body weight in fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola and pecorino. Expect some diet cheese recipes coming your way soon (if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms).
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Tagged as cheese, snacks and party food, suffolk gold

August 8, 2014 · 10:35 am

Suffolk Farmhouse Cheeses

It’s fair to say that Suffolk has historically had a bit of an image problem when it comes to cheese. Back in the sixteenth century Suffolk cheese had a good reputation but farmers began to turn to butter production, which was more profitable; cheese made from the resulting skimmed milk was famously hard and inedible. One connoisseur described it as having ‘a horny hardness and indigestible quality’, Samuel Pepys recorded that his wife was ‘vexed at her people for grumbling to eat Suffolk cheese’ and a range of contemporary ditties describe how weevils are unable to penetrate it and rats on ships prefer to eat grindstones. When severe floods and cattle disease caused a drop in production, cheesemongers were only too happy to turn their attentions to Cheshire cheese instead and before long Suffolk cheese receded into folk memory.
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Tagged as blue cheese, brie, cheese, pasteurised, penicillium roqueforti, suffolk blue, suffolk gold, washed curd

August 5, 2014 · 8:15 am

Sourdough Focaccia with Basil and Laverstoke Park Farm Mozzarella

A little while ago my Italian food-loving friend pressed some of her sourdough starter on me. Those of you that have followed this blog for a while will know that my success rate with foodstuffs requiring cultures or fermentation is not good. I confess that I wrapped the starter in some clingfilm and put it in the fridge. I then tried to forget about it, put some vegetables on top of it and generally abused it foully for several weeks. But one day I caught sight of it and felt a bit bad. I took it out, poked it, stuck it in a bowl and stirred in a random amount of flour and water. By some miracle, after a few hours, it started to bubble. Praise be, it was still alive!
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Tagged as baking, cheese, laverstoke park farm mozzarella, mozzarella, snacks and party food

August 4, 2014 · 12:04 pm

July’s Cheese, Please! Challenge Recipe Round-Up – Summery Cheese

First of all, apologies for the tardiness of my round-up this month. The summer holidays are taking their toll on my available time as I seem to be engrossed in a constant round of Dinosaur Top Trumps, playhouse-building, learning-to-ride-a-bike supervision and football retrieval. But, as ever, a lovely haul of recipes makes the wait worthwhile.
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Tagged as baking, cheese, main courses, salads, summer cheese, sweet recipes

August 1, 2014 · 9:23 am

Allerdale

The advantage of living in London is that there are numerous cheese shops which stock a huge variety of British cheeses; the capital has been an epicentre of cheese commerce for centuries, even before Samuel Pepys was being ‘merry’ with a Cheshire cheese in 1660 (must have made a change from his housemaids). But there are also a myriad of cheeses being made all over the British Isles that rarely or never make it to the Big Smoke and are predominantly sold in local shops and farmers’ markets. I know they’re out there but unless I’m on my travels I often never hear about them. Eventually though, a quality local cheese will pack up its belongings Dick Whittington-style and make it down to one of my emporiums of choice and, when it does, I’m waiting, jaws open like a cat near the hole in the skirting board. So it was when this week’s chunk of regional loveliness hit my local shelves. Snap. Gotcha.

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Tagged as allerdale, cheese, goat's cheese, hard cheese, unpasteurised

July 29, 2014 · 8:12 am

Glamorgan Sausage Rolls

Last weekend was my vegetarian friends’ annual barbeque. Although they are happy to tolerate carnivores and even rig up a separate grill for us to drip our saturated fats all over, I thought I would make an effort and take something veggie-friendly (as well as a pack of sausages and some halloumi…and some beer, obviously). I’d heard of Glamorgan Sausages about a year ago (or Selsig Morgannwg to give them their proper name) and so thought I’d turn them into the ultimate summer picnic food for my herbivorous chums.
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Tagged as baking, caerphilly, cheese, gorwydd caerphilly, snacks and party food

July 25, 2014 · 8:16 am

Doddington

I have to admit I’ve been feeling a bit stumped recently when it comes to finding a cheese I haven’t tried before. I know that there are some 700 different cheese in the British Isles and I’ve so far only scoffed a hundred or so of them, so I’ve got some way to go. But even so, having tracked down and raided all the local cheese emporiums on several occasions, I was starting to find it more difficult to track down an unforaged fromage. So it was with some relief that I spotted this week’s cheese, hiding coyly from the heat behind a plastic curtain:

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Tagged as cheddar, cheese, cow's milk cheese, doddington, gouda, red leicester, semi-hard cheese, unpasteurised

July 22, 2014 · 4:36 pm

Courgette and Chunky Cheddar Loaf

The food blogosphere is currently at fever pitch over what to do with a courgette glut. So, not one to strike out independently, here is my own courgette glut:

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Tagged as baking, cheddar, cheese

July 18, 2014 · 9:59 am

Harbourne Blue

It’s been a very sheepish blog for the last few weeks with St James, Flower Marie and Homewood Ewes Cheese all making an appearance. But the sheepish one this week is me; after tantalising everyone with my promise of cooking something up with the Homewood curd, it all went very wrong. I planned to make stuffed courgette flowers, waiting four days for enough flowers to appear, diligently stuffed them, prepared the batter, heated the oil and then fried them. Oh – except I’d forgotten to batter them first so they all disintegrated on impact. I blame the heat. Sigh. Anyway, onto this week’s cheese which is decidedly goaty:

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