I wondered if asking people to make their own cheese and devise a recipe around it would be a step too far. I envisaged the tumbleweeds blowing across my blog throughout the month, as I frantically made cheese myself and cooked it up to make things look busy. But I under-estimated my fellow bloggers big-time and the sound of whey dripping through tea-towels echoed across the globe. A couple of them in particular (no names mentioned… ;)) seem to have become quite hooked on the entire process and I look forward to some magnificent creations clogging up their fridges and cellars very soon. But onto the round-up…
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March’s Cheese, Please! Challenge Round-Up – Fresh Cheese
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Swaledale PDO
Anyone who grew up in Britain in the seventies or eighties will remember Sunday night TV for one thing: James Herriot driving his Austin 7 through the Yorkshire Dales to the sounds of a soaring, tinkling piano soundtrack. All Creatures Great and Small had a huge effect on me as a child and inspired two ambitions: one, to become a vet and two, to play the piano. The first ambition was swiftly crushed come GCSE time when half of my teachers ganged up to inform me that I was hopeless at science and should do something arty-farty instead. The second was more fruitful and I taught myself to play the entire theme tune from scratch. It remains the only piano piece I have ever played (aside from Beverley Craven’s ‘Promise Me’, but let’s draw a veil over that).
I digress. I chose this week’s cheese because it epitomises the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales. Its history and substance is so intertwined with the area, from the cows and sheep that pepper the hills and valleys to the dry stone walls which its very rind resembles. I’ve even put it on a grassy-green plate this week, because it seemed somehow to belong there:
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Cornish Blue
This week’s cheese was a very lucky find. With Friday approaching and a fromage-less fridge, I braved the cheese counter at my local supermarket to see if I could find anything of interest. Apart from the usual continental suspects and a handful of decent territorials, there is usually very little to be found there, unless you like your cheese soused in some dodgy booze flavouring or tasting of jalfrezi (and sorry if it makes me a cheese snob of the worst kind but I just don’t).
My heart was beating with fear and trepidation at the sight of all the shrink-wrapping when I noticed this week’s cheese nestling against the glass. I’d heard good things about Cornish Blue so snapped some up sharpish (much to the annoyance of the deli lady who was obviously in a big huff about the fact she had to cut into its virgin rind). But the big question was: what’s an artisan cheese like you doing in a joint like this?
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Possibly Poutine
Am I a food blogger? Well, I write about cheese which is, after all, one of the major food groups. I cook stuff and stick photographs up of each excruciating chopping, stirring, braising stage for all to see. So I guess I must be.
But on the other hand, some food bloggers always have beautiful photographs of perfectly cooked dishes quivering on vintage china with flowers in the background. They never seem to have disasters where their pie crust cracks down the middle or they leave a sauce simmering to go and break up a row about a mouth organ and come back to find it’s burnt to the bottom of the pan. I’m certainly not one of those food bloggers. And this post bears testimony to that. So before an angry hoard of Canadians takes up arms and heads for the suburbs of Tooting, look, I know it’s not worked out perfectly, okay?
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Parlick Fell
Today, I bring you a cheese born of long-ago love on the farm. Yes, yes, I know that I did cheesy romance on Valentine’s Day but when I read the family story behind today’s cheese, I got a little wibbly. First, let me set the scene a little with some Thomas Hardy (and for anyone who moans and wants to skip to the cheese part, I’m an English literature graduate, just count yourself lucky I don’t do this every week):
“They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield’s hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft arm.”
Phewee. (And at this point I should say that if you’re the person who came to my blog on Wednesday night having Googled ‘cheese soft porn’, the next bit of the blog is going to leave you sorely disappointed.) Onto the cheese; here it is in its ‘immaculate whiteness’, Parlick Fell:
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Beetroot, Ricotta and Rocket Tart
Anyone who read last Friday’s post will remember that I was in a grumpy, sorry-for-myself pizza-eating mood. It was therefore pizza that sprang to mind when I received some stunning yellow beetroot in my weekly veg box. Not only is it as pretty as sunshine it also has the advantage of not turning you into Lady Macbeth when you try and peel it or of causing alarm when you go to the toilet the next day (ah, come on, we’ve all done it). This photo doesn’t do it justice but here it is anyway with its traditional cousin.
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Dorstone
This was so nearly a post that didn’t happen. Work, travel, deadlines, the parental trauma that is creating a World Book Day costume (and a mighty fine cat-food-box-turned-croc’s-head it was too) and a loitering head-cold left me fit for nothing more than eating pizza horizontally. ‘Stuff it,’ I thought. ‘I’ll give it a miss. No-one’s going to weep because I don’t describe a cheese one week.’ But then, every time I opened the fridge door for more pizza, I saw this little stumpy cheese sitting there and I swear I started to feel sorry for it. And so I had to do it, pizza in hand.
And here is my cheesy tormentor, Dorstone:
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Yorkshire Curd Tart
Once more it’s time to venture into the highly-terrifying world of traditional recipes. As I said recently, when I wrote about Kleftiko, when you tackle a traditional recipe you can guarantee someone will always pop up and rubbish one of your ingredients or techniques as anathema to their grandmother’s way of doing things. But given that I’m half-Yorkshire genetically, I’m willing to take them on. (Yes, I use nutmeg! Sue me!)
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March’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Blog Challenge – Fresh Cheese
It’s March which over here in Blighty means it’s the start of Spring. Everyone is muttering ominously about snow but there are defiant little signs of life popping up everywhere. For instance, here are some tiny daffodils that managed to push their way through the cat poo in my garden; how cute are these:
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Coolea
I am ashamed to say this is the first Irish cheese to make it to the blog. When I decided to focus on ‘British’ cheeses, I wasn’t sure whether to include Irish; Ireland is, after all, a very separate country. I might just as well have included France or Papua New Guinea. I got myself in a right old pickle, trying to work out the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles (all completely different, since you ask). But there are so many great Irish cheeses with fascinating stories behind the people and landscapes that make them that I decided to settle on cheeses of the British Isles (a geographical term, not a political one, since you ask again). Plus, many of the Irish cheeses have won gongs at the British Cheese Awards, so that sealed it for me.
Phew, that was a hard-going intro, wasn’t it? Onto the cheese! Here is Coolea, a very Irish cheese (and if this picture doesn’t make you think of sunny days, I don’t know what will):
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Fromage Homage 