When tackling any cheeseboard, it makes sense to start with the less, ahem, feisty characters. So it is that, in breaking open the Pong English Selection Box, Cerney Ash was first on the cracker, given that its stable-mates are a mature Cheddar, a Stilton and Stinking Bishop itself.
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Last weekend saw us on a camping trip, as ever featuring limited sleep, the ever-present threat of rain and the usual one in ten odds of vomiting (it wasn’t us this time). In amongst this unalloyed pleasure, we also got to enjoy the beauty of the New Forest. Grazing ponies (and some donks with a deathwish), scrub and furze and babbling brooks, perfect for paddling. Striking and scenic but not, at first glance, obvious cheese country. However, this week’s cheese hails from just up the road from our buffeted tent:
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I’d had my eye on this recipe for the best part of a year, since seeing a local wall festooned with nasturtium flowers last summer. I’d read about them being edible with a slightly peppery taste and thought that they would pair beautifully with goat’s cheese. For weeks I staked the house out, wondering if I could just nab half a dozen or if they’d think I was a lunatic if I knocked on the door and asked for a bunch. And then, the season was over, the moment passed. So this spring I bought a packet, sowed them and waited for them to do their thing.
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The clocks going forward last weekend mean several things. First is that my children will wake up absurdly early, full of vim and vigour, at a time fit for only dairy farmers and red-eye pilots. Another is that an increase in warmth and daylight will start to frisk up my tastebuds. Cravings for cheese on toast and chunks of Stilton wane in favour of something a wee bit fresher and lighter. Coincidentally this is the season when fresh goat and sheep’s cheeses start to appear after a winter break; so either my tastebuds are works of evolutionary genius, perfectly in tune with nature’s cycles, or else I’ve been reading too many spring recipes in the Waitrose magazine. Either way, it was a goat’s cheese that took my fancy on a recent spending spree in Neal’s Yard Dairy and very seasonally cheeseonal Sleightlett is too.
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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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Fromage Homage 