This week’s cheeses (yes, it’s a rare double-bill this week!) have had me thinking about what sort of cheese I’d like to be immortalised as. It’s a tricky one. Much as I adore blue cheese, its main characteristics are mould and stinkiness, which I’m not sure I’d like to be summed up by. Ditto smear-ripened cheese which is a bit of a smelly joke. Perhaps a farmhouse cheddar? But then that just brings up words like ‘earthy’ and ‘robust’ which would make me sound like a used tractor. Hmmmm… Anyway, republicans look away as this week I bring you The Duke and Duchess:
Tag Archives: blue cheese
Twice-Baked Hebridean Blue Soufflés
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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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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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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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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Burt’s Blue Cheese
I went to a reunion in Manchester recently – twenty ten years since we started university there, who would believe it? The height of the weekend’s debauchery was my friend’s husband getting thrown out of a pub for falling asleep because he’d been up with the kids since 5am so, hangover-free, we all decided to go for a walk into the city centre during the day. Once, a walk into Manchester would result in one of us getting our nose pierced in Affleck’s Palace (guilty), another gaining a tattoo from a dodgy bloke at the back of the Arndale Centre (not guilty) and purchasing a poster of either a) Pulp Fiction; b) the Blur dogtrack picture; or c) Magic Eye psychedelic cannabis leaves (guilty as charged on all counts). But gone are those days and so I dragged us all to Harvey Nicks to check out the deli counter. I was in search of a local cheese which I’d heard about last year, through Twitter, I think and – huzzah! – there it was:
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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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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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Nettle Gnocchi with Cashel Blue Sauce
I seem to have gone a bit forage crazy, or as crazy as you can when you live in the proverbial concrete jungle. One plant that isn’t fussy about the air quality or proximity to rolling hills is nettles (although I read that if you live in the US, you have to buy them from special hippy stores – is that really right, Stateside folks?) I tried the blue cheese and nettle combination last year when I made Blue Cheese and Nettle Drop Scones and it was surprisingly good; the herbal, slightly fizzy taste of the nettles complementing the tang of the blue cheese.
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April’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Challenge Round-Up – Blue Cheese
Taste is a funny old thing. It’s easy to assume that if you love something with a passion that everyone else does too. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. Children are a prime example: you think that your children are inestimably clever and funny but the person sitting next to you on the train for two hours thinks they are badly-behaved and precocious. And so it seems to be with blue cheese. I adore it and my fridge is never without a hunk. We consume kilos of the stuff and even the precocious children like it. So this month it was a shock to discover that lots of people don’t like blue cheese. Not only were there less recipes than usual but many people prefaced their blog post with ‘I don’t like blue cheese but…’ Nevertheless, several people gamely overcame their prejudices to cook up something lovely.
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Fromage Homage 