Down in the West Country recently, I found myself with a large amount of Barber’s Cheddar cheese (there’s a story behind this but that’s for another time). I’ve written about their cheese before here: not only do they make a really good block Cheddar, they are also the oldest Cheddar-maker in the world and the guardians of Britain’s traditional starter cultures, which is a pretty big deal for many of our farmhouse cheese-makers.
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There are bus stops that are bigger than my back garden but we make the best of it and at this time of year both flowers and vegetables are starting to have a stretch and a yawn in preparation for the big summer show-off. The herbs, however, are already lush and fragrant and so served as the perfect inspiration for this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge.
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Seasonal food was in abundance this month as bloggers paired cheese with everything from asparagus from England to corn in the USA. Sweet, savoury, spicy and smoky all made an appearance in the recipes, as did cheeses from paneer to Cheddar, blue cheese and cream cheese. So, without further ado, here are May’s seasonal, cheeseonal recipes:
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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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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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It’s May Day this week which has, it turns out, more associations with cheese than you can shake a Morris dancer’s jingly-jangly stick at. Sharing a lineage with the ancient Celtic and Gaelic festivals of Bealltainn, the date traditionally marked the start of the summer season. Cows and sheep were taken up to graze the fresh pastures and milking started again (milking was a ‘May to Michaelmas’ affair back in the seasonal mists of time). Finally the ‘white meats’ (milk, butter and cheese) were back on the menu following the lean winter months.
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You can’t move in the food blogosphere at this time of year for wild garlic. I even saw someone on Twitter refer to it as a ‘wild garlic willy-waving contest’ the other day, which did make me titter. But, nevertheless, I was determined to find me some and pair it with some cheese. I’d heard rumours that there was a patch of wild garlic in our local woods (and when I say ‘woods’ please do not imagine anything expansive; Robin Hood would have lasted about ten minutes before he was either discovered or one of the dog-sized rats that live in there ate him alive). But still, it’s a pretty enough spot for SW17.
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It was always going to be hard to follow March’s home-made cheese spectacular. I thought about taking advantage of today’s date and asking fellow bloggers to perhaps milk a pet for cheese-making purposes or cook up a dish specifically with Casu Marzu (more popularly known as Sardinian Maggot’s Cheese). But in the end I decided to plump for something more inclusive – because everyone loves blue cheese, right?
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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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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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Fromage Homage 