Given that this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge is the very British Cheddar, it seems only right that I should conduct extensive research by stuffing my face with as many quality farmhouse Cheddars as I can lay my hands on. The first up for tasting is Montgomery’s Cheddar:
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Feta cheese was on the table for August’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Challenge – and with it the challenge to prove that it’s more than just a salad cheese (although I still got myself a good-natured ticking off from a Greek chap annoyed that I had bracketed it with ‘other salad-style cheeses’ so I hoped that we could do it justice!)
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Macaroni Cheese – or Mac ‘n’ Cheese as it’s now known – seems to be everywhere these days. Mac ‘n’ Cheese restaurants, Mac ‘n’ Cheese vans, Mac ‘n’ Cheese pop-up stalls…you can’t move for slipping on some of the gloopy stuff.
As you may have gathered, I don’t get it. For me, it’s nursery food. Bland, boring and not requiring teeth (yes, yes, I can hear an army of Mac fans rising up against me in ire). I like pasta and I like cheese but Macaroni Cheese, well, it’s lacking something (e.g. onions, tomatoes, herbs, chorizo…you get the picture). So when my usually discerning friend Nat came back from a holiday in Barbados raving about the local macaroni cheese dish, I had to investigate further.
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It’s August 8th! Happy Staffordshire Oatcake Day! I’ll bet you’ve all been drooling in anticipation of this one, cheese-graters at the ready, haven’t you? No? No. Well, I guess that’s because no-one outside of Staffordshire has heard of this mighty regional delicacy. In truth, few people outside of Staffordshire seem to have heard of Staffordshire, never mind its lovely oatcakes; I say this as someone who has spent the many years since leaving for university repeating the mantra, ‘It’s between Birmingham and Manchester…have you been to Alton Towers?’ And I can go to the supermarket and buy French sticks, Indian naan breads, Italian focaccias, German rye bread…but can I get me an oatcake south of Tamworth? No, sirree.
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Soft goat’s cheese was the choice for July’s Cheese, Please Recipe Challenge; a lovely, summery cheese light enough to grace a salad if the sun deigns to comes out or equally hold its own as part of a comforting casserole whilst we watch the driving rain pelt down. The chèvre gauntlet was laid down but who would come to the party…?
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I came across a great recipe challenge recently on Belleau Kitchen. Geared around choosing a recipe at random from your stash of cookbooks (hence called ‘Random Recipes’) it seemed a fab idea. I’ve got a serious cookbook addiction but, like a lot of people, most of the time I cook from half a dozen favourites whilst the rest gather dust. Challenge yourself, I thought. So far, so good.
My first problem was the cheesy nature of my blog. I didn’t want to cheat but equally a recipe for Thai-marinated pork thighs or somesuch was going to look a bit out of place (and I wasn’t sure I could get away with just sprinkling a bit of parmesan on the top). The rules said if I chose a recipe I’d already cooked I could go to the next page, so I thought I’d just keep going until I found a cheesy one (apologies Belleau Kitchen for the complete mangling of your rules). I left out all the obvious non-cheese contenders (sorry Gok Wan) and made my selection and – huzzah! – Rick Stein’s Baked Cheese, Ham and Spinach Pancakes it was! Without a word of a lie, I didn’t even have to cheat.
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I love my local shop but do think they should change their strapline to ‘Let Us Surprise You!’ The surprise being that they have run out of semi-skimmed milk but do have preserved lemons or have no fish whatsoever but shelves full of venison sausages. And so it was that earlier in the week I went in to buy some spring onions and left with a packet of samphire. (And no, I don’t live in some very chi-chi area of London where we all breakfast on crayfish and acai berries, just in case that’s what you’re thinking; I just have a weird, if rather lovely, local shop.)
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Mexico was the first holiday that the Other Half and I went on together. He remembers it mainly as two weeks of ensuring ready access to a lavatory but my stomach is made of famously strong stuff and so I have happy memories of fresh guacamole and salsa, bursting with chillies and lime, fish grilled on the beach, scrambled eggs with chilli and the famous mole poblano sauce. Often abbreviated to ‘the one with chilli and chocolate’, there’s so much more to this smoky, rich sauce (which is hardly surprising when you look at the long list of ingredients). Traditionally served over meat, especially turkey, in this recipe it pairs well with the salty, nutty Cheshire cheese.
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Much of this blog so far seems to have seen me wistfully wandering country lanes in a fog of elderflowers and bluebells. But the truth of it is that I live in the city, where urbanity meets suburbia. It’s not very pretty and sometimes it’s a bit noisy and scary. But in just a ten minute walk, the culinary world is at my fingertips. From kaffir lime leaves to mango powder, salt-fish to kecap manis, I can buy pretty much any ingredient from around the world. And above all, I can eat curry. In the space of a mile I can eat Sri Lankan curry, Pakistani curry, Indian curry, Caribbean curry, Nepalese curry, Bangladeshi curry. It’s fair to say if I’m not cooking with cheese, I’m cooking a curry. But this is a blog about cheese. Cheese and curry?
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Arancini roughly translates from Italian as ‘little oranges’ which is what these little stuffed rice balls resemble. Traditionally eaten in Sicily, arancini are balls of sticky rice, stuffed with fillings such as ragù, cheese or vegetables and then coated in breadcrumbs and fried.
It doesn’t seem to matter how much weighing and measuring I do when I cook risotto, I still end up with enough to feed an advancing army. I also have a violent aversion to defrosted risotto; there’s something just so soggy and sad about it. So when my latest batch of squash risotto resulted in a spectacular surplus even by my standards it seemed an ideal opportunity to make arancini and marry the sweetness of the squash to the sharpness of a blue cheese stuffing. This recipe will make about 20-25 balls.
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Fromage Homage 