welcome to date night

No sitter? No problem.

We enjoyed a quality family meal, starting with pinot noir and artisanal cheese from Venissimo. While we ate manchego, brie, cheddar, gouda, and pecorino, Seba ate his hands. And the velcro thing on the tabbies book.

After putting Seba to bed, we had tiny sandwiches (baguettes with leftover thinly sliced mustard and summer savory pork and creamed chard).

For dessert: Eclipse Chocolat salted caramels and hand-made truffles.

After preparing bottles for the night and then pumping, I'm headed to bed. At 9:15 p.m. on a Friday. : /

quotable

"God defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest he transforms me to a piece of cheese." - William Shakespeare

so many sheep, so little time

Yesterday, Leo and I caught Cook's Corner (America's Test Kitchen) on KPBS during brunch. The episode featured oven-baked mac and cheese and kept us enthralled as we watched the process of making the perfectly creamy entree.

Today, we read about the finer points of a sheep's milk gouda and enjoyed some grated gruyere and asiago on our eggs. So it's only fitting that I should stumble across this article this afternoon.

And, yes. They are all my favorites.

Explorer: Nibbling Through Spain’s Cheese Country
By DANIELLE PERGAMENT
Published: November 23, 2008

THE only words of caution were, “Just be careful you don’t wake up the bats.” I was in a pitch-black cave following a 44-year-old woman wearing tight jeans and a small light strapped to her forehead. While my eyes refused to adjust to the blackness, I could hear thousands — O.K., dozens — of little bat bodies shifting in slumber inches above my head. At last, we arrived.

“These are my babies,” said my guide, sweeping her arm toward a few hundred small wheels of hard, blue cheese resting on a stack of shelves. “You would like to try?”

Sure, great, now let’s get out of here.

We were in Asturias, a sliver of northern Spain that rests on the Bay of Biscay, and I had been drawn there by the region’s tagline: “The Land of Cheese.” I am, by any measure, a cheese person. While other people go to Tuscany for brunello or the Pacific Northwest for salmon, I follow cheese. Not just any fromage. I want the stuff I can’t get at home, the magic recipes that seduced the palates of the ancient Romans, the sharp ones, the stinky ones, the delicate artisanal ones that taste like little white flowers. When I found out there was a place in the world called the Land of Cheese, it was like the great cheese mothership calling me home.

My pilgrimage had led me to the bat cave last September where I was following Raquel Viejo, a local woman whose family has lived in Asturias for generations. The specialty of the region — and what was stored on those shelves — is Cabrales, a blue cow’s cheese named after the town in Asturias where it was first made. We were in the foothills of Picos de Europa, where everything is vertical: the sheer mountain faces, the steep pine trees, the skinny roads dotted with tiny cars nervously hugging the shoulders, flocks of sheep perched on the rocky lands, lone goats standing expertly on their hind legs munching from a thicket of low-hanging leaves, a cacophony of cowbells and beams of sunlight warming it all. Cheese country.

There are thousands of caves hidden in the hills here, and for centuries residents have been using them to age cheese. The specifics of each brand of cheese in various regions of Spain are regulated by a denomination of origin, or D.O., and Cabrales’s says it must be stored in cavelike conditions for at least two months so the good bacteria can kill off the bad. But recently, the craft of making Cabrales has suffered “because so many young people are leaving Asturias,” said Ms. Viejo.

A few years ago, the Spanish government created new regulations for the cheese makers in this area. Some of the old methods, like straining the milk with horsehair sieves, were done away with in favor of more modern technology, like metal strainers and mechanical devices. But the most important requirements — the dairy breed, the aging process, the lack of pasteurization — remain.

Back in her home, amid the intoxicating (some might say rancid) smell of sour milk, I tasted a slice of Ms. Viejo’s cheese, named José Antonio Bueno García after her husband. It was drier and saltier than the blues I was used to, but it didn’t taste overly blue, as some softer cheeses can. Delicious, but I couldn’t shake the image of the bats taking a few nibbles. (Do bats even eat cheese?) So my search continued.

Through another farmer in the area, I tracked down a cheesemaker a few villages over who was famous for resisting modernity. This sounded promising. Oliva Peláez Amieva, a squat woman with a wrinkled face, greeted me outside her small stone house in a purple muumuu and clogs.

“You can tell how long a family has lived here by how they make cheese,” said Ms. Amieva, who has been at it for 60 years. Her cheese isn’t Cabrales because she ignores the D.O. guidelines; in fact, it doesn’t have a name. She only makes about 200 wheels a year and most of it goes to friends and family members. For the moment, I was in the inner circle.

“The health department wants me to put in all sorts of regulations, but it wouldn’t be as good,” says Ms. Amieva, 70. “I used to sell it at the market, but I got in trouble with the police.”

Her cheese was a wonderfully sharp, dry, crumbly blend of goat and sheep milk that tasted slightly of salt and soil. And it’s labor intensive. Without modern equipment, all of Ms. Amieva’s animals are milked by hand. Once the cheese is poured into molds, she rubs each mound with salt and turns it over daily to ensure that it ages evenly; by the end, over 90 percent of the original milk volume is gone.

This isolated nook of the country has spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of artisanal cheese makers for generations. The cheese is cruder than French fromage and not as recognizable as Italian counterparts, but here, each wheel is as idiosyncratic as the person who makes it. The cheese of northern Spain is, like the land that produces it, rough, coarse and sharp, and there’s no way to taste it without traveling there.

I worked my way through a quarter of a wheel as we sat in Ms. Amieva’s modest living room, and realized, too late, that the cheese was so dry, my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Ms. Amieva offered me homemade cider, the gently effervescent, lightly alcoholic beverage that always accompanies a piece of cheese in this area. It was the perfectly sweet balance to her defiantly unnamed snack.

“The reason my cheese is so delicious,” said Ms. Amieva, without a trace of modesty, “is my hands.” She turned her meaty, callused palms over for inspection. “The natural bacteria in my skin makes the cheese more flavorful.”

To travel from village to village is to string together a perpetual cheese-and-cider festival, each farming community fiercely proud of its own, certain its concoctions are the best. Several people asked me if I thought Cabrales was superior to Basque cheese. The correct answer, of course, is “Of course.” But I had never tried Cabrales’s rival, and I was getting curious, so I steadily made my way east, until finally I crossed over into Basque country.

The first thing you notice about Basque country is that the cars all have the same bumper sticker: a cute, puffy sheep, who is the symbol of the region. Again, a very promising sign.

“You won’t find anyone here who likes Cabrales,” said Patxi Baskaran, a farmer who lives in the hills not far from Guernica (Gernika to Basques), the town infamously bombed by the Nazis in 1937. He was speaking with disdain about rival Asturias that I soon discovered was common among the Basques. Mr. Baskaran is a tall, lively man with a red face who has a way of yelling everything he says. His family has been making the same cheese for over a century on his farm. He learned the method from his father, but in order to stay competitive, Mr. Baskaran has had to teach himself how to work with modern equipment.

Mr. Baskaran makes Idiazábal, a hard sheep’s cheese with a strong, earthy flavor. Idiazábal is to Basque country what Cabrales is to Asturias — that is, there are thousands of small-scale farmers who think they make this delicious and individualistic cheese the best. And the only way to know for sure is to nibble your way through the wooded terrain of Basque country.

Mr. Baskaran was quick to tell me that he didn’t deserve credit, his sheep did. Soon it was time to meet the flock. He drove his Toyota 4runner up a deathly steep dirt road that led us above the clouds. Baht, the border collie, jumped out the window and rounded up the sheep for inspection, and hundreds of black faces paused momentarily before resuming their dinner of wild flowers. We stood on the summit of the mountain in the damp, white air, jagged cliffs looming like giant shark fins piercing the fog. “Big farms don’t make cheese like we do in Basque country because the sheep eat grains and they’re more stressed, so the milk is weak,” he said. “My sheep live peaceful lives.”

BEFORE I left Basque country, I met the least stressed sheep in all of Spain. Just west of San Sebastián, above the small town of Zumaia, there were hundreds of the puffy, four-legged cheese makers mowing a verdant field, mouthful by mouthful. They had trees for shade, a brook for water breaks, and 30 acres overlooking the dark, roiling Atlantic.

“My sheep live better than I do,” said the owner of Agerre Berri farm, José Manuel Etxberria, echoing a common sentiment in Basque country. Mr. Etxberria is 39 years old, with light eyes and skin browned from a lifetime outside. “They live very calm — they have a nice view of the ocean. In Basque, we say farmers love their sheep more than they love their women.”

And they make the cheese to prove it. Mr. Etxberria’s version, Itxas Egi, is a hard sheep’s variety with a sharp bite and the fragrant taste of clovers — strong, milky and grassy. This, he claims, is his secret ingredient: Keep the sheep happy eating nothing but sweet green grass and they will return the favor with delicious cheese “that goes perfectly with a glass of red wine and a beautiful girl.”

So did I ever find the world’s best cheese? Mr. Etxberria’s came awfully close, but I had to stop short of calling it perfect because of something he said.

“Cheese is like sheep; they all have a different personality,” said Mr. Etxberria, who has actually named most of his sheep. “And I could never choose my favorite sheep. They are all my favorites.”

HAPPY SHEEP

The best way to get to cheese country from New York is to fly into San Sebastián. A recent online search found tickets around $500 on Continental and Iberian Airlines (both stop in Madrid). From San Sebastián, rent a car (www.avis.com; www.hertz.com) and drive east on the coast to any of the seaside towns in Asturias — Llanes, Ribadesella, Caravia or Lastres.

All have affordable hotels and great cheese shops. Try Hotel Sablon (34-985-401-987; www.hotelsablon.com) or El Habana (34-985-402-526; www.elhabana.net), two cozy inns just outside Llanes. Hotel Sablon closes Dec. 14 to Feb.2; El Habana is closed until March 14. Doubles start at 42 and 118 euros, respectively. Casa Gaspar (Calle de López Muñiz, 6; 34-985-860-676) is a good restaurant in Ribadesella. To buy cheese in Llanes, visit Casa Buj (Calle Mercaderes, 13; 34-985-401-072; www.casabuj.com).

In Basque country, the lovely Hotel Iturregi (34-943-89-61-34; www.hoteliturregi.com) is in Getaria. High-season doubles start at 230 euros. Aitor Lasa (Calle Aldamar, 12, San Sebastián; 34-943-430-354) is a good local cheese shop.

you had me at "cheese"

"Molten cheese" may just be the best word pairing in the English language. I'm gonna have to make fondue. Soon.

A Good Appetite: A Little Nostalgia, a Long Fork and Lots of Cheese
January 23, 2008
By MELISSA CLARK

ONE chilly afternoon, my mother dropped by with a small shopping bag filled with fondue forks.

“I thought you might find a use for these,” she said before rushing out the door.

But wait, I called after her, what happened to the fondue pot?

“Oh, I used it to plant an amaryllis,” she said.

I think she meant for me to use the forks for tasks like removing the last olive from a tall, narrow jar, or spearing a stray cherry tomato that had rolled onto the oven floor.

But I had another idea. Why not make fondue?

Although I hadn’t made fondue since graduate school, when I lived with a friend and her parents’ vintage fondue pot, I remembered the recipe being as simple as a toasted cheese sandwich, but more satisfying. After all, be it an oozing wedge of baked Camembert, the puddles of mozzarella atop a pizza, or a bubbling Welsh rabbit, few foods are as compelling as melted cheese.

But did fondue always have to be the centerpiece of what inevitably comes off as an I Love the ’70s theme party? What if I wanted to make fondue for two? Would we have to wear bell-bottoms?

And, most pressingly, could I substitute another pot for the one currently housing my mother’s flowering plant?

I called Terrance Brennan, the chef at Artisanal, where fondue is on the menu year-round. He was reassuring. “You can use any pot for fondue, as long as you eat it fast enough, before it gets cold and hard,” he told me.

I told him I doubted that would be a problem. Besides, a heavy, enamel-lined cast-iron pot, like the ones at Artisanal, would retain heat far longer than my mother’s lightweight fondue pot, giving me plenty of time to devour a fittingly gluttonous portion before the melted cheese lost its allure.

Mr. Brennan assured me that almost any cheese could work in a fondue. After all, fondue isn’t one particular recipe. I’ve seen it on menus to describe any number of preparations, including a lush blanket coating snails at Anthos and a thick sauce for apple salad at One Sixtyblue in Chicago.

As long as it is primarily made from copious quantities of melted cheese (the word fondue comes from the French fondre, to melt), then, at least to me, it qualifies.

But I did want to start with something fairly classic, so I searched my shelves for a Swiss cookbook. I eventually came across a chapter on Switzerland in a 1970 Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook titled “A Quintet of Cuisines,” a wide-ranging farrago that juxtaposed chapters on Bulgaria, Poland and all of North Africa.

Its fondue recipe called for an equal amount of Gruyère cheese, for its depth of flavor, and Emmenthaler, for its supple texture; a shot of kirsch, for its cherry aroma and alcoholic oomph; and a little garlic, for bite.

The recipe came with a warning: do not drink any cold beverages with fondue, or the cheese will ball up and wreak havoc on your intestines.

The information sounded suspect. So I called my Swiss informant in New York, Ralf Kuettel. At his restaurant, Trestle on Tenth, one can order pizokel, traditional Swiss dumplings, and any of 10 Swiss wines, but conspicuously not fondue. “I’m trying to avoid the stereotype,” he explained.

And what about that ban on cold liquids?

“That’s what people always say, but then, most people drink fairly cold white wine with fondue, so it’s a dish that’s full of contradictions,” he said, adding that he never encountered any intestinal distress from the combination.

He approved of the recipe, though. So that night I made it in my trusty cast-iron Dutch oven. It took all of 15 minutes, and emerged as magnificently creamy, smooth and velvety as custard, but with a funky, deep flavor that dazzlingly enriched anything I dunked in the pot: bread cubes, apple slices, clementine sections, nuggets of salami, pretzels, tofu. It was even marvelous spooned onto a romaine lettuce salad in place of dressing.

When the cheese started to cool and congeal, which took a good 30 minutes, all I did was stick it back on the stove, stirring until runny.

Although I had gobbled the better part of a fondue dish meant for four, days later I was ready for another. A friend was coming to dinner, and I couldn’t think of a simpler or more inviting dish to serve on a winter night.

This time I used a good extra-sharp Cheddar cheese and stirred in a little Irish whiskey in place of the kirsch. We devoured it in minutes, and my friend didn’t even notice the absence of a Sterno can beneath the pot.

When the pot was nearly empty, I put it on the stove to brown the thin layer of cheese that remained. It became as crisp and salty as a potato chip. Called la religieuse, according to my multi-culti sourcebook, it made an appropriately miraculous finale. My friend was unduly awed by my culinary prowess; I never mentioned that fondue was one of the easiest company dishes I’d made.

After those accolades, I realized that most people are charmed by a vat of gushing, aromatic cheese. Fondue became my go-to dinner party hors d’oeuvre, and I tried to concoct every possible combination.

I played with whatever was left over in the cheese drawer, and it was all divine. I used a port wine once instead of a white to make a delectable, shockingly purple rendition. Beer, dry red wine and cream also worked as the liquid component. I gleefully tossed in herbs and extra garlic, fennel seeds and cumin, caramelized onions, chipotle chilies, chopped pickle.

Remembering that I once dined on an extraordinary Stilton and Sauternes fondue at Artisanal, I made a variation with Passito di Pantelleria and Gorgonzola. I even reached out to fondue’s molten sisters and whipped up a chorizo-laden queso fundido and an elegant white-truffle-oil-suffused fonduta with a good, pungent fontina. It seemed I couldn’t fail.

Until the day I did. I watched, horrified, as a mass of gorgeously nutty, aged Gouda seized and curdled into a stringy, unappetizing mass. What had gone wrong? I phoned the cheese maven Max McCalman, an author of books on cheese and a consultant to Artisanal.

He wasn’t surprised. Crumbly, dry cheeses don’t melt as readily as smooth, semifirm ones, he said. But, he added, a little bit of acid, like a high acid wine or lemon juice, will do wonders in smoothing out intractable curds.

So I gave Gouda another try, this time using a two-year-old chunk (the first one had been aged for three years) and a bright, high acid wine. I also threw in some caraway seeds because I love few things more than melted Gouda on rye.

Yet again, the fondue gods were on my side. It was bubbling perfection: rich, pungent, resinous from the caraway and buttery from the runny cheese.

As I was lapping up the last few drops, my mother called. Her amaryllis died. Did I want the fondue pot?

I thought about it for a minute, then declined. I had everything I needed already here.

cheesus h. christ

The English are just as crazy about cheese as their cheese-eating surrender monkey cousins across the Channel. And if you know me, you know better than to get between me and my fromage.

But this is just bizarre — the culture that brought us cheese enthusiasts Wallace & Gromit now has a Web site focused on a 44-pound round of cheddar that gets fan mail. Cue Nero ...

Steve Forrest for The New York Times

Tom Calver, of Westcombe, England, has installed a Webcam to allow viewers to watch his cheese mature. Waiting for Gouda? Forget it: it’s all cheddar, all the time.
Paint Drying? Sorry, Wrong Link. This Is Cheddarvision.
By SARAH LYALL
Published: April 17, 2007

WESTCOMBE, England, April 10 — The cruel randomness of celebrity became clear to Tom Calver in February, when the cheese got a romantic Valentine in the mail and he did not.

The home of the celebrity cheese in Westcombe is a working farm.

“What has he done?” Mr. Calver asked of the cheese in question, a 44-pound round of cheddar currently maturing on his farm in this Somerset hamlet. (Mr. Calver’s farm, not the cheese’s.) “He’s just sat there and got moldy.”

But in common with other instant media sensations and members of the world’s ditzerati, the cheddar has not been impeded in its rise to fame by the modest nature of its accomplishments. As the star of Cheddar-vision TV, a Web site that carries live images of its life on a shelf (www.cheddarvision.tv), the cheese has been viewed so far more than 900,000 times.

“It seems to have engaged many people who might not otherwise have bothered to engage with cheesemaking,” said Dom Lane, a spokesman for West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, of which Mr. Calver is a member.

Mr. Lane helped set up the Webcam in December, when the cheese was made, beginning as milk from Mr. Calver’s herd of Friesian-Holstein cows and then progressing through the standard curds (and whey) phase on its path to becoming a hunk of cheddar. It is to remain on the shelf until December, when, fully mature, it is to be sold for charity.

“We were thinking, ‘How can we demonstrate to people just how long it takes to make a really good cheddar?’ ” Mr. Lane said. “And then we thought: ‘Let’s film it from start to finish. That’s really funny because there’s nothing to see.’ ”

Quite. The cheddar is not busy. It just sits there in a dank, climate-and-humidity controlled cheese-ripening warehouse, subtly aging with hundreds of other cheeses. Once a week a man named Gary, Mr. Calver’s cheese-turner, comes in and turns it to redistribute the moisture within. Compared with the cheese-cam, the old Yule Log on television was a roiling hotbed of nonstop commotion.

As befits an inert object of obsession, the cheese has become a blank slate upon which admirers can express their passions and idiosyncrasies. Poems and songs have been written about it. It has been invited to a wedding. At Easter, it received an anonymous gift of chocolate and decorative chicks.

E-mail correspondents have engaged in a lively debate about the metaphysical significance of the cheese’s mold patterns. From the United States, a teacher announced that his class had set up a wall of cheese, where students could post photographs of the cheese “in various states of rotation.”

Cheddarvision is only the latest boring Internet Webcam to randomly seize the public’s imagination, here in a country with an apparently unparalleled ability to produce them.

The ur-site was probably the one that showed a coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab in 1991. First displayed on the internal network as a way to show lab workers when the coffee was ready so they would not have to make fruitless journeys to the coffee machine, the site went global in 1993. It had more than two million visitors before being switched off in 2001.

Other dull British sites, helpfully compiled by Oliver Burkeman in a recent article in The Guardian, include one that shows nothing happening on a side street of Neilston, a suburban village near Glasgow. Another one (now defunct) showed a pile of compost in Sussex.

“It’s possible that you watched the compost decompose with a deep appreciation for the never-ending natural cycles of life and death,” Mr. Burkeman wrote. “Then again, maybe you were just bored.”

Back here in Westcombe, Mr. Calver denies that his cheese is boring. “The mold is growing,” he said. “Microscopically, you would see a lot of action.”

In fact, a time-release film of the cheese shows the effects of age on its person, as it progresses inexorably from young and smooth to old, veiny and mottled. Seeing the film is a poignant reminder of the ravages of time, similar in effect to watching, say, all the movies of Robert Redford or Nick Nolte in quick chronological succession.

Mr. Calver tasted the cheese in March, on the same day he graded it. (It will be graded twice more, at three-month intervals.) He has high hopes for it, but it is not the only cheese in his life.

“Obviously, I feel quite a lot for all the cheeses,” he said. “It’s like having lots of children. You can’t show one more affection than the others.”

The Web site is taking submissions for its name-the-cheese contest. Mr. Calver’s suggestion is “Tom’s Cheese,” but other possibilities include “Wedginald” and “Cheesus.”

As befitting a celebrity, the cheese has its own page on MySpace.com, where we learn that it is a Capricorn, that it is not interested in having children and that it has 521 friends.

Mr. Calver is not quite sure why anyone would want to watch his cheese, although he said it might have something to do with the frenetic and provisional nature of life today.

“It’s a security,” he said. “It’s something that’s there 24 hours a day. I heard of someone who said they looked at it before bed and found it a nice, comforting thing. You should really talk to a psychologist.”