Gingerbread trailer

This year's showpiece: the Gingerbread Trailer. I was going to make a castle, but then I said something about how a trashy gingerbread house would be funny, and well, humor won out.



- Posted from my iPhone

Glorious cheese!!

For Christmas I got a gift card to Cowgirl Creamery-- how well do my friends know me?

So on the first day when I had no projects due, no classes to teach or rehearsals to run, no work to do--guess where you can find me??


Like kids in a candy store, we sampled everything they'd let us try. Uh-huh.

"We really like cheese " I confide to the guy.

"Yeah, I know," he replies.

And it briefly runs through my mind that they might have a picture of me up on the wall in the back labelled "Easy Cheese Mark. "




Our take: a terrific soft Appalachian, a nutty Tarentais with little crystalline bursts in every bite, a gooey perfectly ripe Ardrahan-- no bitterness to the washes rind, just umami goodness-- and a Comte made from summer milk, affined by Jean d'Alos. The latter was so good I could've taken that whole giant wheel.

Dinner is served.

- Posted from my iPhone

Cheese kitty likes Brun de Noix

Wow, it's been a while since I posted to my blog! Yikes! Not that we haven't been eating of course, but I haven't been good about posting where we've been and what we've had. There's a fat folder full of yummy pics, and I'll try to get up to date, but in the mean time, I'm happy to report that the Cheese Kitty, who has been a little under the weather in the last year, is on the mend, gaining weight and up to his old kitty tricks.

Seen here with the French raw cow's milk cheese Brun de Noix. It's a semi-soft cheese, washed in Nocino, a green walnut liqueur. Nope, I had never heard of it either, but David Lebovitz had a nice recipe posted on his blog here. The flavor of the cheese is absolutely great, nutty with a slight bitterness, although I didn't find that off-putting at all. It's raw, so it's definitely... fragrant, but as My Omnivore put it, "this could supplant Comté as my favorite 'everyday eating' cheese."

I haven't seen it in many places, but they had it at our trusty Cheese Plus, where the pushers know to pull out their wackiest cheeses as soon as they spot us.