A couple of weeks ago I was looking at some one's blog and they had a 'word cloud'...it's the collection of words that are most used, with the most popular being biggest...so I thought it would be nice to have...but I added the wrong thing so now it's more complicated to post comments on my blog...so sorry about that and thank you for persisting...
Last night I went to a tutored cheese tasting. Which seems very pretentious, but was a lot of fun, even if the room seemed to be full of fathers with their daughters. Sweet.
Anyway, the evening was run by Neal's Yard Dairy, and was an opportunity to find out all about mountain cheeses. Evidently, Lincolnshire is full of mountains because Lincolnshire Poacher was one of the ten we got to try....our tutor explained it was because the Simon and Tim Jones who make it were tutored by a Scot from the Highlands, who learnt his cheese making skills in the French mountains before moving to Wales to carry out his business. Contrived was not the word....and I didn't much enjoy it either.
I learnt many things - including that even dairy farming involves slaughter...after all you can't milk a boy calf. Better to use it for veal. And rennet, which is used in cheesemaking) can only be extracted from the calf's fourth stomach once it has been killed. So if I ever become vegetarian, I may have to go the whole way and just eat fruit....
Favourites from the evening were Beaufort Alpage and Mont D'Or, which was melted in the oven before it was served. Low lights were Salers de Buron and Grand Jura. Our tutor rattled on for a good couple of hours, and was brilliantly interesting, but I suspect that more has been forgotten than remembered There was lots of red and white wine to wash it down with, and that's probably a good thing because my arteries are no doubt very clogged this morning. I took home a goody bag of uneaten cheese for the boy...and I have no doubt it will be all snaffled by the time I get home from the office tonight. May be on health grounds that's a good thing....