"She refused to be bored, chiefly because she wasn't boring." Zelda Fitzgerald

Sunday, February 6, 2011

The Cheese List Gets A Home

Cover of "Cheese Primer"Cover of Cheese Primer
The Great Cheese List that I blogged about recently has become a living thing with soul and a will. I started out with a vague list in my mind which morphed into a real, concrete list and then became a thing I shared with friends, a kind of culinary Bucket List curiosity. Ah, but now...now The Great Cheese List is a thing that I think about every time I find myself in the grocery store. I have perused the list so many times that the names of certain cheeses have begun to ring in my mind like mysterious musical notes, niggling  foodie terms that make me salivate. I have always had a friendly relationship with cheese but, now I find it is getting quite serious.

A and I are reading through Steve Jenkin's, Cheese Primer aloud in the evenings and we find ourselves driven ever higher in pursuit of our quesophilic aspirations. He describes ways to eat cheese, how incorporate it into breakfast, lunch and tea and how to know a good one when you find it. We sit snugly, by the fire, nodding like small cheese loving hobbits over his descriptions and suggestions...our eyes whirling in little spirals. The love of cheese has turned us into very dairy-centric folks.

I think part of our mutual attraction to cheese is literally in that dairy connection. When we married we were both big milk drinkers and we would sit down and drink tall, cold glasses together with fresh cookies and feel very chummy for it. These days, A is such a constrained little man and he has become so entirely calorically vigilant that we no longer share our love for a tall frothy glass of milk, he tells me he can't afford the calories. And honestly, I only drink one glass a day myself. But, then...there is cheese.
Italian cheeses.Image via Wikipedia

We have begun to eat cheese as a hobby. We both have copies of The Great Cheese List on our iPhones and we carry it around, bleeping back and forth through it as we lean over the brightly lit dairy cases as the cheese mongers watch us interestedly. We are the new breed of quesophile. We peruse our list while we pick out a cheese (or two or three!) and then we take it home and we're back on our phones, searching for information about the history and eating advise for the tender wheels and molten nuggets we've taken home. We are wired eaters.

And "the list" is no longer a slightly joke ridden, silly idea. It's a serious thing. We're going to eat all the cheese on that list or die trying. It's somehow important. And you can come along! In fact, you might even be able to make your own cheese journey faster, simpler and perhaps even more pleasant by following along as we lope through the list and continue our ever expanding tasting sessions. I've decided it's time for The List to have it's own tab here on the blog. From now on, if you look at the top of the site you will see it, sitting there, next to my poem collection and my about page and hopefully, it will continue to evolve...more and more fleshed out, more filled with descriptions and opinions and tips about eating everyone's favorite melty, oozy, salty, tangy treat. If you have a cheese I have to add....please do tell.

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