66 posts from 2007

Tonight's Cheesetique course was on holiday entertaining. The lecture portion focused on tips for creating the perfect party cheese platter. Some useful tips:

• For appetizer or after dinner, serve 3-4 ounces per person; for the main course, 5-6 ounces per person.
• Variety is good, but include one cheese everyone will love and one more adventerous sweet or salty cheese.
• Always let the cheeses sit at room temperature for 1-2 hours before serving, and provide a knife for each cheese to avoid mixing flavors.

We then tasted the ten cheeses pictured, a range of sweet and savory festive cheeses. I tend to like my cheese to taste like cheese, so some of these were trying too hard for my liking. But, the goal was to present crowd-pleasing options, and most of these were inoffensive and would appeal to cheese newbies. My favorites:

• Saint Julien with Walnut (cow, France) - looks like layer cake, luscious and creamy, sweet with a walnut layer. Great for people who aren't into stinky cheese, this is incredibly mild.
• La Leyenda Brandy Cheese (raw sheep, Spain) - A manchego-style aged cheese wrapped in herbs and soaked in Solera Brandy. Grassy and flavorful.
• Boschetto al Tartufo (sheep & cow, Italy) - Flavored with white truffle shavings, this is Incredibly earthy, creamy, delicate and fragrant.

The bottom right cheese was a Royal Windsor from England. The pink layers are the Elderberry Wine Cheese (okay on its own), and the center is a pungent Blue Stilton. An interesting combination, but the stilton really overpowers the elderberry.

I saw the saddest story on the nightly news last week, about Salvation Army stores pulling all toys from their shelves because they can't keep up with all the recalls. While it's nice on the one hand that they are making sure dangerous toys aren't just unloaded on the less fortunate, it's awful that they have no or fewer toys available. The Marines' Toys for Tots program has brought in extra staff just to check donations against recall lists. I picked up an extra wood non-Chinese toy this weekend during our holiday shopping for a local drive -- please think about doing the same when you shop!

If you haven't already seen it, a new site lists toy test results: www.HealthyToys.org. They test for multiple chemicals in addition to lead, like arsenic and mercury. (Why is there arsenic and mercury in toys?!?) I'm relieved to see a Melissa & Doug product on the "best" list (many of their products are made in China) -- and disturbed to see Circo shoes on the worst. Thanks Target!

We had some heartbreaking news this week, when our local independent children's bookstore announced they were closing their doors, today. Like many independent small businesses in our town, they've struggled with rising rents and taxes while losing customers to big box stores and the evil Amazon low-price empire. I rarely buy books from Amazon, unless I'm impatient to buy something before it comes out in paperback or just can't find it locally (and even then I check Powell's first). I prefer the instant gratification of walking into a bookstore and picking up a fresh new book. And for children's books, we've bought ours nearly entirely from A Likely Story which is a short walk from our house, just past the playground and on our way to other shopping. Even though we have a Barnes & Noble discount card, I didn't mind paying full price for kid's books as I considered it a fair price to support this wonderful place where the boy enjoyed so many fun story times and most recently their little wood play house. During my maternity leave and later with his Aunt-Nanny, the boy attended many of their story times, dancing, clapping, and eventually running off and discovering the joy of pulling books off the shelves. Just last week, home for Veteran's Day we went back for a story time and ran into a mom's group friend. Owen and her daughter had a blast pulling books off a shelf and then putting them back, and O even sat down on a bottom shelf and "read" himself a story. But unfortunately, while their story times were always packed -- with rows of strollers parked out front -- they just weren't receiving enough support from the community. They recently had to begin charging for story times, since so many people came and didn't bother to buy anything. (We nearly always managed to pick up a new book or two.)  Apparently that wasn't enough. The news was posted on a local moms' listserv earlier this week that they were having a closing sale. I took the boy there one last time last night, and bought the next to last board book on their now barren shelves. The boy wandered through the quiet store and got a farewell pat on the head from the proprietor.

FIND YOUR LOCAL, INDEPENDENT CHILDREN'S BOOKSELLER.

Have you ever ridden in a hot air balloon or a helicopter?  Where did you go?

What a random question. But since you asked, yes, I've been in a helicopter twice. Once, a sightseeing tour of the Grand Canyon, and once in a private helicopter over Mt. St. Helens. The latter (pictured) was awesome, one could get used to a ride like that. ;-)

...one child laborer at a time.

I am a long-time fan of Rogue Creamery of Oregon - makers of Oregonzola - but I hadn't tried their Smokey Blue until a recent "Best Blues" class at Cheesetique. Rogue Creamery has an interesting history, started in southern Oregon by an Italian immigrant in 1935 with the backing of J.L. Kraft. Yes, that Kraft. Rogue produced the first American blue cheese to win the London Best Cheese Award for blue cheese, with its Rogue River Blue in 2003. The Rogue River is made only during the autumnal equinox and winter solstice each year, and wrapped in grape leaves macerated in pear brandy to give it a sharp, fruity flavor.

The Smokey Blue is the first cold-smoked blue cheese, smoked for 16 hours over crushed Oregon hazelnut shells. Domestic hazelnuts are entirely grown in the Pacific Northwest, virtually all in Oregon's Willamette Valley, so it's a natural fit. [Did you know hazelnuts have the highest folate level of any tree nut?] The hazelnuts give the cheese a hint of sweetness, balancing out the smoky and sharp blue cheese tang.

I had fantasized about pairing this with Nutella, but alas, I was out and couldn't wait for a grocery trip. Instead I used an Oregon blackberry jam on sourdough toast, which was a great sweet-sharp, creamy-crunchy contrast. Next time around, I plan to pair it with a Rogue HazelNut Brown Nectar Ale, to harmonize with the hazelnut flavor.

This was the first thing I thought of when vox asked what my five favorite spices were... Just finally got around to taking a picture.

clipped from foodietots.com weeknight meal: squash gratin October 17th, 2007 by foodietots in weeknight meals, squash, recipes I created this recipe earlier this summer with our CSA veggies, but squash and swiss chard are still in season at our local markets. I roasted the veggies the night before to make this quicker to prepare the night of.

Choosing organic foods not only reduces the toxins you expose yourself to, it also helps protect the environment. Organic foods are grown without chemical pesticides, the residues of which remain in the soil and wash into our watersheds. Small family farmers will tell you that "organic" farming is nothing new -- for the most part, they are simply continuing to farm the way their parents and grandparents did, with the basic premise that preserving the earth is critical to sustaining farmland. It is only in the past half century that the focus of corporate agriculture shifted to making more food faster and cheaper. While pesticides are regulated and foods offered for sale in the US have to meet "maximum residue levels," less emphasis is given to monitoring the lingering effects of pesticide usage on the environment. Despite the growth pains of the organic industry, with small farms on one end choosing to forgo certification due to the cost and time involved, and large-scale operations on the other end stretching or evading the rules, growing consumer awareness and pressure is the only way to force the big players to reform their practices.

Locally, the misguided obsession with ethanol is reversing recent progress in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. While local consumers are increasingly looking for organically grown corn, there is no incentive to corn growers to behave responsibly when growing corn for ethanol.

To learn more, visit OrganicConsumers.org - and to find local, organic farmers in your area, visit LocalHarvest.org.

crossposted at foodietots.com