Although we’re a little late for this season with first Advent last Sunday already (I suppose that necessitates that we’ll just have to eat extra morsels to catch up) and as the finished kit won’t be ready until next Christmas—via Bored Panda, there are instructions on how to make a cheese Advents calendar of one’s own. That sounds perfectly delectable and preferable—at least to my wizened old palette—to chocolates. I know quite a few fancy delicatessens and fromageries that could pull together some truly gourmet ways to count down to the holidays. What would be your daily treat?
Thursday 1 December 2016
blessed are the cheesemakers
catagories: ๐ง, holidays and observances
Tuesday 4 October 2016
cocktail hour
Discerning gourmand Nag on the Lake had two successive food and drinks posts that paired very well together indeed. First, there were the exquisite still-lives of artist Greg Stroube who imagined how the Renaissance masters might depict a Bloody Mary or a Lime Rickey with all its garnish and the hyper-realistic detail of Bellini (also the name of a cocktail, Prosecco and peach nectar) or Vermeer.
These delights of and for the palette are then served up with a selection of sumptuous recipes from the mind of Salvador Dalรญ from a cookbook being reissued over forty years after its first and only print run. The surreal and bizarre cult cookbook called Les Diners de Gala has over a hundred illustrated recipes—of the strange and decadent variety, like toffee and pinecones or frog pastries. Be sure to indulge more delectable delights on Nag on the Lake.
catagories: ๐จ, ๐, ๐ฅ, ๐ง, networking and blogging
Tuesday 16 August 2016
smoke-screen or homo habilis
Just as a tolerance for dairy afforded some populations an advantage over their neighbours in more recent epochs, an early mutation in humans may have privileged them over their hominid competition. As Mysterious Universe informs via Strange Company, Neanderthals may have been quite literally smoked out by humans who could far better handle the ill pulmonary effects of cooking and keeping bonfires for warmth, light, staving off predation and perhaps rituals. Our view of our extinct cousins is generally a dim one, but gradually we are being disabused of a lot of these primitive stereotypes, including the discovery that most all modern humans have a small percentage of stowaway DNA fossilised within us as a reminder that we once shared our society.
It strikes me as a little ironic that this respiratory robustness may have been responsible for humans pulling out ahead, while there’s such incapacitation and moral panic over air-pollution, asthma and allergies—external and self-imposed. I wonder if those bits of cavemen genes (though a very small component of our total genetic makeup, the traits that we’ve inherited are different from one individual to the next) aren’t responsible for our collective frailties. Maybe our ancient ancestors got help from other sources as well.
Friday 29 July 2016
still life with wine and cheese
An interesting meta-analysis from Cornell University of over half a millennium of food and drink in art—without even the need to repair to the food-selfie iteration of the still life—reveals that we’ve always had a penchant for the exotic and indulgent and much more likely to capture that in portraiture—or as a social snapshot, rather than every day fare. With license, certain subtle messages were encoded with the spread that appears on the table and this in depth study is an appetising reflection of how tastes evolved over time and even, through the lens of the Last Supper, how portions have grown. Take a look at the gallery of artfully arranged meals for yourself to better understand what the statistics and trends disclose.
Sunday 1 May 2016
on top of spaghetti
Via the ever-intrepid Atlas Obscura, we find out that American stockpiles of cheese and other dairy-products are at the highest level in three decades, thanks to a coalition of factors that have glutted the market with European imports to the detriment of domestic products.
I don’t feel that this is an imbalance something like the dreaded TTIP would solve to either party’s satisfaction, as you cannot punish an exporter for making (and we’re partial) a superior product, from cows whose welfare is better looked after. Perhaps the US Dairy Council just needs to get more aggressive in their campaigning and make Wisconsin Colby the new bacon, a flavour touted almost as a condiment for all those years, or craft-beers or the backlash against the anti-gluten leagues.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ฑ, ๐ง, food and drink
Monday 4 April 2016
cheese it, the mads are calling!
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐บ, ๐ง, networking and blogging
Wednesday 2 March 2016
le fromage, la lรฉgende
Via the ever-inspiring and inspired Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a very fine monograph on the limestone caverns of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in the Aveyron region where the legitimate and right-honourable king of cheeses is cured, in accordance with age-old methods.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ง, networking and blogging
Monday 15 February 2016
soup-and-sandwich syndicate
For a few years, we’ve had one of those sandwich-makers to take camping with us, but having received a “panini-press” for the holidays, we’ve aspired to create some soup and sandwich combinations for indoors as well. Lately, we tried Cheese and Leek soup with egg and cheese toasts.
For the soup, ingredients for four bowls call for:
- Salt, pepper, parsley, bay-leaves nutmeg for seasoning
- 100 millilitre (about half a cup) of dry white wine
- Six slices of wheat bread for toasting and for the croutons
- A heaping tablespoon of flour
- Butter
- 100 gram (4 oz) container of heavy crรจme
- 1 litre (4 cups) vegetable stock from bullion
- Around 600 grams (about a pound) of leeks, washed, peeled and cut into thin rings
For the toast:
- Bread and butter from above
- 2 eggs
- Sliced cheese (Gouda or Gruyรจre)
- Spinach leaves or lamb’s lettuce (Feldsalat)
There’s no cheese left out of the cheese soup, of course, but that’s where it gets a bit tricky. In German markets, there’s Schmelzkรคse that’s made for soup and I suppose it’s like the pasteurized processed cheese food that’s available in the States, but looks some much less estranged from natural cheese and is much more appetising. In any case, use about 500 grams of your local-equivalent. In the soup pot, braise the rings of leek in butter for three minutes, dusting the leek with the flour afterwards. Introduce the white wine, vegetable stock with the bay leaves and allow it to cook on low heat for another ten minutes or so. Remove the bay leaves and breaking the cheese product of choice into small cubes, add that and the heavy crรจme to the pot and allow to cook for an additional ten minutes, stirring often and making sure that the cheese is melting. In the meantime, cut two slices of the bread into little cubes and braise them in butter in a separate pan (you can save the pan for the eggs) for about three minutes until crisp and set aside on a paper-napkin to dry. Prepare two eggs sunny-side-up and in your sandwich-maker/pie-iron/panini-press, make the toasts with the egg, cheese slice and leafy green filling—sort of like a croque-monsieur. Season the soup with nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste and garnish with croutons and parsley.
Tuesday 26 January 2016
rarebit or why do we call them comics
Atlas Obscura presents a really fascinating essay that deconstructs a constellation factors that make up the hallmarks of modernity through the lens of a turn of the century comic strip that centres around midnight-snack, indigestion fuelled nightmares with the blame laid squarely on an “imported” (the focus seems to be mostly from an American perspective as the caricatures were but is surely of a universal character since internationally people were experiencing similar cultural shocks) delicacy called “Welsh Rarebit,” basically cheese-toast soaked in beer as a sort of hair-of-the-dog ballast for late-night revellers.
Assiduously, Winsor McCay, under the consultation of his series “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” documents the development of rather Freudian fantasies as carried out in the restive slumber of the indignant, whose psyche and drives might be explained mechanically as an assault by cheese as heartburn. Far from funny, at least to contemporary viewers—much like a lot of the reserve content of the funny pages—McCay portrays secret and vengeful scenes that one would rather not disclose, lest one shows his or her vulnerabilities and suppressed desires. As easily, however, people were willing to adopt a litany of compromise to gain modern conveniences—the electrified dwellings that invited staying up through the night, the logistical coordination that allowed people to live in growing urban-settings (to cultivate such routines and support surplus consumption), I believe that the illustrator though that his readership could recognise that something other was driving this feeling of being unsettled besides just alcohol and cheese, unlike the spectre of Jacob Marley who was initially dismissed as a spot of gravy gone bad. Such fiendish behaviour reflected perhaps made the world more receptive to adopting new customs and paradigms, like the psycho-analysis and other accommodations (and necessary back-lash) that came in its wake. Check out the thesis for further details and panels. Turophiles, what do you think?
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ง, food and drink, lifestyle, revolution
Wednesday 6 January 2016
6x6
op-art: 8-bit watercolours of classical masterpieces
annual: the year in pictures as captured by the official White House photographer
waschbรคr: little raccoon wets a piece of cotton candy only to have it dissolve
perfect for beaufort cheese: Alpine village is being powered by left-over whey
expatriate: one American candidacy is becoming awful diplomacy abroad
umschlag: author and illustrator Edward Gorey’s whimsically decorated correspondence
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ง, environment, foreign policy
Thursday 30 July 2015
caseus formatus
Saturday 30 May 2015
curdling
After several decades of speculation—reverting to staple theories of bacteria or nibbling mice in the mix, researchers have determined why what’s classed as Swiss cheese was traditionally riddled with “eyes” but has now more or less become “blind” (in cheese-talk). The lack of the characteristic holes does not affect the flavour of course but their source was an enduring mystery—until, that is, the holes started to disappear. It was not the fermenting agents, however, that carved out these voids but rather other impurities, like splinters of hay, in the customary wooden milking buckets that have been employed for centuries. In fact, it was not really until modern times that the holes were considered desirable at all and cultivated as something of a trademark for foreign markets. With processes becoming more automated and sanitary, however, large holes are not likely to develop.
Monday 30 March 2015
five-by-five
tron, troff: vector map that renders cities as if out of the film Tron
sky hostess: gorgeous vintage collection of stewardesses in uniform, via Neat-o-Rama
phoenix: from out of the rubble, a show-and-tell of San Francisco rebuilding and reinvention after the great quake
digital syndicate: a roundup of podcasts to peruse
catagories: ✈️, ๐ช️, ๐บ️, ๐ง, networking and blogging
Tuesday 24 March 2015
five-by-five
mannerism: artist Matthias Jung creates beautiful architectural collages
landmark or bats in the belfries: cute series of animals posing as skyline familiars
psyc 101: some heuristic psychological hacks safe to try at home
singing telegram: tweets presented as antique wireless messages
Sunday 15 December 2013
curds and whey
Here is an incomplete Periodic Table of cheeses. I only made it as far as the transitional cheeses and realised that I probably should have undertaken my method of
classification in a more scientific manner to be useful. I started with
base ingredients, hoping to end with hardness but I exhausted
recognised varieties. Perhaps someone better organised can finish this
project with this blank template of the classic layout of the periodic table or create their own system for items that demonstrate characteristics and predictability that can be fit into this format or quiz one selves on the elements that actually belong in this chart. Perhaps even someone could incorporate other basic properties, like wine-pairings.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง, food and drink, Wikipedia
Monday 27 May 2013
hard-currency
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ง, economic policy
Saturday 13 April 2013
who moved my cheese?
This preposterous suggestion, dismissed, made me think of this scholarly interview from Der Spiegel’s International desk examining the rise of anti-German sentiment across Europe over the euro and re-packaged austerity. It is a difficult and probing question, but I think, from these latest rounds of renegotiation, the public protests are a reflection in part at least of frustration that little flexibility—the structural might that Germany appears to have and seems to influence the body politic, that’s not accorded to the people equitably. Unfortunately, more credit does not equal a measure of determined reform, despite similarly deferred wishes for greater alignment.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐ช, ๐ง, economic policy, foreign policy, labour
Monday 1 October 2012
lobbyland or don't mess with the cheeses
European Corporate Observatory, which reports on fraud, abuse and the revolving door arrangement between government and business in the EU parliament, is trying to continue to raise awareness on this sometimes situation rank with hypocrisy and lobbyism that’s reached a dangerous point concerning food and the agricultural industry.
The EU Food Safety Authority (EFSA), a supranational organ that can dictate, among other thing, whether France gets to extend its moratoria on GM crops or Germany can continue to label its food as organic (Bio) or otherwise or if certain additives can enter into the food- chain, has a full complement of agribusiness advocates on its staff and threatens to relax restrictions and safeguards further. The EFSA will hold its annual conference and draft new rules at its base of operations the city of Parma, purveyors of fine hams and cheese, who has seen its domestic industry shocked by not just the peddled austerity in response to economic crises but also by a strong earthquake not so long ago. I am sure the venue appreciates the ceremony on some level, but this just further illustrates how austerity and tough-times are just code for opportunities for business to acquire something that’s usually not for sale on the cheap. Appointed representatives are not like our bodies, which generally demonstrate more intelligence than each of us and can adapt and even thrive despite our worst efforts, and ignoring what the politicians settle on is definite to our peril.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ง, environment, food and drink
colophon
Wednesday 28 September 2011
appellation d'origine controlee and prussian blue
catagories: ๐ง, Europe, food and drink