For the Love of Cheese!

 Generally with my work schedule I usually don’t blog during my days off. I work Tuesday-Saturday and therefore my Sundays and Mondays are rather precious to me in terms of spending time with people and resting and recovering. Last weekend I was able to go to Jonesville and Hillsdale and have a really nice visit with Ben Parker and some of my last remaining friends at the college who are now seniors.

This weekend however, I decided to just stay home, not really do that much. Well, not doing that much ended up turning into a lot, actually. On Sunday I met up with my friends Nathan and Amanda at church and we ended up going out for $5 all you can eat pizza and then to a really cool outdoor expo in Rochester called Arts and Apples. Lots of venders, lots of art, bands playing outside, it was great. Tons of people just walking around and you get to look and, if you have 8 trillion dollars, buy some pretty little things. I ended up purchasing this really cool drawing of Central Hall from Hillsdale with a small poem on it that will end up going next to my diploma that I finally received from Hillsdale earlier this year. It will be my personal little corner of appreciation to Hillsdale.

Yesterday Nathan and Amanda came over to my place, seeing as how I usually go over to theirs, and we decided to go to the Franklin Cider Mill. As Julie Robison and I have discussed, you don’t live in the Midwest unless your favorite season is Fall. And one of the best parts of the Fall, is Apple Cider. I remember growing up how it was one of my favorite places to go because we got to see the big old water wheel inside the mill and then go get hot doughnuts and cider and sit by the river and feed the ducks. Yesterday I made the realization that this so called river, is more like a creek and the only reason the ducks are there is because they know there is a consistent source of food.

I discovered something else there yesterday that perhaps maybe I was blind to in the past. But the Cider Mill had almost a small farmers market on their grounds. Nathan and Amanda bought an Apple Riesling Salsa that I thought sounded amazing over pork chops. I ended up purchasing two different types of cheeses. One was a butter cheese and the other a soft cheese with lots of chives and garlic that made it taste like Au Gratin potatoes without the potatoes. After picking up these cheeses and half a dozen doughnuts and a half gallon of cider, we decided to walk to the nice little park in the village of Franklin, one of the most historic villages in Michigan.

We opened the cheese, with much difficulty I might add seeing as how the only serrated utensil we had was a plastic knife, and much to our surprise realized that the two cheeses actually tasted quite delicious together and thought they would go great in fondue. Well naturally this lead to us coming back home, but not before stopping to buy a Zingerman’s Sourcream Coffeecake, and finding a recipe for fondue and Nathan using his awesome culinary skills to whip up a great fondue that we had for lunch with some chicken that mom had marinated from the night before and cooked to accompany the fondue.

After eating ourselves into food comas, we decided that the only appropriate course of action was to make coffee and watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. If you have never seen this movie and you are between the ages of 20-30, you might not have a soul. JK. No, but seriously. Go watch this movie! It’s hysterical. There really is no other movie like it and you will laugh the entire way through.

Well, by the time the movie was over, mom was talking about dinner and how we had steaks that needed to be cooked. Well, we needed a few more in order to have enough for everyone who was going to be around, so naturally, we went out to Plum Market to find a couple more steaks and on the way we just so happened to run into mushrooms, a sweet Hungarian Red Wine, a very sweet Michigan Late Harvest Riesling, the Best Cheese in the World, and an XO Gouda. How dare I make the claim that it was the best cheese in the world, you ask? Well, it wasn’t me. It was actually voted as the best cheese in the world in 2008. I have to tell you, they might be right. It’s a gruyere from France that has been aged for 18 months. Combined with a good baguette, it might change your life.

So we brought all of this back and had a feast of a dinner with all of cheese, steak, mushrooms, and then we grilled zucchini and mom baked some turnips. It all turned out quite stunningly and allowed for an amazing evening. Oh, I almost forgot. Dessert! We bough some day old Zingerman’s Jumbleberry pies and cut those into quarters to have with Mackinaw Island Fudge  Ice Cream. Nom Nom Nom. So delicious.

By the end of it all, I felt like I had consumed more dairy in that one day than the entire country of Sri Lanka does in a year. It was pretty intense. But cheese is so good! Sometimes I feel really bad for my friends that are lactose intolerant because it’s not their fault that their bodies can’t handle dairy. It’s the manufacturers that stuff so many extra chemicals into it that cause people to develop allergens to dairy. At times I even feel it as well. I generally don’t eat much yogurt anymore because every time I do, my stomach feels like it’s being punched in knots for hours. But cheese isn’t meant to be eaten in gratuitous fashion. It’s meant to be enjoyed for the flavor that it is with bread or jam and sometimes sandwiches. We tend to overload everything with cheese in America. We think, “This stuff is great, give me half a pound of it on my burger please!”

But in France, they eat cheese at the end of every meal like dessert. My host mom would always pull out 5 or 6 different types of cheese and say, “Est-ce que vous voulez du fromage?” Would you like some cheese? Every night the same question. Why? Because the French love cheese. And as they should. Their cheese in great!

The guy who let me sample the cheeses at Plum Market that we ended up purchasing told me he had been working there for 2 weeks. I thought to myself, this guy knows his cheese pretty well. And he probably learned all of this in the last two weeks. I could do that. I’ve been learning about wine and food pairings, cheese is a part of that, right? Just adds to the fun and the pretension. So I might try and get a job at either Plum Market or maybe Whole Foods in their cheese department so I can try and learn about cheese.

Haven’t you always wondered how they make the cheeses the way they do? How they get into the giant wheels? Where they age them and at what temperature? There are so many questions about cheese, and I am sure a whole culture as well, that I would love to become more familiar with. I’ll keep you all posted as to where that goes and hopefully have answers to those questions soon, without cheating by looking on Wikipedia.

That’s all for now. Ciao!