Booniverse

Here we are discovering more cheese and wine. Mmmmm.

TheMan had a Trader Joe’s gift certificate so on my emergency vacation half day before my birthday, I swung by to pick up some cheeses. If you are just starting out on your journey of hard cheeses, Trader Joe’s is decently respectable. Their selection is more erudite than Kroger, maybe slightly more verbose than Hiller’s, but if you’ve been experimenting with cheeses for at least a couple posts than Trader Joe’s is going to look like the community college to Whole Food’s Ivy League. I’m just sayin. Never the less, I procured 5 different cheeses to try whilst perusing their cheese board.

The first cheese I picked up was German Beer Cheese because German Beer cheese! How can you go wrong with that? It’s cow-y and sort of squidgy in a softish cheese kind of way and perfect! Well…except for the smell which we could only classify as stinky. And the taste which was also not so grand. It was sort of nutty-ish maybe and a bit inoffensive, especially given the smell but not particularly beery. What’s the point of beer cheese if you can’t taste any of the beer? The German Beer Cheese eating experience was improved with crackers and it kinda went better with the white wine (Alice White’s Lexia). The cats gave it 2 paws down though. Rejected!

My intension this time out was to get several kinds of cheddar cheeses to try them out (mainly because the selection of oddly awesome cheese was pretty much nonexistent but what cheeses Trader Joe’s had, they had several varieties of). Sadly, I only picked up English Coastal Cheddar before something shiny! happened and I forgot that I wanted to try several different cheddars. Oops. But! English coastal cheddar was a really good choice for my possibly single cheddar cheese. It smelled of cheddary deliciousness and was creamy with a nice cheddar bite. It wasn’t super sharp and the cats gave it several whiskers up. Sadly, it did not go very well with the red (Lindeman’s Bin 45 Cabernet Sauvignon) or the white although the flavor fought less with the white. Still, I think I would get this cheese again given the chance. Yum.

The other possibly cheddar cheese was Dubliner Ireland which seems to be made by Kerrygold. Badmovie has waxed philosophical over Kerrygold cheddar but nowhere on the packaging did this cheese say cheddar so I’m not sure what’s up with that. Perhaps Kerrygold is a cheese company and Dubliner Ireland is some hard slightly fungal cheese with neat little crystalline bits in it. Kind of like how Parmesan can get those little bits in it. It did have a slight sharp but not too much and is also a cheese we’ll keep on the “will buy again” list. It really shone when paired with the cab.

Havarti! I have no idea why havarti but I saw it and recognized the name as a cheese and then POP right into the basket. It’s a creamy Danish cow cheese that is soft like muenster cheese is soft. It also tastes buttery which was an entirely new taste for me. I have no idea why because butter comes from cow milk and cheese comes from cow milk so why wouldn’t some cheeses taste buttery? They should! Except I don’t ever remember running into buttery before. Havarti is also a sweet cheese which went well with the fruity Lexia and was the BOMB on the otherwise meh veggy crackers. I tell you, those veggy crackers were saved by the havarti. Would we get it again? Mmmmmaybe. It’s definitely on the ‘B’ list of cheeses. Unless we are overly blessed with veggy crackers then yes indeed-y do there will be a havarti-ing.

My last cheese was a Switzerland cow cheese called Emmentaler and it won the lame cheese of the night award. It was a Swiss cheese, which I hadn’t registered (do the Swiss make anything other than Swiss cheese?) but it was the blandest Swiss cheese I’ve ever run across. It was a Swiss cheese with no backbone despite the definite Swiss cheese odor it gave off. In my notes I wrote “a cheese entirely made of texture. Meh after taste” but I spaced it oddly. Thus I wound up misreading it as “entirely made of meh aftertaste” which…works too. Sad. Emmentaler goes better with a cracker but is instantly overwhelmed by both the cab and the Lexia. Poor, poor average meh cheese.

2008: At first I thought it was the Smithee clip tapes (bwa!)

2007: I also managed to make a five sided hexagram. I don’t want to talk about it.

2006: JSFR: Choco Chipu 24% Chocolate

2005: JSFR: Sumiyaki Coffee Ami

2004: That is until I had to kill and eat Vande for madly chasing the “new” catnip mousie with much enthusiasm all over the freaking place for hours last night.

2003: Oh yeah, and Grrr to Isaak this morning too. Little bastard jumped up on the bed and then went immediately over to TheMan to get scratches.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Hard Cheeses of Old England. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.