Holiday Blues

This past weekend, as is customary at this time of year, the denizens a chez Fractured Amy stalked, cornered, dispatched, and brought home triumphantly our trophy of the season - a huge Douglas Fir that is now resplendently decorated in a corner of the family room, twinkling merrily and smelling sweetly of holiday cheer.

The Great Tree Hunt on Saturday was more than usually fraught. Naturally, getting three people to reach a consensus on anything (especially when they are as opinionated as Sir, the Kid Squid, and myself) is never easy, but we had great difficulty this year in agreeing on a tree that was suitably conical (but not pear-shaped); tall enough to Make A Statement (but not too altitudinous to fit into the back of my stalwart silver Element); sufficiently green (there were a lot of brown needles this year, presumably from the trees' sitting in puddles for months on end during the wettest summer on record); and possessing of copious numbers of little sticky-up branches for displaying small ornaments and the piece de resistance, our gold paper Moravian star.

When we finally did spot a suitable victim, poor Sir spent almost ten minutes on the cold wet ground, hacksawing away like one possessed. The Squid and I would have offered to spell him for a while, but we know (even though he denies it) that deep down he loves the kill. It's traditional.

When we got home Sir looked so cold and downtrodden from his labours that I decided he needed a treat. Earlier in the week he had plaintively texted me that he'd finished the last of the homemade cheese 'that smelled like feet' (in fact, an impish little washed-rind creation made with bacteria linens - the same bugs that give a red bloom to reblochon and Muenster), so I decided to crack open the much-anticipated BCSSP (Blue Cheese in the Style of Stilton, Perhaps). Much anticipated by others, I hasten to add. I dislike blue cheese. Intensely. Always have.

I was dubious about the BCSSP for other reasons, too, mostly to do with the worrying transmogrifications that have bedevilled it since its introduction into my cave oh-so-many weeks ago. First, it started to grow red fuzzy mold. Then it started to give off an odour not unlike our basement after it has been flooded for a week. In something of a panic, I consulted a variety of expert sources only to discover that such disquieting developments were perfectly normal and nothing at all to be concerned about. I was instructed to give it a good scrape with a sharp knife whenever I thought the situation was getting out of hand and await the appearance of 'the smear'. Then I would really know I was getting somewhere!

As promised, my cheese soon became covered in brown goo that looked like and had the texture of extremely smooth yet sticky peanut butter - although the color was more tahini-hued, now that I come to think on it. The odiferousness was truly dreadful. I scraped and fretted for several more weeks, convinced that I had a real disaster on my hands.

Then, miraculously, a period of time went by when the BCSSP developed a fresh, clean aroma (although unmistakably blue, if you know what I mean) and scraping became a far less urgent task. On Saturday, I decided the time was right.

I cut the truckle into halves around its equator and rejoiced to see inside a creamy pale cheese interlaced with gossamer veins of purest azure. I dared to try a smidgeon and was relieved to discover that it wasn't the worst thing I'd ever tasted. Sir carefully carved some into wedges and ate them with a thinly sliced apple, in which manner blue cheese is often enjoyed in his culture. While not crumbly enough to be Stilton, or creamy enough to be Roquefort, it was nonetheless declared an excellent example of the species.

Just like our Christmas tree.

The Rain Is Gone

For a few brief minutes today the downpour ceased, the clouds parted, and the sun shone bright.

And as the fates would have it, the firmament above wasn't the only thing in my life bedecked in blue:

Feeling Blue

I think I may have mentioned (once or twice) that the weather in the past few weeks has been, as the poet said, godawful. It has pelted down unremittingly for days and days, flooding the basement and causing the entire house to take on the faint scent of wet dog. A clash of weather fronts in the library caused it to rain inside my cave, where the cataract down the back wall promptly froze against the cooling element, requiring that I take the whole apparatus outside (yes, in the rain - are we detecting a theme, here?) to defrost it on the front lawn where a few additional gallons of water couldn't possibly do any harm.

It didn't really matter that I needed to unplug my fridge for a bit, since there was only one cheese remaining - the wax-dipped cheddar that I am saving for Christmas and was quite happy, during its home improvements, to spend a bit of time elsewhere.

But the revelation that I had only one cheese to call my own got me thinking. How better to spend a rainy weekend than up to one's elbows in a cheese vat?

That's a rhetorical question, of course.

Since the family have decided that Wensleydale is my signature cheese, I first made one of those.

Then, deciding I needed a new challenge (although I do plan to tackle mold-ripened fromage again prontissimo, I can't just now as various scheduling commitments make the constant vigilance required by such a project nigh on impossible until October).

But there was something I'd been meaning to try as soon as the weather got a bit cooler ... I seized my chance and made some Blue-Cheese-In-The-Style-Of-Stilton-Perhaps.

Why, you may ask? Although I don't claim to love blue cheese - in fact, I don't even like it very much - I'm surrounded by folks who do. Also, I confess to a scientific curiosity, rather like the one that motivated me to see how all the holes in Swiss cheese come about.

Haven't you ever wondered how a blue cheese gets its varicose veins?

I will tell you. They come from a little foil packet labelled penicillium roqueforti, easily purchased from the Cheese Queen and delivered right to one's door by one's friendly neighborhood UPS man. The powder within looks like the sort of mildew that festoons all the old textbooks stored in our swamp - sorry, I mean basement.

When you add the fungi to your beautiful raw milk, the milk turns blue:

It is quite unnerving.

The rest of the process seems designed to keep the cheese curds as porous, loose, slimy, and moist as possible, so that ideal spore-nurturing conditions will exist throughout the cheese. Instead of cooking the curds for ages and ages to dry them out, I simply scooped them into a cheesecloth bag and let them drain quietly for a couple of hours:

Instead of pressing them to oblivion in a small tomme, I merely applied an eight-pound workout weight to the whole unmolded mass:

The next morning, I had a big moist oozy pancake:

I tore it into little moist oozy pieces ...

... and lightly pressed them into my mold. I added a fetching (and very damp) cheesecloth chapeau to keep the whole thing moist:

After a few days of turning and draining, this was the result:

Instead of the utterly smooth protective rinds I rejoiced to see in my Swiss, Wensleydale, and cheddar cheeses (the less said about the rinds on my camemberts, the better) the surface of my BCSSP was full of holes and anfractuosities such that one could almost see to Leicestershire! Thus, life-giving oxygen might get all the way to the interior of the cheese, nourishing the little mold spores and encouraging them to do their worst.

Or best.

I'll know which in December.

Coming soon: just to be sure my cheese is adequately permeable, I attack it viciously with the sort of tiny knitting needle more commonly employed in the manufacturing of socks and gloves.