The Cheese Course

This week I read a book by Janet Fletcher from 2000:  The Cheese Course.

Ever since Tria opened in Philadelphia, with it's long cheese menu, and artful presentations, I've been looking for the book that would tell me what to serve cheese with.  At Tria, cheese selections always come with the perfect pairing of honey, or figs, or walnuts, or something like that.  But most of the books out there, in my very limited search, seem to concentrate on what wines to drink with cheese.  I wanted to know about food pairings, and I hoped that the Cheese Course would tell me everything.

The introductory chapter of the book is chock-full of information about cheese:  what to look for in the shop, how to serve it, how to store it (plastic wrap is a no-no), etc.  Before getting into specific recipes, Fletcher offers some general advice about assembling cheese platters - how to intentionally feature one kind of cheese, and what assortments might work best. 

Fletcher advocates for having the cheese course at the end of the meal rather than before it.  She says that when you serve cheese as an appetizer, guests tend to eat too much, which ruins their dinner.  But cheese as a last course offers a way to lengthen the meal, to re-open conversation, and allow people to linger a little bit longer over a communal food.  (I'll say in support of this theory that the one time I had a cheese course at the end of the meal, it was extremely well-received!)

One piece of information in this chapter has stayed with me, and has partially answered the question of why I find wine pairings, but not food pairings for cheese:  if you are planning a food accompaniment to your cheese, wine is often not the best beverage to serve, especially if you are featuring fruit.  The flavors of fruit and wine may compete with rather than complement each other.  Fletcher than offers other beverage suggestions, including dessert wines, or even beer, that may work well with your cheese and other food selections.  The key take-away for me was wine or food, but maybe not both.

The recipe chapters were divided by milk source:  cow, goat, sheep and mixed.  Rather than a cheese with one food pairing, the recipes were mainly salads with a featured cheese, or a baked bread or pastry with cheese.  Several cheeses were served with dried fruit reconstituted with brandy or other alcohol.

The image above shows sheep's cheese with oven-dried tomatoes and roasted almonds.  I definitely want to try a particular kind of French sheep cheese with cherry preserves. 

The answer, of course, to my question and search for the definitive set of rules about what foods go with which cheese is that there are no rules.  Tastes differ, and the only way to figure out what works is to try everything and see what works for you.

If you are a cheese fan, check out Janet Fletcher's website, which contains information about all of her books, recipes, listings of cheese classes, and links to her reviews of cheeses in the San Francisco Chronicle.

What are your favorite kinds of cheese, and what do you eat them with?

Next week, one of the first tea books I ever owned, A Decent Cup of Tea by Malachi McCormick.

Tabletops

This week's book review and write-up are a bit out of sync this week because of travel in the middle, but moving on with our Books-from-the-Free-Library-Bookstore series, the other weekend I read Tabletops by Barbara Milo Orbach.

Orbach, author of many books on flowers, decorating, etc., fills her chapters with advice about what to put on the table, color schemes, flowers, and centerpieces.  She says, "The table is the center of life at home.  A beautifully set table is the ultimate symbol of hospitality and a way to express creativity." Each section includes a DIY project such as making napkin rings or floral arrangements.

This is a book from 1997.  And it shows.  The settings and table arrangements are lush, elegant and busy, unlike the simpler, more homemade aesthetic that prevails today.  I liked the book - not loved it - but to me it felt dated and a little quirky.  Here are some things I noticed and specifically noted:

• There is actual text to read, not just pictures and captions
• The text reads like the actual author might have written it
• The author constantly refers back to other books she has written, and in fairness, to other author's books
• A gauze ribbon tied around anything makes that thing better/fancier
• Scented stuff always creeps in, despite the author's saying that it's better to avoid scented products at a dinner party because it interferes with the food
• Although this professes to be a book about tabletops, it turns out to really be a book about flowers and making centerpieces with flowers, food, fruit, etc.  There is minimal information about setting the table, creating a balanced tabletop, and actually arranging the flowers.
• Any table inside is formal.  Any table outside is informal.

I don't buy all of this stuff, but there were a couple of things I liked about the book in particular.  

• The author emphasizes planning ahead and doesn't assume that you can create a beautiful table without trying things out and practicing first. 
• She admits that she really likes setting the table, but cooking is not her thing.  
• It made me think about a couple of things:  (1) The plates I always thought of as dessert plates in my sets of china are actually bread-and-butter plates, and (2) It's really past time to inventory and edit my china cabinets and think about what I already have that coordinates, or doesn't.

Next week:  The Cheese Course!  

A Guide to Tea

 This weekend I had a chance to read one of the books I bought at the Free Library used bookstore last week.  I started with this one, A Guide to Tea.

Note there is no author's name on the front cover of the book. This should be the first clue of what's to be found inside...

A Guide to Tea, while pleasant enough, is really some kind of advertising/marketing piece for Adagio teas.  Not only does it not have an author until you get to the title page, there is no publisher, no photo credits, and no publication date, I suspect so it can't get out of date for as long as Adagio wants to sell it (which I don't think it's doing anymore...).  Amazon reports the date as 2005.  Apparently the author, Chris Cason, is a real person, and really a tea guy.  He may or may not be the tea sommelier for Tavalon Teas.

The book, though about 85 pages in length, is fairly low on content.  (In fairness, it doesn't pretend to be otherwise.)  It ranges across many topics from how to brew tea to where does tea come from to tisanes, but it goes into none of these areas in depth.  The writing is informational, with the unfortunate addition of unnecessary witticisms and/or colloquialisms that seem to be added as an afterthought.  Why?  Why the strange opening justifying the existence of the book because of the Boston Tea Party?

I enjoyed the fact that this book is not a recipe book, but really a book about tea.  Often tea books are just cookbooks with an opening chapter about tea types, etc., but this book stuck to the subject.  It includes many beautiful pictures, uncaptioned and uncredited, but supposedly of Asian and Indian tea plantations, workers, and tea in situ.  But the pictures seem unrelated to the chapter at hand, except in the most general sense. 

I'm happy to have this book, though it will never be a go-to reference guide.  I wonder what the impetus was to publish it to begin with, and whether it was considered to be a success.  Have you heard of it?  Have you read it?  What do you think?

Next week:  Tabletops by Barbara Milo Ohrbach

A New Chapter...

Just when I come to the moment of admitting this blog should go away, I'm inspired to write something.  This week's inspiration is brought to you by the Free Library of Philadelphia, and more specifically, their used bookstore, which I happened to pass, and which happened to be open as I was walking across town the other evening on my way to the opera.  And you know what happens when you pass a used bookstore...

I came away with four books:

http://www.considerthefork.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Tabletops-Practical-Beautiful-Decorate-Table/dp/0517703327/ref=la_B001IO9I0U_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412347455&sr=1-2

 

http://www.adagio.com/pages/book.html

http://www.janetfletcher.com/books.html

...none of which I already owned, which is a miracle!!

But these books got me to thinking about my preoccupation with the subject matter these all dance around, the blogs I read, and the blogs I look for and don't find, now that blogs are unfashionable.  And then there's my not-so-secret desire to give up the career-oriented job I have and open a tea shop and library of all of these books, plus the many, many more on my bookshelves.  And so the kernel of an idea for this blog was born - a weekly review of literature.  Well a sort of literature anyway.

A quick glance at my catalog of books revealed just over 200 books I want to talk about here.  The topics vary, but the vast majority are about tea and tea-related topics.  The next set focuses on aspects of entertaining including tablescapes, table setting, etc.  The smallest group is about home organization and decorating, including a topic near and dear to my heart, flower arranging - a skill I don't really have, but covet.

I'll start with the four shown above, as I read them and attempt to find a place for them to live.  Hopefully you'll read about a new book weekly, starting next Tuesday!

The beginning of an era...

Last week, something momentous happened - I got an IPad!! After coveting one forever, coping with a now-ancient laptop powered by hamsters, a February and March full of lots of gigs, tax refund time, and the end of winter when the heat is no longer on all the time, the time was right and I went for it.

Immediately I had doubts:  should I have gone for the IPad mini?  I'm still wondering about that.  It's so very portable.  (Maybe I need one of those too!). But other than size, though I'm still fumbling around and getting used to it, I love my iPad.  Yesterday, it left the house for the first time.

One of my chief reasons for getting the iPad, other than to essentially take the place of my laptop, is to help me reduce the load of things I carry all of the time.  I have endless pieces of paper that are essential to my life - dance notes, to-do lists, calendar, address lists, magazines to read in case I finish my book on the train, and on and on.  I've done a good job at consolidating some of these items, but still, there are a lot of them.  Enter iPad.  Thanks to the use of Evernote, and other apps, I'm slowly transferring my lists into formats that I can access from anywhere.  I did get a Kindle in December, so now Craig can use that, while I use the Kindle app.  Dancing Master, you are my summer project!!! Can't wait.

So back to yesterday.  In the typical way of all crafters, I have a ton of supplies.  Okay, more than that, but nevertheless, the key is that they are hard to keep track of.  But enter my love of lists and organization.  I have a rubber stamp catalog, and I'm more than half done with my stamp drawer maps which makes it so much easier to find things and quickly put them away.  I also maintain spreadsheets of embossing folders I own, and those I want to buy.  I created that inventory after mistakenly purchasing the same set twice - not doing that again.  So naturally, as I was off to the rubber stamp show yesterday, it was essential to bring my lists along.  And there they were, on the iPad, which I also used to take pictures of a couple of examples I wanted to replicate back at home.  Perfect.  Eventually, in my copious free time, I'll create a full electronic inventory of all of my craft supplies.  I think I even found an app for just that.

I still may get an iPad mini at some point.  Maybe over the summer.  Who knows...

I know you all probably have one of these.  If so, what apps should I get immediately?

Happy New Year!

Have you remembered to write 2014 in a date field yet?

We're well into the new year at this point, but as my "holiday" cards went out only last week, I'm still in New Year's mode.  And New Year's for me is a time of new beginnings.  I tend to think about resolutions, rather than actually make them - I don't know, maybe to hold myself less accountable for them, or forgive myself in advance if I can't actually follow through - but there's still a small list that I work from and think about periodically.  This year's items seem to be centered around home, ironic in a year when many of the months ahead feature intense travel.  Here are a couple of the things I'm thinking about:

-Cook!  I'm not an intuitive cook.  I really just want to follow recipes that someone else has created and tested and hope that they really work the way the book says they're going to (ha!).  My goal for the year is to make an actual dinner that is more than just thrown together, and likely following recipes, at least once a week.  To make this even vaguely plausible for me, I have to plan.  I can't necessarily count on choosing something and having all of the ingredients already at home.  So I have to choose a recipe in advance, make a shopping list, actually shop, and then I'm ready to go for it.  So far this year I've done scallops, chicken with a honey glaze and an apricot sauce, and a quick poached fish, and I think one other thing that I can't remember.  If this ridiculously cold weather keeps up, there will definitely be some stews in my future.

To aid in my cooking Project, Craig got me an actual, real person's kitchen knife as a holiday gift.  I don't really like big knives.  They are scary.  I will be the first person to admit that I don't know how to use one.  And yes, I know that sharp knives are safer and big knives make everything easier, but I've never had one of any quality (and no, the cheap set from Ikea that bends if you look at it doesn't count) to practice with.  Now I do.  And it works!  Yay!  What should I make next week?

-Crafts!  Of course.  I always want to do crafts.  I've even had runs of several weeks at a time when I have free evenings to spend in the craft room.  But more frequently I don't.  And moreover, I want to do crafts in company.  The stuff that I do is solitary in nature, and I like my space, and as long as I have music on, it's often company enough.  But what I think would be really fun is a regular - once a month, even - gathering of people who bring their own crafty projects to a location.  It's a MeetUp or a tea party or a chance to gossip, or all of the above.  I haven't quite figured it out yet, and I don't really want to take on another organization project, but if by some slim chance of the imagination you're out there, live where I live, and want a crafting evening, let me know, and I will attempt to figure something out.

Photo of this year's prescient holiday card by C. Whear

Have a wonderful 2014!

Embossing obsession…

If you are crafty, like me (no, not wily, crafty…) you know that craft obsessions come and go.  I’ve had my beaded flowers period, my cross stitch period, and I’m still convinced that I’m going to make a basket out of buttons one of these years. 

Not made by me - but I have the buttons and the instructions!

But my enduring obsession has been rubber stamps, and making greeting cards.

The world of rubber stamping has changed so much in the short amount of time I’ve been playing along.  Finding the right stamps that fit my tastes was and is a challenge, but as mail order catalogues have given way to internet shopping, that challenge has shifted, but not disappeared.  More on that in another post.

One of the biggest changes to this very small world is due to the rise of the scrapbooking movement – taking all of your photos and mounting them artfully with text and/or other ephemera and souvenirs.  The scrapbooking craze made papercraft materials more varied, plentiful, and widely available than ever.  Machines and papers that were only in stationers and copy shops were suddenly on the shelves at big box craft stores and smaller specialty stores around the country.  I was mostly oblivious to this as it was happening.

In my rubber stamping haze, I was slow to focus on paper.  I’ve almost always started with a white card stock base, layering images, color, other paper elements, but always with a rubber stamp focus. 

Birthday card - 2006

Then there was my amazing discovery of duplex paper – cardstock that was colored on one side and white on the other – it is still a must have in my craft room.  But now, it’s not color that’s got me hooked, it’s texture.

At some point along the road I realized that crafters had these manual machines that do magical things and allow you to crank out die-cut images, but also add texture to your paper.  It’s simple, it’s amazing, and I can’t get enough of it.  It’s not even electronic!  I now look for embossing folders everywhere I go.  Like the quest for the perfect rubber stamps in my earlier crafting years, now I make lists of companies and the designs they have and wonder why I can’t ever find them locally or easily. 

The conundrum for me is making the texture fit in with my stamping style, which remains mostly two-dimensional.  What I commonly see in online photo galleries are cards that feature textured panels with little to no stamped images or sentiments, or cards that use textured papers as backgrounds where the embossed image is largely obscured.  I’m looking for ideas somewhere in the middle.

Image made from embossed brass stencil in 2010 - note - NO rubber stamps!

I have a beginning…

Moose Day 2011

2013

…but ideas are welcome.  Send me thoughts, links to images, or better yet, come over for a craft night!  I’ll supply the texture…