BostonZest: Food: Cheese

Food: Cheese

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Patio Season Launched At Coppa

Living each day to the fullest means taking advantage of our freelance lifestyle and launching "patio season" when a beautiful day presents itself. That means, we spent one afternoon last week enjoying the sunshine and culinary delights on the patio at Coppa in the South End.

We can never resist Coppa's, "Meatballs al Forno / Wood roasted meatballs with tomato gravy." Every speck of that zesty sauce was sopped up with good bread.

To salute spring we selected both their, "Bruschetta di Fave / Fava bean crostini with feta and pecorino," and "Asparagi al Forno / Wood oven asparagus with Lebanese tahini vinaigrette and za’atar." Again, the plate was wiped clean and experiments with tahini as a base for salad dressing have begun in our kitchen. You have to love a chef who sends cooking inspiration home with you.

Plates of Duck Prosciutto, and "Tuna Crudo / Sicilian olives, radishes and olive brine dashi," are two more repeat favorites from past visits.

With a bit of prosecco left in our glasses and a desire to linger in the sun on this beautiful day, we finished the meal with a lovely selection of cheeses.

Earlier this year, a Boston visitor on Chowhound asked where to go for one lunch in Boston and Penny recommended Coppa. The follow-up comment from that poster said, "We went to Coppa... I think this was about the closest thing to a perfect lunch that I've ever had. Wish I had a second stomach."

For more about our food adventures, visit Food & Drink.

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List? Shop Amazon for all your Kitchen & Dining Needs and support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino with detailed food descriptions from Coppa's menu.
Photos: ©2013 Penny & Ed Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Tuesday, May 07, 2013 at 09:22 AM in City Life, Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, Places, We recommend! | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Cheese Alert: Bethmale Chèvre

Last Saturday, we stopped by Bacco's Wine & Cheese to add a little something to our weekend cheese tray and discovered Bethmale Chèvre.

My first request was for something sheepy, and shop owner Bob Bacco suggested one of our all-time favorite sheep's milk cheeses, Berkswell.

Since he seemed to have zeroed-in on our taste, I asked him to recommend a goat cheese. He handed over a slice of this semi-soft, lacy beauty that tasted like heaven. Yes, a piece of that was certainly going home with us.

Lesson: Always ask your cheesemonger for suggestions!

Do you let your cheesemonger suggest new cheeses or stick to your old favorites?

What's your current cheese crush?

This is a cheese that seems to get better with every bite. The first nibble fills your mouth with deep flavor and the second taste has you craving more. As you can see in the top photo, it slices beautifully with a cheese plane that yields lovely, long, irresistible shavings.

Janet Fletcher of the San Francisco Chronicle discovered this cheese long before most other cheese fans. She said, "The aroma is nutty and the flavor mellow and sweet, not remotely chalky or goaty. I have a hard time imagining anyone not liking this cheese." We agree!

And, here are other items from our Cheese Tray!

What's on your Cheese Shopping List? Here are some great books about cheese. These make wonderful gifts for a Cheese Lover. And, when you shop Amazon from here, they put some coins in our tip jar.

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2013 Penny Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 09:22 AM in Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, Places, We recommend! | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, February 22, 2013

"Culture: The Word on Cheese" Is Our Friday Link

Culture: The Word on Cheese is our Friday Link. If you're like me, you scan your twitter feed and always stop when you see certain icons. A tweet from Culture Cheese Magazine always slows me down.

They not only keep me informed about cheese, but they also have great taste in related topics and stay on top of the food scene.

When you explore the site, make sure you bookmark their "Cheese Library." It's a resource you can use anytime you come across a new cheese. And, the search option can help you find cheese by any number of criteria. I love it for locating cheese from a specific country when we're doing a themed meal.

And, just in case all of this isn't reason enough to enjoy and support this resource, they are a Massachusetts business!

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List? Shop Amazon for all your kitchen & dining needs and support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
screenshot from www.culturecheesemag.com

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Friday, February 22, 2013 at 09:22 AM in Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, Friday Links, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Holiday Spirit in Concord & Lexington

PMC_7461 - Version 22012-11-26-hloliday-wilsons-farm- lexington-© 2011 Penny Cherubino

A table of fresh, holiday wreaths at Wilson Farm

There's nothing like a visit to a beautiful New England town, decorated for the holidays, to give you a dose of holiday spirit. Concord and Lexington fit this bill perfectly and you can get a bit of shopping done at the same time.

We spent the early part of the day in Concord. Our puppy Poppy was with us as we walked around the town stopping to window shop and paying our traditional visits to the Concord Shop to pick up a few kitchen items and to the Concord Cheese Shop for a few delicious things to take home.

It was a nice day, so we ordered cups of a great chili from the Main Streets Market & Cafe and dined al fresco. The chili had big pieces of winter squash – an idea Penny plans to copy – and was delicious! It also came with big pieces of cornbread.

Photo by StevenErat used under creative commons license

Concord is a great place to shop with someone who appreciates quality and is looking for a selection that goes beyond the chains. For example, The Grasshopper Shop on Main Street sells clothing and accessories that are selected to appeal to women of all ages.

A stop at Wilson Farm is always on our list when we're in the area, so we were off to Lexington after lunch. The greenhouses were filled with red, white, and green, and the smell of pine was in the air.

They had gingerbread houses ready to go or with tubes of frosting to do your own decorating. They even had Holiday Gingerbread Decorating Workshops coming up on Thursday.

And, of course, this working farm is always a beautiful place for us city folk to feel more connected with the land. Ed and Poppy relaxed on a bench overlooking the fields and woods while I shopped for our supper.

We recommend a road trip to Concord and Lexington whenever you feel the need to enjoy the taste of small town life. It can be a wonderful alternative to holiday shopping at the mall or a great daytrip with holiday guests.

Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2012 Penny Cherubino, Grasshopper Shop photo by StevenErat here it is on Flickr.

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 09:22 AM in Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, History, Places, We recommend! | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Friday, December 07, 2012

Formaggio Kitchen's "Staff Picks" 2012 – Friday Link

We always find wonderful things at Formaggio Kitchen and their skill in choosing wonderful products goes way beyond cheese. So, when their staff picked their "Top 10 of 2012," we paid attention and want to share what we learned with you.

On this list you'll find cheese, vinegars, olive oil, pasta, seasonings, tea, cakes, coffee, chocolate, and more. They added a few honorary mentions. That group included the Cabot Clothbound Cheddar we told you about yesterday.

Formaggio is the perfect place to shop for gifts for the food lovers on your list. We have so many personal favorite items that entered our pantry through a visit to this wonderful collection – the best things one group of people can find to please those of us who love to splurge on great food.

Addresses and directions below the ad.

What's on your Food Lover's Shopping List? Shop Amazon for all your kitchen & dining needs and support this site!

Details:

Formaggio Kitchen

244 Huron Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts (map)

(617) 354-4750

Some items may also be found at:

South End Formaggio

268 Shawmut Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts (map)

(617) 350-6996

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: Screenshot from Formaggio Kitchen's Cheese Blog

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Friday, December 07, 2012 at 09:22 AM in Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, Food: Wine, Friday Links | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Bring a Big Wedge of a Great Cheese to the Party

Instead of putting together a typical cheese tray for your contribution to a holiday gathering or for guests in your own home, why not buy a nice, big wedge of some truly wonderful cheese and bring that. It should be a special cheese – one that is always the first to disappear on any cheese display. We have three to suggest.

What brought this to mind was a conversation with Ed. We were enjoying a cheese tray with both Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor and Rogue River Blue on it when Ed said, "Wow, I remember how much I like these cheeses, we should share those posts again."

Here they are!

First up is Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor Cheese. Invest in a big wedge in great condition and let the cheese fans know that those little black flecks are bits of truffle in the same cheese paste as the company's ledgendary Humboldt Fog, and it will be the first cheese missing from the table.

Here's our post with more details from 2008 Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor Cheese. And, it's still a favorite today.

Next is Rogue River Blue. This is another one we've been talking about since 2008. And, this is only around for a limited time so buy it when you see it. We found the piece above at Whole Foods at the Charles RIver Plaza in Beacon Hill.

Here's our first post on it, Rogue River Blue.

And here's a second when it won a major award,

Rogue River Blue, American Cheese Society Winner

The third cheese we're tossing into this mix is Cabot Clothbound Cheddar. While the first two are American West Coast cheeses, Cabot's superstar is from Vermont. This photo (courtesy of Cabot Creamery) shows how wonderful a single cheese can look on a holiday table.

Here's our post on how we discovered this cheese at L'Espalier back in 2009.

Cabot Clothbound Cheddar – Good Neighbors are Wonderful

Since this is a cheddar, it will be more familar to many of the people at most events. And, this is great cheddar with a crumbly texture and great, deep flavor.

Be the hit of the party by bringing something you love and sharing it with friends and family. Here are some really great tips on serving cheese to a crowd from thekitchn.com.

Do you have an Amazon Gift Certificate to use? Or do you need to buy one for a gift? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2008-2012 Penny & Ed Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

Posted by Penny on Thursday, December 06, 2012 at 09:22 AM in Food & Drink, Food: Cheese, Great Gifts !, We recommend! | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Pain D’Avignon Cheese Bread Grilled Cheese

We love grilled cheese sandwiches with a delicious twist! Last week, we bought a loaf of cheese bread from Pain D'Avignon at the City Hall Farmers' Market.

The bread itself has a fine texture and is filled with Swiss and Blue cheeses. It's delicious on it's own and if you are going to grill it, you should make sure the filling lives up to that standard.

To keep the quality outstanding, we grated a light coating of an aged cheddar onto both slices of the sandwich then thinly sliced some of Stillman's Farm, Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes and piled those on each piece of bread. Finally, we added some shreds of Jamón Serrano to each pile.

To gild our masterpiece, we melted the fat from the jamon and added some butter before we began grilling the sandwiches in a hot skillet. Porky flavor carressed the bread inside and out.

Shredding the ham made sure we would get a bit in each bite. Sometimes when we've left thinly sliced meat whole, the slice has pulled out of all that gooey, grilled, goodness in the first bite. The shredding process also left the stripes of fat that inspired us to melt them with the butter.

The first bite put us in celebration mode so we cracked open a split of champagne to enjoy with our toasties! It seemed to fit with Pain D'Avignon's heritage!

Keep Bread Fresh By Cutting From the Middle (featuring Pain D'Avignon's cheese bread)

Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site! Here are three of our favorite wine books.

The Food Lover's Guide to Wine

The New Wine Lover's Companion

The Wine Bible

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2012 Penny & Ed Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.