Fat = Flavour!

At lunchtime I had a cheese salad.  Salad at lunchtime is not unusual for me.  Cheese at any time is quite the norm.  I love cheese of all sorts.  My salad cheese though is usually a seriously strong cheddar.  Now I know that many of my friends are very sniffy about British cheese and Cheddar in particular.  Well I'm not - so long as it is really tasty and some of the bog standard supermarket Cheddars are just that: including Pilgrims' choice Seriously Strong which I occasionally buy.  So today when I tasted my cheese I was very surprised to find that it had virtually no flavour that my palate could discern.  Then I looked at the packet and remembered that I'd bought it because its description was 'Wonderfully Strong and Punchy Extra Mature' but with 30% less fat.  And therein lies the problem.  As any chef will tell you, two of the most important flavour enhancers are fat and salt.  So 30% less fat meant 100% less taste as far as I was concerned.  I won't be buying that again.

Heaven

Yesterday I spent much of the day having scans at Ayr hospital.  In the evening we settled down to a wee treat ending with a little bit of heaven:

Rioja and a rather ripe Epoisses and a few other cheeses.

Death by Bedsheet

Today's news that obesity could be linked to sleeping in a room with too much light may or may not be scientifically sustainable but it did make me think about some of the odder correlations that have been shown such as this one

How on earth did 5886 people manage to die by becoming entangled in their bedsheets?  In fact how do you die that way?  I'm sorry but I think I am just about to make a request that if I die that way it's not declared.  I want people to be happy at my funeral and celebrate my life but I don't want them so completely struck down with mirth that they can't even participate in the service.

I finished a rather smelly camembert last night before I went to bed.  I slept soundly (and had no nightmares) and woke up this morning with the bedsheets as pristine as when I went to bed.  So far as I am concerned this was a Good Thing because I am here to finish this post and I haven't become a bed sheet statistic and my fridge no longer has that terrible smell (which was there even though the camembert was in two sealed plastic containers).

The correlation came from one of 244,470 correlations on the site tylervigen.com (and one is free to copy anything on the site).

The Postman Called

I have so many posts in draft and so many from ages ago that topicality will certainly not be the point when I press the 'publish' button.  I will start today with an incident from yesterday.  Just after noon the postman arrived.   He went to the back of his van and produced a large and fairly heavy cardboard box.  "You have no idea how glad I am to be getting rid of this." he said.  "I just wish that you were at the start of my round and not over half way through.  It smells like some very serious cheese."  That was odd because I certainly hadn't ordered any cheese.  I duly applied my monicker to his electronic pad.  We were just chatting when Gaz's posemobile drew up and the postie and Gaz started an animated chat about times past, present and future (postie was in school with our first son, Andrew).

In the meantime I came into the house and opened the parcel: a scrumptious hamper which was, you guessed it, based on superb cheeses and all the accompaniments.  It was a birthday prezzie from Gaz.  (the sending of which had been delayed due to the fact that the post would't deliver anything over 10kg so the company had had to seek revised instructions from Gaz).  Postie's and my curiosity suitably satisfied Gaz and I had a wonderful leisurely and suitably cheesy lunch.  The lettuce and tomatoes offset the cheese and tracklements - leastways we kidded ourselves that they did. 

I'm sure that anyone who loves cheese (and possibly many who don't) can tell tales of travelling with cheese.  We drove en famille from Barvaria once with a cheese which had been give to us as a present (I seem to recall it was Limburger)  which despite being in a container and triple wrapped in polythene stank the car out for the 1000+ miles home to the Hebrides.

I'm Ashamed To Say

That in nearly four decades I have only seen the Lewis Carnival a couple of times and one of those was when my wife was one of the judges of the floats.  This year it took place last Saturday in Stornoway.  CJ and I went into town in the morning early to avoid it.  There was a 'continental market' in the square.  It was largely a gathering of food stalls mostly selling take-away hot food.  I hope they did well with the Carnival goers in the afternoon.  There wasn't really much to photograph but I was fascinated by the cheese stall.  We can get a pretty good selection of unusual cheese in Stornoway in both the Coop Supermarket and The Good Food Boutique and I'd rather support the local economy.  However this cheese stall would take some beating for purveying the unusual:

Perhaps I'll give those a miss.