I am eating a cheese sandwich. It is German tilsit on what I want to call "lye bread", for lack of an English word for the bread that is brushed with the lye they put on soft pretzels to give them that reddish-brown glossy finish. I want to call it that because that is the literal translation, lye bread.
Sitting on my counter, I also have a sizeable hunk of Appenzeller, which was the only Swiss or German mountain cheese they had today at Cheese Magic. But I decided to try the Portugese mountain cheese, which is softer than the German varieties I was after and more goat-y. It is also less... ummm... the word in German is "rezent". Spicy didn't quite get it (that was what I tried, when I was sampling cheese - do you have anything more spicy? I was in cheese shop #2 at this point, and the guy pulled a far less ripened French mountain cheese out of the fridge. I took the point that it was not at its best fridge-cold, but still, it was even further from what I really wanted.)
Cheese has me conflicted. See, I'm all for local food. This does not mean that I don't buy organic bananas at Loblaws, but I buy more apples than bananas. Ontario has great apples. And tomatoes, and strawberries, and potatoes, and most anything you need to eat unless you're after mangosteen and plantain...
But, while there are some decent Ontario cheeses, by and large, I am dissatisified (Quebec does better, but then, they allow raw milk cheese production). And I come by the cheese love honestly: after all, my father was a cheesery co-op member in southern Germany. Somewhere stored in my memory banks is the idea that my grandfather was one of the founders. My uncle drove the truck. When I was a child, I thought cheese was in the same category as bread, milk, and jam: something that belonged on the table twice a day. It was good cheese. Still is. But it's got a lot of food miles on it, if I buy it in Kensington Market. Sigh.
But then, I don't make it to the city to go to Cheese Magic (or any other really good cheese store) that often. I hate traffic too much (today, I drove, and then took the subway, and it only took one hour from home to my Annex destination, but that's because I left home after rush hour. On a Sunday morning, I can do it in 35 minutes, driving. At rush hour, I can do it in two hours...)
(Oh, and why the Annex? Cause that's where the Chinese consulate is. And the Chinese consulate is where you get visas for China.)
Posted by Johanna at October 18, 2006 07:02 PM