cheese | Ramblingrose

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This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

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enjoy

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So simple but so cheffy

I almost gave up on writing a post today. I dabbled with a couple of ideas, but could summon up no enthusiasm. It's the sort of day on which it's difficult to be enthusiastic about anything. Just too much rain to go for a walk and so therefore a mild feeling of disappointment with myself for not being braver. After all, how hard is it to hold an umbrella over your head if the almost mist turns to almost rain? So I decided to just chill out with a game of sudoku, but befor

Oct 24

Cheddar cheese - posh to everyday

By posh to everyday I mean the two examples above. On the left is Keen's cheddar from Somerset - one of only three makers to be awarded: "The term Somerset Artisan Cheddar, which is a recognised Slow Food Praesidium is only given to producers that meet more exacting requirements still - making traditional cloth-bound cheeses from unpasteurised milk, with traditional starter cultures and animal rennet. Only three producers Keen, Montgomery and Westcombe meet these criteria."

Oct 22

So much from one plate of food

Somewhere or other I had a quote about there being a whole world on a plate of food. But I have lost it. Mostly this kind of quote -and I have seen this kind of sentiment in several places, refers to the history of the dish itself, and its ingredients. What I am looking at today is rather more personal but it has indeed been a ramble. As I have intimated in the last few posts I'm working in my head towards a post on Robert Carrier classics but then the night before last I

Oct 18

Tiny satisfaction, tiny problem(s)

"a source of joy" Nigel Slater I said I would report back on the ricotta experiment so here I go. I have to say I am pretty satisfied. This is the finished result with the milky residue below. And it was so, so easy. I used Anna Jones recipe for Home-made ricotta in The Guardian. Literally all you have to do is heat up some milk with a tiny bit of salt, take it off the heat, add a precise amount of white vinegar, stir until the curds form, leave for a couple of hours, a

Oct 16

Pickings

"something that is picked or picked up: such as gleanable or eatable fragments - Merriam-Webster Dicitionary "something, especially money, that can be obtained from a particular situation in an easy or a dishonest way" Oxford Learners Dictionary Odd that the Americans and the British seem to have a different meaning for pickings. Of course once you start adding descriptors to 'pickings' you narrow down the meanings somewhat - slim pickings, rich pickings, easy pickings, gri

Oct 5

Beer cheese soup

"two ingredients that don’t immediately scream soup to much of the world" Felicity Cloake Beer and cheese however, are perfectly common and indeed a winning combination. Well I imagine to the experts you have to have the right cheese with the right beer, but to those with no savvy palate like me, most beers and most cheeses are a perfect match. And in Winconsin - famous for its beer, and for its cheese - it's apparently the dairy king of America - they have used their prim

Aug 29

Tonight's dinner? - some kind of pumpkin tart

It's Friday, which is generally quiche night, but David has been loyally eating the remains of last week's quiche for his dinner when I was fasting, and so my thoughts turned to a galette - and specifically a pumpkin galette because I have some pumpkin that needs using. My thoughts immediately turned to Ottolenghi's (maybe Ixta Belfrage's too since the recipe is from their book Flavour) Butternut and sage galette with orange caramel which I have made a couple of times before

Jul 17

Cauliflower cheese soup

"It has something of the Welsh rarebit about it." Nigel Slater Often I have a vague idea of what to do for dinner, and then I either go with what is to hand, or search around my cookbooks and the net to find the answer. Today I thought I should probably use the last bit of cauliflower that I have in my fridge before it goes off completely - small brown spots are already appearing. And when vegetables are getting to that stage, then soup is the answer. There is some leftov

Jun 16

Variety

Variety - "a number of different types of things, especially ones in the same general category." Dictionary.com "Variety is the spice of life" It's late in the day so, in spite of the fact that a blog entitled Variety might actually be a quite an interesting idea, today I'm just doing a bits and pieces kind of post. A variety of things - recipes, information, disvcoveries ... But isn't it interesting how many proverbs and sayings are food related? The above rather gloriou

May 19

Yum - but when would I eat this?

"If you wanted to be really rogue you could dump every single ingredient into the loaf pan itself, mix, bake and eat." Sarah Kate Gillingham/Kitchn The above Badass smoky chilli cheese bear bread was one of the recipes I found when I was writing about yesterday's website Saucy Gander. It looked so decadently scrumptious that I saved the photograph for another post. And here it is, because I have less time today and this is probably going to be one of those - a list of reci

May 6

Whipped feta

"The Best Whipped Feta Contains Feta and Nothing Else" Claire Lower/ Lifehacker Australia I'm not a member/subscriber to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram et al. and so I am not immediately aware of foodie trends. Only when they filter into recipe books and newsletters. So I'm always behind. This one seems to have begun around 2019 - but a recent 2025 study by Datassential maintains that it's only at the Adoption stage - the other stages being Inception - then Adoption - Proli

Apr 18

Torta Pasqualina - an Easter tradition

"The quintessential spring dish." Stefano Arturi I have now been trawling the net for examples of this Italian - no - Ligurian - Easter dish - a pie filled with cheese and greens and eggs. I now have a large number of examples and a few things to say about it but didn't know which example to use as my header picture - so in the end I decided to go for the very first one I looked at from a website called Marcella in Cucina - after all, she's Italian and it looks pretty goo

Apr 10

A quickie about a specific omelette

"the salty sharpness contrasts exquisitely with the rich fattiness of the eggs; against which too, the fresh hit of mint is positively exhilarating." Nigella Lawson Nigella is talking about what she (and lots of others) call a Corsican omelette - or Frittata incu a menta (e brocciu), as it's called in Corsica. Of course like those of us who live nowhere near Corsica, or even France and can therefore not obtain brocciu cheese, we will not be able to make the dish in an auth

Feb 14

Christmas done and dusted. Now you can play

"We can now all admit that the thing we really love about the festivities is the time after the day itself" Yotam Ottolenghi And the leftovers. For my son this is turkey sandwiches and - well - me too. And yesterday, that was what Christmas Day was almost all about. Well apart from being with family, the presents - not such a big deal now that there are no small children involved - the big thing was the leftovers and the opportunity to make sandwiches such as this one - m

Dec 26, 2025

A recipe years in the making

"pushing the boundaries of Italian cuisine, to highlight the power food, drink and travel has on memory" Rob Hobart/Peroni Nastro Azzurro I started out today researching piña colada inspired desserts - it was a topic in my Ideas list. Somehow or other during those rambles around a couple of Google pages, I came across this Cherry and strawberry crostata with black sesame praline a dish that Ixta Belfrage had presented in her Substack newsletter, telling us that it was a re

Dec 4, 2025

Feta or fetta?

"Keep a jar of Persian-style fet[t]a in the fridge and you'll always have something to smear on veg, swirl through pasta, add oomph to recipes and basically make life better." Sydney Morning Herald Good Food I have learnt a few things about feta/fetta today and not just the initial thing - that feta and fetta are not the same thing - but a whole lot of other associated stuff too. And let me say that I am not the only one who uses the two spellings somewhat haphazardly. I c

Nov 21, 2025

Homity pie

" quiche mistranslated by a rugged, carb-addicted farmhand. " Jimi Famerewa/The Guardian In this week's Guardian Feast Newsletter, appeared this - to my potato freak eyes - a glorious concoction. It turns out it was Marmite and leek homity pie from a guy called Jimi Famurewa who had been messing with (the marmite) a supposedly much-loved British pie of potatoes, leeks and cheese. But I had never heard of it, so my interest was piqued - maybe that was just a marketing plo

Nov 8, 2025