i’ve never been very good at picking a favorite anything, and i’m kind of annoying if you ask me to do so because i will probably give a somewhat lengthy speech like: “well, toDay i think it would be fun to watch the hudsucker proxy, listen to the shins and go bowling. while eating pringles. but last week i totally wanted to watch ET and go to the park. so i Really think it’s more about… sorry. yeah. i’ll take whatever’s on special. thanks.”

but then there is aged dutch goat’s milk gouda, and i think i’m ready to go out on a limb and say that it is my favorite cheese. ever. and yes, i would marry it.

the first time i tried this cheese was a few years ago in some schmancy wine and cheese shop in concord, ma. i was there on a business trip and the other woman i was traveling with and i were exhausted and decided to go buy some cheese and a baguette and a bottle of wine and call it dinner in the hotel room. i think we got some other kinds of cheese, too, but honestly i don’t remember any of the next week because all i wanted to do was eat that gouda all day. work schmork.

it’s funny because this was the same trip wherein i discovered that i have a fondness for tempranillo wine, which is one of the most common spanish reds, so this post sounds a bit big for its epicurean britches now, don’t it?

but to return to the cheese, i came home gaga over it and unable to find any in indiana for a long time, until david rousted some up in indy for the decadent garden party almost a year later, and it was still good, but not quite as good. then sahara mart offered yet another reason to become my favorite bloomingtonian grocer by carrying some for a few weeks. i must have been the only person who bought it, though. barbarians. ;)

anyway it’s not all that hard to find these days, possibly because it’s getting hipper, and i have since located several samples that were all lovely, though usually quite expensive. at whole foods, for example? they have one that is aMazing but it costs like $18/lb. and i’m sorry, but i make it a rule to only donate a kidney to subsidize dairy purchases once every five years.

yesterday though? i found some at trader joe’s for $8/lb. and the past few days have been happy, which is what led to this post. i think my conviction is even more solidified because this dairy sensitivity thing i mentioned in the biscuits and gravy post? it’s quite real, but both hard cheeses and goat’s milk cheeses don’t aggravate it much, so it looks like the thing to do is just pinch pennies and cherish only such cheeses that truly deserve to be cherished. which is how it should be anyway, really. and this shiznit’s at the top of the list.

that was educational, eh? :)

and the first reason it might be fun to live in amsterdam, you ask?
why, the tulips, of course!
i like tulips.
and if you don’t believe that, look here.
there are even two pictures that are named “i like tulips”, so i don’t know what else you thought i meant…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under food, photos, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.