Long Clawson Huntsman

Long Clawson Huntsman
Comes from: cows
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$15.99/lb

[first photo on the new blog, and it's astoundingly out of focus, hooray!]

So this cheese is sort of exactly what I do with cheese when no one is looking, and I'm amused that someone else had the idea. See, cheese is great, right? But sometimes, cheese is also *boring.* Because you've had a particular type of cheese a million times before, or maybe you've just eaten a brick of it tonight. Anyway. If you're a normal person, you're probably mixing bread with your cheese, which I heartily recommend but I only do sometimes, because my other addiction (besides to cheese, grapes, pumpkin seeds, beef jerky, pineapple, and nova) is to bread, and if there is bread in the house -- even in the freezer! even *still frozen*! -- I will eat it all in, like, two days. And now that y'all have a clearer picture of my lack of self-control, I will continue on about this cheese.

So there are times, anyway, when you've got a ton of cheese in front of you, and maybe no bread, and you're kinda bored with *individual* cheeses, and so somewhere in your cheese-drowned mind the thought forms that maybe you should *mix* the cheeses, you know? Maybe *combining cheeses* would allow you to finish the cheese you can't finish right now.

(And that second person is actually *you*, because I can always finish the cheese.)

That's what this cheese is, this "huntsman." Someone in England decided, hey! Why don't I combine a cheddar-like cheese (that's the Gloucester part) with a blue cheese (the Stilton part) and see what happens?

And actually what happens is quite good. The Gloucester is nice and sharp and chewy, the Stilton is salty and stinky and a little crumbly, and voila! You have yourself a Frankenstein cheese that actually works, that doesn't go around killing people in order to make them love it. (Or is that the guy from Of Mice and Men? I can't remember.)

I think this cheese would probably taste really good on an apple -- something more sweet than tart, red delicious over granny smith over pink lady -- but I only just thought of that and I've already eaten all of it so I wouldn't really know.