For The Love of Cheese

My favourite cheese in all the world is Pecorino.  The fact that I can name an Italian cheese as my first cheese love is entirely due to my university boyfriend, Andrew.  He also introduced my very naïve South African butt to pubs and Belgian fruit beer, but that’s a whole other blog post.

The main point of this post is that I regularly have wedges of stinky weird cheeses taking up space in my fridge.  They don’t last in the fridge for very long as cheese with a piece of fruit is a regular snack when I’m lounging on the sofa watching a box set or two.

Even before I met Andrew I liked a bit of cheese.  But if you’d asked me about varieties I would have looked at you with a blank stare.  In South Africa I ate of the cheese.  Of course I did, but it was mainly of the Cheddar and Edam sort.  Red Leicester was introduced into the repertoire once I came to the UK.  I didn’t really know there was much else.  


Please remember, before crossing an ocean to my adventurous life in the UK I lived in the land of big meat and any other food group was categorised as a mere condiment.

But after I met Andrew one of our Sunday brunch rituals involved lounging for long periods of time in The Mark Addy Pub which is located on the banks of the river Irwell.  There they served sizable chunks of any cheese you could care to name with hunks of tasty bread and heaped spoonfuls of chutneys and pickles to boot.

Suddenly, along with intermittent bouts of studying, my life was full of blue veins, oozing Bries, Stinky Bishops and a whole lot more.  I’ve always been of the opinion when it comes to food that one should taste first and ask questions later.  This particular brand of cavalier food negotiation skill has led to some truly yeugh moments but equally to other mouth-watering moments of taste-bud bliss.  So all in all it’s a tack which has led me down new food routes I’m very happy to have taken.

And with my taste tour of cheeses within the walls of the Mark Addy overlooking a rather splendid view of the river I might add, I learned to love the cheese.  I care not for all those health warnings about high cholesterol.  I am a health food rebel and proud to be so.

So I was heartily pleased when I attended a wedding earlier this year to see that the wedding cake was made up of several wheels of delicious cheese.  Now these are my kind of people I thought and this wedding cake only serves to confirm that.

There is a belief held in some cultures that one meets and interacts with certain people so they can enhance certain aspects of one’s life and hopefully you do the same for them.  Well, university boyfriend Andrew – you’ve certainly done that for me with regards to cheese.  So, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Some out there may think this a trivial thing.  But opening up to something as simple as a new cheese is opening up the possibility of new tastes to savour in life itself.  So my advice: try new things people and see what the world has to offer.