Cheese No. 2

Not having had the chance to eat any of the Island Bries in Victoria, I carried this cheese with me to Vancouver and used it in a delicious salad. I wanted to make K. dinner as a thank-you for letting me stay with her the night before my flight back to Toronto and I remembered a salad recipe in the Rebar Cookbook that included both Brie and pears. Fortunately, K. had this cookbook and I tinkered with the recipe for the "Mesclun and Fresh Pear Salad, with Brie, hazelnuts and blackberry-thyme vinaigrette." My salad was regular red lettuce, pear slices, yellow pepper slivers, almonds, and, of course, Brie, the lettuce pre-tossed with the following vinaigrette (a variation on the Rebar recipe, halved):

1/2 cup thawed frozen strawberries, blenderized
2 tbsp raspberry vinegar
2 tbsp orange-grapefruit juice
2 tsp honey
2 tsp raw sugar
1 tsp dried thyme*
4 tbsp vegetable oil
salt and pepper to taste (i.e. lots)

* would be better with 1/2 tbsp fresh

The dressing turned out really well but the cheese was the highlight of the salad: it was sufficiently salty and creamy but not too mushy, and leaving the "rind" on didn't affect the flavour at all. When we'd had enough of the greens, K. and I started picking pieces of cheese and pear out of the bowl and eating them with bits of the foccacia that accompanied our meal.

As you can see in the photo at right, Island Bries is packaged in an interesting way: it comes with a wooden coaster stamped with the name of the cheesemaker. When I was looking for info on this cheese on the Little Qualicum Cheeseworks website, there was a note about the coaster included in the cheese description: "Our best seller. Its creamy texture, velvety white rind with mushroomy overtones goes beautifully with a crisp Chardonnay. The little wooden board rescued from the burn pile of a guitar body manufacturer can live again as a coaster."

Other cheese tasting: I also ate some delicious vegetarian lasagna that B. made to celebrate my return to Toronto and going back on cheese -- her recipe used cottage cheese and mozarella (I think). She also served some tomato and bocconcini salad, which is one of the things I'd missed most about not eating cheese after discovering how fabulous the simple combo of fresh, in-season tomatoes, basil, and good-quality mozzarella can be when S. took me to Feenie's in Vancouver.