Waimea Blue Fog Cheese for Daring Cooks

Sawsan from chef in disguise was our March 2013 Daring Cooks hostess! Sawsan challenges us to make our own homemade cheeses! She gave us a variety of choices to make, all of them easily accomplished and delicious!

I was happy to jump onto this latest challenge, due to my long postponed goal of making pressed and formed cheese.  Having experimented with cream cheese, feta and ricotta, I purchased a form and follower (the doo hickey that fits snugly on top) for pressing cheese.  Those items have been languishing in a cupboard, so hurrah, they've been put to use!

Making my own blue cheese sounded fun, despite my granddaughter's dire warnings, mentioned in an earlier post.  So using a favorite kefir and cheese site, Dom's Kefir for instructions, I started off with a half gallon of fresh, raw goat's milk, and inoculated it for 24 hours with kefir grains rather than rennet.  For a variety of reasons.  I always have it on hand for one.  You can visit his site for more information than you need or want to know.  I'm calling it Waimea Blue Fog, since I bought the goats milk there in Waimea, on the cooler, North end of the Big Island, known for an occasional fog blanketing its road and green hills.

Lemon Shrimp with Polenta and La Vignarola

Our current Cook the Books Club selection is The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri. A favorite author of mine, though on second reading, this first novel of his Inspector Montalbano mystery series, is not my favorite. Too much of the corruption, poverty and sleazy side of life in Sicily maybe. Albeit thankfully balanced by the Inspector’s sense of humor and fair play.  And who, with that, according to one of his favorite chefs, "was a good customer with discerning tastes."  However, even his love of and descriptions of good food are not given as much scope in this one. 

Despite a slowish beginning of complex sentences, depressing descriptions of environmental travesties, and dour political mutterings, we do move on eventually into the plot, convoluted though it is.   I’m still not quite sure who all did what to whom and why.  Somehow you don’t feel too sorry for the various corpses.

But you have to love his conflicted main character, Inspector Salvo Montalbano.  He tries to do the right thing, despite the moral climate and political expediency, is known as a just man “who when he wanted to get to the bottom of something, he did.”  And, of course he does, intervening under cover to protect the innocent.