Some Food Thoughts

I have two motivations for this post.

1) The Gilmore Girls have been the front page of my blog for far too long.

2) I want to make a record of a few interesting food experiences I've had lately.

So, here are those food experiences.

Experience A: Figs



I had fresh figs for the first time that I can recall this weekend. I don't like them. There are too many seeds, and the flavor isn't sharp enough for my liking. I actually ate them with goat cheese, which has a very sharp flavor, but the flavors didn't mix well enough to improve the pungent fig taste for me.

Despite this bad experience with fresh figs, Fig Newtons are still awesome.

Experience B: Naan Bread



Normally, I like Indian food when it's there, but I never crave it. I have a newfound respect for Tikki Masala, but that would be a tangent. And I'm not a man who tolerates tangents. In any case, Naan bread is one of the greatest things to come out of India since the Just So Stories. I realize that the bread was probably around before Rudyard Kipling.

Experience C: The Cheese Shop

So, this past Thursday, we went to help Annie's mom paint in a place called Ridgefield, CT. It's rather a rich person's town. We saw one of these on the road:



NOTE: It's an Aston Martin DB9. I knew this because I've started watching Top Gear, one of the funniest television shows ever. It's a show about cars, which may make it inaccessible for some of you who read this blog, but when I make Annie watch clips of it, she always laughs a lot. Yet she still won't watch full episodes with me. Odd? I think so, but I'm sure she has her reasons. Anyway, writing any more about this would be another tangent. And again, I'm not a man who tolerates tangents.

In any case, while in Ridgefield, CT, I had the opportunity to walk into a cheese shop. It was all I could do not to launch into the Monty Python cheese shop sketch the moment I walked in the door. Still, I was able to control myself, and after a conversation with the extraordinarily helpful shop owner, I bought two kinds of cheese.

First, Brebirousse D'Argental.



Artisancheesegallery.wordpress.com has this to say about Brebirousse: "A ewe’s milk cheese from the Lyon region, France, the Brebirousse is a lovely soft and creamy aromatic cheese. It spreads wonderfully on a sliced baguette and pairs with both a crisp dry white and a sweet ice wine."

Second, Tallegio



Tallegio, according to artisanalcheese.com, is "a semi-soft, washed-rind cheese from the Valtaleggio region in northern Italy, near Lombardy. It is characteristically aromatic yet mild in flavor and features tangy, meaty notes with a fruity finish."

I absolutely loved both of these things. I may be a little bit of a food snob, and I'm absolutely a nerd, but I really love good cheese. I could have spent an hour in that cheese shop, and I can hardly stand to spend an hour in any store.

I'm not going to back off of my stance on tangents, but I'm going to go on a bit of a sidebar here. One of the troubles with the view that we should all give away everything we have above subsistence level until everyone in the world reaches subsistence level is that most of the things that really make life interesting and sweet would not longer be economically viable to produce. There would be no Brebirousse, no Tallegio, no Aston Martin DB9's, no television shows--probably no televisions, for that matter--no internet, etc. I'm not saying that this makes economic equality an undesirable goal, but I'm saying that there's something important against which to balance the goal.

That's about the whole of it. I'll end with a gratuitous picture of my wife. Because I love her.