Fromage Montage

All right, I'm sure that many people (of our 8 faithful followers) are wanting to have the skinny on French cheese. After all, Fromage (cheese) is an entire course in the traditional French Dinner and when the French are really enjoying the meal, the Fromage helps them to finish well and feel like they have "dégusted."

So in the interest of those who have been asking us about cheese, I got the cheeses out of our Fridge and took pictures of them. There are actually more types of cheese here than you could try in a year if you tried more than one different cheese a day in that year, never repeating.

First off, let's go with a cheese everybody has at least heard of: Roquefort

I know what some of you are saying: "Hey! That's Blue Cheese!" and yes, you'd be correct, but in France, there are many varieties of «fromages bleu» and Roquefort happens to be one of them. Here, if your blue cheese is crumbly, that means that it isn't worth putting on the table; in fact, it'd probably be best to just use it to catch mice. Good blue cheese is moist and spreadable, like our cream cheese and the blue cheese here spread on a piece of fresh bread is really quite an experience.

Next up: Fouchtra Vieux, or Ol' Fouchtra

When I saw this cheese at market, I thought to myself, "It looks like they rolled that cheese in dirt!" So I bought a piece. Upon looking at it closer, I think they really did, here look at it closer


You can actually see the grains of dirt or whatever it is that they rolled it in. When we asked some French people what it was, they simply responded that it was the «moisissure» or mold that grows on it, but I ain't never seen mold like that! Anyway, it is really delicious and when they have cheese here, you're supposed to eat it from most creamy to most sharp and this lies in the middle somewhere.

Next on the list is Raclette


Raclette is used as a melting cheese and usually poured over potatoes, but it is pretty versatile and creamy. Oddly enough, the cheese is cut into squares, but the little Raclette melting pans they have are triangular so that you have to cut a little bit off of each square to fit it in there.

Next is possibly the king of French Cheeses:


Brie

And this is no ordinary Brie, this is the Brie de Meaux, the real Brie that, yes, is actually illegal to mass market in the U.S. because of how they treat the milk. This Cheese is alive. It smells like broccoli shouldn't but somehow you want to eat it anyway and I even had to cut off a slice after taking this picture. The first house I entered in France I thought I smelled old dirty diapers, but now that I know what I'm smelling, I realize they must have had a pretty expensive arsenal of Cheese.

And now for a change in Animal byproduct: Le Chevre (that's "goat" for you Anglophones out there)

Always seen in this form and with the white rind, Chevre is a very eatable cheese. It isn't as much like feta as you'd expect since that is what American's know of goat's cheese. It's somehow creamy and sharp at the same time and I personally have a hard time knowing when to eat it with other cheeses since it is so easy to eat and yet so powerful at the same time.

The reason that the French even find importance in the order of their cheeses is that if you were to eat say the Brie de Meaux then a Camembert, you wouldn't taste the Camembert at all. By finding the perfect order of cheeses, you find a kind of cheese Zen, if you will.

Lastly, I'll show you what happens when good cheese goes bad



This cheese was left in our fridge and we forgot all about it. It was a pretty incredible goat cheese mixed with herbs de provence. Don't worry, the large ovular object on it is an olive garnish. We're actually pretty sure that the green stuff doesn't go deep and that we can cut it off and enjoy the cheese again!

The next one we're not sure about:



Amber thinks it may have been a bleu at one point, but I don't know, I think it looks too much like banana pudding. And just to let you know, I was able to pull the wrapping off of several other of these cheeses, but this one... WHEW! It reminded me of the smell when I had to clean my Cocker Spaniel's ears, but hey, I might try it out anyway.





*Editorial Note* After talking with another person here more about the Roquefort cheese, I found out that what makes Roquefort cheese real "Roquefort" is that it is made in the region of Roquefort and from sheep's milk. It is as with wine, an AOC cheese, meaning that it has certain regulations about its production and you could find another cheese that tastes exactly like it made in the exact same way, but if not from Roquefort, it is sadly just blue sheep's cheese. Kind of like California's sparkling white wine cannot be called Champagne.

"Flying Solo"

What a week! Bob and Sheri left for Texas early Thursday morning (Oct. 22, I think) at which point we had about 8 people here, I think. The following Sunday, we went from 8 to 26, and all this past week, we've been feeding 26 people, three times a day! Here's what our daily schedule looked like:

6:00am -- wake up, get dressed
6:15 -- coffee must be turned on by this point (it takes about 45 minutes to make 5 liters of coffee)
7:00 -- Finish guys arrive for breakfast. We had to have ham, cheese, bread, boiled eggs, coffee, tea, milk, orange juice, butter, jelly, cereal, and plates/silverwear set out for them to help themselves. Starting at this point, we just had to make sure things stayed full... we usually used 4-5 liters of orange juice per day.
7:15 -- Amber starts desserts for the day while Charles tends to breakfast refills and dishes. If the lunch dessert took a long time, I'd just make that one and have to wait till the afternoon to make the dinner dessert. I often had dessert ready to go before 8:30 in the morning!
8:00 - 8:30 -- French guys arrive for breakfast. They're more talkative in the morning :) and I think they eat more bread.
8:30 -- We double-check that all the ingredients for the day are at hand
9:00 -- our last customers come to eat breakfast and Marie-Yvonne and Barnard arrive to help
9:00 - 11:30 -- the four of us cook lunch, set the table, and keep up with dishes

11:30 -- quick lunch (we eat leftovers)
12:00 - 12:30 -- Finnish lunch (just the main dish and coffee; they only have a 30 minute lunch break!)
12:15 - 1:15 -- French lunch: entrée, plat, cheese, dessert, coffee
1:20 - 4:00ish -- dishes, cleaning up (the French always put bread on the table rather than their plates, so we spend a lot of time cleaning up bread crumbs), re-setting the tables, finishing dinner
4:00ish -- coffee with Marie-Yvonne and Barnard... we'd usually eat any leftover dessert items at this point. :) Then we'd check the ingredients for the next few days and see whether or not Charles and I needed to go shopping that afternoon or early the next morning. Mondays are veggie pick-up days, Thursdays are meat. We also order bread every day for the next morning.
4:30ish -- Marie-Yvonne and Barnard leave. Charles and I either nap, run to the grocery store, or finish up things for dinner.
6:30pm -- Charles and I return to the kitchen to do final dinner prep: check water pitchers, make bread baskets, prepare serving dishes, make coffee, etc.
8:00pm -- dinner starts. It usually lasts -- much to the dismay of some of our Finnish clients -- over 2 hours. On Friday, I left at about 11:30pm and Charles stayed till 12:30... that was unusual, though. We usually get back to our chalet at about 10:30. Some nights we ate dinner and some nights we didn't.
One or two nights, Charles entertained the guests with music while I caught up on dishes. They loved his Cajun songs!


We've had long days, but we've had a great time. We sort of found our "rhythm," and we've laughed a LOT with Marie-Yvonne and Barnard. They are SUCH fantastic people! They've been so patient with us as we learned our kitchen vocabulary in French-- they'd ask us were something was, and we'd just stare at them. Haha! This week has really been good for our language learning! It was hard, though... by the end of the week, we were waking up with sore feet, tired backs, and legs that didn't want to carry us anymore. Saturday we were definitely ready for a break.

Saturday and Sunday Marie-Yvonne and Barnard stayed at home because all of the recipes were ours and because half of our customers (the French ones) left Friday evening.

Friday was room cleaning day. We asked the clients to bring their sheets with them to breakfast Friday morning, if they didn't mind, and we ended up with mountains of dirty sheets!
We had a lot of help with the rooms, though! Anne and Madame Adams came to do the bathrooms, which was a HUGE help! Unfortunately, I forgot to remind them do to the chalets, so I had to clean 3 bathrooms (wah). Bob and Sheri were so good to us to organize help, plan out the menus, order veggies for us for Mondays, and even ask the Boulanger (bread maker) to deliver for us!
Saturday, we still had to do all three meals, but Sunday, we had only breakfast! It was wonderful! We spent the day going to market, drinking coffee, browsing for new cheeses to try, doing laundry, and working in our future apartment. We now have clean floors, a desk, a dresser, kitchen chairs, and dishes!

Sunday night, Charles cooked up some of the mushrooms that grow all over the property. They're delicious!

This week, Monday was going to be Marie-Yvonne and Barnard's last day helping us. Bob and Sheri were scheduled to come back Monday evening and wanted to dive back into work Tuesday morning. However, they fly standby and all flights are currently full. Sooooo they'll be back Thursday evening instead. When we timidly brought this up with Marie-Yvonne and Barnard, they're response was, "oh, no problem!" and they'll be continuing to help us this week. :) However, this week, instead of 26, we have only 17... which doesn't sound like a big difference, but it seems like a walk in the park after last week! Today, for example, we had everything except the icing for the cake and the potatoes done by 2:00pm, which gave us time for a leisurely coffee and an afternoon trip to the grocery store.

Keep us all in your prayers, though, especially Bob, Sheri, Kristin, Isaac, and the kids as they travel back from the US. Thanks for keeping up with us!