You remember the recent post where I said I’d found a local source of cheese crack curds?
Behold, 2kg of cheesy goodness, made fresh and posted yesterday, delivered this morning by the post.
The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
You remember the recent post where I said I’d found a local source of cheese crack curds?
Behold, 2kg of cheesy goodness, made fresh and posted yesterday, delivered this morning by the post.
Ok, so the bulk of the raclette cheese and the pickles comes from Aldi and the potatoes are leftovers from the roast I cooked yesterday, but the rest – venison sausage, honey roast ham and honey roasted belly pork and truffle raclette – were just bought from the Morges Christmas market and I made the bagels this morning.
I’m Canadian. This means that I have a fondness for poutine. It goes with the territory. Unfortunately, getting cheddar cheese curd outside of western Canada has, in the 15 years I’ve lived overseas, proven impossible.
Until now.
I recently came across this little gem of a news article:
Walter Grob, the current owner of the Engelberg cheese dairy, moved from Unterland to Engelberg. After years of hiking in Switzerland and Canada, the young man from eastern Swiss took over the business in 2015 at the age of 24. He produces traditional products in outstanding quality – but always tinkers with something new. Thanks to his innovative strength, he has already launched several new products, such as the Cheddar, and won prizes at the Swiss Cheese Award.
From there, auntie Google provided this information:
Walter Grob
Klosterhof 1, CH-6390 Engelberg
Telefon: +41 (0)41 638 08 88
info@schaukaeserei-engelberg.ch
So I reached out by email.
But got no answer.
Then I reached out by phone.
And got in touch directly with the man himself. And found out that the email reply was written but never actually sent, and since they make cheddar 3 or 4 times a month, I could have as many curds as I wanted. He’s been trying to get the product in stores, but with little success.
But I will get 2kg of freshly made cheddar cheese curds by post next week.
This makes me stupidly happy.
Done!
Swiss wine, elaborated according to a method called “governo”, traditionally used for the Ripasso in Veneto. It consists in reincorporating a wine, in this case Gamay, on already fermented marc, in this case of Gamaret and Garanoir. The wine is light bodied, very fruity, not quite dry, and highly enjoyable served lightly chilled.
It involved way too much drama behind the scenes (that fscking Marshmellow mask!!!!) but the building’s annual Halloween party went off without a hitch, thanks to the combined efforts of Katy, Jen and MJ (and Ben will be very vocal in saying that he helped – even though his help was more autocratic micromanagement).
It was the biggest one yet, with a bunch of people coming from other buildings, friends of friends and random people I didn’t know. The kids seemed to get a good haul. The adults were congregating under the gazebo, happily socialising over a drink or keeping warm around the fire in the chimenea.
We ran out of mulled wine (but there were several bottles that were there to take up the slack). There was a ton of food – the guys at work tomorrow will be happy with the leftovers. After the fact, I’m happy we did it. People really seem to appreciate it. I just wish it didn’t involve as much drama as it seems to involve as part of the planning.
Ben had a passeport-vacances activity with the Amicale du Terre-Neuve de Genève et du Bassin Lémanique. They train the dogs in water rescue ctivities every two weeks, year-round. At first, doofus was all “I don’t want to go” and then “I don’t want to get wet”, and then it was impossible to get him out of the lake.
And is disappointed.
Paloma, her flatmate Elies and her friend Bianca, from Spain, had plans to go to the CERN open days. We had big plans to visit a few exhibits, the data center, and had hopes to go down and see at least one detector. That… proved to be ambitious.
No, we’re not lost at all.
It was packed, badly indicated, we couldn’t really see anything and all the detectors closed early because there were too many people. In the end, we walked in an industrial estate for 2 hours under a very strong sun, we spent 15 minutes seeing the data center (which was cool, if you’re a geek) and we listened to a 2 minute tesla coil concert.
We then spent 25 minutes driving to get to CMS – to find out it was essentially closed. So yes. Not the best use of time. The side trip to carrefour for impromptu grocery shopping was more enjoyable.
Update: this is what we wanted to see. Dominik Gehl and his family were able to do down into CMS when they went on Sunday. Pictures are his: