Made with the goat cheese we were draining here. I can’t wait for the chèvre chaud. Update: Stephanie just posted some photos she took during the process of making the chevre.

(inspired by this is my eye)

After Stephanie and I took a Cheese and Olive Oil class and I took a Local Cheese and Beer class at the Cheese School of San Francisco last fall, we decided to sign up for another 2 classes during their winter “semester”. They’re just too much fun, like a two hour long, prix fixe cheese course with wine.

The latest was on Saturday, from 2-4, which was a nice change of pace from the evening classes. It was led by Michele Buster, a cheese importer who works with small local producers in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. She brought a bunch of cheeses that she herself has imported, including a number that she named for the US market. So not all of them may yet be readily available at Cheese Plus or Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. But keep an eye out!

Starting at 12 o’clock and going around clockwise:

1. Aragones, cow’s milk
2. Montegrappa, cow’s milk
3. Cacio di Roma, sheep’s milk*
4. Palhais, goat’s milk*
5. Leonora, goat’s milk*
6. MitiCapra Valtellina, goat’s milk
7. Torta de la Serena, sheep’s milk
8. MitiBleu, sheep’s milk
9. Fulvi Pecorina Romano, sheep’s milk

I marked my favorites with an asterisk.

Last weekend we made our first ricotta and our second batch of mozzarella—all so we could make a lasagna from scratch. We even made the fresh pasta sheets and tomato sauce. The tomatoes were from cans, but it’s winter, so there’s no harm in that. Other than the Italian sausage, the only other non-homemade ingredient was some parmesan—but it’s going to be a year or more (if ever) before we’ll have any homemade of that.

You might come home to contraptions that look like this:

I was working late last night, and while I was out, Stephanie started making ricotta salata (a pressed, salted, and dried variety of ricotta cheese). Apparently it’s going to age in our refrigerator for 2 weeks.

Or you might come home to chevre draining in the oven:

We bought 4 quarts of goat’s milk from Trader Joe’s and 4 chevre molds at The Beverage People in Santa Rosa on Saturday and right now our apartment smells like a cross between really tangy yogurt and cream cheese.

My recipe for Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies came from one of my mom’s handwritten recipe cards, which my dad scanned and emailed to me back when I was in college. I transcribed it and then posted it to my blog in June of 2004 so I could easily share it with friends (and the internet).

As long as I can remember, they have been my favorite cookies, and certainly one of the most popular in our family. The cookies come out of the oven slightly chewy, brown sugary, and small enough that you can eat more than one or two without feeling guilty. In that way they stand out from most other cookies, which tend to be more chocolatey or more filling.

Since I posted the recipe, I’ve gotten the occasional drive-by comment from people saying this is one of their favorite recipes, one they had lost and were happy to rediscover. Considering that I got this recipe from my mother and she got it from her mother (my grandmother, aka “Grandmommy”), I didn’t see how that was possible. I just attributed their comments to a similar recipe or a similar name. For all I knew, my grandmother had created this recipe from whole cloth through relentless experimentation, or perhaps accidental discovery.

And then on December 10, 2008, a certain Donna left a comment on my blog which began:

I love these cookies and so do my kids. My mother-in-law made them and she got the recipe from The Woman’s Day Encyclopedia Cookbook Volume 3…

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