new cheese recipes

Since there is an abundance of cheese in our house at present, I decided to use up some cheese in a recipe. The cheese book was absolutely correct about Comté being good for gratins.  I made a spinach and potato gratin for dinner by using a generic au gratin recipe I found online and making my own improvements.  It turned out really well and tasted great!  The cheese melted easily and beautifully, with a seemingly perfect balance of creaminess and stretchiness, and resulted in this:

just out of the oven

served with crumbled bacon on top

 Thankfully, the Abbaye Ste Meré has also been consumed.  Brett used it up last week making grilled cheese sandwiches for his lunch.  He said the organo, butter and black pepper masked some of the smell (not that he had minded it the first time around).

Batting .500

I was recently introduced to the wonderful cheese section at Trader Joe's, so I purchased two new cheeses for February.  I chose two French cheeses - Comté and Abbaye Ste Mere.

Comté is a hard French cheese from the regions of Franche-Comté and Rhone-Alpes in the east of France.  It's a very old cheese, that has been around for over 800 years, and is currently protected by the AOC (Appellation d'Origine Controlee).  Approximately 120 gallons of cow's milk is required to make each 80 lb wheel, which is aged anywhere between 4 and 18 months.  This was a really nice cheese to enjoy alone, although it supposedly works well in quiches, gratins and other French cuisine.  We could almost taste the sunny, grassy meadows where the cows grazed.  I would classify it as a medium cheese, as it was neither distinctly mild nor sharp.

Abbaye Ste Mere is a semi-soft French cheese made at an abbey in the Normandy region of France. It's made from raw cow's milk.  Upon opening the packaging, I immediately noticed the smell.  It was quite off-putting.  I went ahead and sliced off a bit for myself and Brett, trying to convince myself it was the rind, and it would be fine if I just cut that off.  However, even after trimming off the rind, it still smelled like what we decided was moldy socks.  After much negotiating with myself (we paid good money for this cheese, perhaps it tastes better than it smells, I have to at least try it to have an opinion, etc), I took a bite.  I'm not going to lie - it was pretty unpleasant.  Unfortunately, as with many things, I can't get past the smell, so I won't be eating anymore of this cheese.