Ryan the cheese man!

food blog hookup
Originally uploaded by deepfry.

oooh, i just got home from the new and wonderful gourmet grocery store just down the street from me. it is now my Local Grocery Store. a dangerous dangerous thing when the nearest grocery store sells sopressata with hand-stitched casing, rounds of epoisse and so forth. i could drop $50 in the blink of an eye. without even thinking.

Provisions + Me = Money Hemmhorage

That its next to a delightful kitchen store full of all kinds of absolutely necessary pots, pans, graters, knives and so forth doesn't help things.

So, for better or for worse, I discovered that I know the brilliant mind behind Provisions...the guy running the place! From this foodblog! Finally, Yum! has paid off! Took us a while to figure things out but after lingering over the cheese case for a good fifteen minutes, we got onto the topic of chicago and finally put two and two together. Fabulous! except that now that i know someone who works there, i have all the more reason to visit the place and, well, my wallet is shrieking for mercy.

I managed to make reasonable purchases this time: a wedge of San Joaquin Gold (which you can weirdly buy on Amazon.com, though you should certainly support your local upscale gourmet grocery store instead!), a delightfully rich hard cheese that's great on soups, pastas and so forth. it's also rather tasty all by its lonesome. And Ryan was nice enough to send me off with a complimentary sampling of Essex St. Comte, a rather subtle but flavorful cows cheese aged in an underground army fort in France. If Ryan is reading this and he needs to send someone to France to inspect the underground army fort cheese aging facility (quality control and whatnot), i am willing to ship across the ocean to scope the place out. just, you know, in case you're looking for someone to carry out such an important mission. i'm up to the task.