The Cheese Counter at Oliver's Market

Our friends from Corvallis arrived last evening for a couple of days, and Dana anf Jim arrived after driving back from the A's game with the birthday boy to. We had a little wine and cheese outside while everybody got reaquainted and caught up.

We had lunch at a winery in Kenwood today with our friends from Corvallis. It is a very Italian looking building built around a central courtyard where we could enjoy hand made pizzas, paninis and gelato in the sun. Pretty deadent for a Monday....

A stop at the market was necessary so we all trooped in to check out the British food section (our friend Anne is English)--Golden Syrup, Crunchy Bars, Branston Pickle, PG Tips, Heinz Baked Beans, Marmite and mushy peas, to name a few things represented. Mushy Peas?? Ugh!

More to my liking in Oliver's is the cheese counter. There can never be too many choices when it comes to cheese--even if the fridge at home is full of it. And I particularly liked the cheese guy. H obligingly posed for me when I asked if I could photograph him. I especially liked his hair, legally covered by a hairnet (as if any stray hair could escape the product used to hold this 'do in place!)

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday on the growth of the artisan cheese making movement in Marin and Sonoma Counties. "Twenty two thousand acres of land in the two counties are currently used to produce almost 100 different cow, sheep, goat and water buffalo milk cheeses...

We have had many of these cheeses and they are all to be found at Oliver's Market . I will leave you with a direct quote from the paper on visiting one cheese maker (where we were sent by the cheese lady in a Sebastopol grocery store). It was exactly as described in the NY Times.*

"My first stop did not initially seem promising. On a gray-washed, showery Saturday morning, I parked between wandering chickens in the muddy barnyard of the Joe Matos cheese factory. It offers no tours and makes a single product, an aged farmstead cow's milk cheese called St George that Joe Matos based on a recipe from his native Azores.. In the closet sized salesroom with a few holy cards on the walls, a grumpy looking worker emerged from an interior door....Unsmiling and without a word, she held out a tray of precut samples....On my way back to the car, I bumped into Mr Matos. 'My wife and I came from the Azores in 1965 when I was 26....I am the fifth generation of cheese makers'....this is a good country if you want to work hard....'"

We had some St George for lunch today.

*Christopher Hall in the New York Times, Travel section Sunday, June 2, 2013