They Already Decided Not To Trust You (Reblog)

Evil Cheeses (Chow)

I love cheese. Every kind of cheese, from the pungent aged Asiago I added to a vanilla-butter sauce for the lobster ravioli we had last night to the homely Kraft American slice (which melt well in scrambled eggs).

Or so I thought.

Here are some cheeses I will never seek to eat.

• Maggot cheese. You are apparently advised to wear protective eyewear while eating these cheese lest the cheese fly larvae injure you by jumping into your eye...although frankly that sounds preferable to undigested larvae boring holes in your intestine.
• Mimolette, a French cheese intentionally infested with cheese mites to gain flavor from their excrement, dander, and corpses. There are actually lots of variations of these mite cheeses across Europe, such as the German Spinnenkäse.

Mm. To take that taste out of my mouth, here are some recent things I've done with acceptable cheese...
Above is the vanilla-butter sauce with Asiago we had last night, topped with lobster ravioli and some fresh sage. It was fun cooking with a real vanilla bean, which I've never done before. The Baltic Red 4 year Asiago was the last bit from our cheese party.
This is a nice ricotta sauce we had just before NDM's trip to Rome.
Some fried buffalo mozzarella slices NDM prepared for me to use in a gnocchi dish a while ago.

Finally, with the last of the Shropshire blue from our cheese extravaganza I made a cauliflower and cheese soup similar to one I've made before but much, much more pungent.

Google Reader Now Useful (Reblog)

Well, the original rationalization for this blog (it's under the title right above) has been killed but dead by the Google folks. Google Reader now allows sharing items with an annotation.

Denning (Pets)

The days I really need a foot-muffler are coming to an end, but throughout winter and early spring Líle's denning behavior has kept my feet nice and toasty. By next winter, who knows if she'll still fit under there?

Boob Kitties

Check it out! This blog currently has the eighth hit on Google for the search "boob kitties", with Molten Chocolate Boob Cake. JTC was prescient in his comment.

And, um, no. There was no reason I was searching for "boob kitties". In fact, it wasn't even me. It was probably Scylla, who thinks Molpe is a bit of a boob. (It's the first definition!)

Woof (Pets)

Clearing out my local stash of puppy pictures...
Líle's on top of the world...
The never-ending battle for hedgehog supremacy continues...
The dogs attempt to cooperate with the staging of a sophisticated cat trap...
So... Tired...

Puppy Without A Cause (Pets)

It is sad that in this day and age child smoking is still a problem.

Líle Branches Out (Pets)

Earlier this month Líle met AM's dogs, Ollie and Max, for the first time. She handled it pretty well. Ollie continues to be surprisingly aggressive and controlling...he's been a timid bottom for most of his life, but as his lipomas have grown so has his assertiveness. Max was also all over Líle, but he just wanted to play.
As you can see, Líle wasn't too sure about Max, but we're hopeful she'll warm up with time.

We also took Líle for a walk to meet one of our neighbors' dogs, Daisy, a sweet lab who is probably about 80,000 times as well-trained as our dogs. It was Líle's first meet-and-greet without 'Dolon present, and it went fine, although she was a lot more interested in playing with people than Daisy. We were unable to arrange a mutually acceptable trade for Daisy.