Whether it was a knee-jerk reaction to yesterday’s very strong Picodon or a genuine appreciation, today’s Timanoix was a hit! Smell… taste… texture… everything was back up on the higher end of the scale and we rated it among the best to date.

One interesting thing that we learned today is that secularization is having an impact on the cheese industry. Who knew that man’s increasingly greater withdrawal from God would affect cheese, yet it does!

With today’s Cheesy Christmas choice, Picodon, LaBoxFromage treated us to something that we hadn’t had to date… a cheese made from goat’s milk.

Timo was looking forward to tasting his first goat cheese as, generally speaking, that’s his favourite. In this case however, using the word ‘treated’ is being generous… so much so that Timo would’t let it pass his lips…

Today’s cheese tasting began with a slight dilemma … trying to distinguish between the stickers for cheeses ‘6’ and ‘9’, which, trust me… looked exactly the same.

It’s for this reason that you won’t see a still-wrapped photo of today’s cheese. In the end, there was only one way to find out for sure….

If ever there was a wintry cheese… today’s Cheesy Christmas sample would definitely be it.

Again, we were already somewhat familiar with today’s cheese as it’s not the first time it’s graced our pallet. Typically, anytime we’ve had it, it’s been in a well-known dish from the Alps… ‘tartiflette‘, combining potatoes, onions, lardons (small, cooked pieces of ham or bacon) and of course… Reblochon.

OK folks, it’s Cheesy day 4, and things just got serious… we cut into our first blue cheese.

Well, I say ‘we’, but Timo didn’t even go there…

Today was a dim, damp, and cold day typical of Winter days in France. The perfect weather for growing moss. I teasingly refer to this season as ‘moss-growing season’ because by February, it will be all over gates, concrete entrances and any garden furniture that didn’t get put inside.

It was also Day 3 of a Cheesy Christmas….

It’s Day 35 of lockdown … and Day 2 of a Cheesy Christmas.

Today’s cheese is one that we’ve purchased before at the local grocery store, so it wasn’t as much of a discovery as yesterday’s Coeur de Pomm.

I’ll tell you about it, but let me also relay a few cheese-tasting tips from the booklet that accompanied our cheeses…

If you know my wife, you’ll know that…
She. Loves. Cheese.

So this year, I got her a gift that she’ll get to enjoy for the 24 days leading up to Christmas, (unlike most gifts that you only really enjoy after the big day) … an advent calendar of French cheeses. Today was cheese #1…