The beginning of it all! Cheese 1: Havarti with Caraway

Hello.

as anyone who has stumbled across this blog knows, I have elected to become a cheese connoisseur. This was all started by a particularly inspiring bowl of Macaroni and Cheese I consumed at Rogue Ale Pub and Brewery in Newport, Oregon.

The link to that particular post is Here

Anyways, I have decided to do this with very little knowledge on cheese other than the fact that  I really like to eat it. My goal is to literally just eat cheese and cheese covered products and tell you how it went. I'm also eating this shit with wine, because I know enough about wealthy lifestyles to know that rich people eat cheese with wine. Because I have no money they will more frequently be paired with a variation of Moscatos. As those tend to be at the bottom of that wine barrel and nothing can beat drinking a 5 dollar bottle of Barefoot Moscato (this post was sponsored by Barefoot, hopefully). 

I've only tried a couple times to write actual blog posts and I have absolutely no idea how this is supposed to go? I feel like I should have pictures of cheese sporadically placed throughout this? Here's one to start off.

This one is titled "Shirtless Guy Holding Cheese"

So, now that I have you all settled here is my first review, aside from that other first review that I did. 

the first cheese I picked up was DaneKo brand Havarti with Caraway, and it was paired with a fine Roscato, which I'm 100% sure is not actually a real wine flavor sanctioned by the wine people (but boy was it delicious).

As you can see I put much thought

into my set up. I even used a placemat.

I have had Havarti cheese before, this was not my first rodeo with this particular flavor. But it's no cheddar and if one of the six people who might read this has not had Havarti I figured I would start with something I'm vaguely familiar with and can give a decent review of. Then, I don't know, maybe someone will buy it? I actually don't know the purpose this blog is really supposed to serve.

Our ( I did the tasting with Scrambles, aka Kiegan, my roommate) first tasting was just with the cheese on a plain water cracker (if you've never had water crackers they are basically just boring crackers, which, yes, is possible). Our first impression was very good. We liked the flavor, especially with the caraway which I've never had in a cheese so that was fun. It was easy to eat and we decided it would make a wonderful snack cheese (which I put into theory today as I proceeded to eat half the block with Club Crackers in one sitting). The smell did linger on my fingers for like a day, but it was a good smell so I'm not even mad. It really begged the question "Can I eat this in the middle of the night when I don't want to make anything or look at the refrigerator too long?" And the answer is a resounding YES. 

We then tried it with the wine, which i'm sure there's a certain amount of wine that you are supposed to drink to bring out the flavor but this section was a lot of "I can drink more of this" and us doing that. When we finally reached the cheese post-wine we were pleasantly surprised. It had a really nice cheesy tang (technical term) that we didn't get before. I felt like I was eating more cheese than when I was just eating cheese. The wine definitely didn't offend, and it was very hard to not refill my glass. 

I have since placed this cheese on every meal I've prepared in my home, (which I have eaten out a lot this week so it's not much) mainly because I want to see how it tastes with stuff, but also I spent a lot of money on this small block of cheese and I don't want it to go bad. So here is a list of all the things it goes well with:

• turkey sandwich
• spaghetti with vodka sauce
• four day old bbq chicken and rice
• club crackers
• another turkey sandwich

Here is what it doesn't go well with:

• Ramen
• Just don't do that 
• ew, I have regrets

I still have a quarter of a block left so please give me suggestions as I am very close to just eating it straight from the cheese block which is probably a terrible idea. (also just any notes in general on the blog are welcome, with the exception of like grammar stuff. I don't care about that.)

I guess I should have a rating scale for this? Um? I'll give this cheese 9 out of 10 slices. There's always room for improvement, and why was it so hard to get the smell off my hands?

Big thanks to my wonderful BF Jeremy for supporting this new and weird hobby, and for tackling the domain for this website. Also thanks to Scrambles for eating cheese with me. and thanks to Grant for the wine, I'm pretty sure that's the one you left in my fridge on the night of my cats birthday party.

Thank you for reading, until we cheese again. 

Kels 💖