Yet Another Dégustation

I guess it's going to be a tradition of sorts for now that we pick up some delicious new cheese at the market on Saturday's and pig out on a dégustation.

For this particular plate of assorted goodies, I prepared a salsa verde (or whatever you call a salsa made with green tomatoes). I put green tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, orange zest and juice, pureed it Mexican salsa style - as opposed to American style chunky salsa - and served it to go along with my multi-grain baguette. A great accompanying little treat to this were the very thin slices of dried duck. Though they were very fatty - as only duck can be - and barely tasted anything unless you sucked on them, those little slices of duck were a good initiation to other items that particular vendor has at the market. These include foi gras, terrines, French-style sausages, and other weird French delights.

As for the fruits and veggies, I cut up some apples, pears, cucumber, served them with grapes and these really beautiful looking sour prunes I found at the market. Along with some merlot (this time I tried to read the descriptions of the wines on their labels to make sure the pairing wasn't totally off) and a cheese whose name I can't remember but was stronger than gruyère but milder than the Le Comté which I had last week, this dégustation was a nice light meal.

Le Comté Cheese Dégustation

I'm not from a culinarily sophisticated family. We didn't know anything about wines (my parents didn't drink which certainly didn't help). We didn't experiment with recipes from around the world (my parents idea of cooking was grilled cheeses or reheated pizza fingers). And we certainly never had any fancy French cheeses served with fresh fruit as a meal.

Thankfully, I know a bit better now. So when I walked up to the Loup Gourmand - a cheese counter at the local farmer's market - and asked for dégustation suggestions, I was more than pleasently surprised of the intensity, rich, nutty flavour of Le Comté cheese (www.comte.com).

This cheese was simply beautiful. Complex. Rich. And a great cheese to eat with a simple dégustation. All I did for supper was cut up the cheese, an apple, some chinese pears, a mango, tomatoes, prepared some grapes and garlic stuffed green olives. I also bought some fondu beef (thinly sliced beef), wrapped it around German salami and brie, and then cooked these little hot morsels in a bit of oil. Along with a Wolf Blass Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 (which my very mediocre sommelier skills tell me there probably could have been a better wine pairing) the meal was a party of different flavours taking each other's place one after another to leave you with a very satisfied feeling of having eaten well.

Anyways, I don't know much about cheeses or wine but I do know that this meal was good. In my opinion, a dégustation is perfect for any day.