Fromage norvégien

Take that, France! Take that, Holland! Take that, England! The new #1 cheese in the world is from … (let’s let the drum roll fade completely out) … NORWAY!

And there it is in the photograph below. Ignore the humans, they are only the cheese makers, Ole and Maren Gangstad. It’s that speckled green and white thing on the cutting board you should be looking at. This cheese has a name, and it is Nidelven Blå . There’s an entire article about the competition that is required reading for cheese admirers everywhere.

Even better, this is a blue cheese, one of my personal favorites. I learned to love the blues at my grandfather’s table, where my palate was broadened mightily in the area of cheeses. There were hits and misses there, but many more hits.

Now all I have to do is to figure out how to get an invitation to the next competition, one where I am not a judge but would be allowed to wander around the tables sampling each and every one I could get my hands on. I would do this until I was either comatose or had perished in the effort.

• Blue cheese: loved
• Cheddar: loved
• Primost: didn’t love, like eating sand that had gone off
• Limburger: loved, but must be eaten with clothespin on nose
• Gammelost: ehhhhh
• Roquefort: loved
• And so on and so on

This success story should also put to rest the discouraging myth that the only thing Norwegians can cook is pickled herring and salt cod.

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What a godawful mess is Gaza. A truly horrific attack on October 6, followed by a savage reply which continues unabated.

Only two things seem clear to me. One is that Hamas has declared itself to be an enemy of humanity. Not just Jews, but all of us. Its existence is an ongoing threat to any chance of Middle East peace in our lifetime. The second thing is that Israel could not do anything else but respond to the attack. It was too big, too many dead, too ugly.

That’s it. The last bit of clarity. Without having any special knowledge or insights, I find myself appalled by the Israeli government’s response so far. My mind says STOP, ENOUGH! But the Netanyahu government shows no signs of stopping, instead they are continuing to stack new horrors that they create upon the ones committed by Hamas and in so doing diluting the support that was theirs when Israel was clearly the victim.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Mahatma Gandhi

Thomas Friedman wrote something worth reading, published in Tuesday’s New York Times. The title is a bit long, but the piece itself comes to the point very quickly: The Israeli Officials I Speak With Tell Me They Know Two Things for Sure.

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Baked something new yesterday, at least new to me. YouTube had served up a video on making bannock. For those of you who are as ignorant as I was 24 hours ago, bannock is a non-yeasted bread that any number of people get credit for having invented, either the Scots or the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas or I don’t know who else.

Easily baked in a heavy frying pan, Dutch oven, or even wrapped around a stout stick, it is usually consumed out-of-doors. The loaf I created had a simple recipe using only water, baking powder, oil, salt, and flour. It tasted pretty good, actually. but mine was baked in a convenient LG range, which was blatant cheating. So I’ll have to try it again, this time over a campfire.

There are a bazillion different recipes out there, adding fruit or cheese or anything your heart desires. Some recipes even allow the bread to rise a bit, as in the video. It seems almost foolproof … let’s see … how to screw this up down the road … it will be difficult.

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