SHEEP CHEESE

ALLCAPS!

I was tickled by the name of this cheese that we found in the reduced section at the supermarket – just Sheep Cheese. Nothing else. No specifics. I don’t know why, but I thought it was really funny… It was also reduced to 40p, so we put it in the basket and made it part of a Saturday ‘buffet’ dinner.

It’s a medium hard cheese, similar in texture to a cheddar, and to best appreciate its flavour we simply cut it into little cubes and ate it as it came. How cute are the little cocktail picks? They live at the G man’s house, they are dead happy to be useful.

The cheese is a tiny bit squeaky on the teeth – just a suggestion of squeak, not as squeaky as halloumi. It is tangy and yogurty in flavour, with a hint of nut at the edges. I imagine it’d be excellent melted in a sandwich with some pastrami and gherkins, or maybe you could serve it up on a lamb burger? Double sheep. I will endeavour to find out more about it than just ‘sheep cheese’, because we enjoyed it and would like to try it again.

The rest of the photos are pretty shoddy. I was using the G man’s camera and for whatever reason I just can’t get the hang of it – any time I try to use it I end up with really blurry photos, even on the same settings as I use my own, inferior camera. Also the low light didn’t help. Excuses, excuses…

You can see the sheep cheese in a teacup at the back, which I thought would be a cool way to serve it, alongside another teacup of cheese straws. The cheese straws came out of a packet – this was another of those times when we just bought ready to eat or almost ready to eat stuff. I do have bloggers guilt over it, but I can’t be a cooking genius all the time… Anyway, these particular cheese straws are soft, flakey and buttery, made with puff pastry and the right amount of cheese. Yum.

In the bowl at the front left is a big pile of breaded mushrooms – straight from the fridge in the supermarket, ten minutes in the oven, no messing. These have long been one of my favourite things – they’re not fancy in the slightest, but I can’t get enough of them. Crunchy mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, what’s not to love?

We also had blinis (yep, shop bought) with cream cheese and smoked salmon – a classic, and a classic for a reason. A slightly blurry classic, in this case…

The next delicacy was some delicious asparagus spears, drizzled in olive oil, salt and pepper. Half of them were also wrapped in prosciutto. Now, I knew that this was a Thing that people do, and I knew it sounded good, but I’d never actually tried it. Oh, my. For such little effort – maybe ten minutes work, at most – you get an amazing, classy snack. I couldn’t stop raving about them, except to eat more of them. The asparagus got steamed in the microwave for two minutes, then I sliced in half five thin rashers of prosciutto, and used the resulting smaller slices to wrap up asparagus spears. Just as simple, and as wonderful, as that.

Looking back, it was quite a retro buffet. We should have had the sheep cheese on cocktail sticks with a pickled onion and a bit of pineapple, stuck into half a grapefruit. Is that a British thing or is the Cheese Hedgehog universal?