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Friday, June 23, 2006

Cheese + WFMU = Fun

On Wednesday, I not only kicked off summer, but I kicked off my new venture as proprietor of Caseophile Creative Services, by making a special appearance on Kenny G's show "Intelligent Design" on The Freeform Station of the Nation, WFMU. Kenny's show is 3 hours, and I was on during the last hour. Listen to the whole thing, though. There's good stuff in there.

Kenny is an enthusiastic caseophile himself, and he hosted the show while many members of the WFMU staff (and friends) stopped by for what is probably the first cheese party to ever happen on the radio.

(If it's the "first" of something, especially the first of something cheese-related, I want to break it in, so I owe a BIG "thank you" to Kenny for inviting me to be on his show.)

Station Manager Ken Freedman provided engineering services, and a few people even called in with questions.

For some reason, lots of people wanted to know if cheese can be made from human milk, and the milk of all sorts of animals whose milk is not normally used in cheesemaking. The answer is simple: if it's a mammal, you can milk it. If you can milk it, you can make cheese. Of course some animals' milks are better suited to certain types of cheesemaking, depending on the quality of the protein, fat, etc., but it's certainly possible to make cheese from any milk.

Someone asked, "What about snakes?" and I think it was Station Manager Ken who reminded us that milking snakes involves drawing the venom from the snakes' fangs. I added that this would not only not make cheese, but not make good cheese, as it's essentially poison.

I had a great time. I love being on the radio (I used to be on radio free brattleboro a long time ago), and I think this might be the first time I mixed radio with cheese. Oh wait, that's not true. Once, on my old show, "Phrenology Today," a listener called in and said she liked to eat Cambozola with potato chips. Makes sense when you think about it.

Anyway, please follow the link to Kenny's archive of the show, and while you listen, you can play along at home by going out and getting the following cheeses and eating them in this exact order. I brought 9 cheeses, and I tried to bring a good sampling of different varieties, not just representing different animals and countries, but different categories, such as Ossau-Iraty, Alpine, thistle-renneted, etc. The order was a little tricky, especially with that many cheeses, but here they are, in order of appearance:
Paglietta
Capra Valtellina
Monte Enebro
Pleasant Ridge Reserve
Comte 18-Month
Izarou, Ossau-Iraty
La Serena (The Spanish one, not the California one)
Abbaye de Belval
Bleu du Bocage

Pretty soon, Kenny is going to post a story about our cheese party on WFMU's "Beware of the Blog." So when that happens, I'll post the link. Then you'll get the descriptions of all of the cheeses, too, so you can listen, eat, and read along. I told you I'm a full-service Caseophile.

Thanks again, Kenny G!

Yours in Cheese,
-Wendy

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Wendy, I recently answered to your email. Thanks for writing!

Anonymous said...

Its all about da cheese ;-)

The Writer said...

Hi Dov,

Yeah, ain't it though!
Hope you and Lori are eating lots of cheese these days. Nice sitting across the table from you earlier this evening. By the way, did you notice there was no cheese on the menu?!

Yours in Cheese,
-WML