Cheese or Font

How's this for a cheese game? I present to you Cheese or Font

Au Petit Chavignol opening 7 days a week

Starting Monday September 21st, APC will be opening for dinner 7 days a week! We're ironing out the wrinkles to be open for lunch, hopefully by mid October.

les amis shopping bags

This was spotted at sunny 3rd beach today. It's a gaggle of insulated les amis shopping bags. They are great for short outings, where you want to take great care of the cheese, and keep it cool. We are the friends of cheese afterall. Only five bucks each.

Worst cheese label. ever?

I dunno about this one...kind of a highlander with a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet, meets lord of the rings, meets badly photoshopped blue dyed sheep. Perhaps it might make a better T-shirt. For what it's worth, the cheese is fantastic.

Cheese Judging

Today Allison hosted a cheese judging for the 2009 PNE at Au Petit Chavignol. Allison and I were joined by Jeff from Bishop's and Jeff Van Geest from Diva, along with Claire from les amis. We only had 9 entries over four categories this year. Considering the many different cheeses made in BC, I was bit disappointed by the lack of entries. Perhaps next year we will get a larger level of participation from our BC cheese makers.

I won't say who, but similar to last year, there are clearly some good cheese makers in BC. I felt that one fresh cheese in particular could easily pass for a product from France. Another popular cheese was clearly an under performer today. When tasted in it's raw and naked state, it simply didn't cut it. Too bad, yet an eye opener at the same time. Unlike the Canadian Cheese Grand Prix (where Allison is also a judge) which only judges cheeses made from cows milk, this competition is open to cheeses made from milk other than cows milk. As previously said, I hope to see more entries next year. We all take cheese very seriously. It is a part of how we make our living.

Summer of Jam

I may have almost bitten off more than I can chew the other day with apricots. I had know idea how much it would yield. I decided to make a big pot of apricot butter. By big, I mean about 100 liters. It took longer than expected to cook. It wasn't finished until 10 pm, so I had to call in Allison for bottling support. We finished up by about 2:30am. I'm glad I ordered so many bottles because we used everything. All that aside, it tasted great.

I've been sourcing great fruit at the farmers markets. I picked up more blueberries today. I'm going to make another batch of citrus-blueberry preserves. I'm also going to give making pickles a shot. I've been getting lots of local fruit from our neighbors in Stratchcona. I received alot of fresh figs and some transparent apples. I ordered in some beautiful candied ginger from Australia. I forgot that candied ginger can actually taste that good. Combine it all together and I made our first batch of Strathcona Fig Chutney. It's a great barter system we've created. We're trading cheese for fresh picked fruit from our community. Both sides benefit. I'm told that coming soon is a bumper crop of Italian prune plums. Maybe some plums in marsala are in order? Should be good with cheese. The best part is that after all these preserves age a bit in bottle, we'll have wonderful accompaniments to serve during the upcoming seasons, until summer rolls along again.

The vinegars are doing fine. They are so intense now, I can only imagine what they will be like after another month of soaking in the flavours.

Now that we're all settled in with the new store and APC, it's been time to focus on the production kitchen. This is the reason we built a big commercial kitchen at the new hastings store. Summer is a great time, as there is so much fresh local fruits available to us. I made about 80 liters of raspberry vinegar today using raspberries that allison picked up at a local "U-pick", and I'm in the midst of a small batch of red currant jelly that she also managed to procure. It really takes a long time for the current juice to drip through the jelly bag, but it's such a beautiful colour. I'll start tarragon vinegar later this week. We also have some salad dressings coming down the pipeline.

Au Petit Chavignol always has a feature terrine in the restaurant each night, so we get to try lots of different recipes. It's good practice, as we're working towards making terrines to sell in all of our stores. This is going to take some time to get organized, as we want to do it right. More on that later.