My husband's folks were in town this week and volunteered to watch the baby so we could go to dinner together. After much deliberation, we decided to go back to Proof so I could actually enjoy the wine and cheese (as an aside, the food and atmosphere are great too). They have a solid cheese menu, including brief descriptions of each one (ie: "firm, tangy, complex"). After a pregnancy-prompted hiatus from the pasteurized cheeses I love, I went strait for the blues and those that sounded "stinky." This produced:
- Red Hawk: a mostly soft cow's milk cheese, which did have that barn-yardy flavor that people label "stinky," (the menu actually described it this way) but the cheese taste itself was on the thin side -- not quite creamy enough to make the flavor sort of go up your nose the way those kinds of cheeses can;
- Garrotxa: a semi-firm sheep's milk cheese labeled "herbacaous," which apparently means "nice, sound, cheeseplate cheese with enough flavor to be interesting, but not enough to put people off"; and
- Gorgonzola Dolce: an Italian blue, that I really loved. Blue cheese can poke you in the mouth and overwhelm other things on the plate, but this one was smooth and creamy and had an almost sugary ending on it.
They served it with raw honey, rum soaked rasins, peach puree, and fig/pine nut bread, which made for a really sweet cheese plate (so if you like dessert to be sweet, but want cheese, this is a nice compromise). The waiter offered to pair it with a desert wine for me, and in retrospect I should have taken him up on it. Definitely next time.
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