Cheese and Wine Festival

Yesterday Nick and I went to the Cheese and Wine Festival at the Southbank Centre.  There were a bunch of wine festivals on the city but this was a CHEESE and WINE festival so I was sold.  The tube was suspended and it took us ages to get there but once we saw this we were pretty happy we went through all the fuss.

We started off with a delicious pear cider.  I don't know why but I always think cider is similar to beer which I don't really like - but its not and it tastes 1,000 times better.  Nick went back for seconds.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this raclette making man serving up steaming hot dishes of gooey melted cheese over potatoes.  

Nick hadn't heard of raclette (obviously he is not cultured and hasn't made it to one of my mom's famous raclette parties) but he was smart enough to know that gobs of melted cheese on potatoes = good.  So we bought some.  Ah just look at him scraping off the melted stuff from that big hunk of cheese.... 

Yesssssssss

Do I even need to tell you it was good?  It was good.


Clearly this isn't enough cheese and potatoes for one night though so we bought some Cheddar Cheesy Mash.

Not exactly a looker but quite possibly the best mashed potatoes of my life.  No I'm not exaggerating.

Nick hogged them.  Typical.


Then I realized I was at a cheese and WINE festival and hadn't had any wine yet.  That situation was promptly fixed and we went cheese shopping.  We picked up some Tuma Rusa - a cow and sheep's milk cheese (the big white cheese below) which was really soft and mild.

Then we got another cheese from Normandy which I don't know its name mostly because the girl who sold it to me was French and it was difficult to pronounce let alone remember... but its the one in the middle right of the picture wrapped in grass.     

Overall the Cheese and Wine festival was a great Sunday out.  The only problem was they had so many cheeses it got to be a bit overwhelming at times when trying to decide which cheese you wanted.  Clearly we couldn't purchase ALL the cheese there but we went home with some winners.  They also had cheesy desserts like cheesecakes and cheesecake brownies, but we'd had enough cheese after our two rounds of potatoes.  One booth was selling make your own cheese kits.  I was REALLY tempted to buy one but they were pretty expensive and I'm not entirely sure I'd want our house to smell like a boys locker room.  


On the other hand I DO want our house to smell like fresh bread.  So hopefully I'll be baking some baguettes to serve with the cheeses we bought.  I'll keep you posted.