Capricious Goat Cheese
If you've been wandering Bay Area farmer's markets recently, chances are you've seen Capricious goat cheese stands. I've seen them at the Civic Center market in San Francisco, the 9th Street market in Oakland, and the Ferry Plaza market in San Francisco. Next time you see them, don't pass them by. They make a fantastic aged goat cheese (I haven't tried their younger cheeses). It's got a butteriness, nuttiness, and a smoothness that can't be beat. It's probably the best American cheese I've eaten in a while (and I'd say best overall in a while if it weren't for the raw-milk Brie de Meaux and Camembert I ate in Europe).And I'm not alone in my feelings, it seems. While talking to the man running the stand, he told me that it had won Best of Show as well as 1st place for Aged Goat Cheese at the 2002 American Cheese Society awards.
He further informed me that the two women behind Capricious Cheese, Diana Livingston and Ginger Olsen are relatively new cheese makers. They had an excess of goat milk, and decided to make some cheese with it. They spent some time developing their recipe and finally entered their cheese into the American Cheese Society awards for the first time. And that first time was this year, where they took two awards home. Clearly this is a cheese to keep an eye on.
If your local cheese shop doesn't carry it, and you can't make it to a farmer's market, check out the (still primitive) company's website. It looks like you can order from them directly.
Food news
The big news for today is McDonald's decision to lower the amount of trans fat in the oil they use for making French fries, fish fillets, and other fast foods. This sounds good, but it sounds like nutritionists are agreeing on the fact that any trans fat is bad, so McD's has a way to go. And McDonald's is still plenty evil overall. Still, it's nice to see them bowing to public pressure a bit. Just goes to show that they're willing to change their habits if they get enough bad press. Now, if people would just boycott them until they make their slaughterhouses better places to work (see Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation).SFGate has a pro screw cap article. I'm all for removing the possibility of cork taint in wine, so I look on this as a positive development. Nobody wants to waste money buying a bottle of wine that isn't any good. I've smelled one cork-tainted wine in a wine class, and I'm pretty sure a bottle of Burgundy we got not too long ago was mildly tainted (the flavor was flat and off, but the same wine from a different bottle was delicious). I found it interesting to see how they're beginning to train waiters to present screw cap bottles to customers, since the obvious problem with screw caps is that wines which use them look like cheap supermarket wines.
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