A Cheesemonger's Garden on the Roof

The garden is planted. It wasn't pretty and I'm still not entirely sure that anything will grow (at least anything delicious). There are twenty tubs up on the roof and they're filled mostly with tomato plants but also with some cucumbers, peas, and different varieties of peppers.

I'm quite pleased with the garden thus far. The plants are growing tall and robust. A few of the plants actually have some fruit on them already and the rest are flowering like crazy. My biggest concern remains water. The supply there of as well as drainage. I'm here 5 days a week and now that it has been hot, I like to give them water every day. On Mondays I have enlisted a helper to give them a bit of water after their rest day on Sunday.

I decided not to drill drainage holes in the tubs. It's just so hot and windy on the roof I figured the plants would need all the water they could get. And the tubs are so large I figure that the risk of the roots rotting is pretty minimal. 15 of the 20 tubs have rocks on the bottom to assist with drainage. The other 5 do not. I wish I could say it was because of some elaborate experiment, but really it's just because I forgot during my second round of planting. I'll let you know if it seems to make any difference.

It's fun going up on the roof to play gardener. I like the break from the cheese shop and I feel like I am producing something (very minimally) instead of just reselling something that someone else produced.

And I didn't even have to eat anything weird

So Molly Mogren, director of communications for food critic and eater-of-weird-things Andrew Zimmern came to check out the cheese shop last week. I was a little bummed out that she didn't ask me about my experience with eating bizarre foods (which, in case you were wondering, includes veal brain, lamb testicles, and the ever disgusting lamb kidney) but it was still a great chance to talk about the cheese shop in all its splendor.

You can read her post here. I like that she referred to me as a former IT guy. It makes me seem like I had some kind of spiritual food reawakening. That will be the angle of my autobiography, I think.

Hands across Trans-Fat free America

Those of you who have spent any time in the shop know that there is one ingredient that won't ever find its way into any of our products. That's the big evil trans-fat aka partially hydrogenated oil. So three cheers for my former home of New York City which just enacted it's trans-fat ban. You can read all about it here.

Cheese paper in the paper

Some of you may have seen that Formaticum cheese paper had a little blurb in the food section of Thursday's Star Tribune (or strib for you cool kids). In said article it was mentioned that you can pick up a package of Formaticum cheese paper at your friendly France 44 cheese shop.

We really like the Formaticum paper, so much so that we use it in the shop. The retail packages are cool looking and have a guide to small cheesemakers across the USA (many of whom are represented in our cheese case).

There's a lot of debate about the best way to store cheese and I'm not going to try and tackle that here. All I'll say is that if you're going to purchase a nice hunk of artisanal cheese it's nice to show it a little love.

California Uber Alles?

I've gotten a little carried away, I think. I really want to have the best domestic cheese case in the midwest. I've been doing okay with the east coast cheeses, and we have a lot of Wisconsin cheese (hear that Minnesota dairy folk?), but I feel like I've been lagging behind on the California cheese. Not any more. The overnight delivery came today and now we're representing the U.S.A coast to coast. From California I present to you:

• Bellwether Farm San Andreas (raw sheep milk)
• Bravo Farms Silver Mountain (bandage-wrapped raw cow milk)
• Three Sisters Serena (raw cow milk)

and then we've added a couple of old favorites:

• Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor
• Pt. Reyes Original Blue

Other cheeses in straight from the farm:

• Another 10# wheel of Cato Corner (CT) Bloomsday (I can't believe that last wheel didn't even make it a week!)
• A new offering from Cato Corner (CT), the Womanchego.
• Sprout Creek Batch 35 (NY) is back by popular demand
• More Sprout Creek Toussaint (NY)
  
• Meadow Creek Mountaineer (VA)
  

Bicycles and cheese, like chocolate and peanut butter

Here's the blurb we sent out to the world yesterday. We live in a biking town and we really would love to see enough people riding their bikes down to the shop so that we have to purchase a second bike rack.

"France 44 Cheese Shop Combats High Gas Prices

The new cheese shop at France 44 is offering customers who ride their bicycles (or walk)to the shop 10% off their entire purchase. With oil prices at record highs, the cheese shop at France 44 wants to do its part to reward anyone who wishes to leave their cars at home and enjoy a nice ride through one of the top bicycling cities in the nation. Come down to the shop, show us your helmet or even just point to your bike parked on our bike rack and we will give you a 10% discount on your purchase."

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

So many dirt puns, so little time. Today was the day that my organic potting soil arrived at the shop. One of the folks from Sunnyside across the street drove a pallet of dirt (in 18 pound bags) over on a fork lift. It was a little intimidating because I knew that all of that dirt was going to have to somehow find its way to our roof. I'm not sure what I expected, but I guess I expected less bags than there were. On the pallet were 30 bags of dirt. For you physicists and microbiologists out there that's 540 pounds of dirt.

Step one involved loading bags of dirt onto the beer cart. The beer cart is a rather crude sort of cart that only kinda sorta works. 7 bags of soil was the magic number for the cart. Any more than 7 and the cart began to flounder (as did the cheesemonger). So then wheel the cart into the loading area and up one flight in the elevator. That's the easy part.


The hard part are the stairs to the roof. Kinda steep, not much too hold onto and then I had to chuck the bags once I got to the top of the stairwell. Okay, so working in a cheese shop and sampling cheese and meats all day has not done wonders for my physical fitness. I sit, I blog, I cut cheese, I sit, I find cheese to order so I can cut it. But I'm still in the prime of my life so there really is no excuse.

Bottom line is that I moved all 30 bags up the stairs by myself. Gold star for me! Was it pretty? Oh no. Did I sweat and grunt and huff and stop for water breaks every couple of bags? Dear god yes.

And now there is dirt on the roof. Now all I need to do is water those bags of dirt and plants will appear, right? Oh, I need plants. Right. I guess that means planting day will be soon. Hopefully we won't have any more explosive hail events here at the corner of France and 44th.

Best Cheese Ever Alert

Our shipment from Cato Corner farms in Connecticut came an hour or so ago. And finally Mark has sent a wheel of Bloomsday. In my humble opinion, this might be the best domestic farmstead cheese there is. This is the cheese that made me want to run a cheese shop. I've been begging Mark since we've opened to send some along. It's the perfect texture and it has the most alluring and addictive flavor.

Okay, it's here. C'mon and get it.