Drifting through Madison, WI – Bavaria Sausage and Holland’s Family Cheese

With some free time in the Madison, WI area you can discover all sorts of lovely surprises, including two new additions to our Purveyors page. On a recent business trip to the area, a walk around Capitol Square brought me to Fromagination, a specialty cheese shop featuring Wisconsin cheeses and other artisan and local products. [...]

Grilled Cheese Sandwich #3

The cheese that started the experiments with Grilled Cheese Sandwiches - Carr Valley's Menage. If you missed them, here are Grilled Cheese #1 and Grilled Cheese #2. Enjoying the Menage before dinner one evening, the complex, grassy flavors combined with the creamy texture inspired this thought - What would this be like as a grilled [...]

Grilled Cheese Sandwich #2

The Second of a Three Part series. (Part One here) This grilled cheese was created for my youngest daughter.  It begins with bacon; Nueske's smoked bacon.   The extra slices from a Sunday morning breakfast inspired my youngest daughter to request a BLT grilled cheese. The tomato component was easy enough - adapting an oven-roasted tomato recipe [...]

Grilled Cheese Sandwich #1

With Thomas Keller's sage advice to consider the grilled cheese "a blank canvas", we share three recent creations, each in separate posts. Our first begins with a unique cheddar, Deer Creek's Vat 17, which is a specialty cheese produced for, and distributed by, the folks at The Artisan Cheese Exchange. Chris and Julie Gentine founded [...]

Reflections on Sauerbraten

Inspiration can come from anywhere. At a recent used-book sale, I stumbled across this 1936 publication by Culinary Arts Press of the "Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book: Fine Old Recipes" and decided it was time to try a traditional Sauerbraten which I had been considering for some time. Here is the recipe: I started with a [...]