Encore: Our 2nd American Cheese Society Conference was July 22-27

Why go, you ask? We cannot resist following our curiosity about the phenomenal growth of American artisan cheese, and tracing the historical threads that link our New York state roots and families to cheese making.

Last year, we drove from the Adirondacks to Burlington Vermont for the 2008 conference. It was lovely, quaint, and too small for the crowd. Some of the sessions had to be held in tents, outdoors…picture HOT.

The 2008 conference was in Chicago…picture PRICEY. The weather was perfect. We were right downtown on Michigan Ave, with only parks between us and the Lake—we had great views of both from our 21st story room. There were grand fireworks over the park both Wed and Sat nights. Summertime in the city. It made me nostalgic for Prague, my only real city living experience. The meeting rooms were all indoors and convenient. But the tradeoff between adequate space and cost was a hard one.

This year’s events got underway on Wednesday with all day pre-conference tours, and continued with sessions through until the Saturday evening Festival of Cheese and Sunday morning cheese sale.

The Pre-Conference Tours

We arrived Tuesday night and started our week with down-home Chicago-style deep-dish pizza and locally brewed beer at Giordano’s. Nice. The Metro wasn’t running from O’Hare to the Chicago Loop…meaning a $50 taxi ride instead of $2 for the metro. Luckily, we flew to into Midway and that branch was running. But for a lot of folks, the glitch was a major inconvenience.

Wednesday I went on the Tour of Retail Cheese Shops. Two of the shops were especially great… Pastoral Artisan Cheese Shop and The South Marion Street Market and Café. I am posting photos from them.

Maybe as many as a third of the attendees were artisan cheese retailers. Everyone was sharing information on pricing, marketing, and equipping their shops. I almost got tempted to open one! It was an opportunity to rub elbows with some really nice people and a great way to spend the first day.

Russ and Meg toured the Roth Käse specialty cheese factory in Wisconsin…very brave of them because it meant a 3.5 hour each way bus trip after traveling to Chicago the day before. The photos show the facility, and the conference attendees done up in their laboratory finery.

Sessions

Just to give you a flavor of the sessions…how about these?

• The Role of the Government as a Business Development Partner
• How Retail Stores Train Their Cheese Employees
• Town Hall Meeting of Cheesemakers and Retailers
• Is Cheese the New Wine?
• Sell Them or Smell Them!
• European Forbearers: Reinventing the Classics
• Creating a Successful Restaurant Cheese Program
• Strategies in Retail Cheese Pricing
• Coffee and Cheese Pairings
• Beer versus Wine Smackdown: Which Goes Better With Cheese?
• Is Selling to Big Box Stores Selling Out?

Amazing passion in these discussions. The folks from Costco, Kroger, and Kraft must have felt badly outnumbered, although they carried their senses of humor with them when they came to the discussions.

Eating

It difficult to get one’s mind around the fact that there are so many different varieties of cheese; nearly 1100 types of cheese were entered in the competition for Best of each of the many categories. We had cheese at every meal, yes including breakfast. And, there was cheese to eat at the sessions…you can’t discuss coffee and cheese pairing, or have a wine and cheese smackdown, without tasting the coffee, wine, beer and the cheese.

At lunch there would be a normal conference meal, plus a tray of cheese samples in the center of the table.

Wednesday evening was a “dine-around.” The conference arranged with about 10 Chicago restaurants to have a prix fixe meal with cheeses from one company paired with each of the multiple courses. We went to Bin 36. Beehive Cheese, from Utah, did the pairings. Their “Barely Buzzed” was a 2007 competition winner…hand-rubbed with Turkish grind and lavender buds. Fantastic food!

At the Meet the Cheesemaker session we went table to table talking with cheesemakers and eating their cheeses.

A 25th Anniversary of the ACS Reception featured…cheese! Tables and tables of cheese with an open wine and beer bar.

The finale was the Festival of Cheeses where all the cheeses were on display and the 2008 Award Winners were displayed with their ribbons. Eleven hundred kinds of cheese to eat in one room at one time! Tables heaped high with cheddars, bloomy rinds, blues, butters, fresh cheeses, chevres, sheep cheeses, on and on, all to admire and eat. There was even a skyline of Chicago carved in cheese, as the photo shows.

The photos will help you get the feel…but you really do need to be there. Seeing is neither smelling nor tasting nor believing.

The photo above is of the Festival of Cheeses. If you look hard you'll see all the tables hidden among all the eating people.

The photos below show:

• The Pastoral Cheese Shop
• The tour group eating lunch at South Merion Street Market and Cafe
• Cheese being sorted at Russ and Meg's tour
• Meg in her factory finery
• Cheese drying
  

The photos below are:

• many tables full of cheese to eat
• The cheesey skyline

Waldo Demonstration Farm

Now that our packs are put away for a while and we have added the Camino photos to
the posts below, we are again giving some attention to our other projects. In that vein, we went to visit the Waldo Demonstration Farm, about 15 miles from home. We had met the proprietors at the Farmers’ Market and been eating their lettuce, cucumbers, and okra. They invited us to come see the farm and, having enjoyed our other small-farm visits, we were ready.





This is the fourth farm we have visited in the past five months…not counting the “Mud Farm” in France, of course. Although each farm was small and family run, this one was really unlike the others.

The farm has about 25 acres, with probably less than an acre in cultivation. In addition to vegetables, we saw dozen or so beautiful chickens living in a lovely chicken house, and about a dozen heifers. They roam the pasture eating mostly grass, with a bit of feed added each day for variety. At the end of the season, the grass-fed heifers will be sold back to their original owner for slaughter, with the farmer keeping some of the yield for himself.

The vegetable farming uses hydroponic technology. The plants live in grow-towers, pots, shallow raised beds, or pipes in a quite small area of the farm. The pots and grow-towers are in a field and they’re covered by shade cloth as needed. In the pots are okra and tomato plants. The five-to-six foot okra plants are still very productive, despite the May/June Florida heat. The tomatoes were producing, but getting that end-of-season look typical of Florida tomato plants as July approaches.

A few tomatoes, as well as herbs, swiss chard, and strawberries are, or had been, in grow-towers. They are a patented arrangement of Styrofoam-like planters, each about a 12-inch square. There are four medium-filled planters to a tower. They stack at angles to each other so the corners of each planter are exposed and available to hold plants. A pole through the center of each stack keeps it upright. A pipe carrying nutrients dissolved in water runs above the towers the length of each row, about 30 feet long. A tiny tube inserted into the pipe above each tower drips the water at a very slow and steady rate into the top planter. It filters through to the lower planters.

Each tower could support eight tomato plants or up to 16 smaller plants. The farmer said he found that four tomatoes were as many as worked for him. Otherwise the plants were too close and bushy to walk the rows and harvest easily. He liked the towers, and to experiment with various plants in them. Most of his tomatoes were in pots as were the okra plants.

Most of the lettuce, and some swiss chard, grew in a greenhouse next to the field of grow-towers and pots. The greenhouse was about evenly divided between the pipes, some pots, and raised, shallow beds about 30 feet long and 5 feet wide.

The pots held cucumbers, now spent but with vines still stretched on strings up toward the greenhouse super-structure that supports the plants.

The beds contained growing medium, now fallow and ready to be discarded so they could be cleaned and made ready for the post-summer growing season.

The third section of the greenhouse holds long rows of 4-inch white pipe. Nutrient rich water pumps continuously through the pipe, drawn by gravity from one end to the other and then pumped back to the far end. At about 12-inch intervals, the pipes have square holes into which lettuce seeds sprouted in half-inch cubes of fibrous medium are inserted. Nourished by the flowing water, they grow to heads of bib, boston, romaine and other types of lettuce, which we have been buying all season at the Farmers’ Market.

The nutrients are mixed in large tubs at the end of the rows of pipes and the raised beds and controlled by the pumps and gravity flow. Like all the farmers we’ve met, this one had an amazing knowledge of the biology and chemistry of his plants and their growing processes.

Another glimpse into our food and the people who produce it. Someday it would be nice to be able to know who grew all our food, and how they see the process of feeding themselves and the rest of us.

Camino hike finished; Off to Madrid and Barcelona for a few days

After a restful, rainy night in our hotel in the Pamplona suburb of Burlada, we took off by train for Madrid to meet our friends, Arnold and Ismini. We had several restful days of sightseeing, good food-wine-cheese, and fun you can only have with good ole friends.



Madrid is lovely to visit...bustling, clean, full of parks and ornate buildings. Barcelona is as nice. Full of young people...more young people than any of the other places we have been in France or Spain. Vibrant and eclectic.

AVIS caused us more than a little grief on the trip between the cities. More to come on that!

The photos show:

• Peg (with no backpack!)at the train station in Pomplona
• All of us learning to be really angry with AVIS along the route to Barcelona.

We did it!

We walked every mile as planned. It is amazing that the last day gave us enough non-rain to make it to Pamplona. More to come in the future.

Click on the links to hear voice recordings of what we were thinking on the last day of hiking.

On the Trail, the last day, Sun in the afternoon, May 31st

More from the Trail, lost in Pamplona, May 31st

Last post from the Camino, Pamplona, May 31st

As reported in the voice recordings, it had rained so hard last night when we were in Zubiri that the path was flooded. But the rain diminished to a drizzle and we were unwilling to forego our last day on the trail. So, off we went in our rain gear. The first part of day was quite an adventure! After we arrived at the nice, flat river park path into Pamplona the hiking next to the swollen river was easy. Getting lost at the end because of bad directions added to our tiredness, but in no way spoiled the thrill of making it to our goal!

The photos show:

• Russ stepping into the swollen stream that almost caused our Korean pilgrim friend to tumble into the drink. Can you see the rocks we needed to negotiate?
• Russ pondering the just completed wet walk, while encouraging Peg to plunge in. Pretty reflections eased the discomfort, though.
• A pretty town we passed through
• A view of the lovely countryside
• The swollen river near Pamplona and the river walk
  

Walking along the ridges of the Pyrenees

A gorgeous day of sunshine! We walked from Roncevalles to Zubiri, about 13 miles. It was still uphill and down, in the mountains, although we got over the peak the day before. So beautiful, being on a ridge and looking over at the tops of the other ridges, right at our level.

Tonight we have a fourth floor walk up room, shared bath. But only 27 euros :) The auberges are 60 bunk beds to a room, for 5 euros. Not brave enough!

Click on the links to hear what we were thinking as we found our 4th floor walk-up and closed restaurant.
Zubiri May 30th 4th floor walk up, restaurant closed

Now we are having a beer and talking to the other pilgrims. This is a great experience. On to Pamplona tomorrow.

The photos show:

• Russ crossing the medieval bridge that led us into Zubiri
• A crowd of pilgrims gathered at a breakfast spot a few miles after we left Roncesvalles
• Several views from along the ridge-top trail between Roncesvalles and Zubiri
  

Over the Pyrenees and into Roncesvalles, no rain!

A wonderful morning, again. We started with breakfast at the casa rural and then hit the road about 8:30. The sun shone on us as we climbed, and climbed, and climbed. We climbed about a half mile in about 7 miles. At the top reaching the point where Roland failed to sound his oliphant and recall the army to save him before he was mortally wounded.



By the time we got there we were pretty tired, but the vistas were spectacular and we loved it all. At the top it was windy and we donned our jackets for the descent into Roncesvalles...only about a mile and 300 ft less elevation.

Click on the "reports" to hear real time voice recordings of our thoughts.

Report 1: Arriving in Roncesvalles, the start of the Spanish part of Camino, May 29th

We are staying in a renovated monastery...monks never had it so good.os at mass at 8:00. This is totally cool.

This town has 20 inhabitants and hundreds of peregrinos...especially on bike here for some reason.

All is well for today...about 14 miles to hike tomorrow.

Report 2: Leaving Roncesvalles, May 30th

Report 3: The Pilgrim Dinner and Mass in Roncesvalles (recorded on the trail to Zubiri, May 30th)

The photos (not in order because I cannot make them stay in the order I put them in) show:

• a foggy morning in the Pyrenees
• a clear view of a craggy mountain top
• a hazy view back down to a town we climbed past
• a couple of views along our dry! trail today
  
• cold, tired, wind-blown hiker at Roland's Pass
• kids building a monastery out of styrofoam rocks on a field trip in Roncesvalles
• the hallway in our 'monastery' and a corner of our living room
  
• the old hospital, turned gite d'etape, where the ward had bunks for about 100 pilgrims
  

Saint Jean Pied de Port, The Rain Stopped, Glorious Walk to Valcarlos in the Pyrenees

The train ride up from Moissac was rainy and very interesting. We sat with Irish pilgrims who walked the trail all the way in Spain a few years ago and continue to walk alternate routes. The train from Bayonne to Saint Jean Pied de Port was packed with pulgrims...every seat. the rain slacked to drizzle about when we arrived. What a quaint town! Basque architecture...all white washed buildings with red roofs. No more fieldstone walls. It is a walled city with cobblestone streets...Russ does not like how they treat his feet, but they sure make it look old and fun.

Had a good Basque dinner and a good night´s sleep, although not where we expected because they´d overbooked. But they found us a great place. No complaints from us at all!

This morning, it was Not Raining! Glorious start to the walk over the Pyrenees. It was not even cold. We shed our jackets after a mile or so. The hills are covered with patches of forest, prosperous looking farms, sheep, streams, wildflowers. The parts where we walked along the road had light traffic. We stayed off the trails that were muddy...no more mud, please.

We arrived in little Valcarlos between noon and one. Our inn is on the side of a ravine and as totally cozy as it is pictoresque. We walked into town and Russ used his Spanish to ask a lady at the church where to find glue to fix his boot. She took us to a store and helped us find the glue. Back at the inn, he sewed his boot together with dental floss and covered it with the new glue. The Camino is about leaving your old ways behind...maybe he will be a cobbler in the next life.

Now an afternoon of lolling around, an evening meal in a Basque restaurant on the square by the church, and breakfast at 8:00 at the inn before starting on the next 9 mile hike, to Roncesvalles...half the distance continues our climb over the mountains, and the other half starts us down. This is one of the prettiest places we have ever been.

Oh, and I love that in Spain they use qwerty keyboard :)

About the photos...I cannot get them to stop rearranging themselves at will. Therefore I will simply tell you what pictures I have posted and you can perhaps match up the descriptions with the photos.

• Pilgrims on the train with us from Bayonne to Saint Jean Pied de Port
• Pilgrims hiking from the train to the town
• Russ and Peg, with belly packs covered by rain jackets, at the Pilgrim Welcome Center in Saint Jean Pied de Port
• A main street of Saint Jean Pied de Port in the rain
• Overview of Saint Jean Pied de Port from a hill above the town
• The river running through Saint Jean Pied de Port
• Russ on the bridge over the river
• 3 pictures along the way to Valcarlos in the Pyrenees
• Dogs following Russ along the route into the Pyrenees
• A dog wishing it could follow us on the adventure
• A little town we passed through on the way to Valcarlos
  
• The altar in the Valcarlos church of Santiago. Note Santiago on his horse ready to kill the Moors, even though they did not come to Spain until centuries after his death
• An overview of Valcarlos through the trees along the trail as we hike up and out of town in the morning
  

Lower in the post is a description of what we experienced this day and a set of real-time recordings.

Click on the links below to hear voice recordings of our thoughts, made in real time.

Report 1: Leaving Saint Jean Pied de Port and Starting up the trail into the Pyrenees
May 28th morning

Report 2: To Valcarlos, Halfway up the Pyrenees-Russ
May 28th afternoon

Report 3: About Saint Jean Pied de Port, the walk to Valcarlos, and being halfway up the Pyrenees-Peg
May 28th afternoon

Report 4: Leaving Valcarlos and Walking in the Pyrenees May 29