Crunchy cheese

I'm learning that cheese can be a little gritty if it's been aged a long time.  That's not a bad thing, it adds a dimension of texture in a food that otherwise is usually rather uniform.  The other way to make cheese crunchy is of course to cook it and burn it a little on the pan, like you do with grilled cheese.  I'd be interested someday to learn about the chemical makeup of cheese, but at the moment, I have way too much crap to do.

Today we had Cypress Grove Midnight Moon cheese.  It's a goat cheese and it's phenomenal.  There's a little bit of crunch and a little sweetness, but it is divine and creamy and I want to take a bath in it.

In honor of the goats whose milk created this delicious cheese, I present the following video, without further comment.

In praise of soft cheese

One of the things you're supposed to avoid when pregnant nowadays is soft cheese.  Apparently, unpasteurized soft cheeses, improperly handled deli meats, venison, etc., can contain the bacteria listeria, which causes hardly any problems in healthy adult humans, but can cause miscarriage in pregnant women.  Listeria isn't terribly common, so I wasn't sure whether I should avoid soft cheeses altogether or only cheese that I knew to be pasteurized.  It can sometimes be hard to tell if soft cheese has been handled correctly or is properly pasteurized, like feta on a Greek salad at a sketchy bargain pizza place, so I asked my obstetrician whether I should worry about it.   He said that as a general rule, if you're concerned that you maybe shouldn't do something because you're pregnant, just don't do it and save yourself the worry and the risk.  So I avoided the big listeria culprits for my pregnancy, despite being an avid fan of feta and good cheese in general, and didn't worry too much about listeria.
Now, on the other hand, I'm not pregnant, so I can eat as much soft cheese as I like.  To celebrate this fact, I got a little piece of garlic and herb laced Chevre at Publix yesterday for a snack.  It was delicious.  I'm pretty sure the goat it came from looked like this when she was a baby:

That's a goat I met a while back in North Carolina.  I'm pretty sure her name is Carol, but I might have just made that up.
Anyway, I spread the Chevre on Carr water crackers and it was so creamy and delicious, and interestingly, it went really well with the pear baby food that I had all over my face and torso from feeding my little munchkin her lunch a little earlier that hour.  I guess it makes sense, in a perfect world, one would eat chevre with one's crackers on a little wooden board paired with some fruit and maybe some nuts.