An Ode to Brie

I rediscovered Brie this weekend. Strange how a piece of cheese could make me so nostalgic for a time and place in my life long since past. But it did. One wiff of that distinctive and somewhat stinky smell and I became wistful for the days of real French baguettes and supermarchés with aisle after aisle of fromage: Chamembert de Normandie, Beaufort, Neufchâtel, Roquefort, Le Vache qui Rit. Yes, I am actually waxing poetic about cheese. Yet it's not just cheese to the French, it is almost an identity all it's own, if you will. Indeed, I rather wonder if it is not sacrilege to not like cheese in France. It gives new meaning to the phrase, "You are what you eat." And if that phrase is true, I am most certainly a little moldy around the edges.

Well, I feel like my relationship with cheese closely mirrors my experience of France in general. I started out just as any other American girl unaccustomed to such overabundance of choice and eventually acquired the taste for most of what I tried. Minus goat cheese. I still think goat cheese is something someone came up with to frighten small children into behaving and grown adults into penitence. But the point is that experiencing the important parts of a culture so apart from my own changed me in ways I can't explain. And somewhere along the way I came to associate all those small, but significant changes with the things that were closest at hand: the things that I ate, the things that I saw, and even the people I was with.

So thank goodness for a dear friend who shares my love of all things French and reintroduced me to all the culinary joys that are out there if you're only willing to spend a little time discovering them. Over the years I've gotten progressively more and more "busy" to the point that I've abandoned many of the things I always loved to do. This blog is an effort to regain the artistic outlet that I lost when I stopped writing. With any luck I will also rediscover my long lost pastime of culinary creativity.

It occurs to me that what I write in this forum really isn't very interesting or clever and I doubt many people will read it. But as stated above, it really is a simple catalogue of my daily thoughts for my own amusement, and as such will likely be a continually random enumeration of my random musings.