Eating Cheese

So Gill came to see me.  We spent the weekend eating cheese and drinking gin.  These activities were a special requests, so I had filled the frig with an exceptionally large quantity of cheese, and I must admit that we managed to eat most of it.

Knowing Gill was coming, I had been purchasing special food stuffs for the last week.  Since I had to go back and forth to Inverness for the computer, I had hunted high and low for unusual cheese, gin and in this process I saw a tray of quail eggs.  I had never had quail eggs, and they were pretty, so I bought them.  We decided to have poached quail eggs for breakfast.  

They were really hard to crack.  The shell was soft, but the membrane inside was really tough - the winning method turned out to be a bread knife sawing the egg in half.  The eggs are mostly yolk, and we each had 5 perfectly poached yolks on toast.

After breakfast, we shuffled off to shell beach and collected Groatie Buckies for good luck.  A Groatie Buckie is just a tiny cowrie shell, and they are considered good luck, but you can't collect too many or they are bad luck.

It was one of those rare occasions when they were pretty easy to find.  As we were walking along the coast to shell beach, I saw this group coming toward us, and I thought that dog looks just like Oreo and sure enough it was Oreo.  The Casper's had been Groatie Buckie hunting too.

Groatie Buckie on Crocus

We went to Strathy Beach on Sunday and had planned to bring the dogs.  Unfortunately, I opened the door to the back seat to put in the leash, and Badger jumped in.  He immediately scooted to the far side and as I tried to remove him, he acted like a mule putting all his weight in his butt in an attempt to 'win.'  

Gill seemed rather surprised by this behavior, and I found this somewhat satisfying in that Badger always acts like a sweetie in front of people and here he was acting like a jckss. 

I finally removed him (worked up a sweat doing it), and the 3 girls headed off to the beach, which was beautiful, as usual, and a really wonderful way to start the day.  

We came home and had a cheesy leek off.  I had seen a program where a somewhat strange chef challenged the concept of using a roux to make cheese sauce saying there was a better way that prevented the stodgy texture.  I had discussed this with Gill, and she didn't even try to hide her disgust.  

So we each made cheesy leaks - hers with stodge and mine without stodge.  They were both really good, but I'd say the sauce without roux was maybe too rich for the leeks.

We took both of these over to Jason's and had Sunday lunch with the Caspers, Wiers, and Barkers - our latest addition to the clan.

Monday we got up and had a lazy morning before we caught the plane to Manchester.  I had a meeting there on Tuesday, so as luck would have it, we both had a travel companion and that turned out to be a very good thing indeed...