mimolette!

isn't that a totally fun word to say? mimolette! it's adorable. it's also a cheese, if you didn't already guess. after spending the morning being stabbed with needles and worrying, the fisherman and i did a little afternoon driving and found a cute little grocery store in the middle of nowhere that i had read about. i'd been wanting to go there for a while, after hearing that they were tiny but carried a pretty varied selection of gourmet foods. i was after cheese, and cheese i found! along with some salted anchovies that i should have bought, in retrospect.

mimolette is a french, cow's milk cheese. they age it anywhere from a year to two; this particular wedge is about 18 months old. the older it gets, the darker in color it gets. you might notice it has an unusual crust, sort of speckled and pockmarked (a bit like cantaloupe skin), due to an equally unusual aging process. what's mimolette's secret? cheese mites! yes, little buggies eat at the rind and this leaves it marred like the surface of the moon, tiny craters everywhere. how does it taste? delicious. like most cheeses aged for over a year, the paste (that's the fancy word for the cheese itself) is hard and a bit crumbly. it's nutty and slightly sweet, with a bit of a cheddar-y tang. it's not very strong, like you might think a cheese aged with bugs would be. you can grate it, it would be good on pasta or potatoes (then again, not much isn't good on either of those thing), but it's nice just sliced and eaten. i would pair it with an ale of some sort; nothing too dark or heavy. pretzels, mimolette and beer, maybe a nice crisp apple, a smidge of salami, would make an awesome snack or light dinner. this afternoon i ate it with some pretzels and some aged goat cheese.
and here's my awful haircut. i'm smiling on the outside but a sad little clown on the inside, trust me. i mean, look at how ridiculous my pinned back bangs are. i can only really do one side, they weren't really long enough to start pinning them back, so the other side is all puffy and defiant like "bitch! this is what you get for going to hairmasters!" i just suddenly have so much fucking face, you know? nothing to hide behind. bleh. in a few weeks i might like it better, but right now i'm not loving it. plus, i think i found the spot the doctor said is thinning. i can't see the back or top of my head, obviously, so i used my camera to take some photos and checked those out. it's not a huge spot, and if he had never uttered the word "thinning" i would have just thought it was a combination of my hair part and cowlick. as it is now, i wish i were a faithful jewish man so i could use a yarmulke to cover that shit up. grrr.

i gave them tons of blood this morning, so in a week or so i should know what's wrong with me, if anything. i might just be a fat girl with a hunchback and unfortunate female pattern baldness. in which case, i should change the name of my blog to "rogaine and liposuction."