Happy two month anniversary!  It’s incredible to me how quickly these first couple of months have gone by, yet I have managed to pack in 60 new things already, full of fabulous people.  Who knew that there were so many good peeps all around us!?!!  We just need to take the time to introduce ourselves.  That has to be the single biggest unexpected benefit of this entire project so far: all the new connections with wonderful people that I have made.  I feel extremely lucky and blessed.

So tonight, I decided to toast them by realizing an idea that has been stuck in my head for several years now.  In fact, it germinated from a book called ‘Sleeping Naked is Green‘ by Vanessa Farquharson, who wrote it based on her experiences of adding one new act of green to her life every day for a year.  On day 213, she marvelled at how brilliant it was to have ice cream served in a cone instead of a disposable cup, and how it must be possible to extend this idea of serving food in an edible receptacle to other areas, like being able to drink wine from a cheese glass.

Having had some time to ponder this, I had worked out two basic approaches on how that could work:

• Choose a firm cheese that you could turn into a wine shot glass by cutting out a large cube and hollowing out its inside; or
• Choose a cheese that you could melt down and then pour into a glass-shaped mould that you could then set out to solidify (or freeze) to use as a wine glass.

The contestants.

Coming from a culture of instant gratification, not to mention limited time after an exhausting yet rewarding weekend workshop, I naturally chose the first option, although I do fully intend to explore the other option at some point in the not too distant future.  I mean, for some reason, we happen to have a glass-shaped mould ice cube tray in our freezer I would say just for this specific purpose, so why not, really.  In any event, here are the steps that I followed to realize the dream:

1. Make sure you have wine.  I recommend a nice red, or even port, to accompany your cheese.  There are a few exceptions to this rule, but why complicate things?
2. Pour yourself some of the wine to sip while you are preparing the cheese, just to be really sure that it is yummy and drinkable.
3. Pour some of the wine into a smaller glass for the end product, so that you can feel free to top up your own glass at will.
4. Select your cheese.  If you have none, then don’t worry.  You still have your wine, so you are more than fine.  And now you have an excuse to try again tomorrow.  And the next day.  Until you finally remember to buy some cheese in the first place, which may be never.
5. Your cheese should be firm but not crumbly, and have a fairly strong flavour.  For this experiment, I tried two different kinds:  a goat milk cheddar, and Baluchon, a firm yet creamy Canadian cheese from Quebec.
6. Cut good-sized chunks of cheese that you can firmly grasp between your thumb and index finger.  I would suggest at least 2 inches square if you can swing it.
   

   There's a hole in my bucket...

7. Take a spoon or melon baller and scoop out the inside of the cheese cube.  I opted to simply carve it out with a knife.  This worked fine on one of the cheeses, but was a bit of a disaster with the cheddar, as it was too crumbly.  I ended up having to eat all the chunks that fell on the plate.  Ya, sometimes it is pretty great to be me.
8. Pour the wine from the smaller glass you had set aside earlier into the cheese glass.  (See?  Aren’t you glad you kept it separate from the now nearly empty bottle?)
   

   Bottoms up!

9. Raise your cube, drink it down, and enjoy!  Then refill it until the wine is gone.  At that point, feel free to take bites from the cheese cube itself, and notice the flavour of the cheese, now that it has had a chance to integrate the wine.  Pretty spectacular, right?

And that’s it!  Best invention ever?  Probably not so much, but it sure as heck doesn’t suck…  And on that note, raise your glass and celebrate with me, and hope to still see you here in another couple of months.  Cheers!