WineontheKeyboard

This fantasic swiss cheese fondue is a regular on our dinner menu. We have it for the main meal. With a side of wine.

Swiss Cheese Fondue:

1/4 lb Emmenthal Cheese (also spelled Emmental cheese, but don’t get me started…)
1/4 lb Swiss Gruyere
1 lb–give or take–any other Swiss Cheese…I prefer Baby Swiss
2 cloves garlic
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/4 c Kirschwasser (cherry brandy)
1/4 c white wine (don’t forget to taste this ingredient as you’re making the fondue!!)
sprinkle of nutmeg
1/4 c flour–give or take

Okay, so this worked out well. I told SuperGuy that he had to cook, and I was in charge of the picture taking. You know, a group effort.

I helped a lot with this ingredient. You know, tasting and sampling…

Pour in about 1/4 c kirschwasser…Cherry Brandy

Add about 1/4 c white wine. Pino Grigio is preferred by the finer chefs.

Smash the garlic with a knife. SuperGuy says this makes them easier to peel off that outer layer. Use your favorite knife.

SuperGuy insists I tell you to cut off the green tip end of the garlic. It can give a bitter taste. Who knew there were so many rules about chopping garlic?? I just, um, chop it… Anyway, add the garlic to the fondue pot.

Add the juice from 1/2 a lemon. (of course, then you have the problem of what DO you do with the juice from the other 1/2 of the lemon. But these quandries of the universe are more than we can really go into today.) See the lemon juicer? SuperGuy has a gadget for everything he does in the kitchen.

Turn on the fondue to medium and heat the liquid to just barely boiling.

Here you see the cheese. About 1/4 lb ementhal and 1/4 lb swiss gruyere. About 1 lb of any other swiss. Baby Swiss is best. Trust me.

Grate the cheese.

Toss the cheese in about 1/4 c flour. Hey, wait!!! Where the heck is his wedding ring??? Hey!! Be right back…

Okay, okay, he swears he took it off when he was staining a table he’s refinishing for me. All is forgiven. I’ll go retrieve the ring for him though…

Slowly add the cheese when the liquid gets to just boiling. You might want to turn down the heat just a bit. Sprinkle in some nutmeg. Just a bit.

Serve with cubed bread and cubed apples. Or anything else you have around. Like veggies.

We serve this as our main course. Yummy. Makes for a nice leisurely dinner of conversation and dipping into the fondue. Not to mention the competition to see who drops the fewest pieces into the fondue…

Doesn’t that look delicious?? We make it so often, we keep the cheeses and kirschwasser on hand. Well, and we never seem to have a problem coming up with the Pino Grigio either… A perfect dinner for two. If you have any left over, it’s really good heated over an open faced sandwich. Enjoy!

Baby Boomer, Cooking by Kacey
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Deja Vu…well besides being the name of a great bar when I was in college….

I was having a deja vu type of week last week while visiting the campus of Mizzou. I went to college at Mizzou (Go Tigers!). When I went back there a few years ago with my son when he was registering for classes, it was like waves of memories washed over me…twisted in with the realization I had walked these streets everyday for 4 years. The same streets my son was soon to walk every day. It was like our lives had folded together and our paths had interwoven in some weird way.

Mizzou is a pretty campus…even more so now than I was there. They’ve done a great job prettying up the campus. They’ve also done a great job with their expansion projects, tying them in to the existing older architecture. Mizzou has a “red campus” (old red brick campus) like this shot of Jesse Hall–their administration building and a “white campus” white limestone buildings.

Here is the student union, the “entrance” to the white campus. This pretty walkway up to the union used to be an old torn up street when I went to school there.

Here is the “landmark” that Mizzou is known for. The Columns in the quad.

This is all that is left of the original Academic Hall at Mizzou. It burned down in 1892.

My Great Aunt Verena (love and adore the name Verena) went to Mizzou. About 80-90 years ago if I’m doing the math right. One of the few women on campus at that time. I have an old black and white photo she gave me of the columns back from when she went to school.

It just seems a bit weird, in a good way, to think of the history of this college and our family. SuperGuy went to Mizzou his last two years of college too. So we have a lot of history wrapped up in it. Now, in August, my youngest one, The Impish One will start college at Mizzou too. I sometimes get in a weird place when I’m walking around the campus now. Trapped between two worlds. For just a brief flash, I’m 20 again and reliving my college days.

Baby Boomer by Kacey
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You know, I’m really loving this stage of life. Really. There is time to be me. Without the guilt of “I should be doing this for that person.”

I can’t imagine any other stage of life where I would have had the time to invest in learning photography like I have now.

I’ve taught myself quite a few new things in the last 5 years or so. Knitting (love handknit socks!), web design, web site optimization. Well, and of course, photography. Which then led me to learning photoshop.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved being a mom. Well, I am still a mom. But I have time to explore all these things that interest me now.

(these sunset photos brought to you by the commercial breaks in Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday… )

So, now that you have more time, what are you learning to do? Or even if you don’t have time now, what new things are you trying? Okay, and if you have a bazillion toddlers and have no time what so ever…what would you LIKE to learn to do?

Baby Boomer by Kacey
9 Comments »