Cheese of the week: Mona  

For the past few months my sister Jackie has been doing a Cheese of the Week post over at her blog, Allora, Aspetta! Jackie lives in Italy, and so naturally she's focused on the cheeses there and her experiences with them. Lately though she hasn't posted much, so as a way of encouraging her to post a little more often and also because I also enjoy cheese, I'm going to be posting a Cheese of the Week here on locussolus as well.

I'll focus mainly on American cheeses, first of all because I live here, but also because I think there's a lot of great cheese being produced here now, and I don't see too many people online writing about it. There are two places I know if in Oak Park with a selection of American artisan cheeses: the Marion Street Cheese Market and the Oak Park Whole Foods (I don't shop at other Whole Foods stores often enough to know whether this is true everywhere). During the summer there is some interesting cheese available at the Oak Park Farmers Market as well, although I know some of this cheese comes from the Marion Street Cheese Market. As it happens, I also spend a lot of time in Wisconsin, so I may have some opportunities to try cheese directly from some local producers there.

This week for the first time in several months I stopped by the Marion Street Cheese Market to pick up something interesting for the first post. The Cheese Market is only two or three years old, but it seems to be doing well. The selection of cheeses has doubled since the last time I was there, and I was impressed to see that a lot of the new cheeses were from the midwest. Also they are going to be moving to a new location on the other side of the train tracks this fall, which is a little strange since right now they're right on the newly renovated strip of Marion Street. I can only assume they're moving because they need more space.

One of the cheeses I picked up was a sheep and cow's milk cheese Mona, pictured above, from the Wisconsin Sheep Dairy Cooperative. It was so tasty and easy to eat that my daughter and I demolished the whole wedge without trying to pair it with anything... I guess we're not very experienced reviewers. But I do think that it's a fantastic cheese for eating by itself. It's a fairly hard cheese, but it's not too dense and not too crumbly. It was fresh and mild, sweet and slightly acidic (these last two are apparently characteristic of sheep's milk cheeses). In any case, I highly recommend it and will get another wedge soon -- although next time I'll try to keep it around logn enough to pair it with some things and maybe compare it with some other cheeses. Until then, the WSDC website suggests eating it with a nice glass of port.