Wanda (my wife) and I used to dine on cheese and charcuterie plates quite often for dinner. I don’t know why we stopped as we used to really love to relax over a spread of meats, cheeses, and pickled vegetables and talk about our day. Tonight seemed the perfect time to re-institute this tradition. I had spent a long day at work and when I got home I needed to spend some time working on a recipe and article, for another website, that I had been pushing off, but now the deadline was looming. By the time everything was done I was in no mood to cook, and the hot, humid weather had sapped my appetite. I was about to blow off dinner altogether-Wanda could fend for herself-when I passed by one of the local cheese stores on my way to the store for a few things. Thoughts of our earlier cheese and charcuterie dinners swamped my mind and next thing I knew I had cheese in hand and was heading to the store to round out the dinner.

By the time I had completed my shopping I had 3 cheeses, prosciutto, sopressata, a melon, and a few things from the olive bar. For the cheeses I had picked a Manchego from Spain, a nice relatively mild, nutty cheese. The other two, both from Wisconsin, were a goat’s milk “”mozzarella” from Mt. Sterling Creamery, a slightly hard, aged cheese, that still retained plenty of that chalky, minerally flavor that makes goat’s milk cheeses so distinctive. The final cheese was Benedictine from Carr Valley. It is a washed rind cheese made from a mixture of cow’s, goat’s and sheep’s milk. The cheese was appropriately pungent and flavorful as all washed rind cheeses are, though a little less so than most of it’s European counterparts.

The prosciutto was used to wrap chunks of melon, while the sopressata was sliced paper thin. I also sliced some of the Hungarian salami that we are never without. It is produced by a company called Bende, just outside of Chicago. Bende is one of the only producers, in the US, making Hungarian style salamis and sausages and have earned a world wide following. The salami is redolent with garlic and gets a little kick from copious amounts of Hungarian Paprika added to the mix.

Dinner was rounded out by a variety of pickled vegetables including a mix of olives in a greek marinade, balsamic glazed pearl onions, and wonderful, spicy greek peppers filled with feta and marinated in olive oil. I still had a few mushrooms I pickled in May so I added those to the mix also. You can find the recipe for those here

While I would normally have served red wine, or beer with this meal, I wasn’t in the mood for beer and red wine just seemed too heavy in the humidity. Instead I choose to serve a Wisconsin wine from Door County Winery. It was a bottle of their cherry wine. While I usually stay way from these “fruit” wines, tonight it seemed the right choice. It was light and a little too sweet for me, but I have to admit it was refreshing and the sweetness really went well with the stronger of the cheeses.

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