Grilled cheese sandwich

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, August 3, 2009—

MOSTERDKAAS WAS A surprise. When we visit the Netherlands, nearly annually, we always come back with cheese. (Well, ditto when we visit Italy, of course.) You can bring hard cheese in, all you want, if it's vacuum-packed; we've found this works fine for Parmagiano and for various boerenkaasen, those delicious hard aged Dutch cheeses that often go by the generic names Gouda and Amsterdammer, though those are in fact quite specific cheeses, typed by terroir, or at least point of origin.
This last time was the first time we'd run into mosterdkaas, aged cow's-milk cheese flavored with mustard seeds. Cumin's common; nagelkaas, studded with cloves, less so though one of our favorites. We like netelkaas too, flavored with nettles.
Tonight we ate the last of it — clearly we didn't bring enough home. Lindsey made grilled cheese sandwiches, on Como bread from the Downtown Bakery. Well, not exactly grilled: she toasted them dry in the toaster-oven. With them, boiled potatoes and blanched green beans with the last of yesterday's pesto; afterward, green salad.

Rosé, Var, "La Ferme Julien," 2007