Goes Well With Berries

It’s berry picking season, and that means one thing: cheese and fresh fruit for dinner. I love nothing more than loading up on cherries, strawberries, blueberries, or blackberries and setting out a cheese board to match. Add a plate of smoked fish, a light salad, some white wine, and you’ve got a glorious feast. No fuss. No hot oven.

Haystack’s Queso de Mano is one of my favorite summer cheeses for berries. It’s a raw milk goat cheese – very gentle but nutty and herbaceous – from Longmont, Colorado. To continue reading, please click here.

Full disclosure: This piece is part of a series I write for Di Bruno Bros. The deal is, I choose the cheese, and they pay me to develop a post. This is how I cover the cost of my habit

The Trouble with Burrata

Twice a month, I freelance for Di Bruno Bros., the largest cheese counter in Philadelphia -- I choose a cheese to write about, and the store posts my write-up on its blog. This week, I picked Burrata -- a delicious, hand-pulled mozzarella purse with a plush cream center. I chose it because Burrata is a wonderful summer cheese, and most people don't know it exists.

Once you try it, though, you'll never forget it. It's like discovering poached eggs.

You can read about serving ideas in the post, but I thought I'd show you a few outtakes from Burrata's photo shoot. I snapped these photos in my kitchen a few days after taking a food photography workshop with Julie Basello-Holt of Creative Genius. No matter what I did, it was tough to make this cheese look appealing. I wanted my Burrata to look sensual, not like a disemboweled gourd. That was a tough one. Burrata gets messy once you slip off its leek straps.

Below, you'll see what I came up with. Any input on how to make this look more delicious? In the meantime, I encourage you to seek out this little devil. It's glorious, a cooling centerpiece for dinner during a heat wave.

To read the full post about Burrata, please visit the Di Bruno Blog.