Tough choices as usual!

We didn't give you all a lot of time to dream up fresh rhymes for this year's contest (just a week or so), but we still saw an outpouring of casienated love.

Poems tended strongly towards the sweet (who win Briar Rose Creamery's goat cheese and chocolate truffles) with fewer works addressing the spicy (who win a selection of Virginia Chutney Co.'s tasty cheese lubricants). The field also tilted heavily towards submitter Lisa, who crushed the competition with sheer volume.

The Winners

♥ A top pick from our lovelorn staff was Jaclyn Stevenson's travelog in free verse, with our expatriot "foreign girl" falling for the charms of an open-air market. Sweet is the word.

Oh man, every President's Day I think of Kate Beaton's hilarious historical comics, and forget to post them to the blog. Well, this time, I remembered.

The background: the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a wheel weighing about three-quarters of a ton (and containing no Federalist milk!) given to Thomas Jefferson by the residents of Cheshire MA in 1802.

More than thirty years later, the supporters of the populist Andrew Jackson, believing that "every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid him." created a similarly massive cheese:

Click here for more Jacksonian hijinx. Beware of salty language!

While most folks are on the long holiday, we're on a conference call talking about the summer issue. Sometimes magazine work can be a grind.

Time for a goat massage:

Brought to you by the fine folks at Becky's Homestead.

Sigh.

Sometimes I'm just a victim—the folks at the Kitchn have got my number and are just churning out dessert recipes this week that I must link to. First it was vanilla ice cream affogato with Scotch, and now it's blood-orange syllabub.

Just ran across this essay at Oddity Central about kiviaq, a Greenlandic Inuit dish made from fermenting whole sea birds. For an American, the images and video are pretty tough to take—whole, unplucked birds are left stuffed into the stomach of a seal for up to a year, then skinned and eaten raw. Heady stuff, and don't click through if you think it'll ruin lunch. But I was glad to see the author put the dish in context: in the darkness of a Greenland winter, hunting fresh food is difficult and dangerous. Kiviaq can make the difference between starvation and survival.

Always been a fan of espresso on ice cream (Toscanini's sweet cream w/ a shot, please).

But the folks at Kitchn are mixing it up a little: instead of hot 'spresso on cold vanilla, they advocate a shot of Scotch instead, with the liquor's alcohol softening the ice cream instead of the heat of the coffee.  Sprinke with a little espresso powder, and you're all set.

It's time once again for culture's annual Valentine's day poetry contest. If music be the food of love, then cheese be the poetry of food... or love be cheese of music. Or something.

As always, the rules are simple: sign in and post your poetry in the comment thread below. Use any form you wish—sonnet or limerick or free-verse, and employ any muse, be it a fair lad, lass, monger, or succulent cheese—but your masterpiece must include both l'amour and le fromage. You can check out last year's entries for inspiration and read who won the judge's hearts.

Gawker author Brian Moylan has something to share with you:

I think this is going to be the most controversial thing I have ever published: I hate cheese. I think cheese is disgusting. Every single aspect of it. I hate the way it smells; walking past the pungent cheese section of Whole Foods is like being in a sort of agricultural locker room. I hate the taste of it, harshing on my tastebuds like some foreign infection. I hate the consistency of it, either the mucousy texture of brie or the creamy bite of Cheddar. I hate it all.

He continues on the same vein, with a few choice examples not printable in this, a family publication.

But besides possibly winning a lifetime subscription to the magazine, why don't we give Gawker what they want: clicks.

The folks at Coombe Castle are really very romantic—you can tell by their advertising. Now they've done gone and put up some instructions for making your own bouquet of cheese roses, cut from their passionately-tinted port-infused Windsor Red cheese.

Obviously, the striking creamy white and red marbling made Windsor Red stand out for a Valentine's Day spread; however, its firm, smooth but pliable texture was perfect for sculpting romance!

A red rose symbolizes passion, of course, but for more Platonic relationships, a yellow cheese-rose of friendship would certainly be welcome. But be careful when selecting your material: an orange cheddar flower would symbolize passion and desire. For nachos, perhaps?

I didn't think I'd like this recipe by Jasmin over at 1finecookie.com until I read this:

If I don’t run away to join Menudo, I will join DMX and his Ruff Ryders: With DMX in and out of jail (and hospitals) so much, the Ryders need a new leader.

... 

So.. with all this business I had to come up with something quick. Behold, pizza in a jar. People are obsessed with things in jars. I can’t help but give the people what they want.