My earliest memories of home made food came from my Babci (Polish for grandmother) when I was around 10 years old. My grandmother used to make such specialties as pierogi (stuffed dumplings) and galumki (cabbage rolls) on a regular basis, especially around the holidays. I remember us sitting at the kitchen table pinching the little dumplings shut with floured fingers and later eating them; each with a golden fried crust and a black peppery bite (oh, and while watching the 'Price is Right' on the television).

I just heard that that Sally Jackson, owner and cheesemaker of Sally Jackson Cheeses in the Okanagan Highlands, WA has announced she is selling her animals and her business.

This comes after a recent recall of her cheeses, compounded by a separate demand that her business meet Grade A Dairy standards - something not normally required of cheesemakers making aged cheeses.

I started the year obsessed with butter, bacon, and beer.

As you may remember from my last post, I am starting a lab focused on the study of the microbial ecosystems on cheese rinds. As it turns out, doing microbiology research requires a lot of stuff. At least that is what I am realizing as I set up my new lab… There's the equipment: pipettmen (to transfer small volumes of liquids), tubes (to hold the liquids), racks (to hold the tubes), and machines like a vortex (to mix the liquids in the tubes), freezers (to store samples), incubators (to grow microbes), and microscopes (to look at those tiny microbes). Then there are the reagents that make the experiments we will do possible, things like: growth media (microbe food), cell-lysis chemicals (detergents that bust cells open so we can extract their DNA), and enzymes like DNA polymerase (a purified enzyme that makes copies of DNA so we can study it- the one we use comes from a microbe found at vents at the bottom of the ocean!).