For me, one of the best parts of working at Culture is when, as a group, we review images that come in from the various photo shoot assignments. We collectively go through them and decide which ones will work best with the editorial and layouts.

As you can imagine, the decision making process is often challenging as there is only so much "print real estate" available and inevitably there's never enough room to include all the ones we want.

Given a singular common denominator of cheese, there's an amazing spectrum of subject matter contained within the many hundreds of pages printed over the last year. In no particular order, here are some of my personal favorites from 2012.

July 25th. Tonight's dinner was late and so, appropriately, quick. Blanched corn -- the first sweet stuff of the summer -- tossed with cracked pepper, torn garden basil, lemon cucumbers, brandywines, and Ploughgate Farm's Queso Fresco. A perfectly tangy and tender take on a cheese that's so seldom made right. Marisa Mauro was taught the authentic recipe and has started selling limited quantities at her local farmers markets. I was lucky enough to plea some off her at July 24th's Vermont Cheesemakers Festival, and it didn't last 24 hours. 

This is why I have a love/hate relationship with the annual VT Festival: all us cheese lovers are able to try the fleeting side projects and small-production items, fall for them, then miss them.