I had some friends over for dinner over the weekend, and since one of the guests was a vegetarian I decided to use cheese as the theme around which to construct an entire vegetarian menu.
Cheese is actually a surprisingly useful theme for a multi-course dinner because it can play completely different roles depending on the dish. It can be the main ingredient, a garnish, a sauce, a foam, a filling, or even part of a cocktail. The main challenge was making sure that ten cheese-based courses did not turn into ten increasingly heavy plates of melted cheese.
The final menu ended up ranging from a blue cheese martini and a fairly light beet salad through several pasta and vegetable courses, before finishing with Japanese cheesecake.… Read the rest