Rails from the Rails #11 - Cheese Please

(as seen here)

All Aboard: I have been on quite a long hiatus but instead of going on about the break in detail, allow me continue where I left off.

I will start by briefly addressing the end of the 2007 season. Losing in football is difficult. Losing in the Eastern Final, thereby being prevented from playing for a chance to win the Grey Cup, is devastating. A loss like that is hard to describe. It feels as though a part of you has died; never to be resuscitated. But, you can take that feeling and allow it to paralyze you or you can take that feeling and use it as motivation to move forward; I have chosen the latter.

Tickets Please: On a recent trip to Montreal aboard a VIA passenger train, I came across two very interesting articles in two separate magazines. In this Rails from the Rails, and the one to follow, I am going to use those articles as springboards for some thoughts and experiences.

The first article of interest was a piece entitled Eat, Drink and be Daring: 100 Must-Try-Before-You-Die Tastes. The work by Chris Nuttall-Smith was printed in Toronto Life magazine. It was a very interesting article. Here is the introduction to the article as it appears on their website:

Toronto’s long been an international food city, but it’s fair to say that we’ve only recently melded the flavours of here and far away into a cuisine that’s definitively our own. This is our list, arranged in no par­ticular order, of the city’s must-try foods—from local classics like butter tarts (No. 63) to more recent arrivals like kimchee empanadas (82). They’re all either made in Toronto, unique to Toronto, or hard enough to find elsewhere that they make us feel lucky to live here.

As you can imagine, with my penchant for food, I was intrigued. In a photo accompanying the article, a large hunk of cheese caught my eye and I quickly read about this particular “taste” from Toronto. Number 3 on their list was Thunder Oak Gouda from the Cheese Boutique. A single-herd cow’s milk cheese from Thunder Bay that has been aged an additional 3 years in the Cheese Boutique’s vaults was something I had to try.

Of interest, Mike O’Shea and I had met some of the staff from the Cheese Boutique at a charity fishing tournament in the summer. We spent part of that afternoon “talking shop” with Agim Pristine. The Cheese Boutique was started by the Pristine family in the 70’s and Agim is one of the family members still involved. At the fishing tournament, Agim sent Mike and I home from the fishing tournament with some gourmet cheeses with the promise from us to visit his shop in the future. The article and its contents were a reminder that we had to make this visit.

Mike and I made the trip this past January. We were scheduled to attend the 30^th annual Toronto Ducks Unlimited dinner downtown and we realized that we would be driving past the Cheese Boutique on our way. We decided to leave early and fulfill our promise to visit Agim at work. Now, you need to understand, we did not need any coaxing to get us to visit a place where we would be surrounded by meat and cheese. Mmmmmm, meat and cheese! What else is there? We were not disappointed.

Indeed, we were surrounded by cheese when we entered the public-access cheese vault. Huge wheels of parmesan cheese and large blocks of cheddar were on either side. And by large I mean 500 pounds-large in some cases. Overhead, large slabs of prosciutto dangled enticingly. It was awesome. Cheeses I had never even heard of hung from various hooks, and the aromas were fantastic.

And so it went. Cheese and meat followed by meat and cheese. The Thunder Oak Gouda was as good as I had hoped. The prosciutto and bocconcini sandwiches we ordered kept our hunger at bay. We left the store with various cheeses, some truffle butter and some Kansas-cut steaks that looked like they belonged in an episode of the Flintstones. This was a field-trip catered to perfection for food-loving footballers. It won’t be long until we return to get our fill.

Last Stop: Of the 100 tastes presented in the article I can lay claim to having tried 10 of them thus far. There are several more tastes that should be fairly easy to come by. Putting a significant dent in that list is going to take some hard work but eating is something I’m good at so I’m going to give it my best shot. I figure, with teammates like Chad Folk, Brian Ramsay, Taylor Robertson, Adriano Belli, Jeff Keeping and Mike O’Shea, I shouldn’t have too much difficulty finding company on my quest.