THE BIG CHEESE BOOK

beer and cheese tasting

stinky blue

lovely Sasha at top left, adding milk to cheese (can't remember why we were doing this) and the teenage cows, "heffers," at Trader Point Creamery in Indiana

This weekend marks the end of one of the most exciting projects I've ever participated in. It's rare that an email lands in your life that truly makes one of your dreams come true, but that's exactly what happened about 4 months ago. My friend and esteemed cheese guru/writer/knower of all things cheese, Sasha Davies, recommended me to her publisher to shoot her latest book, a how to make cheese cook book. What an opportunity and what a challenge were my immediate thoughts! These sentiments proved to be at the core of each of our shoot days, then my long nights of editing. I've always wanted to photograph a cookbook and here I was doing just that.

For the past few months, Sasha, David and I have worked tirelessly through big days of cheese making (and noshing!) to make this book come together. David is a local home cheese maker and recipe developer. From both David and Sasha, I learned a tremendous amount about the process of making cheese at home, an ambitious and very rewarding process. The real joy however was the collaboration between my cheese colleagues. The problem solving and the fun of photographing over 15 different cheeses in various states of development (and stink!) was greater than anything I could have imagined. Not to mention the farm visits to meet the makers of the raw cheese-making materials. The goats and cows couldn't be any cuter! Spoken like a true vegetarian.

Here are just a few images from the collection submitted for the book. Which won't come out for about a year. I just couldn't resist a little bit of celebrating over here on the blog.

Cheers!