A NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION THAT LASTED!
Soon after we moved to Nordelph we discovered the 'Cheeseman' cheese stall on Norwich Market. We even followed the move of the stall after the redevelopment of the Market, from Row F ('fromage') to Row C ('cheese').
One disadvantage of buying cheese on infrequent visits to a place a long way away is that you tend to have a glut of cheese, followed by a lean period until the next visit to Norwich!
But a more substantial disadvantage that became apparent was that the cheeses we knew we wanted made up a complete order, and we found we weren't experimenting with new varieties.
We resolved to tackle this problem at the New Year, 2007. It became a New Year's Resolution, and is in fact the only one that we can recall that lasted any longer than about January 3rd!
The idea was that -- after buying what we normally would -- we would invite the proprietor to nominate a cheese that we hadn't tried. The basis of this nomination was important -- it was most definitely NOT to be a recommendation; the purpose was simply to draw our attention to a new cheese, without any expectation or description.
We had to work hard to convince the staff that we really weren't looking for anything more than a pointer to a new experience of cheese. We deliberately didn't ask for any particular type of cheese (hard, soft, blue, &c.), and we repeated regularly that we wouldn't complain if the selection wasn't to our liking.
This sort of extravagant and cavalier behaviour really only works if you have an initial success -- we would almost certainly have given up if we hadn't liked the first cheese selected for us. In fact, the launch of this scheme introduced us to Morbiere, a cheese that has become a firm favourite, not least because of its distinctive streak of ash down the middle (see the photo).
There's not much point in cataloguing the cheeses we found -- this was a personal odyssey, and you're very unlikely to agree with our tastes. In all, we probably found slightly more cheese varieties that we liked than disliked, but not by much.
There are plenty of other places to buy cheese, of course, but our year-long (and continuing) experiment has made the commonplace sparkle just a little!