Animal farm lunch

It's just dawned on me that today's lunch included food from five different species: goat, sheep, cow, buffalo and Lily's fermented tofu creature. I could have better aligned lunch with my Animal Farm metaphor by including some pork salami, but I'm full and I'm sure you'll appreciate the pun anyway.

Lily's creature and the corned beef pastrami aside, the star ingredients in my lunch were sourced from Sabato, a local store that sources foods primarily from Italy, Spain and France.

http://www.sabato.co.nz/

I popped in yesterday with my son Kieran to buy a couple of things and, as usual, got completely carried away and came out over $200 poorer. And it's all this blog's fault. A lot of my recent new foods have been of an Asian persuasion, so I decided it was time to get Continental.

In between futile attempts to prevent Kieran from hoovering up all of the (many) free food samples on offer, I managed to suss out some previously untried cheeses: Garrotxa (a Spanish goat milk hard cheese) and Bleu des Basques (a French sheep milk semi-soft blue cheese). Both taste delicious.

I'm not sure why, but I've got a real thing about sheep milk cheeses and regularly seek them out. Maybe it's something to do with living in the land of sheep?

While waiting for the frommagier to slice some samples I espied a tub of New Zealand produced buffalo yoghurt in a nearby chiller. Buffalo yoghurt is really, really white - far more so than cow's milk yoghurt, which has a slightly yellow hue. It tastes similar though.

I ate the yoghurt sweetened with some maple syrup - a newfound discovery borne out of the desire to rid my pantry of a bottle that had a teeny bit of syrup left in the bottom. What a great discovery: the toffee-ish taste of the maple syrup went really well with the creamy buffalo yoghurt. Must eat that one again sometime soon.

Today's lunch also included a couple of crackers spread with Lily's tofu creature. It still has BO but has a nice, creamy taste and texture. I'm becoming quite fond of it really.