There are some days where you have every intention of working out with a friend, and that plan devolves into drinking wine and eating cheese and making pasta and you are both secretly very happy about it. Those are actually kind of the best days. This cheese board was born from one of those scenarios - and the spontaneous change in plans meant I only had a few hours to pull it together. My golden rule for a cheese board is: 3 cheeses, 3 meats, 3 accoutrements (condiments, fruit, nuts, etc) and of course the carb to carry it all home. And always, always serve it with wine. For this one we had:

• Comté (my spirit cheese, made from cow’s milk in the Jura region of France)

• Fromager de affinois (a super, super creamy brie-style cheese made from cow’s milk in France)

• Cypress Grove Purple Haze (goat cheese with lavender and other herbs from Northern California)

• La Quercia prosciutto

• A dried peppered sausage

• Duck liver mousse (forever one of my favorites, vegans please don’t come for me)

• Marcona almonds

• Dates

• Local honey

And for wine? Two Shepherd’s Trousseau Gris, a favorite around here: it’s a skin-contact wine so it’s got a beautiful acidity and a bit of a bite to it that pairs perfectly with a creamy, fatty cheese board.

Late summer in Virginia is humid and loud and heavy. Summer 2018 was one of thunder storms, a near-constant downpour and a humidity that brought mold into our home. It was a tough one for the farmers too - so many saw rot, drowned crops, disease. Weekend markets are my favorite and this one was no different. From our CSA we got tomatoes, peppers, onions, and impossibly huge zucchini. From the market I picked up greens, raw milk, pastured eggs, a new local cheese, strawberries, locally milled sourdough bread, and a bouquet.

This is going to sound pretty cheesy, but this little oyster marks a turning point in my life.

At the time it was just a Hog Island Sweetwater - briny and salty and creamy, doused in Frank's Red Hot - but in the year since, this photo has come to symbolize more than that. I ate this little guy as part of a press trip to a winery promoting their summer event series; after a year of trying to build my business as a freelance writer and marketing consultant, I realized then that it had all paid off - I was doing what I set out to do. This was also the last thing I ate before getting on a red eye to visit Tom in our new home in Virginia - where he would propose the very next day. So it’s not just an oyster. It’s an embodiment of the culmination of hard work and love and things coming together in my life just the way I had hoped. There’s a lot of happiness wrapped up in this photo, and that is why food is so special. Because it gives you a sense memory, a flavor to attach to the feeling of a specific time, place, event, person. There's something magical about oysters, something M.F.K. Fisher wrote about extensively in her 1941 book, "Consider the Oyster," the inspiration for this blog. Oysters are a miracle of nature, a perfectly rare delicacy that needs nothing but to be cracked open in order to be deeply enjoyed. There are very few foods so pure, so whole and complex with such minimal human intervention. And because of this, they are a symbol of so much: wealth, sex, spirituality. And maybe it's because of the nature of the oyster itself - slurping it from the shell with your bare hands, briny ocean dripping down your chin, bits of shell gritting in your teeth, the perfect taste sensation when salt meets fat - or maybe it's for some other reason, but my memories attached to oysters are so vivid and clear. My first oyster, tipped back uncomfortably at a debutante ball in the Palace Hotel; eating them with nothing but bare hands at a picnic table on a cold, clear, windy day in West Marin, one of the first times I brought Tom to see my hometown; in a wide open hall at the first wine fair I went to in Paris, off of a paper plate, with tons of lemon. The intensity of these memories is what I want to write about here. There are already so many food blogs out there, an endless array of recipes for the same things over and over and over; but why is it that we keep reading? Keep searching for the BEST pie crust or the perfect pizza dough or the most delicious way to prepare cauliflower? I want to dig deeper, to get to the root of why we cook, why we eat, and why we feel so compelled to share it. Because many times the best meals, the ones most worth sharing, are the least extraordinary. And that's worth talking about.