Behold, the power of cheese

We arrived in central Vermont on Sunday, staying at Lake Champagne campground in Randolph Center. Our site has a great view of the surrounding countryside - there are no sites in front of us so it’s a wide-open view.

The folks spent yesterday a little ways down south, shopping at their favorite Vermont places. They started at the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Store, where you can find everything that’s listed in the catalog and then some. Mom always buys lots of cool baking things and ingredients there and she didn’t disappoint. I’m not sure if they sell the Kong Squeaker balls there but one came back for the Puppy.

After that, they headed to where their favorite cheddar is aged, hand-waxed, and sold at Sugarbush Farms in Queechee. They get several pounds of this cheese every year, and have done so for 7 or 8 years now. It all started with some aged cheddar. Each year, the cheese is older and this year the blocks they got are 96 month old. That’s older than any of us! Mom always rations it throughout the year, well all we get are scraps but I’ve seen her walk off with some big chunks! That is some SHARP cheddar! Sugarbush also does maple sugaring, and we also saw a jug of syrup and hot pepper jelly go into the pantry.

They also went to Co-Op, or as Jill the GPS calls it, “Company Op”. It’s a cooperative-owned food store in New Hampshire that sells lots of yummy things, like organic veggies, naturally-raised meats, local products, and has especially tasty local, organic, artisan breads and lots of cheese. One of the cheeses they picked up was a locally-produced and smoked mozzarella that we hope to see on some pizza soon. They also brought home a snack called “Just Veggies”, freeze-dried crispy, crunchy veggie bits with nothing else added. We’re glad they saved us each a little bit - they were sooooo….. tasty and snackadacious. And they had a natural sweetness, just like me.

To protect all this dairy product they also bought a frozen block of Scrapple and some frozen spinach to use as ice packs. That seemed to work pretty well and now we might get to have Scrapple twice on this trip.

We’re not as enthusiastic about the spinach. More “Just Veggies”, please!

Ree