SAY CHEESE.....PARMESAN!

So what’s in a name you may ask? Well here at BohemianMojo we love when they mark out the region and heritage of great quality food. We are in fact huge fans of the protection of regional specialties afforded by the ‘geographical indicator’ rules.

These are held as vitally important in Europe where the member countries, and indeed their regions, jealously guard their traditional food origins and recipes. Of course they do. After all they are benchmarks of great quality and great taste. For consumers those geographical labels ‘indicate’ they’re on to a good thing.

Bohemian Mojo has been following the nightmare unfolding in our fields, pastures and orchards with the terrifying collapse of the honeybee population.

Like others we’ve watched it happening with a sense of despair and disbelief. How could mankind do this we ask ourselves? We realize the implications this collapse holds for the human food chain will be dramatic. After all around a third of our fruits, vegetables and cereals depend on bees for fertilization. A third is a lot; a hell of a lot. But here we are again.

Lately, there has been a much needed uproar about the amount of “sugar” in manufactured food products. Bohemian Mojo have said we are wading into the fray and indeed we are, and this time we’re doing it by providing a little bit of perspective.The war against ‘sugar’ is real and very necessary for the health of all, including the earth and other beings on the planet. Unfortunately, real foods are getting caught up in the onslaught and being lumped into the bad food category and it seems like it is time to shed some light that might keep us from throwing the sugarbaby out with the proverbial bathwater.

The truth is our bodies are designed to have some sweetness now and then. So, the idea of eliminating or marginalizing all ‘sweet’ foods is actually not really a very natural or healthy one.

For years the big food processors and their colleagues in the supermarkets have been asking one lump or two because. They were certainly talking about the sugar load in the food they sell but they might well have been talking about the effect on your children.

Let’s face it, it’s become all too obvious that the contagion of morbid obesity and diabetes begins at school age. We see the victims of this sucrose overload in school bus queues up and down the land.

Buttery, creamy, with a hint of earthy nuttiness, Ossau Iraty is a traditional Basque cheese. It's an AOC protected status. Protected status is a practice that is critical to small communities, regions, and traditional means of producing food. 

I stumbled across a wedge of Ossau Iraty quite by accident and am completely smitten. It is delicious! I must confess, sheep’s cheese is beginning to hedge to the top of my favorites list. This particular cheese originates in the Pyrenees and is the only cheese from the Pyrenees with a controlled designation of origin, the AOC. The AOC, is a French designation recognizing that legally any cheese using the name Ossau Iraty must comply with the designated criteria and come from the designated area.