Autumn Leaves Artisan Cheese & Foods Festival

Monday, October 08, 2007

After discovering existence of the Autumn Leaves Artisan Cheese & Foods Festival to be held at the end of September at Valley Shepherd Creamery and pouting because I wasn’t able to attend, I was delighted to find out an FTP reader was going and was more than happy to serve as our eyes and ears for this awesome-sounding event!  What follows is Athena Fotiadis’ report on the festival:

Back in July, I was at my local farmer’s market (Montclair, NJ), and I noticed a new cheese vendor, Valley Shepherd Creamery.  I perused the
selection, and I decided to try their manchego-style cheese.  It was great! While waiting for my cheese to be wrapped, I picked up a flyer for the Autumn Leaves Artisan Cheese & Foods Festival on Saturday, September 29, 2007.  I was so excited!  I immediately lined up a friend to come with.

We arrived about noon after a very pleasant and easy drive down Route 78. It was warm with a slight nippy breeze, my favorite weather.  The leaves are
already barely starting to turn colors and the drive took us through some beautiful landscape.  When we made it to the entrance, we were directed to
drive on a bit to the middle school.  They had parking and a bus to take us to the farm itself.  Already, we could tell, it was pretty busy!

So, the cheese.  There were quite a few farms/cheesemakers represented. Some were from New Jersey, many were from further up the northeast,
including Quebec.  My friend and I tasted cheeses from Meadow Stone Farm from CT (cheese with chocolate liqueur and tobacco wrapped cheese), the
well-known and TV-featured Bobolink Dairy from NJ (Jean Louis and Drumm, if you like your cheese stinky, here’s where to go), Artisan Made-Northeast from CT who distribute some of the other cheeses there (five different blue cheeses, my favorite being the Benedictin, and handmade chocolate turtles that were orgasmic), Seal Cove Farm all the way from Maine (really creamy and nice goat cheeses and a couple of interesting washed rind cheeses), Cato Corner Farm from CT (our favorite, we tried everything he brought and this was the cheese we bought for our baguettes), and Beltane Farm from CT (the *freshest* goat cheese I have ever tasted!).

There were other cheesemakers there, but it started getting very crowded. So, we were at Cato Corner Farm and decided to buy our slices for the baguette table as mentioned before.  They had a really neat thing that you could buy a slice of cheese from whomever you liked for $2 and then go to the baguette table and pay $2 for a generous hunk of baguette and some olive oil and/or balsamic vinegar to make a nice sandwich.  We got the Fromage d’O’Cow, a creamy and stinky cheese.  We were lucky to have gotten the last of the baguettes (although, they started using the rounds of bread from one of the purveyers there, which for some reason, we didn’t visit).  So good!  The olive oil was such a nice green fruity counterpoint to the cheese.

We dived back into the tent, it was starting to approach mob levels.  It wasn’t even 2pm at this point.  We decided we need desert, so we headed to
the Bent Spoon table for the Lavendar Mascarpone ice cream.  You know, the cheese was awesome, but I think the ice cream was divine.  We never made it to any of the wine tables.  At this point, you couldn’t get near them in under 10 minutes, and I noticed some of the other vendors were starting to run out of stuff.  I don’t think they anticipated the turnout (I think their website mentioned 1,500 people!), which is actually a great thing to me.  That many people care about quality, handcrafted food!  We headed back to a few tables and got some apricot honey from Gooserock Farm from NJ, and tried the handmade chocolates by J. Emanuel, also in NJ. We totally missed the Quebecois cheese.  It was starting to get really really crowded.  We took a break and took some photos of the sheep, and headed to our final destination--Valley Shepherd’s own table outside their shop.  We tried the Fairmount, a nice swiss style, mentioned by Nicole in a previous post, and the Califon Tomme, a beautiful gouda-style cheese, which actually, this was my favorite.

Whew!  Can you believe, we were actually cheesed out at this point.  It was just about 2pm, so we headed back.  The cheeses that I know that can be
found in the Philly area are Valley Shepherd and Cato Corner Farm.  Everyone had a website, and quite a few ship their products.

All in all, it was a perfect September day with really great food, and I can’t wait for next year!

My mouth is absolutely watering!  Thanks, Athena, for such a great report - I’m completely jealous!  To see more photos from the festival, click here.