Bounty of Oregon

I was contacted by some lovely folks in oregon to ask if I'd like to help to judge their competition. How cool is that?! I love oregon, and I love cheese and chocolate, so it was a winning combination.

Oregon Bounty Cuisinternship Contest started today, a great all espenses paid trip to follow an expert for a week. So if anyone is interested in entering, check the website, and get writing! Even if you dont win the competition, the website has lots of tools to plan a trip.

We had an absolutely lovely wedding anniversary in Portland in 2007 and keep trying to think of excuses to go back, so this was a lovely reminder that its been too long!!

The cheeses included some rogue blue cheese, a delicious goat cheese tapenade, a firm white cheese, and a very oozy brie type of cheese. Our favourite was definitely the Rivers Edge Chevre Tapenade from three ring farm, it was remeniscent of boursin with the garlic, but so much better!!

There was a very quaffable fruity tempranillo wine, which we slightly chilled since it was a warm day.

The chocolates were an interesting mixture, there was a 'hippy crunch' mix of chocolate and rice, which was a good snack. There were a couple of lavendar chocolates, a dagoba lavender dark chocolate, and some fleur de sel caramels which were topped with lavender. I really want to love lavender in desserts, but it just tastes nasty to me, so I'm sure I would have loved them without the lavender! I think my favourite were the berry chocolates which had a lovely berry mixture in them and some nice crunchy seeds.