The assortment of goat cheeses that we tasted.
Fellow blogger Sarah Feagles (right) with classmate Grace Webster and Grace’s boyfriend Daniel Walls.It takes no effort to let the competing demands of recruiting and classwork completely isolate you from events outside Fuqua. In fact, I’m writing this in a computer lab that overlooks the Kirby Reading Room, where 60 or so of my classmates are schmoozing with a visiting employer. I just left that same event 10 minutes ago, and I’m slumped in my seat so that none of the recruiters look up and see me. It’s a proud moment.
The plus side is that with all the clubs on campus, there is always something happening elsewhere, and it takes only 20 minutes of driving to get to a place that has nothing to do with academics or internships. For me, that place was a goat farm. The Culinary Club hosted another iteration of their popular goat cheese tasting at Prodigal Farm, and though the tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, I achieved queue-skipping victory by awkwardly loitering around the registration table until they went on sale. Another proud moment.
Eyeing the yummy goat cheese cake.The drive to Prodigal Farm was beautiful in itself, as was the back-and-forth drive on Bahama Road as I repeatedly missed the turn-off. I joined about 30 other Fuqua students at the tables and spent two hours learning the differences between the various circles of goat cheese on my plate and then devouring those delicious differences. As a bonus, Fuqua’s Wine Club chose pairings for each cheese. Both the hostess from the farm and the Wine Club representative did that classy thing that classy people do, where they describe the wine or cheese using taste descriptors that would never occur to a layperson, and then you take a bite or sip and realize that yes, this Riesling does have notes of banana peel.
Most of the people at the event were second-year students, which makes sense, since we first years are supposed to be so overwhelmed with classwork and recruiting that we forget our own names. At this point, though, it’s events like the cheese tasting that remind me that the outside world exists, and also that Durham is in the midst of farmland that bears exploring.
Lastly, a top three list of Prodigal Farm takeaways:
- One of the goat cheeses was aged in bourbon-soaked fig leaves.
- The person who runs the farm used to be a lawyer in New York, and she knows all of the goats by name and by udder.
- Blueberry cardamom goat cheese cake. It was so good that it gets its own sentence. It was so good that its sentence doesn’t even need a predicate.
More...