Hebden Bridge Big Green Weekend

What a fantastic weekend, selling local Todmorden Cheese at the Hebden Bridge Big Green Weekend with local Cheese Royalty Jean Hartley from the Crumbly Cheese Stall.

There were some questions regarding just how 'local' and 'green' the market actually was, but you don't get more local than Pextenement Cheese made just 3.2 miles away (3.3 if you count the distance walked by the cows to be milked!).

The Big Green Weekend is an annual event but Pextenement Cheeses are also available in Hebden Bridge at the monthly Farmers Market, Pennine Provisions, Valley Organics and Relish Global Eatery.



This picture was taken at the start of the day. The pile of cheeses went by mid-afternoon.

SJ's Breakfast

Some people like cornflakes, others prefer toast and jam. Not my friend Sarah - she is quite partial to a piece of Pexommier for breakfast.

Kept at room temperature, this piece was ripened to perfection. A perfect specimen of a Pexommier whose life was cut short by SJ's hunger.

Oh no, not again....

Oh yes, here we go again. The Cheese premises are once again inaccesible due to this mornings snow. At 5am when I started this morning, there was just a light covering of snow. Four hours later, the place is completely covered. Here are some pictures.....

Oh well, that was a bit short-lived....

Why did I write about the googlewhack on the blog?! It now returns more than 1 entry - i.e. 2 entries from this blog are now showing up! That's set me a new challenge - I will have to invent a new name for one of the future cheeses we're working on.

Off to celebrate my birthday now by......

turning pexommiers in the cold store!! They don't seem to understand the concept of Sundays and days off, they need constant attention throughout their short 3 week lives.

I've created a 'googlewhack'.....

So what's a 'googlewhack' you might say? It's an internet based word game (obviously devised by some very bored people) involving the search engine site Google. The idea is to key in any two words of your choice and see how many websites Google points you to. This will usually result in thousands of pages being found. However, on very rare occasions, Google will only find one. It looks through billions of webpages and only finds one that delivers. A site that, in its own way, is unique and special. This is a googlewhack, and there are actually people out there who find them for fun!!

This has occured since I invented the word 'Pexommier' for our new french style cheese. If you enter...

"pexommier publicity"

into google you will only find this blog !!!

This may change over time as more and more sites reference the word pexommier, but it's a good start.

ps. it's not a true googlewhack, because one of the words is not in the dictionary (yet!!).

Free publicity is good publicity....

The Halifax Evening Courier decided to feature the launch of our new cheese - Pexommier. The picture took some doing though - me and Andrew squeezed together hunched over a pile of cheese for what seemed like an age.

http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/news/New-cheese-a-big-hit.6012089.jp

Read the first comment below the article. Local newspapers are there for free publicity! It is down to companies like ours to create news stories for them. Unfortunately (or not) :-) free publicity does follow when they decide that we've created a story worthy of reporting.

Australia is catching up with us....

Word of East Lee Soft Cheese is slowly spreading around the globe. Not entirely sure how the aussies got hold of this but it seems that they've heard of the Todmorden Incredible Edible initiative and more importantly East Lee Soft. Follow the link to read the article courtesy of The Age.....

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/grassroots-movement-20091205-kbwv.html

I'm now a lot fitter.....

.... from walking up to the cheese headquarters due to the snow. Unfortunately, I only have a little sports car that is completely useless in the snow, so over the past couple of weeks I've had to resort to leaving it on the main road and completing the journey on foot.

My mind has wandered between wondering if you can actually get frostbite in Todmorden, to wondering why I didn't build the cheese factory in the valley bottom. I've even contemplated buying some ridiculous 4x4 car but ruled this out because I definitely prefer my Celica. The 20 minute walk has certainly filled my head with ideas, just imagine what a walk to the South Pole would do to my imagination.

I forced myself to be constructive in this time of cold desperation, resulting in me re-designing/re-writing the Pextenement Cheese website in my head. So, roll on 5 days of being hunched over my laptop, coding what has filled my head for the last few days, albeit with a few excursions into Facebook etc., to keep my sanity.

I've almost keyed it all in, I'm just testing it now. The results will be available soon, hope you all like the new look......

ps. if anyone wants a website, let me know.......

Pextenement Cheese Company wins an award....

Many thanks to everyone who voted for Pextenement Cheese Company in the recent Todmorden Business Association awards. We won the inaugral 'Totally Locally Hero' award - for the best Todmorden product or service of 2009.

More details (and a rare picture of Carl!) can be found in this newspaper article....

http://www.todmordennews.co.uk/news/Todmorden39s-business-award-winners-celebrate.5933213.jp