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Last Thursday, The Martha Stewart Show aired their first-ever Cheese Show. Martha hosted a number of American cheesemakers and authors, led the audience through a tasting of a cheese plate, and even made cheese on the show.

If you missed it, you can still catch it online, and we have the link.

Cheese storage is one of those confounding subjects. If you buy a really nice cheese, you don't want to ruin it with a lack of parenting skills, right? Perhaps you know how you shouldn't store cheese. But do you know how you should? Proper preservation of cheese is easier than you think.

Halloween isn't a particularly cheese-centric holiday, but if you're planning a celebration of the caseophilic persuasion on Saturday, this is the cheese to serve. It's just about as classy as it gets, as far as creepy foods go.

It's easier than you think. Promise. Like most cheese, all it takes is 3 ingredients: Milk, an acid — in this case, white vinegar — and salt. Ready, set....

Look closely. It's as if I had a premonition that this cheese was rip-open-worthy. See those tear marks on the packaging? They're for good reason: if you had a hunk of this, you'd be opening it as fast as your little fingers could muster, too.

Blue cheese and an iceberg wedge. It's all about that soul-satisfying cold crunch, the bold, creamy blue, almost profound in its simplicity. The dish would be at home among the roster of Dana's Weekend Meditations about how food can make you stop and think. But topped with my mother's superlative blue cheese dressing, it's a creation that's decidedly cheesey, and most definitely worthy of a spot in this week's Cheesemonger.

Just a month ago, I was complimenting the cheese counter at Whole Foods. My, how quickly things change. On Friday, imagine my bewilderment when there, in writing, I noticed a large sign explaining a certain cheese term that was not only incomplete but also inaccurate. And all this in the wake of my praises!

As someone who's more often snobby about her cheese than not, it's never been hard to admonish the admitted lovers of American cheese. Like, Kraft singles American cheese.

So imagine my inner-conflict when yesterday, I became a convert.

Or maybe we should say, All About Cow Milk and Cow Milk Cheese. (It just wasn't as catchy.) What are the properties of cow milk and to what kind of cheese does it lend itself? Herein, a brief primer on one of the most versatile milks around, and why oh why we love it so.

In the world of cheese lingo, the term farmstead is becoming as popularized as ever. I'd even predict that it'll soon be thrown around as frequently and with as much comfort as grass-fed and free range. But hopefully, by nature of its narrowly defined meaning, the word won't be just another marketing term to exploit that doesn't necessarily mean much at all.

Well, it's not new pricing, exactly, but Whole Foods had made a pretty major change to their cheese signage. At first it seemed tricky, like a marketing ploy, but after giving it more thought, we think that it's actually pretty genius — and moreover, a way to encourage the general public to buy more cheese.

If you live in the Bay Area, put this cheese on your To Try list (much more enriching to follow than that nagging old To Do). The story behind the cheese and the people who make it ain't bad, either: read on for their story and the trailer for the new documentary about their dream of cheese.

It's hard having a cheesemonger for a daughter. She's tasted a lot of what's out there, and (admittedly) can be pretty snobby when it comes to cheese. Take it from my parents, who continually try to impress and please me with new cheeses when I go for visits. (It's they who have the love affair with Jarlsberg Light, remember that?) But just this week, they made serious progress.

We've talked about useless gadgets and useful ones, but these mostly recent tools didn't include some of our real favorite kitchen gadgets. Ingenious kitchen devices have been around for hundreds of years, and we love some of the most old-fashioned ones. So here, from apple peeler to cherry pitter, are some of our very favorite old-school kitchen gadgets.