One of my favorite shops in Ely is Chapman Street Market. I have a horrible, dark, cheese obsession and this shop caters to that sickness in me. I think in a former life I may have been a mouse. This weekend I decided to share that disease with our friends Chris and Abby and show them my secret, guilty place.
Chapman Street Market is more than a cheese shop, they do catering and lunches and all kinds of other foodie things. Here is their website: http://www.chapmanstreetmarket.com/ However, the main reason I go there is for the cheese and have been known to easily drop sixty dollars in this store just on cheese and baugettes.
How can you not spend money in a place that holds almost every kind of cheese known to mankind? Although they didn't have my favorite cheese, which is sottocenre, a black truffle cheese. I will have to do an article strictly on that cheese.
We bought a brie with mushrooms, a chunk of prima donna and taleggio and a warm, crusty baugette and wasted no time setting it all up with a couple of bottles of wine in the pontoon boat. 
We torn the baugette into pieces and topped them with chunks of rich cheese. The mushroom brie went well with the bottle of moscato I brought and the taleggio went well with the bottle of Root 1 that Chris brought. I love new things and Root 1 was something new to me. It was a red wine that wasn't real dry or sweet, but had a lots of berry and fruit flavors. It would be an excellent steak wine. Chris was dunking his bread and cheese into the wine and told me how his dad taught him to do that. He said his parents started giving the kids watered down wine when they were young and how his dad would walk around to each wine glass and grate a little Parmesan into it. It all winds up in your tummy anyway, he said. So I had to try a little piece of baugette and cheese dunked into Root 1 and while it was pretty good, I just don't like the texture of soggy bread. So I don't know if that would be something I could do all the time but the story was interesting! Chris' family is a large Irish-Italian family that loves each other to death, is very passionate, very into their food and wine and hugs everyone. They are fun people to hang around.
The cheese was a wonderful treat and we put a pretty good dent in all the food. I loved how the prima donna Gouda cheese had these little pieces of crystallized salt in it. Chris said it wasn't salt, it was "coagulated enzymes" in the cheese. Well ok, I love coagulated enzymes!
I love picnics on the boat, I love cheese and I love spending a weekend with fun, real people! I hope we will have many more weekends with Chris and Abby!
