As it turns out, when your friends and family read your blog, and then come to your house, you start to think maybe you ought do a little more than make sure you dig out all the local take-out menus from your junk drawer.

I realized this when when my mother-in-law -- who reads my blog -- came to visit us recently, and I figured if I spend so much of my time writing about the foods I cook and eat, it seems only right that I should cook something special for her... but what? Seeing as I'd just read Julia Child's My Life in France, with its loving descriptions of even the simplest French foods, and with my mother-in-law as our guest, who lived in France for a while when my husband was a toddler, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to try putting together a simple French meal.

Now, to put it kindly, I'm somewhat picky about Doing Things Just Right Or Not Doing Them At All. For instance: I will scrap a grocery list and start fresh if I find I've misspelled "mostaccioli" on it. Somewhat picky, unhealthily compulsive... to-may-to, to-mah-to. Anyway. That's how I am and I was intent on doing a French meal right.

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I decided on a roast chicken (using an organic free-range chicken and this recipe to get the best results ever) with potatoes persillade and some haricots vert with shallots, and a flourless chocolate cake (made by FreshDirect) with crème Chantilly. But I still wanted to do a little something more, although I didn't know just what.

While I was thinking it over for a few days, I saw the Thanksgiving episode of this season's Top Chef, in which Gail Simmons reacts with horror and disgust at being served a cheese course after dessert. Huh, I thought, she's really an annoying human being, isn't she? But, hey -- a cheese course. There's something you don't see everyday.

So. A cheese course. It sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? Well, I don't know about you, but I totally had no idea what or how to serve one -- and I already mentioned how I am about Doing Things Right.

With that in mind, I sat down, googled "cheese course" and then spent the next two or three hours reading, without getting any definitive rule on what to serve: one cheese with fruit and nuts, four cheeses on their own, cheeses of all different types of milk, cheeses of all the same milk, cheeses of different countries, cheeses of the same country. There was pretty much no consensus on the matter -- except that it should come after dinner but before dessert, which I already knew, thanks to Gail what's-her-face making such a fuss about it.

Just before I was about to give up, I found an NPR article by one of my favorite food bloggers, Clotilde Dusoulier of Chocolate & Zucchini. Her advice on serving cheese courses was as concise as it was reassuring, and more than a little charming -- how could it be wrong? Following her suggestions (and after a good hour of putting cheeses in and out of my FreshDirect cart), I chose three French cheeses:

1. Fleur Verte, a soft goat cheese covered with fresh herbs
2. Ossau Iraty, a semi-soft sheep's milk cheese
3. Bleu d'Auvergne, a cow's milk cheese I've eaten before

I took them out of the fridge as we were sitting down to eat, and brought them to the table to a warm demi-baguette, after I cleared away the dinner dishes.

We started with the Fleur Verte, which was wonderfully creamy and soft, although the fresh herbs were slightly more pungent than I expected. The Bleu d'Auvergne was intensely funky, almost overwhelmingly so, but without any of the bad aftertaste you can get with a bleu cheese. The star of the show, however, was the Ossau Iraty. It was firm and sweet with just a little nippy edge of sharpness to it. It was the one cheese all of us kept going back to for more (and the one I happily polished off a few days later).

In the end, due to (or maybe in spite of) all my research, the cheese course turned out to be the best -- and definitely the most fun -- part of the entire meal that night. So, if I haven't scared you off the idea and you're thinking about trying this yourself, here are a couple of my personal suggestions:

• Although you can serve a cheese course with just one exceptional cheese, it's a lot of fun to have a range of cheeses for everyone to taste and compare.
• Don't buy too much cheese. It's probably better to run out of a cheese than to get stuck with a big chunk of, say, a really funky bleu cheese.
• Two words: good bread. It'll complement any cheese -- and even if you pick a loser cheese, well, at least the bread is good.

You know what? The next time you invite someone over for dinner, just pick a couple cheeses and give it a try. It was fun, it tasted great, and it kept us sitting around the table talking and enjoying each others' company... and I don't really think you can ask for much better than that, my friends.