Chillin' Wit'...Tenaya Darlington

IN THE Cheese Command Center of her Fishtown home, Tenaya Darlington is fighting the Gouda fight.

By day she's a St. Joseph's University professor, but by night she's "Madame Fromage," a blogger working on her latest project to help promote the art of cheese.

The Cheese Command Center - which is what Darlington calls her third-floor office - is still packed with lists of cheeses from her last project, a book she did with Di Bruno Bros. called House of Cheese: A Guide to Wedges, Recipes and Pairings.

Darlington, 42, discovered Di Bruno's cheese selection when she moved to Philly in 2005 from Wisconsin to take a job as a writing professor at St. Joe's.

"I literally missed the taste of home," she says. "This was a way for me to carry Wisconsin into this new life."

Darlington, who wears cheese-grater earrings and magenta tights, is so cultured in the wheys of cheese that some might call her a cheese wiz, although she prefers "cheese courtesan."

"I love to help other people fall in love with cheese and I love to make matches," she says. "I love to make pairings and I love to meet people and dissect their brains to figure out what kind of cheese could I pick out for their personality."

On this Sunday, Darlington is picking out cheese portraits instead of cheeses. She visits her good friend and collaborator, artist Mike Geno, in his Kensington studio, and the two go through his paintings of cheese - he calls them "cheese portraits" - for a project that will marry his art with her knowledge of the food.

Darlington is Geno's cheese mentor. When he began painting blocks of cheese, he reached out to Madame Fromage for guidance. They began to take "cheese treks" across Philadelphia.

"I'm all about the taste, and he's all about the image," she says.

As she goes through his prints, looking for a few to take home and start writing about, Geno says that Darlington introduced him to a world that loves his work - a world where cheese is, in fact, the Big Cheese.

- Stephanie Farr