I’ve never liked goat cheese. I find it too goaty. In Cantonese, there is a word for it: sohw. It suggests a smelly, savoury flavour.

Well, last weekend at the Lyttelton Farmers Markets, there was no cheese for sale except for goat cheese. You can’t have a farmers market lunch platter without cheese, so goat cheese it was. I ate it wrapped up in lettuce, salami and hummus. I enjoyed goat cheese for the first time.

I had an epiphany.

Goat cheese isn’t a food that you reach for when you need a snack. It’s an ingredient. Just like a spoon of fish sauce or a raw clove of garlic would be nasty on its own, when used with other ingredients that enhance or compliment it’s pungent flavour, it’s good.

So, next time you shy away from a food that you don’t like, try looking at it again as an ingredient. It would make Happy Goat very happy.