I still can't eat bad goat cheese. Tastes like goat. Hrm. But good goat cheese tastes like goat cheese. Mmm. (On that note, Greek yogurt... good. Sheep's milk Greek yogurt... tastes like sheep.)

There are many tastes that I like, but there's a difference I can't qualify between tastes that I look forward to and will go out of my way to find and prepare, and tastes that I adore, but which I'm all too happy to have only when they float across my plate by chance. An example of this is a carrot lemongrass soup I had a few weeks ago as part of a tasting menu. The flavors linger in the back of my head, and I'm still enjoying it, but there's no way I would seek this out myself. I wonder if it's just a matter of control - am I afraid I won't able to replicate this experience if I go looking for it - will I just ruin the memory of how good it was before with something less satisfying? Perhaps. I'm not sure if I feel this way about anything I'm confident I can prepare from scratch.

On occasion, I'll find something I generally hate prepared well, then never want it again. That one glimmer of an ingredient fulfilling its teleology; sometimes that's enough. I've never had a fondness for a Bloody Mary - I don't like the spicy tomato thing. But one weekend, after a drunken revelry and much croquet, I awoke to a glass of something else entirely. It was a perfect mixture, it was the perfect amount, it was inordinately tuned and only slightly peppery, and that was the end of that.