It's amazing what sticks with you through the years. In a couple months I'll be sending my oldest off to college, but I still remember a cultural geography class I took when I was an undergrad, where we not only memorized a zillion place names, but also read papers from the Worldwatch Institute on things like the Green Revolution. It turned out to one of my favorite classes, even though a mischievous teaching assistant meddled with the final, and we students were asked to locate not just Polynesia and Micronesia and Indonesia on the map, but "Amnesia" as well.
One afternoon, the professor waxed eloquent on goats. Goats, he told us, were the perfect domesticated animal. They didn't need the vast grasslands (and grasses) of cows and horses, since they liked to eat just about any kind of weed and thrived even in rocky, unfarmable terrain. They provided milk, like cows, and where there's milk, there's dairy products: butter, yogurt, cheese. And, finally, you could just eat the goats themselves. Perfect little farm animals that would permit a more sustainable world.
While I haven't gotten around to eating goat meat, I did visit the Harbor Home Farm stand last week. I'd run into another Marketgoer who told me she was going to make a beet-and-goat-cheese salad, and suddenly I needed to have my own beet-and-goat-cheese salad.
Rita and Helen went over the cheese offerings with me, and we settled on the Chevre with Rosemary, rather than the tangier feta:
I "roasted" up my beets in the crock pot, tore some spinach, sliced a few strawberries because they were getting overripe, and drizzled fig-balsamic vinaigrette over all.
In that bowl, it would have made a lovely 4th of July salad as well, though we had it on the 3rd. With the rest of the goat cheese I have visions of re-creating a luscious DERU Market sandwich I had some weeks ago: roasted chicken, goat cheese, caramelized onions, arugula, aioli.
Make the world a better place and add some goat goodness to your life! Come make the acquaintance this week of Rita, Helen, and their flock of nubians, saanens, and "snubians."