Beetroot and Goat's Cheese

I have always hated beetroot because it tastes like earth.  I don't want to take too much of a risk with it, just in case the earthy taste means I'm actually eating dirt. My Nan always used to say, "You'll eat a bushelful of dirt before you die,"  I don't know how much a bushelful is and I'm not ready to die just yet. Unfortunately, beetroot is one of the the things that I'm really good at growing, which means I have to eat it, so I was desperate to find things to do with it that I could stand.

When I was on holiday a couple of years ago I had a salad in a pub only to find it had beetroot and goat's cheese on it. If I hadn't been quite so hungry I might have done my fussy eater routine and pushed it around my plate for a bit before hiding the beetroot and goat's cheese under a large lettuce leaf.  Since a holiday in France when I was a teenager I've been very suspicious of goat's cheese, not that I ate any cheese at the time but my sister has never forgotten the experience.  The smell was enough for me and then watching her retch continuously for the whole holiday everytime the cheese was mentioned was enough to put me off for life. So there I was, starving hungry, with my two least favourite foods on my plate, on a Sunday in West Wales after all the shops had closed and an hour's walk ahead of me.  I had no choice but to eat it: I've never looked back; it was delicious.  Now I only eat beetroot and goat's cheese together.

At the weekend I went to the Essex Food Festival and saw on the WI stall (or it might have been next to the WI stall) jars of bacon jam.  "Bacon Jam!" I exclaimed.  "That's nothing there's hedgehog juice over there," said my mum. (It was hedgerow juice). I nearly bought some just because I'm not very keen on jam or bacon and after the beetroot and goat's cheese revelation I was thinking that the solution to fussy eating might be to put try things that you don't like together.

I am planning to try my theory out and was wondering if it would work with other things other than food.  If you spent time with two people you didn't like would you suddenly like both of them? I might try it with books I might try to read the Luminaries again, alternating it with Cloud Atlas.  I could keep a fish and a bird as pets or  plant a laylandii and grow bindwind up it.

I must stop writing now, as it's time to make tea.  That'll be cheese and onion crisps with mashed banana for my daughter, tomatoes and yoghurt           for my son and to help deal with the  courgette glut it will be courgettes and  oragnges for the Long Suffering Husband.