Women who stare at goats…cheese.

You know that experience when you went to the first school dance, and you were so freakin’ excited you didn’t know what to do with yourself?

You put on your favourite jelly sandals, glitter lip balm and blue hair mascara, and that moment you walked into the hall and caught sight of all those boys from the boys’ school, you were like “this is so exciting and scary I think I’m going to scratch my face off!”

And you did. Just a little.

I had that experience today, 15 years after the fact, when I entered the Simon Johnson fine foods store in Sydney’s fancy-pants waterside suburb of Pyrmont.

Seriously. I don’t use the phrase amazeballs very often (oh wow I do) but this store was so sexy I could have died.

Everything featured matching labels, there was a significant collection of olives and, my dear cheeselovers, a fromagerie!

Some cheeses at Simon Johnson's fromagerie.

When you walk into the room, the aroma is face-scratchingly amazing. I could smell a thousand cheeses all at once, vying for my attention like so many awkward and toe-shuffling fifth grade boys.

But unlike the boys, these cheeses didn’t avoid my gaze, leaving me paired with the shifty one up the back in some form of nightmarish dancing competition while he fist-pumped the air to the strains of the Macarena.

Because to have done so, my friends, would have been seriously un-amazeballs.

I gawked and poked, and I chatted to the delightful young attendant who, with her lovely hair and coral lipstick, was the perfect chaperone for my experience.

As has been my wont of late, I was eyeing off the goats cheeses. After a little chat with my chaperone cheese merchant (“I like my goats to punch me in the face with flavour”) I chose the Tomme de Chevre Glac Affinee.

A-maze-balls.

Being a chevre lovre I didn’t know what to expect. But the Tomme de Chevre was so smooth and rich (with that goaty punch that I so love). It was surprisingly soft and creamy for a cheese that appeared to be so firm, and its dry and crumbly rind offered a sharper contrast to the subtle flavour within.

It was almost as if we chose each other, Tomme and I. Across the room we just…connected, and before long we were doing our own gustatory slow dance.

Yeah. We’re going steady.