Plants that wake when others sleep, hills soon splashed with wild flowers, grass a new and richer shade of green and the air scented with fresh and familiar smells. Papatūānuku is breathing and she makes me swoon. There’s so much food adventure to reconnect with this time of year, the mind boggles about what to forage for first. Talk about food envy.

Lara, Cara and Zara – known as the Ziggy Pigs – are all seriously food- obsessed goats from Little Farm Goat Dairy. They go to great lengths to get all the food every day. ‘Porcini’ means ‘little pigs’ in Italian, so it seemed only natural that Zara, who is Princess Ziggy Pig, would get the nod for the naming of this cheese. Zara is a goat’s cheese rolled in a generous amount of porcini powder, locally foraged by my friend and certified wild-food forager, Melany Wright. While every forager will remember finding their first porcini – I still have not – I will never forget phoning Melany with another of my foraging queries, to learn she would have to call me back once she’d butchered the roadkill she’d just found. It happened to be a ‘little pig’. Melany is my foraging hero; like Getafix from the Asterix books, she’s all secret magic potions and lost knowledge. I started foraging as an act of mindfulness and Melany has been my foraging muse from the start. When I do find my first porcini I’m sending it to Mel.

Cheesemaker Andrea Gauland likes to promote the rare and heritage breeds on the farm, naming her cheeses after her goats – much like Biddy from Cmwglyn Farmhouse Cheese did with her cows. Zara is not in your face; it’s delicate yet complex, tart and fresh, which allows the flavour of the porcini to join right in, like a porcini frangipane. All of these together combine for another little cheese with big flavour, a shroomy bloomy New Zealand-made and -foraged beauty.
CALUM HODGSON – THE CURD NERD