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Goat cheese is an ingredient that I love. It is creamy, tangy and goes well with so many flavors. My initial thought was to come up with one thing that would be a simple bite for people, but I soon had so many ideas that I decided to make a three-bite hors d'oeuvre.

They are great in almost any form. Stuffed with goat cheese though is a great combnation.

My first idea was based on something I have done before. I wanted to stuff half a date with goat cheese, and sprinkle it with chopped pistachios. The sweet of the date contrasts the tang of the goat cheese amazingly well. But I wanted to take the sweet flavor a little further for this bite. So I pureed the goat cheese with a little sour cream (keeps the tang, but makes it more "pipe-able") and the merest touch of vanilla flavor. I piped the resulting mixture into the medjool dates, and put them back into the fridge to re-set before service.

The next bite I wanted to make I also wanted to do something fancy and savory. I also wanted to make sure there was some color on the plate as well. I originally thought to make something with some puff pastry and perhaps a bite of pancetta in there with the goat cheese, but this was too much work for a small kitchen, and our pastry chef already had her own dessert to work on. But I liked the salty taste of the pancetta, so I changed to Prosciutto and wrapped that around the goat cheese. To finish off the effect and add a splash of color and flavor, I then wrapped this with basil. The tri-color wrap I called my "goat cheese cannoli", and the only trick was keeping it from unwrapping. My first thought here was to tie it up with a chive - but again, this was too much work. I used a fancy pick to secure the wrap, and this was a fortuitous choice, as it gave the plate some height.

For those of you who don't know, tarragon has an anise-like flavor, and generally does not play nicely with other fresh herbs.

Last idea - again to make sure I had an odd number of items on the plate - was to do something simple. I intentionally wanted a simple third item because the simplicity of the third idea would nicely contrast the complexity of these other two. Sometimes you can make a plate look more fancy by going simple. I rolled small balls of goat cheese - just about bite-sized - and rolled them in chopped fresh tarragon and crushed black pepper. (Not too much pepper lest that be all the guests tasted for the rest of the night.)

But the last trick here was to make sure all these items went with one another. The only thing I was concerned about was the tarragon and the basil conflicting with each other. So I was sure to taste these two items back to back to see if there was a problem. Fortunately, the common goat cheese flavor helped bridge the two together perfectly.

So with the items created, plated and ready to go, all that was left was to chop up the pistachios and send them out. Until I realized we were out of pistachios... But dealing with last-second disasters is a totally different story!

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