Last night it was three days since our return from New Zealand and we sought to relive the experience by sharing one of the two garlic chocolates we bought at the Ocho craft chocolate establishment in Dunedin.
Ocho is short for 'Otago Chocolate'. The shop and factory is located in Dunedin's Warehouse Precinct, where the distinctive Dunedin buildings have been transformed from a near derelict state and been given a new lease of life.
We discovered Ocho by accident, lured off the street by the coffee and chocolate aromas. We'd just passed on taking a tour of the huge Cadbury plant around the corner.
It is a labour of love for the artist and former journalist Liz Rowe, who says she got side-tracked into making chocolate after spending six months in Latin America in 2011.
I know what it's like to be seduced by chocolate as a traveller to those parts. When I was in Lima in 2015, I went to the Chocolate Museum for breakfast not once, but every morning during my three or four day stay. The displays put the lure of chocolate into the context of its science, history and labour relations.
Later that year I couldn't believe it when my dietician actually encouraged me to eat chocolate - natural chocolate - and how serendipitous it was that the local health food shop had a large batch of Ecuadorian dark chocolate at a good price. I had that rapturous experience of something you've long regarded as sinful suddenly and unexpectedly being revealed as a virtue.
While enjoying the garlic chocolate last night, we talked about how we might entice our garlic farmer friend from the NSW South Coast to get into the business of making garlic chocolate. Somehow I think she would be intrigued enough to give it some thought.
After a Cadbury dairy milk chocolate upbringing, I became fascinated with the possibilities of creativity with chocolate after seeing the film Like Water for Chocolate in the 1990s. I had just discovered kangaroo meat and I attempted a chocolate kangaroo dish. It wasn't very successful but I didn't regret trying.
I think I was attracted to eating kangaroo at that stage by the fact that it had just come on to the market for human consumption and was still regarded by most people as taboo. A decade or two earlier, the same could be said for eating garlic.
I remember my mother telling me that it was anti-social to eat garlic. She said it was one of the things that distinguished European migrants from 'us', but it was something we'd have to learn to tolerate. In particular there was a Ukrainian man to whom we'd often give a lift who always reeked of garlic.
Now we have learned not only to tolerate but to love and appreciate garlic, for both its taste and its health and cultural virtues. Likewise chocolate. No longer a sin but - in right measure - one of life's authentic peak experiences.