I'm making my annual New Year's Eve gourmet dinner for just me and Ron tomorrow night. Every year, I pick new and somewhat difficult recipes because a) I enjoy cooking, and b) it forces me to get out of my culinary comfort zone and try something interesting.
At the market today, I wandered around picking up all the ingredients - items that I seldom buy. I think I spent half of my time in the dairy aisle. Since I'm making French dishes, my grocery list had unsalted butter, eggs, whole milk, whipping cream, and a hunk of cheese on it. With Ron's cholesterol and my dieting, we rarely buy the real things. Everything is normally "lite" and "fat-free" and whatever else they call things that are injected with chemicals to make them taste like something.
Since I started watching Julia Child as a kid, I've always baked and cooked with butter. Never margerine. Because Julia said that there's a big difference in the results and, if you're gonna cook, you should use the best ingredients you can buy.
Julia lived into her 90s and her favorite foods that she ate regularly were NOT iceberg lettuce, diet Sprite, and we-know-it-looks-like-it-came-from-a-cow-but-it's-really-landfill dairy products.
I was shocked, yes, shocked, at how difficult it was for me to find whole Swiss cheese. I thought I finally found it but, when I got it home, the teeny tiny writing on the back said it was "part-skim".
Why can't we just have cheese like our grandparents bought (or made)? Because no one would buy it, that's why. We've got ourselves so marketed-up that we can't even find real food anymore.
So, I'll make my French dish with the part-skim cheese and hope that Julia isn't peaking out from between the pages of her cookbook. Consuming more liqueur than I put in the mousse should help with that. And Julia's spirit may just be appeased.
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