Until I came to live in France I watched a lot what I ate. Then, I came here and it all changed. Why? Very simple. The products I was used to getting were no longer available. I had to adapt myself to not having things such as nonstick spray to avoid using oil, or 2% milk that would not upset my stomach, or even my delicious manila mangoes… they don’t even know they exist in these latitudes. And I don’t intend to sound like a whiner, it’s just a mere few examples on how diets tend to change also with the rest of our lives when we move to new places. So, instead of having papaya with lime juice and salt for breakfast I quickly (and needless to say, happily) switched to croissants with marmalade or baguette with butter spread and marmalade if no pastries were available.
But after just a few classes at the well-renowned institution teaching me the foundations of the French Culinary Arts, I found I had to embrace using an additional ‘little bit’ of butter. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about desserts, sauces, tarts, fish, or whatever one might feel like having, there’s always a vast potential for that tiny extra ‘noisette de beurre’ to be used in the preparation we shall taste.
The other day, in the middle of a demonstration class I even had the nerve to laugh out loud when the Chef promoted putting what seemed to me as a pound of butter -of course I am exaggerating as much as possible- to the Sole Meunière which tasted delicious and whose recipe requires frying the fish in bubbly melted butter. And, I didn’t mean to be or sound rude at all, but this way of cooking, though it’s quite tasteful and I can’t deny that I am liking every day a bit more, it surely is very different from those health charts we used to have back in grade school or which are distributed by nutritionists when one wants to lose the uncomfortable love handles acquired with age, lack of exercise, and sedentarism… oh, and McDonald’s. Hahaha!
Then again, it may be healthier to have the little extra yellow fat to make food shine or taste better than stopping by the drive-thru.