As you have no-doubt surmised from my pizza and cookie posts, "Oui, Chef" is not a site with a focus on low fat, or no-fat cooking. I am decidedly an (almost) everything in moderation kind of guy, and believe that a well balanced diet, and a reasonably active lifestyle, should allow most of us to not stress so much about every calorie or fat gram we consume. As such, you will not hear me preach about how you should eliminate a long list of “unhealthy” foods from your diet, but rather how you should include as much of your rich, local bounty as possible in your cooking, while still working to achieve a healthy nutritional balance in what you eat. For me the most important thing in my cooking, and in what I am trying to teach my kids, is that we cook and eat “whole”, or real foods, not foods that are imitation, highly processed, or pre-prepared. When we can buy these goods from local and sustainable sources, we do. We eat more fish and poultry than red meat, lots of vegetables and fruits, and include as many whoIe grains in our diet as we can.
The fats I use in cooking are natural, not concocted in a lab somewhere. They are used judiciously, but not exactly sparingly, and I would encourage you to do the same. I am an absolute believer in the old maxim, fat = flavor, and find most fat free dishes almost unpalatable. Fat is an important contributor to the mouth feel and texture of food, and is why eating a well marbled piece of Kobe beef from Japan can be a transcendent experience, while eating a boneless, skinless chicken breast is more akin to kissing your sister (not that I have, mind you, I’m just sayin’). Fat is also a conveyor of a food’s flavors, transporting them to each corner of your mouth and helping them to linger there. This is a good thing. I mean, if you’ve gone to the trouble of cooking a nice meal, don’t you want to be able to savor it for a while?