I mainly cook with olive oil,
<g> In Poland of my childhood, olive oil was very special, and very hard to get; those who cooked with oil at all (most used bacon grease, lard, or butter) used rape oil (called "canola" in the US, doubtless for PC reasons) with -- occasionally -- a drop of olive oil added for fragrance, and lots of sighs of "if only" variety...
So... At 21, and ignorant of "all things kitchen", I land in Utrecht (Holland) for the summer and find myself giving a party to our little dorm (one small building, 10 occupants, all students at the U. I'm one of the 10, having taken over the room of someone who went to Spain for her holidays) and the significant others. I'm told how many cases of beer I should provide, and how much hard liquor (vodka; thankfully; brought a lot of it from Poland <g>); they'll supply the weed (marijuana), since I'm new to Utrecht and don't know where to get it. I'm told that, for eats, cheese will do, but I'm sick and tired of cheese, even though it's excellent (get it daily, for lunch, at the hotel I work in).
I decide to get -- in addition to cheese (which all the Dutch seem never to get tired of) -- some meat (cold cuts). I take myself off to the butchers and find there -- miracle of miracles -- another hard-to-find-in Poland item: steak tartare.
Buy that, bring it home, and realise it's different than the Polish variety; it's *dry*. In Poland, oil is already mixed in, you only add (either mixed in, or served around, to mix in as you please) the egg yolks, the chopped onion, and the chopped pickled cornichons. Never mind; I can add oil too.
Olive oil, in Utrecht, was very easy to obtain... I wanted to make the dish "special", so used it... Yechhh, gag <g> Thankfully, I disliked excess fat, so I didn't put much. And they didn't know any better, so they liked it. But, for me, the whole thing was *ruined*; it *smelled*.
I'm using olive oil much more respectfully now; by the time I was told not to use it in making mayonnaise (other than Aioli, which has enough garlic in it to combat the taste), I only smiled and nodded in agreement :)
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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