Cooking class # 7--how to "lighten" a rich recipe

For the times when you want to make a "lighter" version (ie: a lot less cream!) of a French recipe, I made a blanquette de veau--"veal in white sauce".

The difference here is that the sauce is not white because 90% of the cream is replaced by pureeing the vegetables (onion, celery, carrots, mushrooms, fennel, and leeks) that have been cooking with the veal in water and some chicken stock. To the pureed vegetables, fromage blanc (a soft creamy cheese, like sour cream but low in calories and high in creamy flavor--0% fat) instead of cream is added, along with some of the vegetable and veal broth, tarragon, lemon juice, salt, pepper and some cayenne pepper. Carrots and mushrooms which have been cooked separately to retain their shape are added at the end along with the cooked veal. A very small amount of cream is mix in. The sauce is surprisingly flavorful and rich. Served over rice or pasta or potatoes, it is a very nice dish.

For dessert, I made "bavarois" --a Bavarian cream dessert. The cream has been replace with fromage blanc (0% fat) which is added to pureed fruit (raspberries, blueberries, currents), along with a bit of sugar. To make this seem somewhat like a mousse, Italian meringue (beaten egg whites to which a combination of cooked sugar and honey plus some gelatin) is folded into the fruit/fromage blanc mixture. Because of the gelatin, the cream holds its shaped. The cream is placed in a mold on top of a cookie base I had made earlier.

This is a very pretty and tasty dessert. The only difficult part was getting the caramel to mix with the egg whites. The temperature of the caramel has to be at about 120 degrees Celsius for it to mix well with the whites.