I took a cooking class last night at Sur la Table. We prepared a menu of simple, but delicious, foods using interesting ingredients.

We made a flatbread with goat cheese, thyme, orange zest and two kinds of olives. Spectacular, from the dough to the topping. Our roasted beet, goat cheese and hazelnut spinach salad was–mwah! (kissing fingers). I don’t even like spinach salad, but I dug the one we made. Tasty. We made beef tenderloin medallions with a merlot caramelized shallot sauce. And poached pears with a caramel creme anglaise.

Delectable. Scrumptious. Plain food, interestingly prepared, normal portions.

I have eaten haute cuisine at many fine restaurants around the world and a number of them right here in California. And here’s what I want to know:

• Who decided that a tiny piece of pork attached to a hunk of fat is “high-end cuisine?”

• And who decided that a delicious dish results from a Frenchman force-feeding a goose until its liver explodes, then killing the goose (a mercy, I’m certain) and serving that fatty liver on a plate. {Oh, and prettily naming the cruel force-feeding “gavage.” }

• Oh, and then those famous fungi: truffles. Who decided that the haute of haute cuisine is any dish that tastes like dirt?

• Or that ice cream, “churned” tableside with liquid nitrogen and tasting like a giant pat of thick, sweetened butter, was anything but dining theatre and a disgusting heart attack in a bowl?

Maybe I just don’t have an “informed palate.”

Or, just maybe, my palate is a little too well-informed:

Pork belly.
Truffles.
Liquid nitrogen and ice cream fixins
Torturing a goose so diners can have foie gras