Luxury versions of everyday products.

I'm wondering about high-end versions of things that you use to cook with -- things that you swear by.

I can't deal with imitation vanilla, for instance so I buy the outrageously expensive stuff for baking. A bottle of vanilla will last me a long time so it seems like an okay splurge.

Not long ago I ordered a tomato, mozzerella salad in a restaurant and the basalmic vinegar they used was heaven! Who knew? I wish I would have asked about what brand it was.

With the holidays coming up and my small family staying home I thought it would be nice to maybe splurge on a few things to make a really special meal.

What luxury version of everyday products make a big difference?

What do you splurge on?

Thanks!

Where do you find that olive oil? Is there a certain brand?

What do you use hazelnut oil for? That should be easy for me to find as there are hazelnut orchards all around here!

Real maple syrup.

The delicious chocolates from the Szamos Marcipan coffeehouse instead of standard fare supermarket bonbons or, worse, candy bars..

Like Butrflynet said, a real block of Parmesan cheese rather than that pre-grated stuff.

Good imported cheeses, period, no need to list.

Back in Holland I used to sometimes go to some length and a two-or three times normal price to get quality bread at one of the two specialty bread shops in town - or at least get the bread from the bakery in the V&D dept store instead of the crap sold in AH supermarkets - but there's nothing comparable here.

I am, however, particular about other bakery products. Pogacsak, for example. The cukraszda (patisserie) in Kiraly Street, by Hollo Street, has small ones with pumpkin seeds that are really good, while their other ones are meh. Good cheese pogacsak you can get at the Vajas Sutemeny shop on Oktogon, the Europa cukraszda on Istvan Korut (next door to the coffeehouse), or you walk into the Muvesz coffeehouse and buy them there to take away. The Jewish bakery in Dob Street, on the other hand, has crap pogacsak, even as some of their other stuff is quite delicious. It's amazing how good - and how bad - pogacsak can be depending on where you buy which ones.

Same with cakes - most cukraszdak have Flodni's, which can be pretty good or so-so; but they got the best ones at the Sport cukraszda in Bank Street, even though much of their other stuff is mediocre. It's like they all have their own specialty thing.

Good coffee - I'm not much of a coffeedrinker, but Zsuzsa at the Semiramis coffeeplace on Nagymezo knows exactly how I want my latte: mild and with hot milk (for some reason they prefer it with tepid milk here). And the coffee is quality.

Oh, and there's this other little Semiramis coffeeshop by Rumbach street where occasionally they have these small-cookie-sized Italian almond pastries with a cherry inside that are delicious - in Utrecht you could always buy them at this specialty tea and coffee shop on the Vismarkt, sigh. You also had these two Italian delicacy shops in Utrecht that had all kinds of good stuff with, on the cookies front, Brutti ma bonis for example.

Just like a former colleague of mine ran a Turkish take-away place round the corner from where I lived - Ana's Kuzin - she was trying to elevate the genre above the kebab style thing and attract a wider clientele, and with an always changing menu of all kinds of delicious dishes and salads and smaller things, she was succeeding well. Yeah, well, not everything in Budapest is better.

What I also miss: the half a litre bottles of freshly squeezed juices (orange, orange/banana, orange/kiwi, etc) and smoothies you can buy in most every AH supermarket in Holland. Here fruit juice is what we had until the early 90s - dull, watery tasting juice "on the basis of juice concentrate" in cartons, or the occasional 100% orange juice in cartons - but never fresh, and nothing beyond that. Sigh, the yuppification of Holland did have its good sides.

They're kitchen