a couple of weeks ago i came across this post the very same day that chris was coming by with his duck confit.  as soon as my eyes locked in on the recipe, i knew this was to be my promised companion salad, a guaranteed sure-fire marriage made in heaven.  the richness of the crispy duck atop some perfectly cooked lemon butter asparagus - and then this salad beside it.  beautiful.

arugula and mango salad with a white chocolate and sriracha vinaigrette
shamelessly stolen from the culinary sherpas

all i can say is that this salad had me at hello…

1 package baby arugula leaves
1 mango - sliced
1/4 cup cilantro leaves

1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 tablespoon sriracha
1/3 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup grated best quality white chocolate
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

in a sauce pan over medium heat, combine the sugar, orange juice, sriracha, and white wine vinegar.
stir and bring to a simmer to dissolve the sugar.
remove from heat and add the white chocolate, stirring well to melt and incorporate it into the dressing.
set aside and let cool, but do not refrigerate or the chocolate will set and become hard.
combine the arugula, cilantro, and mango in a salad bowl
whisk the olive oil into the white chocolate mixture to incorporate, season with salt and pepper, and toss well.

i highly recommend that you run-not-walk and make this salad.  it was impressive in every way.  the white chocolate is very subtle and the acidity of the vinegar breaks the cocoa butter perfectly.

today ceF is officially 1 year old. 

thanks for all your well wishes.  i would have baked you a cake, but in the name of zipping my jeans and continuing on with my plan, instead i put up a few updated pictures of myself taken last week (the very night i -ahem- had dinner with joe bastianich) and took down the younger thinner versions from last year.  after all, this ain’t match.com - if you get my drift. 

i’m just keeping it real…

so, i lift my glass of filtered water to all of you.  here’s to another 171 posts.  fyi, that’s 1,197 in dog posts.

hey, thanks for reading…

(if i’m going to whine, ice cream is the very least i can offer…)

dear readers…  ceF is 2 days shy of turning one year old and well, i must tell you that as much fun as this is, in the short time that we’ve known each other i have recklessly and pitifully packed on some serious poundage. i have tried to be better about keeping it all in balance, but to date am failing miserably. i have tried to do all the things i know to do. but i am weak in the face of good food. 

to keep us all entertained here, i have been also trying to achieve some semblance of excellence with my cooking. ok, maybe excellence is going too far. but i am aiming high, and honestly, most of the time we’re eating pretty well here at kitchen central. but i’ve still got a lot to learn, and that means practice. and repetition. using it or losing it. and this tends to involve churning out a fair amount of food if you ever want to call yourself a cook.  and i aspire to that…

right now i’m in santa monica for 3 weeks. and guess what? i’m not going to any great restaurants or cooking. i’m in semi-radical cleansing mode drinking fresh juices and eating fruit and plain salads. as in vegan raw without the frills of nuts or seeds or oil or seasonings of any kind.  as in yes, you’re right this is not easy - and no, i don’t recommend you do this.  unless you want to. which you probably don’t. and man, i so do not blame you. because if i could find a way to eat the way i wanted to eat all the time, and not look and feel toxic, i’d be all over it.  you see, i am the quintessential plate cleaner. i love to eat and i can pack it away but good.  but i am terribly vain - and that’s a tricky combo to balance. so here i am - paying for my salty high-caloric intake.  because the fat lady has sung and it’s time to pay the piper. 

interestingly enough, the older i get the more he charges - the little flute playing bastard…

but to keep the blog fires burning, i have a few things that i recently whipped up and then stockpiled, knowing i’d be away from the kitchen.  and this is one of them.  fresh mint custard ice cream with pralus 75% chocolate.  i used david lebovitz’s recipe for the ice cream, always adding an extra egg yolk as a sacrifice to whatever god that thomas keller worships (i do believe he uses up to 12 yolks in his ice creams).  and then i went a little too heavy on the chocolate because well, one bar is 3.5 ounces and david calls for about 5 ounces (i don’t have the book with me) and i think i may have used over 1 1/2 bars.  but next time i think i’d stick to the one, as that’d be plenty. this batch was a bit heavy on the chocolate. not that it’d hurt your feelings, because the chocolate is so spectacular and plays well off the minty custard…  but still, live and learn.

the fresh mint is steeped in the warm milk/cream mixture and then the custard is made and chilled. to make the stracciatella, you add the melted chocolate in a steady stream at the very end of the churning process, keeping the chocolate away from mixing blade.  being a stracciatella making virgin, i did a so-so job… but it was really very, very awfully good. and i guess one day i will have to try again. and again. but not for a little while.

my inner child had hoped for the ice cream to be a bit on the greener side - but when thinking about the steeping/straining process, it seemed unlikely that the leaves would give up much color. but david had promised an emerald hue and dear readers, that just was not happening. also and for the record, i’m not a huge mint fan. and now i know why. because most mint things that we buy are made with some kind of extract that is way not my thing. this ice cream was minty, but subtle. it tasted real, because it was.

and i’ll be posting here and there, but for now, i’ve gone west to where the ‘beautiful people’ are. to where you are pretty much always - comparatively speaking (to like, anywhere) - too fat, too old and too poor.  i kind of never "got" LA but i want to.  and i am willing to love LA - if it will let me.  i will hang by the beach and soak up the califiornia vibe and then i am back to nashville for a night, only to take off the next day to nyc to do my usual thing - which totally revolves around food.  and as one might imagine based on my last trip home, i am still going to dine quite well. and so this is when i will get to practice balance. and then i get to practice even more balance a week later in chicago at alinea and trotter’s.

so, it’s looking like if all goes well i will be one helluva balanced woman come july.  and then i will throw a party and invite you and i will make this mint stracciatella for everyone and only eat one scoop.

which brings us back to all of you summer loving, ice cream eating people out there.  why not go and make yourself this minty custardy ice cream?  it is truly wonderful.  the recipe is in david’s book and if you’re an ice cream aficionado and don’t own it, i urge you to get it.

and oh by the way - if there is a next life? 

i am so coming back as a person with the metabolism of a hummingbird…

or more accurately, peanut butter noodles. but the dish is still much better known as "noodles in sesame sauce" and usually ‘cold’, at that.  at least in nyc where i lived on it for the better part of my early 20’s. and even though i’ve seen a few versions that use roasted tahini, the peanut butter version just works so well on every level that it’s what i do, because it is quite frankly - an absolute and total winner. and everybody loves a winner… yessiree.

anyway, this dish had been on my mind since i saw it over at smitten kitchen and then recently again at kalyn’s, where she used whole wheat noodles. i think the earthiness of the ww pasta lends itself perfectly to this dish.  my version is an adaption of both of those, leaning more towards the ‘gourmet’ recipe from june 2002

peanut sesame noodles
adapted from gourmet, june 2002

i totally blanked on the sesame seeds, which is too bad because i have the black ones sitting right in my kitchen and they’re both a great looking garnish and tasty.  so try to use your imagination, ok? 

1/2 cup smooth organic peanut butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup warm water
2 tablespoon chopped peeled fresh ginger
2 medium garlic cloves, chopped
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoon brown sugar or honey or agave
1 tablespoon sriracha chili sauce - or to taste

1 lb whole wheat thin spaghetti
1 orange or red bell pepper, cut into 1/8-inch-thick strips
1 yellow bell pepper, cut into 1/8-inch-thick strips
1 cucumber, seeded and cut into 1/8-inch-thick strips
1 cup of snow peas
4 scallions, thinly sliced
chopped cilantro
3 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted
1 lb of shrimp or chicken or beef or pork belly! or tofu

mix all the ingredients for the sauce in a strong blender, set aside
put water on to boil for noodles
slice the cucumbers and bell peppers into long thin strips
slice the scallions and chop the cilantro

if you’re using shrimp, skewer and grill.  if you’re using another protein, i trust that you will figure it all out just fine…

one minute before the pasta is ready, throw the snow peas into the pasta water.
drain and toss with the sauce, serve immediately garnished with the vegetables and make it all look pretty,
  

because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough and doggone it people like you…

i present to you "the mangosteen".  the mango’s jewish half cousin.  ok, actually, there’s no relation whatsoever.  and if there is, the newly-outed, anti-semitic mango is not owning up. 

the mangosteen is typically advertised and marketed as part of an emerging category of novel "functional fruits" sometimes called "superfruits" presumed to have a combination of 1) appealing subjective characteristics, such as taste, fragrance and visual qualities, 2)nutrient richness, 3)antioxidant strength and 4) potential impact for lowering risk against human diseases.  i stole that entire line from wikipedia and promise to return it the moment you finish this sentence.

oh, but you know how it can be… you read about some foodstuff… and then you start hearing more… and then it escalates into raves… and of course, said item is often both hard to come by - and expensive… and that’s usually about when i place my order. 

but how could you blame me?  the final straw came just as i happened upon a post over at ’serious eats’ entitled "Delicious Mangosteens: Better Than A Hot Fudge Sundae?"  I mean talk about roping in an already food obsessed person who constantly FRETS about her weight.  i could even say that those words were borderline seduction.  so being the susceptible woman that i am, armed with a newly received tax return in the bank, and an american express card in my wallet - not to mention a perpetual hankering for ice cream despite an ever expanding waistline, i was all about buying these fruits of the mercenary gods.

the case was overnighted from (guess…) california and arrived still cool at my doorstep the next morning.  no matter what you might think from the pics, they’re small.  like about the size of a clementine.  i got 10.  which with shipping averaged them out at about $7 each.  which would have been ok because i was WILLING to go there.  i just wanted to be wow’ed.  i wanted to be the cyber messenger of the mangosteen.

but alas, i am here to say - save your money, kids.  they’re good.  but…

they’re not ’toe scrunching’ good. 

they’re not ‘i have to call my best friend’ good.  nor are they ’i feel good about spending the money’ good. 

and definitely not ’i'll take these over sex’ good. 

 is anything that good?

and if i wanted to sleep with you, it’d be ’torcetti con salsa di noci e funghi’.  but being that we’re all platonic here, i thought i’d keep it to the english since i hit you so hard in my last post with my γαλακτομπούρεκο. 

i’m forever browsing blogs, looking for inspiration - and this dish caught my eye while catching up with the folks from ‘we are never full’.  it’s a site full of exuberance and passion - they take their food very seriously and it shows.  the pasta sauce, from genoa, is a recreation of yet another wonderful dish from their extensive travels through italy.

again, i’m a big fan of simplicity and so that’s where my sensibilities tend to lead me.  this was the primi course for a small dinner party, followed by a secundo of grass-fed grilled to perfection ribeye, along with a basic green salad of romaine and arugula with grape tomatoes.  so yes, perhaps simple, but a wonderful dinner.

the pasta dish suffers somewhat from the innocousness of its beige colorway.  but apart from that, it’s quite good.  having said this, let me share my initial resistance, which was that the walnut texture in the sauce, was for me a minor distraction. but it seems i was alone in this assessment.  and everyone else was raving.

but you see, the thing is (and here’s a dirty little secret), in my mind, my opinion - when it comes to food - outweighs any number of other opinions at the table.  so i’m not sure if this pasta is a do-over for me.  my gauge is this: if i were in a very good restaurant, would i flip over this?  and then i know…

soak two pieces of crustless, white bread in some of the cream so it soaks it all up.

put the salted pasta water on to boil

in a pan, add your sliced mushrooms along with some olive oil or a pat of butter and sauté until firm-soft.

process the walnuts until fine, then add and blend all the rest of the ingredients together : the milk-soaked bread, the cheese and cream, along with a pinch of salt to taste.

add your pasta to the boiling water and cook till al dente.