CONFESSIONS OF A                                                                  
     
RESTAURANT WHORE
A San Francisco Girl's Down and Dirty Adventures in the Culinary Playground

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Alone without the Whore...

As the whore is finishing up the last of her shows, and I'm left alone one last Saturday night, I thought I'd hijack her blog and do a post of my own. Shhh, don't tell her.

Not having much to do, I figured I'd make myself a spectacular dinner, but wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to make. I stopped at Costco, but didn't find any nice meat-stuffs, so it was going to be a Vegetarian only meal. Good thing Rainbow's on the way home from Costco.

I figured it had been a while since I'd made ravioli, and while walking through the produce aisle I spotted nice looking spring onions and fava beans. You always need a salad with pasta, so I figured some bitter greens, with fennel and tangerines would do nicely. (I don't make this shit up, I just regurgitate crap we've had at various restaurants.) I needed something for dessert too, and the strawberries looked awesome (albeit $5/pint -- shit this place is expensive.)

I came home and cooked up a fucking storm. Music blaring , I went to town. Because this was going to be a social dinner-making exercise (yes I know it was just for me), I cleaned some radishes I bought at Rainbow, opened a nice half bottle of Robert Sinsky, started snacking and began the prep.



I tend to use recipes less and less, but was curious if we had anything useful in our wide array of cookbooks. I was going to use Jamie Oliver's pasta recipe
again, but I checked the Silver Spoon and went with their recipe instead. (It worked like a charm.) As the dough was resting in the fridge, I prepped the beans, and the spring onions. Those were mixed with some Bellweather farms ricotta, parmagiana and lemon juice. Rolling out the pasta dough worked wonderfully, and I put down the dollops of filling:



After folding over the raviolis, and cutting them apart, I put them back in the fridge while I worked on the salad. I washed the watercress, and arugula, and shaved the fennel on the mandolin. I mixed up a dressing of olive oil, lemon and tangerine juice. Then I neatly pealed and sliced the tangerines, lying it all out on the plate and dressing it. Damn sexy:



Pasta water was boiling, and a saute pan was ready for the pasta "sauce." I was going really simple, as the ravioli filling was very tasty itself. (I should know, as I'd eaten a quarter of it already.) I threw the ravioli into the water, and butter and sage into the saute pan. After about seven minutes the ravioli went into the saute, and a few minutes later -- viola, dinner was complete:


And damn, it was a fine frickin' dinner. I ate all the raviolis, though I had intended on saving some for her. I saved some salad, finished up the wine, and then passed out for a while. Dessert will have to wait till tomorrow.

Thanks y'all for indulging the whore's husband. I promise, she'll be back to her fabulous writing soon. (I miss her much more than you guys do!)

-Jon

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The ravioli, salad and strawberries all looked fabulous, wonderful job.

I hope you are willing to bring the camera along to restaurants. Joy's descriptions are so wonderful, but I would love to see some photos as well. Thank you both for the wonderful food blog.

3/26/2006 7:30 AM  
Blogger Sam said...

This is so the best blog post all year. I am laughing so much. I am not going to show it to fred in case he gets a similar idea.

Jon - you can invite me round for dinner any time.

I would like to use some bad language - but like you I am a bit tame when it comes to that.

3/26/2006 2:12 PM  
Blogger bobgirrl said...

You don't happen to have a single brother who can cook like that, do you??

3/27/2006 12:48 PM  

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