To me, there is no better culinary metaphor for chaos than taking a food processor and just throwing in whatever the hell you can think of throwing in. This is why I love smoothies. You can let your imagination run wild, and sometimes a discovery is made that becomes an all-time fave.
So last night I sautéed up some eggplant and sliced up a fresh California tomato, and soon realized I didn’t really have an appropriate dressing or sauce for the dish. It occurred to me that a vinaigrette would go quite nicely, and I got to work.
The thing with a good vinaigrette is that, just like with a smoothie, you can get pretty creative with the ingredients you already have on hand. For this one, I threw a ton of fresh cilantro in my Oster Smoothie Blender (which I seriously recommend getting, by the way), added some raw organic apple cider vinegar (see photo at the top of page), some olive oil, a pinch or three of salt and black pepper, a little bit of coconut sugar, and, because I knew it had to be a fruity vinaigrette to get the flavor combination I was looking for, one granny smith apple, and I mixed the fuck out of that shit.
The results: A+++. It was a great dressing for both the eggplant and the tomatoes, but especially the tomatoes. They were really good tomatoes.
The real magic, however, came the next evening when I used it as a marinade for some chicken breast, which I sautéed in that oil my buddy Joe gave me at his party (at least I assume he gave it to me. I woke up the next day and I had it in my bag, but everybody got pretty loaded that evening, so the details are a bit fuzzy).
Paired with some peach salsa and a bag of Peruvian chimichurri rice (take a wild guess where I picked that up), this was truly a great meal, made even better by the fact that I didn’t finish eating until 11:15 PM.
I just noticed while proofreading that I used not a single semicolon in this entire post; I really like using semicolons.