my fashion faux pas meal

As in: no white shoes before Easter, loose the leg warmers and satin is out.

This meal is all wrong. I learned in cooking school that it is important to consider the combination of foods on a given plate. In other words, what are the varying textures? Are the colors contrasting? Do you have a protein, vegetable and starch? Have you styled it and stacked it? Are you presenting it properly toward the guest? Sauce should not go over the protein, but in front. And so forth.

True, this is as unfashionable as any season would beckon: everything on the plate is all white. The protein is chicken, the vegetables are roasted cauliflower and fennel and the starch—sauteed potatoes. White, white, and more white. In fact, I could have had pasta with oil and salt or Parmesan risotto and still stayed in the same white theme. I even considered sauteing white mushrooms with a reduced white wine sauce to top the chicken… that would have worked with veal too. Please pass the focaccia.

Instead of unfashionable, perhaps we could coin this as deliberately edgy, like putting color on color: a tie and shirt of the same color. It is a bold, confident statement. Although, since the plate consists of entirely white food, the thought of trendy color is a bit of a stretch. At least the other components are there: a protein, a starch and vegetables.

I actually get a kick out of color and always have. I remember matching earrings to socks and shirts—even during the neon shirt phase (scary). You may not know this, but for almost a year, I had a blog called Brown Bag Blues; it includes a series of posts on colored lunches. The blog is a source of ideas for what to put in lunches, to stave off brown bag boredom (I didn’t have time for 3 blogs, but it is still posted, with a pile of lunch ideas if you want to peek; my 2nd blog is about this year I am spending in Florence, Italy, with my family—family frolics).

It is time for dinner… by the way, anyone want milk, white wine, some grated Parmesan? Panna cotta, vanilla ice cream or creme brulee for dessert?

You think this is bad, perhaps I should implement a Christmas dinner of red and green…

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