Something new

Argh. I thought today it was the twelve... Instead I'm one day past the deadline for 'The weekend Coobook Challenge' :( :( ! Anyway, I'll post my recipe here and tell Sara about it.. let's see what she says.. I had thought about the theme quite a bit, because it was so intriguing: 'Something new'. So I decided I would go to the 'Berkeley Bowl', the wonderful grocery store in Berkeley that sells every possible vegetable and fruit you can ever imagine, and just try something that I had no idea what it was!
So I got a few special fruits. My idea was to make a fruit salad to eat together with 'Ventagli'. These are special cookies that I already had in the past, but I never tried to make. So this would also have been something new for me: try to make the famous 'Ventagli' :).... And here is the result:

Macedonia di frutta esotica con crema al limone, panna montata e ventagli (Exotic fruit salad with lemon cream, whipped cream and ventagli).
1) Choose the fruit that is in season and that looks more interesting: I had strawberries, mango and kumquats. A wonderful mix of colors. Cut it in pieces, and add lemon juice on it. Let it infuse for a few hours.
\2) Prepare the lemon cream: mix two eggs with 2 tbsp flour and ~2 tbsp sugar, add ~2 cups of milk slowly, to avoid clump formation. Add pieces of lemon peel (big, you will have to remove them in the end). Bring to boil, keep stirring. Boil for ~3 min, then let it cool down and remove the lemon peel. Refrigerate until you're ready to use it.
3) Whip the heavy cream with some powder sugar (sweeten to taste). Add the lemon cream and the whipped cream on the fruit, right before serving.
4) If you're lucky and you have something like Berkeley Bowl closeby, you can now add something fancy on the top. I bought this really nice fruit, I had _no_ idea how it would taste and what it would be like inside. It's called star fruit.
What's really amazing is how it is inside:
So cool!! I loved the colors. So I cut a slice of it and I added it on the macedonia:
The taste is hard to describe. It's between a banana and grapes. Nothing like a lemon or so, that you would expect after seeing the green and seedy interior. The consistency reminds of pomegranate. It's very nice, especially on this sweet fruit salad.
Serve it with ventagli (recipe follows).

Ventagli (Fans)
This recipe is dedicated to Zinnur, who asked me for it. I found it on two different internet websites (here and here), in Italian. So this is a version taken from the two of them, blended together.
Either prepare or buy frozen puff pastry (I confess I chose the second option, I didn't have time to make it myself :( ). Take a 1/2 lb sheet, and knead 2 tbsp sugar with it. Spread it thin on the table, with a rectangular shape. From both sides, fold the dough inward twice, so that in the end the two sides touch themselves:
(sorry, I realize now this picture is not really clear.. anyway, you have two small rolls on both sides, basically). Now fold this roll in the center, inward again, and start cutting slices ~ 1 cm thick (~ 1/3 of an inch). You will see a sort of ventagli shape in the slices, once cut. Butter a baking pan, spread some sugar with a spatula on both sides of the ventagli and place them on the pan, leaving ~ 2 inches of room between one ventaglio and the other one. Refrigerate for 30 min (this is an important step! Otherwise they will lose their shape when baking). Bake at 430 F for ~ 5 min, then flip the ventagli and bake them on the other side, until golden.
In the end it's really easy to make them, and they come out exactly like the ones you buy :)

Anyway, the roundup for the WCC is already up! Give a look at it.