Spring Cleaning.

I've recently discovered an excellent way to organize my recipes. Thanks to a reader over at Serious Eats who suggested the method, I've been spending the weekend copying and pasting and throwing out all those torn out magazine pages.

The idea is simple. Open a gmail account for the sole purpose of emailing yourself recipes. Copy and paste the recipe from the blog, magazine site, or type in the content in the body of your message and title it with the name of the dish. It is also wise to include a link to the original post and the date and issue of the magazine you got it from. Now that you've got all those recipes in one place you can organize them with gmail labels. Add labels like soup, dessert, main course, tried and liked, etc. and label the recipes accordingly. You can add multiple labels to each recipe and then (this is the coolest part!), if you feel like having fish for dinner, simply click on your 'fish' label link and it will show you all recipes labeled as fish. Pretty neat, huh?


In the midst of all this recipe organizing I managed to try a couple new things. This shrimp and mango salad from this month's Gourmet was so wonderful we're having it again this coming week when the mango gets ripe. It takes no time to throw together.


SHRIMP AND MANGO SALAD WITH GLASS NOODLES
Repost from Gourmet, April 2007

4 ounces very thin bean thread noodles (also known as cellophane, glass, or mung bean noodles)
1 pound cooked, peeled, and deveined medium or large shrimp
1 large mango, peeled and cut into cubes
3 scallions, thinly sliced crosswise
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh serrano or jalapeño chili
1/3 cup rice vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Cover noodles with boiling-hot water in a large bowl and let stand 8 minutes.
Drain noodles in a colander and rinse with cold running water. Drain well, then return to bowl.
While noodles are soaking, combine shrimp, mango, scallions, basil, and chile in another large bowl.
Stir together vinegar, sugar, and salt in a measuring cup until sugar is dissolved, then toss half of sauce with noodles and half with shrimp salad. (The sugar isn't going to dissolve in cold or room temperature vinegar so put it in the microwave for a few seconds to dissolve it.)
Serve noodles topped with shrimp salad.