Blue Cayenne

Sandwiches anyone?

I’m a bread baker. I enjoy the process–all that kneading feeds my soul. It’s  cathartic for me, particularly during these difficult times.

Every week I bake sourdough using my 20-something starter Kellyanne. (It is a conceit of sourdough bakers to name their starters.) I also bake milk bread and a variety of other non-sourdough loaves. No commercial breads in my kitchen!

This week I got the itch to make focaccia. I’ve seldom baked it but found an interesting recipe in a cookbook I’ve recently added to my burgeoning collection. 

Focaccia has an interesting history–dating back to Roman times according to food historians. Roman bakers baked flat breads called panis focacius directly on their hearths; it was a cheap and easy bake and became a kind of Mediterranean fast foods Over time, the leavened bread we think of as focaccia today became an Italian specialty in the area of Genoa. Some believe that pizza was popularized later as a variant of focaccia. 

This focaccia recipe is from the cookbook Veg Forward by Susan Spungen. You can order this cookbook through your local bookstore and from Amazon here.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. This is a plain recipe spiced with fresh rosemary and topped with a generous sprinkling of Parmesan and a generous drenching with the best extra virgin olive oil you have in your kitchen. From there, you could try all sorts of other interesting toppings. Tomatoes, garlic, and other herbs are commonly used but focaccia is sometimes baked sweet with raisins and honey. Pine nuts make a nice (but pricey) topping, too. 

Focaccia is sometimes served plain and warm dipped in milk or cappuccino for breakfast or as an accompaniment for an Italian meal. Here, I’ve sliced it thick and used it for an indulgent sandwich of good cheese, pickles, and avocado.  I slathered my sandwich with a new favorite piquant Peruvian Pepper Jam  distributed under the Divina brand. It is spicy and sweet and made with piquillo peppers, limo peppers, sugar and lime juice–perfect (and beautiful!) spread on a sandwich. 

If we’ve gotten you in the mood to bake bread, you could look at some of the other bread recipes on Blue Cayenne. We’ve got Jalapeno Cheddar Bread,   Hokkaido Milk Bread,  Raisin Bread,  Nan-E Barbari Persian Flat Bread and some killer Banana Bread recipes. 

Ahhh. When to eat bundt cake?

Breakfast? Snack? Dinner? Middle of the night?

I’ve done it all. I assume that when Marie Antoinette counseled “Let them eat cake” she meant bundt cake. (OK. OK. I know she probably didn’t say that, but it works here for the narrative.)

This bundt cake is from a Polish baking cookbook Dobre Dobre by Laurel Kratochvila. You can order the cookbook through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. Incidentally, Dobre Dobre comes from a Polish expression “Dobre, dobre, nie za slodkie”  which means “Good, good, not too sweet.”  This cookbook was named one of best cookbooks of 2025 by The New York Times. And, American-born Berlin-based Laurel Kratochvila was a James Beard finalist. She is also the author of New World Baking.

Bundt cake (or Babka Piaskowa as the author names this cake) is a staple dessert in Eastern and Central Europe. Piaskowa in the name means “sandy” and this delightful cake has an ever-so-slightly sandy texture.

Stories about the origins of bundt cakes abound. The Dr. Oetker site claims Roman origins for the distinctively shaped cakes. In modern times, the cake was repopularized in the 18th Century in Europe and was particularly popular in Vienna.It is reported that Maria Antoinette, the Austrian queen of Louis XVI, brought the bundt cake (or, at least its ancestor the gugelhupf) to the French court from her native Austria when she married. 

Fast forward to the 1950s in the United States. The Minnesota-based Nordic Ware company introduced the first commercial bundt pans to American cooks. They have sold more than 70 million bundt pans over the years. So, it is no exaggeration to say that the bundt cake has a strong foothold in American baking.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

It appears to be spring here in SoCal.

Get ready! Zucchini “abundance” is just around the corner.

Here is a tasty recipe from Alison Roman’s new cookbook Something From Nothing.  You can buy the cookbook through your local bookstore or online through Amazon here.

To my taste, the contrasting textures in this pasta salad were delicious–crunchy fried walnuts, silky pasta “tubes,” an abundance of salty crumbled Parmesan cheese. All of it was boldly complemented by the strong flavors of a lemon and garlic dressing and  two generous cups of pungent fresh parsley, mint and cilantro. It was a party for the taste buds.  

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.