Food, Photography and Bons Mots
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’m a sucker for fresh beets at the farmers’ market. At my farmers’ market, the vendors spray water on the beets to make their reds and oranges pop. Catches my attention (and triggers my taste buds) every time! The beets we eat today are believed…
Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldies But Goodies recipe is for Crispy Oyster Mushroom Skewers With Crushed Chickpeas. It’s a keeper. Here is the link: Crispy Oyster Mushroom Skewers.
Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.
And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne Food and Photography Blog. If you are in the mood to cook (or eat!), we hope you will take a moment to look at the many excellent recipes we have featured.
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…
It is spring here. Gardens are waking up and jobs around the house beckon. It’s time for an energy boost. Looking for more protein in your diet to power you through some of those jobs? Lentils are a good choice. A cooked cup of red…
This is an exceptional recipe. Exceptional. I don’t use that word very often.
This is an Ottolenghi recipe from his website here.
The Ottolenghi lede to the recipe suggests these pears as a topping for pancakes or French toast. Trust me. These are wonderful with a generous scoop of the very best vanilla ice cream you can find.
Did I mention that this dish is beautiful?!
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…
Another soup beauty! This soup has a very unexpected ingredient—Jerusalem artichokes. What the heck are Jerusalem artichokes? Are they even artichokes at all? According to Harold McGee’s definitive book On Food and Cooking the Jerusalem artichoke is sometimes called a sunchoke or an earth apple.…
I had a kuri squash rattling around in my pantry left from a recent foray to the local Farmer’s Market. I love the deep saturated color of that squash and it needed to be used while it was at its peak.
This recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty More for Squash With Chile Yogurt and Cilantro Sauce turned out to be a perfect recipe to feature my pretty kuri.
This is a beautiful dish–brilliant orange reds from the squash, bright greens from the cilantro sauce and the promise of creaminess from the chile yogurt sauce. A feast for your eyes!
I confess that I used to avoid hard squash preparations because squash like kuri, acorn, and butternut are so difficult (and sometimes dangerous) to slice and peel. At some point in my cooking, it occurred to me to put the squash in the microwave for a couple of minutes to soften (but not cook) it. That made all the difference. No more squash terror in my kitchen!
This is a recipe from Yotam Ollotenghi’s Plenty More . You can buy the book through your local bookstore or on Amazon here,
This is a wonderful cookbook–one of my favorites in my collection of hundreds of cookbooks (I know. There are all kinds of addictions. Mine is cookbooks.)
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
Beans! Glorious beans! This is an enthusiastic repeat recipe for Blue Cayenne. We originally featured the recipe back in May of 2024. Here is the link and the recipe: Turkish White Beans. This recipe is from Yasmin Khan’s cookbook, Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories From Turkey,…
“Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau This very simple James Beard recipe for macaroni and cheese caught my eye on a day when I was craving the quintessential American dish. Sometimes a simple recipe reminds us…
Brunch. It’s a portmanteau– a made up word joining two words and two meanings. You know, a blend. List and article: Listicle. Smoke and fog: Smog. Breakfast and lunch: Brunch. Actually, Blue Cayenne’s sweet Chief Quality Officer (CQO) Juliet is probably a portmanteau, too. Juliet…
Today’s plat du jour on my table is ratatouille, a classic French vegetable stew that is a specialty of cooks in Provence and Nice. Apparently, a lot of other Mediterranean countries claim some version of this dish, too, so you may have encountered ratatouille under…
Beans! Glorious beans! This is an enthusiastic repeat recipe for Blue Cayenne. We originally featured the recipe back in May of 2024. Here is the link and the recipe: Turkish White Beans. This recipe is from Yasmin Khan’s cookbook, Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories From Turkey,…
Jose Andreas. Marcella Hazan. Jacques Pepin. Elena Zalayeta Masaharu Morimoto Marcus Samuelsson. And on and on and on…and on. These women and men have enriched the American culinary world. Immigrants all. So here, in the spirit of recognizing and celebrating the creativity, drive and good…
It’s October already and time to start thinking of cold weather comfort foods. Nothing fits that bill quite like beans. This recipe combines Rancho Gordo alubia blanca beans with generous quantities of parmaesan cheese and chile crisp for a stewed bean dish perfect for those…
This recipe brings back fond memories of parties in my home. On my buffet table, a three bean salad was always a reliable dish–easy to put together, flexible, and interesting. Recently, my local Farmer’s Market has been offering beautiful yellow was beans that reminded me…
This is a delicious hybrid recipe. It’s a riff on a hummus recipe we ran on Blue Cayenne back in April of 2019 here It occurred to us that a rich topping of roasted grape (or cherry) tomatoes and roasted eggplant cubes would complement the…
