Blue Cayenne

At my local farmers’ market, the stone fruits are winding down. The cherries are gone. The apricots are so ripe they’re squishy by the time you get them home. Peaches and plums, however, are still available in abundance. 

As you know if you read this blog, plums are my jam. So, I’m in a very good place right now. 

This recipe for Cafe Sperl’s Plum Squares  is from Diana Henry’s cookbook Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul. Cafe Sperl is a Viennese coffee house that dates back to the 19th Century when it catered to the likes of  archdukes, musicians and prominent military figures. 

You can order this cookbook through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. This cookbook was published in 2005 and was recently reissued. It is Diana Henry’s ode to cold weather cooking. So, if you are sweltering in this summer’s heat wave, perhaps this cold-weather recipe will help you escape into dreams of colder times and climes. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. This delicious recipe can be made with apricots as well as plums. 

It’s summer! Woo-hoo!

Right now, my favorite local farmers’ market is bursting with beautiful produce. What better way to showcase (and enjoy!) that bounty than by making a fresh salad? 

Make that a fresh crunchy coleslaw and I’m in heaven. Make it beautiful and just WOW.

How to get that beauty in a coleslaw, though? I confess to years of making dull greenish slaws with nothing more interesting than a bit of mayo and some caraway seeds. This Ottolenghi Grilled Sweetcorn Slaw recipe, with the usual creative brilliance of the Ottolenghi kitchen, changes all that. Grill some sweetcorn! Pickle some red onions! Sprinkle cilantro leaves and mint leaves liberally into the mix!

One of my favorite items at my local farmers’ market  is the intensely-colored carrots. When we used to travel in India, I fell in love with the bright red carrots that were often used in the wonderful carrot puddings. After years of looking, I’ve finally found them again at a small specialty stall at my farmers’ market. The vendor there specializes in all sorts of great stuff—tender carrots in multiple colors, pointy haspi cabbages and on and on. So, it was with pleasure that I featured those beautiful carrots in this salad. 

This recipe comes from the Ottolenghi online site. You can find the recipe here.

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

This is a sweet little tart. Easy, too. It is a Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart from Hetal Vasavada’s new cookbook, Desi Bakes.

Over the decade that I’ve been writing Blue Cayenne, I’ve posted innumerable recipes for stone fruit dishes. To me, stone fruits are a culinary gift of the gods–sweet with a pleasant bit of tang, juicy, texturally intersting and on and on. There are the bright beautiful colors, too. 

Technically, stone fruits are drupes–a fleshy fruit with a hard stony pit. This category of fruits includes all the usual suspects–peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, cherries, mangoes. But there are ever so many more choices in the stone fruit world!

There are hybrids, for example. Consider  pluots, apriums and pluerries.  In the hybridizing of these fruits, scientists put their thumb on the scale favoring a specific drupe. The pluot, for example, leans toward the plum while the aprium gives the apricot star billing. Then there are the pleurries! What? A pleurry is a cross between a plum and a cherry. It is sometimes advertised as being “sweet like a cherry with the summer fresh plum zing.” Wow!

Some berries are drupes, too. Blackberries and raspberries, for instance, are aggregate drupes, made up as they are of clusters of individual drupes, each one having a tiny pit in its center.

Surprisingly, drupes include olives, dates, coconuts, almonds, and walnuts. Who knew that there was any relationship whatsoever between that beautiful Santa Rosa plum on your plate and the olive in your martini? 

How to select your stone fruits at their peak of sweetness? The experts suggest following the scent. That’s right. Sniff the fruit for a sweet scent. Another clue for sweetness, look for wrinkling of the fruit’s skin at the stem. 

In addition to today’s recipe for Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart, here are some stone fruit recipes from Blue Cayenne’s archives. Why not truly embrace stone fruit season and dive into the many great recipes that incorporate the fruit? 

Peach and Raspberry Salad

Almond Apricot Cake

The Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart recipe  being featured today on Blue Cayenne comes from Hetal Vasavada’s new cookbook, Desi Bakes. You can order the book through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Here is the recipe for Peach and Plum Frangipane Tart as I prepared it in my kitchen.