Blue Cayenne is 11 years old.
Who knew?
When we anxiously pushed the “publish” button to post our first blog eleven years ago, we certainly didn’t know that this labor of love would stretch on and on…and on. (This is the 733rd post for Blue Cayenne. Damn!)
Mostly, on that October day in 2015, we held our breath—amazed just to type in our blog’s name Blue Cayenne and see that we actually had done it.
There was a site!
And it looked good!
A definite Woo-hoo! moment! In celebration, there was an indulgent round of shortbread cookies for our staff. (That would be me and Sweet Juliet.)
Our first recipe back in 2015 was for a Senegalese Bean Salad. Here is the link: Senegalese Bean Salad. It’s still a great recipe.
And what a challenging, sometimes exasperating, interesting, and educational experience it has been!
A good friend recently asked why we started the blog and how we pick the recipes we feature on Blue Cayenne?
Our goals were (and continue to be) many.
First, we needed a healthy nudge to improve our truly modest photography skills.
A nudge was in order for our writing and eating and cooking, too.
Writing a blog, we decided, would give us motivation, structure and discipline in all those areas. Oh how we’ve needed those deadlines!
And then there was that siren call of what we call “the collection”–a curated cookbook collection that is now seven hundred books and counting. ( Yotam Ottoenghi’s Simple, Too is due in our mailbox any day now and we’ve got our eye on Rebecca Eisenberg’s Small Batch Breads. It never ends…in a good way. ) Frankly, we wanted an excuse–any excuse–to delve more deeply into our cookbooks and to add new ones. Here is a photograph of part of “the collection.”
So, working with my patient photography teacher Al Nomura, inspired by my digital media teacher Nami Aoyagi, and loosely patterned after 101 Cookbooks–a fine blog that we admire, a food blog with the colorful but otherwise nonsensical name Blue Cayenne was born. (Actually, Blue Cayenne came from a fondness for the intense color of the orange-blue flame on a stove burner.)
Game Plan: Cook/bake/adapt recipes from “the collection.” Photograph the dishes. Write, write and rewrite. Repeat. The goal has been 5 posts a month and we’ve pretty much met that standard.
It has been wonderful!
So, here we are at the beginning of our 12th year. We’re taking our next step toward our next birthday with this recipe for Roasted Grapes And Feta With Grains and Kale adapted from Hetty Mckinnon’s new cookbook Linger. Since our first recipe post back in 2015 was for a hearty Senegalese Bean Salad, it seems fitting that our first new recipe as we start our twelfth year be a hearty salad. Roasted Grapes and Feta With Grains and Kale is certainly hearty…and beautiful, too.
Linger is available through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.
Here is the recipe for Roasted Grapes and Feta With Grains and Kale as I prepared it in my kitchen. This would be great as a vegetarian main or a substantial side salad for any celebration.
Thank you for reading Blue Cayenne. My Chief Quality Officer (and willing chief taster) Juliet and I are so glad you are here.
Oh, and by the way, here is yet another favorite photograph of Blue Cayenne’s faithful gourmet pup, Sweet Juliet—an appropriate Halloween shot since this is October and Juliet is already getting her scary on.
Roasted Grapes and Feta With Grains and Kale
Ingredients
- 1 pound seedless grapes
- 1 medium red onion (cut into wedges)
- 4 sprigs of fresh thyme leaves
- 3 T. balsamic vinegar
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- 7-ounce block of feta
- Salt and black pepper
- 1 C. farro
- 1/2 bunch locanto kale (roughly chopped)
- Juice of 1/2 lemon
- 1 C. roasted walnuts (roughly chopped)
- 1 C. mixed mint and parsley (chopped)
Directions
- Step 1 Preheat oven to 415 degrees F.
- Step 2 Line a baking sheet with parchment. Put grapes and wedges of red onion on the baking sheet. Scatter the fresh thyme leaves on top of the grapes. Drizzle 1 T. extra-virgin olive oil and 1 T. balsamic vinegar over the grape mixture and toss to coat. Roast for about 10 minutes. You want the grapes to begin to collapse but to stay juicy.
- Step 3 Top the roasted grapes with the cubes of feta and return to the oven. Drizzle with more extra-virgin olive oil and a generous sprinkling of pepper. Bake for another 10 minutes until the grapes begin to burst and the feta is baked and solid.
- Step 4 Boil the farro in salted water according to package directions. Drain. Rinse. Drain, again. Cool.
- Step 5 Clean, dry, and separate the kale leaves. Drizzle 1 T. extra-virgin olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and the juice of 1/2 a lemon over the kale. Massage the kale and oil mixture aggressively. You want to soften the fibers in the kale.
- Step 6 Combine the warm grapes (the salad is best if the grapes are a bit warm!), grains, onions, half the roasted walnuts and feta. Drizzle with another tablespoon of the balsamic vinegar, 2-3 T. extra-virgin olive oil, Toss. Generously season with salt and freshly-ground black pepper. Garnish with reserved roasted walnuts.
