Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldie But Goodie recipe is perfect to celebrate spring and this year’s exceptional strawberry crop. This is a recipe for Strawberry-Pistachio Cake. Here’s the link: Pistachio-Strawberry Cake.

You don’t want to miss this great recipe…again.

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.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.

I don’t know about you, but corks don’t sound all that appetizing to me. Nevertheless, these chocholaty treats, Bouchons au Chocolat,  are basically called “little corks.” 

This Bouchon au Chocolat recipe is from Aleksandra Crapanzano’s wonderful cookbook Gateau: The Suprising Simplicity of French Cakes. Crapanzano is the recipient of a James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. She also wrote a food column for the Wall Street Journal for many years.  Her  book can be ordered through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. These bouchons are very very very chocolaty and the texture is delicate. They are  just the thing to treat yourself to as you wind down a busy day. 

My friend Joyce recently made a heritage trip to Japan with her daughter. From luxury hotels to rustic ryokans, they savored the sights and tastes of Japan. 

As dedicated foodies, Joyce and I talked a lot about Japanese food before her trip. While we were fascinated by the beauty and complexity of the kaiseki ryori haute cuisine for which Japan is famous, we also were intrigued by aspects of Japan’s yoshuku cuisine–Japan’s fusion food scene where foods like the egg salad sandos famously sold in Japan’s 7-Eleven Markets are enormously popular.

I savored every second of those food conversations; her  trip was a vicarious food journey into a cuisine that is largely unfamiliar to me. 

Fortunately for me, Joyce was willing to do a lot of food “research” on her trip–eating  a lot of spectacular Japanese food  and searching the markets of Kyoto and beyond for examples of foods like that Japanese egg salad sando that had caught our attention. (You can read about that sando search on Blue Cayenne  here.) When she returned, she also introduced me to Japanese Nama Chocolate, a creamy melt-in-your-mouth chocolate confection to die for! (Hoping to find a doable recipe for that!!!)

In the last couple of months, Joyce and I have  been playing with some Japanese recipes.Most recently, she brought me an elegant lunch feast of Ochazuke (green tea rice) accompanied by a glorious assortment of savory condiments and sauced with her mom’s miso “secret sauce.” Ochazuke, Joyce told me, was a dish she enjoyed at her mom’s table while growing up in Hawaii. The lunch she generously laid out on my table was elegant and delicious.  

So, as I was casting about for new recipes to feature on Blue Cayenne this month, I had Japanese food on my mind and this Japanese Potato Salad with Cucumbers, Carrots and Red Onion recipe caught my eye. As I searched the topic on the Internet, I discovered that Japanese Potato Salad is an exceedingly  popular dish there for bento picnics and lunchboxes. Who knew?

The slightly chunky mashed potato salad traces its origins back to the late 19th Century Meiji Period when Japan was opened up to western influences including western foods. In this case, Meiji chefs adapted the popular-at-the-time Eastern European Olivier (Russian) Salad to Japanese tastes. They subbed in Japanese mayonnaise, rice wine vinegar and fresh sliced cucumbers to great effect.

This Japanese Potato Salad recipe is adapted from a Serious Eats post. You can find the original post here.

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