We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last

a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. 

                      —Ray Bradbury

My good friend and neighbor, Gene, celebrated his 89th birthday the other day. There were a lot of people celebrating with him, too. Gene is a former science teacher at Long Beach Wilson and an all-around smart and good person. Sarah, his wife, hosted a jubilant family dinner on his birthday. Family and friends flooded the family Facebook page with cheers and good wishes or stopped by to offer their good wishes in person.

Juliet and I paid him a visit, too.

Juliet, ever elegant, was dressed to the nines in her vintage pink lamé jacket. Gene is high on her list of favorite people.  (The pup likes to party, too.)

Our birthday gift was  a box of cornmeal cupcakes decorated with blood orange slices that had been macerated in tangerine marmalade. (We used the wonderful marmalade Sarah gifted us from her kitchen. The marmalade was made from tangerines harvested from yet another neighbor’s tree picked just at the perfect point of ripeness. Clearly, it takes a neighborhood to make an exquisite jar of marmalade!)

The magic in this recipe is that, to get to the subtle not-too-sweet deliciousness of the corn muffins, you have to bite through a “candied”  blood orange slice. Those sweet contrasting textures make the recipe pop.

So, one more time, great good wishes, Gene. Party on!

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in The New Sugar and Spice Cookbook by Samantha Seneviratne. The cookbook is available from your local bookstore or from Amazon here. Here is a link to the original recipe as it appeared in Fine Cooking Magazine: Marmalade Cake/Fine Cooking Magazine.

These muffins are at their best eaten on the day you bake them.

Here is the recipe.

When I was growing up, “Eat your spinach” was touted as the route to good health. I can still sing the Popeye spinach song, too: “…I’m strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.” (Damn. That little earworm will be in my head all day now.)

Today, it’s “Eat your blueberries,”  and with good reason. Blueberries are a spectacularly healthy food. (No disrespect to spinach, by the way.)

A North American native first commercially cultivated here in the early 1900s, blueberries are rich in Vitamin C and Vitamin K. They are rich in flavonoids—an antioxidant  widely credited with protecting memory and fighting inflammation. They’re good for your waistline, too;  a cup of blueberries has only 84 calories and comes in low on the glycemic index. No wonder blueberries are often called a superfood!

To befit their importance, blueberries have their own month (July) and their own emoji.

And about those emojis… I confess to being among the pitifully uninformed on emojis and their origins. As it turns out, the word “emoji” is actually a  combination of Japanese words for picture and character. Emojis trace their beginnings to a popular meme on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. The father of the emoji was Shigetaka Kurita, a digital artist whose original work is now among the collections at the Museum of Modern Art. CNN did an interesting piece on Kurita; here is a link: CNN Shigetaka Kurita profile.

Fast forward to today and the current state of emojis, I didn’t realize that “official” emojis were a thing. Apparently, in an effort to standardize emoji use, there is an organization called  the Unicode Consortium. To date, the Consortium has recognized more than three thousand standard emojis, the blueberry emoji among them. They are scheduled to add more in 2022 including  a hand forming a heart.

This recipe is adapted from the cookbook Zoe Bakes Cakes. The cookbook is available from your local bookstore and on Amazon here..

Ah, Moosewood!

I owe them big time. I honed so many of my cooking skills on their cookbooks, beginning with  Mollie Katzen’s delightful handwritten and self-illustrated Moosewood Cookbook back in the 1970s.. Katzen introduced me to everything from hummus to banana raita. The book is a treasure.

Over the years, I’ve continued to collect Moosewood cookbooks. There are now fourteen cookbooks in their series. The cookbooks occupy a special place on my bookshelves and are dog-eared from use. Leafing through them now, they conjure up memories of my early days as a home cook when everything was new to me and the possibilities were seemingly endless.

Moosewood Restaurant, if you haven’t heard of it, is located in Ithaca, New York, and is a renowned natural foods restaurant. Established  by a group of friends in 1973 in a renovated brick school building, the Moosewood collective is widely-recognized as a pioneer in the natural foods  and organic foods movement– recognized by Bon Appetit Magazine as one of the thirteen most influential restaurants in the 20th Century and winner of  numerous James Beard awards. Katzen’s original Moosewood Cookbook, considered by some to be the bible of the natural foods movement, was named to the James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook Hall of Fame. Millions of copies of her book have been sold over the years and a 40th Anniversary edition of the book is available through your local bookstore or through Amazon.

Here is a soup recipe, Ybor City Potato and Garbanzo Soup, from the Collective’s 1999 cookbook Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. (Ybor City is a Cuban neighborhood in Tampa Florida. The city was once the cigar-making capital of the United States.) This spicy soup is chock full of potatoes and garbanzos and served in a saffron broth. Whatever you do, don’t skip the saffron; its flavor makes a world of difference in this soup.

Here’s the recipe. It is from the Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special cookbook.