Wishing you and yours a happy Thanksgiving!

Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. Here are a couple of Blue Cayenne’s most-requested holiday favorites: https://bluecayenne.com/two-holiday-favorites-from-blue-cayennes-archives-cranberry-relish-and-squash-apples-and-cranberries.

You don’t want to miss these great recipes…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.

OK. We missed it. February 23 was National Banana Bread Day. Bummer.

Here’s a way to make up for our banana gaffe–combine bananas with your seasonal pumpkin bread. (National Pumpkin Bread Day was October 30. We missed that one, too.)

First commercially imported to the United States in the 1870s, bananas have been a staple in American kitchens for a relatively short time. Spoilage was always an issue. In the 1930s commercial leavenings–baking powder and baking soda–became widely available to home cooks and it wasn’t long until American housewives figured out that “spoiled” bananas could be incorporated into a tasty and economical cake.

The Chiquita Banana Company (originally the United Fruit Company) was a major early player in the importation of bananas to the U.S. To get their product onto American tables, the company launched an aggressive advertising campaign that included this delightful 1940s cartoon: Chiquita Banana Cartoon.  Who knew you could rhyme equator and refrigerator?

This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the Taste of Home site. You can find the original recipe here.

You can find a number of other delicious banana breads and cakes on Blue Cayenne. Just type “banana” into the search bar or click here.

I’ve written about Yotam Ottolenghi here before. He is one of my favorite cookbook authors and his newer vegetable cookbook Flavor, written with Ixta Belfrfage, has quickly earned a prominent place on my cookbook shelves.

Ottolenghi has written a number of best-selling cookbooks. Flavor is the third in his vegetable series after previously-published Plenty and Plenty More. In Flavor, you’ll find a lot of recipes showcasing Middle Eastern ingredients (Ottolenghi is Israeli by birth) but also recipes with many other international influences. Flavor is available to purchase at your local bookstore or on Amazon.

Part of Ottolenghi’s “magic,” as a chef and recipe developer, is his enthusiasm for presenting foods in a vast variety of ways. Interestingly, in the introduction to Flavor, he confesses to grappling with the pressure to come up with new ways to present vegetables: “I must confess to a small niggling doubt that creeps in now and then. How many more ways are there to fry an eggplant, to slice a tomato, to squeeze a lemon, or to roast a cauliflower? How many more secrets are there to be discovered in a handful of lentils or a bowl of polenta? The answer, I’m delighted to report, is many.”

I own all of his cookbooks and I’m in awe of the number of very different recipes he presents for eggplant, for example. I confess that eggplant was not always one of my favorite foods. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t in a league of kale for me but it wasn’t a vegetable I would call a favorite. Ottolenghi has changed my mind. 

 This Stuffed Eggplant in Curry and Coconut Dal is a stellar recipe.  You can find the link to the original recipe (published in The Guardian)  here.