Made this. Loved it.

But why cook with alcohol?

According to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, alcohol bonds with the fat and water molecules in your food and carries flavor and aroma. In other words, in a creamy tomato sauce like the one in Penne alla Vodka, the vodka makes the dish smell and taste better, adding brightness and balance to the dish. This only enhances your cooking when the alcohol is added in small quantities, though. According to McGee, too much alcohol and you smell the alcohol and taste its bitterness rather than the aromas and flavors of the food.

So, if you have a lot of extra vodka on your hands, you will just have to drink it rather than cook with it!

I hope you enjoy this dish. I found myself wishing I had made a bigger batch.

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This recipe is adapted from one that appears in The America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook. The cookbook is available on Amazon. Here is a link: Amazon.

Happy Year of the Pig. I’m a bit late cooking for Chinese New Year. Life got in the way.

Here is a wonderful stir fry served with noodles that I’m pretty sure you will enjoy. No pigs here, though, just a great melange of vegetables.

Stir fry, by the way, is a cooking technique that is believed to have originated a couple thousand years ago during the Han dynasty in China, perhaps first used in roasting tea leaves. It was a pricey way to cook, though, in that it required the use of expensive oil and fuel. As a result, the technique was not widely used until later.

The term “stir fry” was first introduced in the West by  a physician/cook named Buwei Yang Chao in a 1945 cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. Her book was an important early book of authentic Chinese recipes published in English. Chao’s Harvard linguist husband, Yuen Ren, and her daughter Rulan assisted in the translation and coined the terms stir fry and pot sticker.  Author Pearl Buck wrote the preface to the book and did a lot of the proofreading.  Buck reportedly was so intrigued by the recipes that she interrupted her proofreading mid-task to start cooking in her kitchen. Buck later remarked that she would like to nominate Chao for a Nobel Peace Prize, saying “What better road to universal peace is there than to gather around the table where new and delicious dishes are set forth, dishes which, though untasted by us, we are destined to enjoy and love.”

This recipe is adapted from one that appeared in the New York Times. Here is the link: Stir-Fried Tofu and Peppers.

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day. Roses.

These sweet little roses are made with apples, puff pastry, a wee bit of apricot jam and a smidge of creativity.

Trust me. You can do this. Despite looking intricate, these apple roses are a cinch to make and they make an impressive presentation for someone you care about.

To do Valentine’s Day right, you’ll need a poem to go with your apple roses. I’m partial to this one by Mary Oliver. I only have one rose bush in my yard, but, like Oliver, I’m pretty sure she sings when nobody’s listening.

Here is a video that explains how to do it: How To Make An Apple Rose.

Happy Valentine’s Day from the executive team here at Blue Cayenne. That would be me and Juliet.

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