Food, Photography and Bons Mots
I’m late to the party. (What’s new? I know.) To be honest, I didn’t even know I liked soft polenta, but it is pretty wonderful, particularly mixed with generous amounts of butter and grated asiago (or parmesan) cheese. In this dish, the polenta is topped…
“When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.” –Rodney Dangerfield Close your eyes and this soup is absolutely delicious. Stare at it in your bowl…not so much. How do you write about (let alone photograph) a…
Here I sit on a blustery December day in Southern California enjoying a hot cup of my favorite Darjeeling tea and a slice of this spice cake. Sweet Juliet is curled up at my feet enjoying a quiet nap. Mmmm. Life is good.
I think you will enjoy this cake. I was drawn to bake it because the original recipe was one of Deborah Madison’s recipes and I’m a fan of her cooking. She is a James Beard Award-winning chef and is the author of some wonderful cookbooks: In My Kitchen, The Greens Cookbook, The Savory Way and others. Madison, pictured below, opened the famous San Francisco Bay Area Greens Restaurant in 1979 where she was one of the pioneers in the farm-to-table movement.
Even with Madison’s seal of approval, I was surprised just how really good this cake is. It has warm spicy flavors from cinnamon, cloves and allspice. It has a generous amount of dates, raisins and walnuts, and it is baked in a rich persimmon batter. It would be a great addition to a holiday breakfast table and would make a pretty wonderful hostess gift.
Persimmons, by the way, are thought to have originated in China where writers have sometimes used the fruit as a metaphor for life, writing that it is “tasteless and bitter when young, soft and sweet once mature.” Sounds good to me, soft and sweet baby boomer that I am.
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This recipe is adapted from a Deborah Madison recipe. Here is a link to Amazon where you can buy her book:
Local Flavors by Deborah Madison.
Here is a link to the original recipe from which this recipe was adapted: kitchn: Spiced Persimmon Tea Cake.
Raise your hands if you don’t like baked beans. Nobody? I thought so. This baked bean recipe has it all. It shines with the best beans you can buy but it is also great with plain Jane canned beans. (I used Rancho Gordo…
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – And Wilderness is Paradise enow.” –Omar Khayyam Omar Khayyam had it right. Bread elevates the soul. Studies…
‘Tis the season.
You can’t have Thanksgiving (or Friendsgiving–what a great idea!) without cranberry sauce and this cranberry sauce recipe is a stunner with a bit of a southwestern kick–chiles.
Cranberries are, of course, a part of America’s history. Reportedly, cranberries were served at the first Thanksgiving celebration although there is no proof that actually happened. Whether pilgrims actually ate cranberries or not at that first feast, cranberries were, without a doubt, a distinct part the early American food story. One of only a few native North American fruits, these bitter-sweet fruits were an important part of the native American diet, often served with venison.
Once cranberries caught on among the new arrivals in America, subsequent American settlers co-opted the fruit and turned it into the ubiquitous sauce that graces just about every Thanksgiving table–sometimes, sadly, as that ridged gelatinous mass that wiggles out of the can onto the serving plate.
This year, “just say no” –with apologies to Nancy Reagan– to that canned cranberry abomination and make this recipe or the one that I posted last year or anything other than the canned stuff. Anything! ( Not My Mother’s Cranberry Sauce)
Here is yet another cranberry sauce recipe from Blue Cayenne (Cranberry Sauce with Jalapeños).
It is not like you don’t have access to a lot of fresh cranberries to use in your Thanksgiving recipes. Americans consume about four hundred million pounds of cranberries each year with twenty percent of those cranberries being consumed during the Thanksgiving holiday. Today, about one thousand cranberry bogs provide the cranberries to meet the nation’s cranberry needs–a lot of those bogs being located in the Pacific Northwest. Competition is beginning to creep into the cranberry market, though, with imports entering the market from Canada and Chile.
For the most part, all American cranberries are wet harvested. This means the bogs are flooded with water and the cranberries that float to the top are scooped up and sold by cranberry farmers. How cool is that?
An interesting website, kitchenproject.com, has a lot of information about cranberries and takes a kind of grim (and funny–if you enjoy dark humor) view the fruit: “Cranberries are like the ex-wives of the fruit world. It’s love at first sight, and then wham ! They hit you with an almost violent, face-contorting blast of bitterness that changes the way you ever thought about it.”
Whoa! Someone at kitchenproject.com needs a hug.
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Here is the link to the original Martha Rose Shulman recipe: Martha Rose Shulman’s Cranberry Sauce with Chiles
Want to really tell somebody off? Call them a polentoni (a big polenta). You read that right–a big polenta.That’s the nasty insult that southern Italians lob at northern Italians, or, at least, they did back in the day. Why’s that? It seems to have a…
I’m enjoying a fair amount of Middle Eastern/North African cooking of late. I love the bold flavors and the high-intensity colors of the dishes from that region. Brings back good memories, too. When the world was a gentler place, my husband and I did a…
Happy Halloween from those of us here at Blue Cayenne.
Juliet, our chief quality officer, is particularly into the Halloween party mood today. She is all dressed up in her frilly Halloween collar and can’t wait until the doorbell starts ringing tonight. Did I mention that Juliet is the most social pup on the planet? She loves everybody–even the little ghouls and goblins who venture out on Halloween dressed as Moana or Jack Sparrow or Big Bird. The way Juliet sees it, it’s all good.
While you are passing out Milky Way bars to the trick-or-treaters, why not make this pretty banana-cardamom upside down cake for yourself? No costume required. Well, maybe an apron. If any of the little goblins ask, you can tell them that you are dressed in honor of Julia Child. That should get you either stares of incomprehension or “just give me the candy, lady” tantrums.
This wonderful little cake is a cinch to make. You are in and out in about an hour.
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This recipe was adapted from one by Gail Simmons that appeared on The Splendid Table website. Here is the link: Gail Simmons’ Banana-Cardamom Upside Down Cake
This is not a pizza. I know. I know. It sure looks like a pizza and we all know that old duck test: “If it looks like a duck…” Nevertheless, this is a crostata. A crostata is a rustic Italian baked tart, the…
