Food, Photography and Bons Mots
I’ll admit it. The pumpkin push is beginning to get to me. I like pumpkin, but… There are sixty pumpkin items on the shelves at Trader Joe’s! You read that right. Sixty! And Trader Joe’s is not alone in its bid to promote pumpkin…
Mark Twain wrote that “A cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.” Funny. Think about it. Cauliflower: B.A., M.A., Ph.D.–and that is just one of those plain vanilla white cauliflowers. Who even knows how many degrees one of those splendid romanesco cauliflowers…
This lemon-spice cake is my recipe gift to you today. It’s a visiting cake.
The occasion?
This week marks Blue Cayenne’s second birthday. Woo-hoo! Let’s party!
But, what in the world is a visiting cake?
Cooking diva Dorie Greenspan (Dorie’s Cookies, Baking Chez Moi, Around My French Table) recently wrote about “visiting cakes” for an On The Road column in The New York Times Magazine. A visiting cake is a gift cake, one that is necessarily sturdy, durable and full of long-lasting flavor. Historically, a lot of visiting cakes were fruit cakes, but we’re not going to go there.
The lemon-spice visiting cake that Greenspan includes in her Times piece is perfect for a visiting cake. Its texture is pound-cakeish (I’m sure that must be a word). It is flavored with bold spices (ginger and cardamom) and hand-rubbed lemon sugar. And, its moist crumb is locked in by a generous brushing of melted orange marmalade.
I can tell you from personal experience (trust me here) that the cake tastes great for days after it is baked. In fact, it is at its very best on the second and third day after you bake it.
But, back to our birthday…Both of us here at Blue Cayenne–me and my Chief Quality Officer Juliet–thank you for reading our posts and for your generous words of encouragement. A special thanks goes to Al Nomura, my talented photography mentor, who (amazingly) has never lost faith in my ability to improve as a photographer.
Truth be told, Juliet and I are having an awfully good time with this one hundred ninety-one post (and counting) project. We’re eating some very good food, too, and it is always more fun when you can share the recipes.
Thanks for visiting.
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This recipe is adapted from a Dorie Greenspan recipe. Here is the link: Dorie Greenspan’s Lemon-Spice Visiting Cake
Oxi! (or is it Nai! ?) I could never keep yes and no straight in Greek. (Could be a dangerous confusion in any language. I know.) These Greek Baked Beans are delicious. I just made another big (for me) Rancho Gordo bean buy and…
There are a lot of paths to the same destination. (Sound pretty Zen? I’m having one of those mornings.) I previously posted an excellent recipe for Parker House Rolls on Blue Cayenne (Here), but learned this new recipe in a Sur La Table class this…
For regular people, this is a wonderful dish. For artichoke aficionados this dish makes the earth move.
This torta has lots of meaty artichokes (two pounds of hearts) suspended in an airy parmesan cheese and egg custard.
Artichokes and egg custard. Wow.
This recipe is an adaptation of one from Cara Mangini’s wonderful cookbook, The Vegetable Butcher. (Amazon )
As you know if you read Blue Cayenne, I’m a patsy for a great lead into a recipe and Mangini caught my eye with this one: “Tortas are Italian sweet or savory cakes, tarts, or pies–they are made differently in each region of Italy. This one comes from my great-grandmother, who was Ligurian, although it is not traditional…It has a savory filling of baby artichokes, eggs and parmesan with a very unusual breadcrumb crust. It is one of my family’s most prized recipes and I’m telling you, it really is special. I am going to guess that you haven’t had anything like it.”
Ligurian food? I confess to being pretty uninformed about Ligurian cooking, but that is about to change after eating this artichoke torta.
Bathed by sea breezes and blessed with mineral-rich soils, Ligurians are known for the herbs they grow (especially basil and rosemary) and the cultivation of high quality wine grapes, olives (and olive oil), porcini mushrooms and pine nuts–crops often grown in picturesque terraced fields that overlook the sea. From what I read, we get all sorts of great dishes from the region– pesto alla Genovese, focaccia, minestrone and this succulent artichoke tart. (We have a lot of cooking to do, people.)
Liguria, by the way, is that crescent-shaped sliver land that makes up northwestern Italy. Located between Piedmont and Tuscany and sharing a border with France, Genoa is its capital and the region, sometimes called the Italian Riviera, overlooks the Ligurian Sea. But you already know about Liguria even if you don’t realize it. Liguria, with its rainbow-colored houses precariously perched atop a rocky outcropping on the edge of the sea, is the subject of that ubiquitous travel poster/photograph you see in just about every doctor’s office.
Give this recipe a try. If you enjoy it as much as I did, be sure to offer up a toast to Mangini’s Ligurian great-grandmother. She was some cook!
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This week’s farmers’ market had the most beautiful grape tomatoes in the history of the world. Impulsively, I bought three baskets. Whoa! What does one person (and a small sweet dog) do with three baskets of ripe tomatoes? So, this morning I bucked myself up…
Pucker up for this one. This Lemon Buttermilk Ice recipe is adapted from one authored by Steven Satterfield, executive chef/co-owner at Atlanta’s Miller Union and author of the Root To Leaf cookbook. ( Amazon: Root To Leaf ) Satterfield is a James Beard Foundation award winner…
Everyone loves potato salad. Right? Add a dash of Irish heritage and you move right past love to a near obsession.
That would be me.
True. I haven’t taken the Ancestry.com DNA test. (I’m waiting for that proverbial Irish bargain sale.) Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure my Irish bona fides are strong. My maiden name was Mc Gee.
So, you ask, just what kinds of potatoes does a good Irish girl obsess over?
Answer: Name a potato dish. ANY potato dish. You have to remember that, at the time of the Irish Potato Blight in 1845, the average Irish peasant ate five to ten pounds of potatoes per day. Love of the tuber is in our jeans genes.
To be perfectly honest, I eat mashed potatoes right out of the pan and then scrape the scant leftovers from the sides of the pan for breakfast. I obsess over a good colcannon. I can embarass myself loading up a baked potato. Make potato pancakes or French fries or home-made potato chips and I’m there.
Just in time for LaborDay, here is an adaptation of a potato salad recipe that just ran in Melissa Clark’s column in the NY Times.
It is very good. I should know.
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This recipe was adapted from a Melissa Clark recipe that appeared in the New York Times. Here is the link: Mashed Potato Salad with Scallions and Herbs.
John Keats wrote that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” So it is with this beautiful salad. The colors are intense. The flavors and textures are delightful. There is joy on your plate. But why do certain foods, like this beautiful salad, tempt…
