Food, Photography and Bons Mots
Summer! Here is a bit of mood music to set the tone: Joe Hisaishi’s One Summer’s Day. How pretty is that? This is my favorite time of the year for cooking. Summer fruits and vegetables are ripe and plentiful in the farmer’s markets. I just…
Salad Days! No. Not the Shakespearean kind of salad days full of reminiscences and regrets. You remember— Cleopatra lamenting her youthful indiscretions. “My salad days, When I was green in judgment: cold in blood, To say as I said then! ” Instead, these salad…
Happy Fourth of July to those of you reading this in the United States. What could be more quintessentially American than a banana cake with salted caramel glaze? OK. I know that a hot dog with everything is pretty standard Fourth of July fare. But…
Happy summer! Too hot to spend much time at the stove? These Thai Corn Fritters may be just what you need. A short cook on the griddle and you have a tasty appetizer, entree or side. (OK. I’ll fess up. I eat these for breakfast,…
This dessert soars! Truly. If you read Blue Cayenne regularly, you know that I have a love affair with plums. I can’t be sure, but I think I would choose plums if I were stranded on a dessert desert island. That and vanilla ice cream and…
“Beebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie” Recognize that lyric? It’s classic Prairie Home Companion. Anyone else miss lazy Sunday afternoons spent in front of the radio listening to that show? Truth be told, I hated the twangy music but loved the gentle humor. If you are unfamiliar with the…
Oh, how I wish I had a vegetable garden! I would try my hand at growing everything. Gene, my good friend and neighbor, has a flourishing vegetable garden this year. On occasion, he lets me come down and dig around to get my fix.…
Need a little spice in your life? (Who doesn’t?) This spicy pozole soup should do the trick. Pozole is the Spanish word for hominy. Hominy is a traditional ingredient in Mexican cooking. It’s use, in fact, dates back to the kitchens of the Aztecs when…
This is a very good vinaigrette. Glorious, in fact. The hot new chef, Samin Nosrat, featured this salad dressing recipe in a recent New York Times Magazine food piece titled “Best Green Salad in the World.” That kind of high praise made me think this…
