Blue Cayenne

There is a surprise in every delicious bite of this unusual salad!

The big surprise here is a big schmear of softened goat cheese and cream cheese hiding under this pretty pile of greens and golden beets. 

More good news! There can be a real WOW factor with this salad; it lends itself to being very artfully arranged on a plate. 

I served this recently at a dinner party. My guests were curious when I served it. When I collected the plates, every  bit of the salads was eaten down to the last tiny microgreen. 

I’m listing the ingredients below, but not the quantities. This recipe is very flexible. I’ll leave the quantities up to you, the size of your party and your taste. 

It’s the season for gift giving. 

Here’s an idea: Gift a snacking cake.  Your gift will be as unique as it will be delicious.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in Chetna Masan’s great cookbook, The Cardamom Trail. You can find the book at your local bookstore or on Amazon here. The book’s target subject is baking both sweet and savory foods (many of them European classics) with spices ranging from cardamom to cloves to tamarind and fenugreek. These were the spices traded centuries ago along the ancient trade route often referred to as “The Cardamom Trail.”

The cookbook’s author, Chetna Masan, was a Great British Bake-Off contestant. She was born in India but currently lives (and bakes) in Great Britain. In the forward to her book, Makan explains that she often takes a classic European recipe and adds Indian spices like cardamom to mix things up. This, for example, is a delicious “take” on traditional carrot cake. 

The cardamom spice used in this recipe, if you are unfamiliar with it, is the world’s third most expensive spice–after saffron and vanilla. Indigenous to India, the spice was grown only in India until around 1900 when German immigrants exported it to Guatemala. (Guatemala is now the world’s major producer of the spice.)  Today, according to Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking, a significant percentage of the world’s crop is consumed in Arab countries (for Cardamom coffee) and by Nordic countries where the spice is used extensively in baking.

If you are really a fan of this spice (as I am), here is a link to an interesting 7-minute video about cardamom growers in India: Cardamom Production in India. The harvesting of the spice is difficult and crops are increasingly threatened by climate change. That means, of course, that the world’s third most expensive spice is likely to get a whole lot more expensive in coming years. 

Here is the recipe for Carrot and Banana Spiced Cake as I prepared it in my kitchen and a link to the original recipe on the author’s web page: Carrot and Banana Cake.

I needed some comfort food this week and this baked Frittata was perfect.

First, it’s beautiful. The appearance of food is important to me. In my kitchen, the colors and textures of food (not to mention the plating)  play an important part in my appreciation of food. The beautiful swirls of spinach and the specks of bright red pepper contrast so beautifully against the pale yellow egg custard in this dish.

This frittata is delicious.  While the flavor is mild, there is a lot going on inside the custard with the savory additions–onions, peppers,  goat cheese, and on and on. You could add other vegetables to your taste. I’m thinking mushrooms would be a great addition. I made this frittata with “Sweet Pointed Peppers” from Costco. They were sold by the bag and imported from Canada. They were so beautiful that I just had to buy them. Initially, I had planned to make them into a cream soup but decided they would be beautiful in this frittata. I’m thinking that poblano peppers would also work well in this recipe. 

Finally, this is a supremely easy dish to prepare. It can be on your table in under an hour. 

I paired a slice (OK. several slices) of this beauty with one of my friend Ellen Hoffman’s delicious rolls (recipe here.), a glass of rose and a Grisham novel.

This recipe is adapted from a Genevieve Ko recipe from The New York Times. You can find the original recipe here.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.