Blue Cayenne

This is superb! Easy, too. 

There are recipes for variations on this dish all over the Internet. Apparently, interest in this dish caught fire in 2018 when it was posted online by a talented Finnish blogger named Jenni Hayrinen. Here is a link to the author and the original recipe: Jenni Hayrinen’s Feta and Cherry Tomatoes.

Here is the Baked Feta With Cherry Tomatoes and Garlic as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

Banana Bread is having a moment. It was the most searched-for recipe online in America in 2020 according to CNBC.

This hot weather has done a number on my bananas; their skins were black and their flesh was mushy. In other words, they were at their perfect sweetness!  Clearly, it was time to make Banana Bread.

While I have a lot of great Banana Bread recipes, I’m always looking for the ultimate recipe. Someone on one of the food bulletin boards I read was singing the praise of this Dorie Greenspan recipe and I decided to give it a try. The original recipe is from Greenspan’s Baking With Dorie cookbook. The cookbook is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

This recipe makes a lot of bread (a 9 inch by 13 inch baking pan full!), so be ready to share it with guests or to freeze some. Or, of course, there could be a total Banana Bread binge on your part. No one’s judging.

(This is not Blue Cayenne’s first rodeo with Banana Bread, either. Click on this link and you will find a number of wonderful variations on this treat: Banana Bread.)

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

Put everything down. Make this soup. Now.

It is that good. In fact, it is a fantastic soup—rich, umami-packed, beautiful in the bowl.

The most important factor with this soup is, of course, its full flavor. A close second is its absolute beauty.  The soup shimmers in the bowl–red tomato disperses itself across the surface of the soup interrupted only by gleaming drops of quality olive oil and butter.

This is an interestingly-spiced soup, too. As you look at the ingredient list for this soup (below), you may be surprised to find caraway seeds and dill listed. The caraway and dill give this soup has a kind of Eastern European vibe.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia about caraway. In Germanic folklore, caraway seeds were believed to protect children from witches when placed under the child’s bed? Who knew?

This recipe is adapted from Joshua McFadden’s Grains For Every Season. The cookbook is available through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

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