Blue Cayenne

I made this Indian mushroom curry for an important party recently. What a great recipe!

I remember eating a lot of wonderful food in India, but I don’t remember mushrooms. So it was with some surprise I found Mushroom Masala Curry on the buffet at Costa Mesa’s renowned Royal Khyber restaurant. Then, as I was developing my menu for Friendsgiving this year, I came across this recipe made in an Instant Pot.  It is a pretty easy recipe and I was pleasantly surprised how good it was. 

Apparently, cooking with mushrooms has become more popular in India in recent years. You can find a lot of Indian mushroom recipes online and some general articles about the mushrooms available to cooks in India. This recipe uses regular white or brown mushrooms but India is also the source of some exotic varieties.

If you have a moment, here is a beautiful short video about morel mushroom hunting in Kashmir, India, in the Himalayas. Not only can you learn about “hunting” the morels in the mountains but you can see some of the beautiful Kashmiri forests. The mushroom gatherer in this video, Shareef, appears to be a delightfully gentle man like many of the people we came to know in Kashmir when we visited.  Here’s the link: Rare Mushrooms of Kashmir.

Here is a link to the original online recipe here.  Archana Mundhe also has a cookbook, The Essential Indian Instant Pot. The cookbook is available on Amazon here.

Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldie But Goodie recipe is for the classic Pimento Cheese Sandwiches. You’ll find it here.

You don’t want to miss this great recipe…again.

Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.

And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne.. If you are in the mood to cook (or eat!), we hope you will take a moment to look at the many excellent recipes we have featured.

It was a party in a dessert bowl.

We were celebrating the happy birthday of my neighbor and good friend Sarah, and I needed a light dessert to follow an ambitious Mexican menu. 

Sarah loves everything lemon, so I prepared this Melissa Clark (New York Times) recipe for a No-Bake Lemon Custard with Strawberries. 

It was an amazing dessert with all the perfect custard notes and a pitch-perfect lemon flavor. The macerated strawberries made for a beautiful presentation and a counter flavor to the lemon. (In the interest of fully-vetting this recipe, I’ve since enjoyed the custard with blueberries and raspberries and with a mixture of berries. Those berries are a wonderful complement to the lemony custard, too.)

Here is the recipe. You can find the original recipe on the New York Times recipe site here.

Interestingly, this is a custard made without rennet or gelatin. When you add the lemon juice to the cream and let the mixture chill, the magic happens and the custard sets. 

Here’s the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.