Blue Cayenne

Love to try interesting-sounding new recipes? Me, too! Get a recipe failure now and then?  Me, too!

All may not be lost.

I enjoy experimenting with new recipes. Sometimes, a recipe just doesn’t appeal to my taste or it lacks the visual appeal that is so important to me in food. Occasionally, I have a real failure.

 The other day it was the latter. A. Real. Failure. 

I had bought a beautiful cabbage at my local farmers market. I tried a recipe that featured a whole roasted cabbage. The recipe  just didn’t work for me and there I was with a whole roasted cabbage on my hands. What to do?

Serendipitously, writers on a site I read regularly on Facebook  (Cookbooks of Interest) were posting about a recipe from Josh McFadden’s much-acclaimed cookbook, Six Seasons. That recipe they said was perfect—easy, delicious, healthy. One poster wrote: “My husband told me that I can make this soup any time. So much flavor from such simple ingredients.” Wrote  another, “This was absolutely delicious on this cool cloudy day. I couldn’t keep my spoon out of it. The sweet and melty cabbage– oh my.”

So, I decided to “repurpose” my abundance of roasted cabbage. Cabbage Soup With Onion and Farro it would be!

“Oh My!,” indeed. 

The soup is delicious.

You may be curious about the farro featured in this recipe if you haven’t cooked with it before. Farro is a nutty-flavored form of wheat grain. According to Harold McGee’s seminal book on all things food-related  (On Food and Cooking) farro (or emmer wheat) was probably the second type of wheat to be cultivated after einkorn wheat. It could be grown in warmer climates than einkorn wheat  and became the most cultivated form of wheat in the area from the Near East to Northern Africa until Roman times when it was superseded by durum and bread wheat. 

Six Seasons is available through your local bookstore or can be purchased on Amazon here.  By the way, I’m also finding Thrift Books to be a great source of new and used books. Here is the link: Thrift Books.

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

Pavlova:  A meringue-based “cake” with a soft marshmallow-like center and a crisp crust.

How good does that sound?

Throw in a story about a famed Russian ballerina and a century-long petty diplomatic dispute between Australia and New Zealand about the origin of the recipe and you have an interesting recipe, indeed! I don’t know about you, but I especially enjoy making a recipe that has an interesting back story.(Caesar Cardini’s Caesar Salad, Catherine de Medicis’ Macarons and Pimento Cheese Sandwiches come to mind.)

Must be that high school history teacher “phase” in my life. 

Some years ago, 2016 actually, Blue Cayenne featured a Pavlova recipe. Here is the link to that previous post Pavlova  complete with a photo of the recipe’s famous namesake ballerina decked out in a quirky swan costume. (Below,too,  you will find a photo of that delicious Lemon Curd and Berry”Pav” that we baked (and enjoyed) back in 2016.)

The other day, while searching the King Arthur Baking site, we found KAB’s simplified take on the pavlova batter and gave in to serious Pavlova cravings So, here we are with another Pavlova recipe and a simpler option for the meringue.

Here is still another iteration of this pavlova recipe, this time with mascarpone whipped cream (wow!), lemon curd and berries. I loved the color scheme of this one!

Here is King Arthur Baking’s simple Pavlova recipe as we prepared it in our kitchen. You can find the original recipe here.

I remember first encountering bok choy years ago on a trip to China. Whether we were in Bejing or in The Stone Forest, bok choy was on our plates. It’s a staple in the Asian kitchen. Today, back in the United States,  bok choy is everywhere from your local bodega to the local Costco. 

If you haven’t tried it, you are in for a real treat. Bok choy  is a type of Chinese cabbage. It’s flavor is sometimes described as spinach-like. Believed to have originated as early as the 5th Century AD, bok choy is believed to be related to cabbage, broccoli and kale. It is low calorie but rich in vitamins and minerals. It’s versatile, too; you’ll find it widely used in stir fries, soups, salads. It can be boiled, steamed and stir-fried. 

This is a delicious soup recipe featuring bok choy in a star anise-flavored broth. 

This recipe is from Hetty McKinnon’s  cookbook Tenderheart. You can order the book through your local bookstore or find it on Amazon here.

McKinnon, a James Beard Foundation finalist, is the author of a number of cookbooks including To Asia, With Love and  Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food. Brooklyn-based, you can find her work in The New York Times, Bon Appetit and The Guardian. 

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