Food, Photography and Bons Mots
You want raisins with your spaghetti? Turns out that you definitely do. This Spaghetti With Spinach, Pine Nuts and Raisins is a knock-it-out-of-the-park variation on traditional spaghetti recipes. There is the silky smoothness of the noodles, the crunch of the pine nuts, the healthfulness of…
Like suitors proffering lovely flower bouquets, young men stood along the side of the road offering beautiful bunches of fresh green asparagus. It was a long-ago trip and we were on the road from Rabat to Tangier. I was enjoying the green countryside, but I…
It’s National Chocolate Cake Day! Woo-hoo!
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 a chocolate vinegar cake. Here is the link: Nana’s Vinegar Cake
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.
“When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I…
Oh glorious banana bread! How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I’ve certainly baked my share of banana breads over the years and I’ve posted several very good recipes here on Blue Cayenne. Just type “banana bread” into the search box on…
Apple pie is as American as…er…apple pie.
Or, maybe not.
It turns out that there are no apples native to the United States (except crabapples). Zero. Zip. None.
Apples are believed to have originated in Asia.
Apples were introduced to America by the Jamestown colonists. Things moved quickly after that. though. By the 1800s more than 14,000 varieties of apples were being grown here. (Today about one hundred apple varieties dominate the American commercial market. Gala apples are the number one crop and Red Delicious apples (yuck!) are the second largest crop. China is the world’s top apple grower. The United States is second with a projected production of 10.7 billion pounds of apples here in 2022-2023. (That’s a whole lot of apples!)
We Americans are not slouches when it comes to consuming apples, either. Apples are the most popular fruit here with the average American consuming more than 26 pounds of apples (in all forms) per person per year.
There are good apple recipes. There are great apple recipes. This is a WOW apple recipe.
This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Shauna Sever’s Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland cookbook. The book is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.Here is a link to the original recipe: Apple Slice.
This is how I prepared the Apple Slice in my kitchen.
As the old Southern New Year’s saying goes, “Peas for pennies, greens for dollars, cornbread for gold.” In other words, these foods, when eaten on New Year’s Day, promise prosperity. My mother was in the black-eyed-pea school of Southern New Year’s cooks. I always wondered…
This creamy Cauliflower and Zucchini Soup is just the mug of soup you need to warm your body and spirit during this winter’s chill. It’s definitely soup weather–even here in relatively warm southern California. Cauliflower, of course, is good for you, too, as you move…
This is THE cookie of the season as far as we are concerned. (Juliet and I did some rigorous testing. We have three extra pounds between us to prove it.)
Cookies, by the way, are believed to have been a delicious invention of bakers hundreds of years ago as a tool for checking oven temperatures.
Blue Cayenne is fortunate to have an onsite oven tester, our Chief Quality Officer (CQO), Sweet Juliet.
Here is a photo of Blue Cayenne’s chief cookie tester in her season’s finery–deep in thought, no doubt, about those lemon cookies.
This Lemon Meltaway recipe is a Yossy Arefi recipe from The New York Times. You can find the original recipe here. Arefi is a gifted baker who, in addition to writing for The Times, is the author of two wonderful cookbooks, Sweeter Off The Vine and Snacking Cakes. Both books are 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 a Holiday Cheese Ball–perfect for a party or a personal indulgence. Here is the link: Bits and…
