Blue Cayenne

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 is a Spicy Fruit Salad that makes wonderful use of summer’s fruit bounty.  You will find a link to a recipe for Spicy Fruit Salad 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.

Need an easy but impressive dish for the end of the month?

This Asparagus in Puff Pastry just might fit the bill.

Don’t be put off by the puff pastry ingredient. There is no need to make your own. You’ll find puff pastry in the frozen section of most supermarkets. It is very easy to work with. Just defrost, shape, fill and bake. 

My local Jon’s Fresh Marketplace carries little 5 inch by 5 inch squares of puff pastry, the size you’ll need for this recipe. If you can’t find the pre-cut squares in your market, you could, of course, buy the larger sheets of puff pastry and cut them to size. 

You can find a lot of Asparagus and Puff Pastry recipes online. This particular take on the dish is adapted from a recipe that appears on a site called The Bread Stone Ovens Company. You can find their recipe here.

By the way, if this recipe emboldens you to work with puff pastry, you can find another great recipe on Blue Cayenne. That one is for sweet Puff Pastry Pinwheels and you can find it here.The pinwheels are beautiful. 

I’m a salad person through and through.

I have six cookbooks on my bookshelves that are dedicated entirely to salads. I have a new one on order. When I buy a new cookbook, one of the first sections I check out is the salad section.

To me a salad is essential to make a meal, a thing of beauty, a health food and on and on.

This salad from Yotam Ottolenghi’s extraordinary cookbook Jerusalem is all of the above. Plus there is the tart bite of the sumac and chile flakes and the delightful crunch of the almonds and pita.

Don’t let the sumac keep you from trying this recipe. It is available at most supermarkets, at Trader Joe’s, and, of  course, at all Middle Eastern markets. Sumac is usually used in powdered form and is ground from the berries of the flowering sumac plant. Interestingly, sumac is a distant cousin of the cashew and the mango. If you want to know more,  you can find a link to a  thorough article about sumac from Eater: here.

Make this one!

You can buy his cookbook at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.  Interestingly, on Amazon the cookbook is rated 5 stars by 87% of the 4913 reviewers. There are only 45 grumpy reviewers who give the book a 1 star rating and most of those are people whose book arrived damaged.