Blue Cayenne

This is a beauty of a galette–redolent with lightly-caramelized onions, loaded with tender potatoes and sitting atop a layer of Boursin cheese and a generous crisp crust. There is a lot of love here.

A galette, by the way, is a rustic free-form tart from the French baking tradition. As the story goes, the galette dates back to Norman times when it was referred to as a “gale” or flat cake. Bon Appetit Magazine once wrote of the galette that it has that “Oh, I just threw this together” type of charm. Who doesn’t want that vibe at their table once in a while?

There is a lot of versatility with this galette, too. It could easily be the main event on your dinner plate or a hearty side. Or, pair it with an egg for breakfast. Or nibble it right off the tray as I’m doing right now.

As a bonus, this is an easy crust. Pretty, too.

This isn’t Blue Cayenne’s first rodeo insofar as galettes are concerned. Find an outstanding Tomato, Goat Cheese and Honey Galette here and a gorgeous fruit galette here. Come to think of it, why not try them all?

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Bake From Scratch Magazine (available here).

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last

a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. 

                      —Ray Bradbury

My good friend and neighbor, Gene, celebrated his 89th birthday the other day. There were a lot of people celebrating with him, too. Gene is a former science teacher at Long Beach Wilson and an all-around smart and good person. Sarah, his wife, hosted a jubilant family dinner on his birthday. Family and friends flooded the family Facebook page with cheers and good wishes or stopped by to offer their good wishes in person.

Juliet and I paid him a visit, too.

Juliet, ever elegant, was dressed to the nines in her vintage pink lamé jacket. Gene is high on her list of favorite people.  (The pup likes to party, too.)

Our birthday gift was  a box of cornmeal cupcakes decorated with blood orange slices that had been macerated in tangerine marmalade. (We used the wonderful marmalade Sarah gifted us from her kitchen. The marmalade was made from tangerines harvested from yet another neighbor’s tree picked just at the perfect point of ripeness. Clearly, it takes a neighborhood to make an exquisite jar of marmalade!)

The magic in this recipe is that, to get to the subtle not-too-sweet deliciousness of the corn muffins, you have to bite through a “candied”  blood orange slice. Those sweet contrasting textures make the recipe pop.

So, one more time, great good wishes, Gene. Party on!

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in The New Sugar and Spice Cookbook by Samantha Seneviratne. The cookbook is available from your local bookstore or from Amazon here. Here is a link to the original recipe as it appeared in Fine Cooking Magazine: Marmalade Cake/Fine Cooking Magazine.

These muffins are at their best eaten on the day you bake them.

Here is the recipe.

When I was growing up, “Eat your spinach” was touted as the route to good health. I can still sing the Popeye spinach song, too: “…I’m strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.” (Damn. That little earworm will be in my head all day now.)

Today, it’s “Eat your blueberries,”  and with good reason. Blueberries are a spectacularly healthy food. (No disrespect to spinach, by the way.)

A North American native first commercially cultivated here in the early 1900s, blueberries are rich in Vitamin C and Vitamin K. They are rich in flavonoids—an antioxidant  widely credited with protecting memory and fighting inflammation. They’re good for your waistline, too;  a cup of blueberries has only 84 calories and comes in low on the glycemic index. No wonder blueberries are often called a superfood!

To befit their importance, blueberries have their own month (July) and their own emoji.

And about those emojis… I confess to being among the pitifully uninformed on emojis and their origins. As it turns out, the word “emoji” is actually a  combination of Japanese words for picture and character. Emojis trace their beginnings to a popular meme on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. The father of the emoji was Shigetaka Kurita, a digital artist whose original work is now among the collections at the Museum of Modern Art. CNN did an interesting piece on Kurita; here is a link: CNN Shigetaka Kurita profile.

Fast forward to today and the current state of emojis, I didn’t realize that “official” emojis were a thing. Apparently, in an effort to standardize emoji use, there is an organization called  the Unicode Consortium. To date, the Consortium has recognized more than three thousand standard emojis, the blueberry emoji among them. They are scheduled to add more in 2022 including  a hand forming a heart.

This recipe is adapted from the cookbook Zoe Bakes Cakes. The cookbook is available from your local bookstore and on Amazon here..