Blue Cayenne

Summer salads are a “thing” at my house. Cool and light after a hot day, a salad is the perfect way to wind down the day and ease into a cool evening with a good book and a sweet pup.

Here is a beautiful (and delicious) Peach and Raspberry salad to add to your summer salad repertoire. It’s beauty will grab the attention of everyone who sits at your table.

Appearance is an important consideration in choosing the foods that we put on our tables. Food researchers tell us that our appetites are stimulated in significant ways by the appearance of our food. In other words, our eyes send signals to our brains that tell us certain foods like a pretty chocolate cake promise good taste—a  brown shriveled banana…not so much.

So, if the food researchers are to be believed, right now your eyes are messaging your brain that the beautiful greens and reds and yellows in the Peach and Raspberry Salad photo that appears at the top of this page promises a delicious meal. You can’t help yourself.

The science of appetite arousal is not lost on the food industry either. They factor food appearance into just about every part of their operations—from packaging to lighting to the colors they choose to paint the walls of their public spaces.  Have you ever wondered why, for instance, your food is usually served on a white plate? The answer is that the arrangement of food on a white plate makes the color of the food pop, not to mention the fact that a white plate messages your brain that the food is clean, safe to eat, and fresh.

Home cooks know this instinctively…or we should.

Dressed in a peachy vinaigrette, this Summer Peach and Raspberry Salad is a knock out. It  hits all the right flavor notes, too.

Trust your eyes on this one.

Here’s the recipe. (If, after enjoying this salad, you find yourself in the summer salad “groove,” you can find other Blue Cayenne salad recipes here.)

This recipe was inspired by one in Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook Simple. You can buy his book on Amazon (here) or at your local bookstore.

Every month Blue Cayenne features one post from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. Here is a Russian Salad recipe.

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 bottom of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.

Here is the link to the recipe: Russian Salad.

And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne Food and Photography Blog. 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 to offer. 

Stone fruits!

I’m pretty sure I could eat my weight in plums. Don’t even get me started on nectarines. And apricots! What velvety beauties they are! The Greeks called apricots “the golden eggs of the sun.” How pretty is that?

They’re all in season right now (from May to September), so you can easily find them in your market.

Apricots occupy a particularly sweet space in my heart. My birthday cake was always a “Paradise Cake”—a white box cake with an apricot and coconut frosting. 

Here is a great Apricot Crumble Tart recipe–a paean to the sweet-tart wonderfulness (is that a word?) of apricots. You’ll love the contrasting textures and flavors in every bite of this tart. I guarantee that you will keep coming back again and again (and again) for just one more taste. (You’ve got the irrefutable evidence of that last statement right in front of you. Look at the cake in the background above. Keep in mind that I live alone.)

This recipe is adapted from David Lebovitz’s My Paris Kitchen cookbook. The book is available through your local bookstore. Lebovitz, an alum of the iconic Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, and now a resident of Paris, also has a newsletter online. You can find the newsletter here.