Food, Photography and Bon Mots
The Simpsons were wrong. You CAN win friends with salad…at least with one dressed with a fantastic vinaigrette. (The Simpsons: “You Don’t Win Friends With Salad.”) Today you get two excellent vinaigrette recipes. The vinaigrette on the left is a fresh fig vinaigrette. The one…
De gazpacho no hay empacho. It’s a Spanish idiom. You can never have too much gazpacho. Or, translated for meaning, you can never have too much of a good thing. So, in that spirit, here is a very good gazpacho recipe. Pretty, too. Gazpacho…
This elegant little vanilla cake is a keeper. It is good enough to serve guests and a delicious self-indulgence when you raid the kitchen at midnight.
I’m always drawn to a recipe that makes interesting use of an ingredient that is unusual in its genre. In this case, this peach cake uses fennel seeds which have a subtle licorice-like flavor.
If you are not familiar with fennel and fennel seeds, here is a photo. Both are readily available in your market.
Fennel has been consumed for a very long time. Reportedly, Roman warriors believed that fennel seeds gave them extra strength and kept them thin. The discussion of fennel in the diet made its way into ancient mythology, too. Prometheus, for example, hid fire in a fennel stalk. Dionysus carried a wand of fennel.
During the Middle Ages, Charlemagne decreed that fennel must be grown in every garden, believing that the herb bore healing properties. Medieval Europeans also stuffed fennel fronds in keyholes and hung it on doors to ward off ghosts. Even the Puritans bought into the fennel story. Reportedly, they carried the idea of consuming fennel seeds in church from Europe to America, believing that chewing the seeds would suppress stomach sounds during services. Fennel seeds were called “meeting seeds.”
Today, fennel bulbs and seeds are pretty widely used in stews and gratins. They also are still used as a digestive. Next time you are out enjoying an Indian meal, be sure to grab a handful of the fennel (and other seeds) commonly left in a bowl beside the register as you leave the restaurant. Indians chew the seeds to freshen their breath and to aid digestion after a heavy meal.
You can find several savory recipes using fennel here on Blue Cayenne. Just type “fennel” into the search bar to the right.
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This recipe for Vanilla Cake With Peaches and Fennel Seeds is adapted from one that appears in the Honey and Company cookbook Golden. The book is available here.
Summer tomatoes. **sigh** While we still have some late summer tomatoes in our gardens and stores, here is a beautiful galette that showcases their beauty. It is especially beautiful made with some of those big multi-colored heirloom tomatoes. Tomato Galette Save Recipe Print Recipe…
There are all kinds of food awards around…Michelin Stars, the Bocuse d’Or, and on and on. Here at Blue Cayenne we think we need an award for particularly wonderful recipes, too. So, we’re introducing The Juliet, named, of course, after our beloved Chief Taster…
When Jose Andreas was recognized in 2018 by Time Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world, fellow chef Emeril Legasse wrote of him:
“Jose is an exceptional, generous, compassionate human being. His infectious philanthropic spirit reminds all of us that no matter your craft or passion, our most noble calling as human beings is to selflessly foster hope in and chase despair from the lives of others.”
Andreas is a chef by trade. He operates dozens of restaurants across the world (eight in Washington, D.C. alone!) and is widely credited with introducing the small plate concept to America. He is the co-author of the NY Times bestseller “Vegetables Unleashed” (with Matt Goulding)and has authored a number of other notable books. He also is the founder of World Central Kitchen, a non-profit that seeks to address poverty and hunger. World Kitchen feeds five thousand homeless people every day in Washington, D. C. Every day.
Among his many other humanitarian efforts, is the World Alliance for Clean Cookstoves which aims to replace dangerous, air-polluting cookstoves across the globe as a way to improve peoples’ lives and reduce dangerous climate emissions.
When tragedy strikes, whether it is Hurricane Maria or the California wildfires, Andreas assembles his team and feeds people in crisis. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Andreas’ organization served more than 3.6 million meals to Puerto Ricans displaced by the hurricane. As his co-author Goulding says in the introduction to “Vegetables Unleashed,” “When Jose wanders, the world benefits.”
Did I mention that he is an immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1991 with $50 dollars in his pocket?
This is my adaptation of Andreas’ recipe for Pochas (simmered shelling beans). It’s wonderful.
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You can buy “Vegetables Unleashed” here.
Happy National Sneak Some Zucchini On Your Neighbor’s Porch Day! OK. It was August 8th. It’s the thought… On the other hand, where were you? Juliet and I didn’t get any zucchini on our porch. We looked. Let’s make up. I’ll put a great zucchini soup…
I guess I have always lived in a scone desert. I never tasted one until I was an adult. Always seemed meh to me. Then, this scone came along. Wow. My late-in-life discovery of scones made me wonder about the origins of scones. It turns…
Do you still experience childhood food nightmares?
Me, too.
For me, the nightmare always begins with me prying open my battered metal lunch box. (Cue in the music from Jaws: Jaws.)
On the worst days, there would be a processed cheese sandwich with gloppy mayonnaise, a box of shriveled raisins, and a little metal container of canned fruit cocktail.
The fruit cocktail particularly stands out in my memory. You know–the fruit cocktail where all the fruits are so overcooked that they are indistinguishable one from the other.
Maybe it is just me but there is something seriously wrong when a cube of pear tastes exactly like a cube of peach. I remember picking out the cherries. They were the only good thing in the whole mess.
This Spicy Fruit Salad recipe will erase those bad memories of bad fruit cocktail. It showcases the fresh individual tastes of each fruit. When you bite into the fruits you can actually taste their differing textures, too. Then there is the spiced syrup where star anise and chile flavors are infused into a thick syrup sauce that is poured over the fruit. That syrup can be as spicy and as exotic as you want.
This is not your mother’s fruit cocktail. Promise.
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This recipe is adapted from a Melissa Clark recipe that appears here.
Stare into this swirling spiral vortex. That and a good hot cup of chamomile tea will make you very sleepy. I love this bundt cake pan. It is a Nordic Ware pan from their Heritage Collection. I bought mine on Amazon here. (Full disclosure: Jeff Bezos…
