Blue Cayenne

As you know if you read this blog, I love plums.

I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about plums.

Here it is. 

Crimson orbs of joy,
sweet tang dances on my tongue—
summer’s kiss in fruit.

Summer’s kiss. What a beautiful metaphor capturing the delight of biting into a red, juicy, tart plum. Maybe ChatGPT isn’t soulless after all. (OK. I’m just kidding about that last part–the soulless part.) 

Because I love plums so much you can find a number of plum recipes here on Blue Cayenne. Just type plums into the search bar and you will find a collection of plum recipes. Here is a particularly great one,  Ina Garten’s Plum Tart: Plum Tart.

This recipe is from Samantha Seneviratne’s cookbook Bake Smart. You can buy this book through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

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 Buttermilk Molasses Quick Bread, a bread that would be just right as the base for some of those too-hot-to-cook recipes you need right now. You’ll find the recipe here.

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.

Love fried rice?

I certainly do. 

This fried rice recipe just might tickle your taste buds.

The New York Times Food Section featured a recipe for Tomato and Basil Fried Rice by cookbook author Hetty McKinnon  this week. McKinnon is the author of a number of vegetable-forward cookbooks, most recently the much-acclaimed cookbook (and moving memoire) Tenderheart. (You can find Tenderheart through your local bookstore or on Amazon here.)

This particular McKinnon recipe is on the Times’ cooking site but not in Tenderheart. By the way, if you don’t already subscribe to the NYT Cooking site, it is a real bargain.  There are, for example, twenty-seven recipes for fried rice on the NYT site–ranging from recipes by Eric Kim to Melissa Clark  to Mark Bittman and including two more fried rice recipes from McKinnon. Here is a link to their subscription page: Cooking Subscription NYT . In addition to being a real treat for yourself, a cooking site subscription makes a great (and economical)  gift.

The recipe I’m posting today was inspired by McKinnon’s Tomato and Basil Fried Rice recipe. As always seems to be the case with fried rice recipes, one adds a little bit of this and a little bit of that from one’s own pantry-of-the-moment. In my case, I added fresh corn, peeled Hatch chiles, fresh bean sprouts, green peas,  and a handful of chopped green onions. I also was more generous in my seasoning with soy sauce and salt. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen: