Happy New Year! Make A Resolution To Eat Swedish Shortbread Cookies

Make a resolution to eat more cookies in 2019. These Swedish Shortbread Cookies would be a good place to start. They are crazy delicious. They are beautiful. They are easy to bake. And…they passed a stringent taste test by my friends (and cookie aficionados) Carole…

Cookbook Reviews, Cookies, Desserts, Vegetarian

December 24, 2018

Wishing you and yours….

a happy holiday, the best new year, and a little chocolate cake. Chocolate Macaroon Cake Save Recipe Print Recipe My Recipes My Lists My Calendar IngredientsFor the cake1 C. virgin coconut oil (melted, cooled– plus more for the pan)1/4 C. unsweetened cocoa…

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December 20, 2018

Spilling The Beans On Guinness Baked Beans

Truth be told, I love baked beans. There are few meals that I enjoy more than a big bowl of baked beans and a generous side of coleslaw. To my taste, the crunch of the coleslaw perfectly complements the sweet/savory flavor of the baked beans. Throw in a piece of my neighbor Sarah’s world-class cornbread and I’m over the moon. So, naturally, I’m always on the lookout for creative new ways to prepare baked beans and the creative twist in this recipe, the use of Ireland’s famous Guinness Stout as the cooking liquid for the beans, fascinated me. This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Julie Van Rosendaal’s and Sue Duncan’s cookbook Spilling The Beans. Their book offers ways to incorporate healthy beans into your recipes at every meal. Yes, even for breakfast! While our British cousins have long savoured breakfast beans (baked beans on toast and baked beans as a part of a full English fry-up, for example), we yankees never have seemed to warm to the idea of putting beans on our breakfast plates. Spilling The Beans may change that. Spilling The Beans also makes a convincing case for the health benefits of consuming beans. Beans, they remind us, are high in fiber, rich in protein, cheap and their cultivation is easy on Mother Earth. They also have a long, long shelf life, so you can keep them handy in your pantry, either canned or in dry form, for use anytime you are moved to cook with them. And, don’t be afraid of cooking with dried beans either. Now that Instant Pots are cheap and pretty much ubiquitous in kitchens across the country, there is no reason not to prepare your own beans from scratch. It’s a cinch. While this recipe is wonderful (and you can sip a Guinness while you cook), you might also want to consider some of the other baked bean recipes I’ve posted on Blue Cayenne over the last three years. Just type “baked beans” into the search box to the right of this post and you will find baked beans with chipotles, baked beans baked with whiskey and a killer baked bean recipe using dates as the sweetener. Now where did I put that coleslaw with caraway seeds recipe?

Guinness Baked Beans

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Ingredients

Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 onion (chopped)
1 onion (quartered)
3/4 C. ketchup, barbecue sauce, or tomato sauce mixed with 1/8 C. brown sugar
1/2 bottle Guinness beer--plus extra to add to beans as they are baking to keep them moist
1/8 C. apple cider vinegar
1/8 C. molasses
1/8 C. Dijon, yellow or grainy mustard
4 C. cooked small white beans
1 Granny Smith apple (peeled and chopped)
Salt and pepper to taste
Garnish with chopped parsley and/or a pretty radish

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Using a large heavy bean pot (I used my old Le Creuset Dutch oven), heat the olive oil and saute the chopped onion until it is tender and beginning to brown. This will take about 5 minutes.
Add the tomato product you have chosen to use (I used ketchup), the Guinness, vinegar, molasses, mustard, beans and a generous amount of salt and pepper. Bring the mixture to a simmer. Stir in the quartered onion and the chopped apple. Cover the pan and put it in the oven to bake for at least one hour. I baked my beans for several hours, adding additional liquid to keep the beans moist. I used the extra Guinness, but you could also use apple juice.I turned down the oven heat to 300 degrees F. after the first hour of baking. You will want to bake your beans until the sauce on the beans is thick and bubbling.

Nutrition

Calories

385 cal

Fat

1 g

Carbs

89 g

Protein

4 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

https://bluecayenne.com/spilling-the-beans-on-guinness-baked-beans

Spilling The Beans is available from Amazon: Spilling The Beans.

Beans, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, Vegetables, Vegetarian

December 12, 2018

Cream of Carrot Soup, Soup for Syria, and Photographs That Will Break Your Heart

This is one beautiful (and delicious) soup. The original recipe comes from a cookbook titled Soup for Syria photographed and compiled by Beirut chef, photographer and cookbook author Barbara Abdeni Massaad. Massaad also is the author of the best-selling cookbook Man’oushe: Inside the…

Soups, Vegetables, Vegetarian

November 29, 2018

S’Wonderful: Cauliflower, Potato and Cheese Soup

Soup is hot! Fortunately for us all, soup recipes seem to be having their moment. There have been any number of interesting and innovative soup cookbooks published in recent years. I know I’ve added Anna Thomas’ Love Soup, Barbara Abdeni Massaad’s Soup for Syria and…

Soups, Vegetables, Vegetarian

November 24, 2018

Double Chocolate Banana Cakes

These sweet little cakes are perfect.

They are single-portion size. They pair beautifully with homemade vanilla ice cream (See ice cream recipe here.) They are beautiful. And then, there is the combination of quality chocolate (Barry Callebaut chocolate) and ripe bananas–a sure-fire winner on the flavor scale.

I used my new mini bundt pan mold for the recipe and the little cakes came out great. I love this pretty swirl pattern.(I think this is Nordic Ware’s prettiest bundt pan. I also have their full-size swirl pattern bundt pan that I used on the lemon bliss bundt cake that I previously posted on Blue Cayenne. You can take a look here. While you are at it, you might want to try that recipe for the holidays. It is an outstanding cake.)

Have I mentioned that I’m a kitchen gadget junkie?

When we were traveling to exotic places, I sought out obscure local cookware stores and bought whatever intrigued me. I have Turkish kebap skewers, Greek retsina carafes, and a lot of other stuff I am still trying to identify. I used to have a semi-pornographic raw coconut grater from the Cook Islands (a gift from a friend), but, after years of storing it in the dark recesses of my closet where no one would see it, modesty finally took over and I tucked it away in a Goodwill donation. I can only imagine what a stir that one caused when it was unpacked in the Goodwill back room.

I have drawers full of kitchen gadgets. Call me if you need anything. No. Really.

chocolate banana cakes

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Ingredients

4 1/2 ounces King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
3/8 ounce All-Purpose Baking Cocoa or Dutch-process cocoa
4 ounces soft unsalted butter
3 1/2 ounces sugar
1 large egg
1 t. vanilla extract
8 ounces mashed banana (about 2 medium bananas)
4 ounces sour cream
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips (chocolate mini-chips preferred)
Powdered sugar and maraschino cherries to garnish

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. If you are using loaf pans (9 x 5 inch), lightly grease them. If you are using a mini-bundt pan mold (as I did), spray they with oil. With the mini-bundt pans, be very sure to spray them carefully; there are a lot of nooks and crannies in those pans and you want your little bundt cakes to come out clean.
Combine the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa. Set aside.
Using a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar until they are light and creamy. I used a hand mixer for this. Then, beat in the egg and stir in the vanilla, banana and the sour cream.
Gently, mix in the dry ingredients and the chocolate chips until they are well incorporated. I used Calliebut semi-sweet chocolate chips. (The original recipe recommended using mini chocolate chips. I think that is a good suggestion to ensure that the chocolate melts properly.
If you are using a loaf pan, pour (or scrape) your batter into the pan. If you are using the mini-bundt pan form, put the batter into a gallon zip lock bag. Cut off the tip of the bag and pipe the bag into the bundt pan molds.
Bake for 45 to 60 minutes or until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean. I wanted my cakes to be moist and took them out of the oven at about 30 minutes. At that point, their internal temperature measured about 205 degrees on my ThermPro digital cooking thermometer. (Another gadget!) Ovens will vary, so you will want to watch your cakes carefully the first time you bake them in your own oven.
Remove the cakes from the oven and allow them to rest in the pan for about 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, turn them out onto a rack and let them cool completely.
Garnish with powdered sugar and a maraschino cherry.

https://bluecayenne.com/double-chocolate-banana-cakes

This is a recipe adapted from the King Arthur Flour site. Here is the link: Double Chocolate Banana Bread .

Cakes, Desserts, Fruits, Vegetarian

November 21, 2018

Squash, Apples And A Little Sage Advice For The Holidays

Best wishes from those of us here at Blue Cayenne (that would be me and Juliet) for a happy Thanksgiving. And, if the going gets tough around the table tomorrow, you might do well to remember the sage advice of Oscar Wilde: “After a…

Apples, Side Dishes, Vegetables, Vegetarian

November 16, 2018

Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread

Santa’s in the house (or, at least, in the neighborhood). It’s time to get your gingerbread on. This recipe is a riff on traditional gingerbread. It has generous dollops of fresh cranberry sauce stirred through the batter. What you get is a taste of traditional…

Cakes, Desserts, Vegetarian

November 12, 2018

Of Cabbages, Kings and Flying Pigs: Creamy Cabbage and Potato Soup

The time has come, the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

And whether pigs have wings.

–Lewis Carroll

First, let’s talk a bit about cabbages.

Wild cabbage is thought to have first been consumed by humans thousands of years ago. Historical records show that ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans ate it. In fact, many considered cabbage a delicacy. Diogenes, the Greek cynic (You know the story. He was the one who carried a lantern around ancient Athens looking for an honest man.), is said to have consumed nothing but cabbage and water–not even a dolma for him!

The Egyptians and Romans were more fun, though. They consumed copious amounts of cabbage, to be sure, but their motives were skewed a bit more toward having a good time. They believed that eating cabbage before binging on alcohol would ward off a hangover and allow them to drink even more alcohol. No wonder Tut died at such a young age! It was the partying.

Later, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, the emperors sponsored sports clubs to demonstrate their power and train their cavalries for battle. The clubs also served another purpose. They provided the “bread and circuses” that kept the masses occupied and distracted. For a long time, the two most important Turkish sports clubs were, get this!, The Okras and The Cabbages–an homage to local production of the two popular vegetable crops. I don’t know about you, but I would have put my money on the Cabbages any day. I can only imagine the slime jokes that the Okra team was forced to endure.

During the age of exploration, European ship captains carried barrels of fermented cabbage to treat the wounds of their sailors and to ward off scurvy.

In more recent times, cabbage often has been relegated the background as a cheap food for the poor. Orwell’s 1984 envisioned the miserable life of the urban poor in tenements permeated by the smell of boiled cabbage. Lewis Carroll, though, approached cabbage with a little more serendipity in his poem The Walrus and The Carpenter (quoted above) from Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

When World War I came along, cabbage took center stage again. The popular fermented cabbage dish, sauerkraut, was way-too-German for patriots in the west and was renamed “Liberty Cabbage.”

More recently, food scientists have extolled the health benefits of cabbage, a vegetable with almost no fat, that is rich in fiber and is high in vitamins C and K. Too, cabbage is a part of the brassica family that includes broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and other cruciferous vegetables. Some scientists believe that regular consumption of brassicas can ward off some types of cancer, protect heart health and manage type two diabetes. Brassicas are also the second cheapest vegetable to consume, after potatoes.

Now that we’ve discussed cabbage, we need to move on to Lewis Carroll’s question about whether pigs can fly.

I’m pretty sure they can. Apparently, they get the window seat.

Here is a recipe for a warming chowder-like cabbage soup I like a lot.

Creamy Cabbage and Potato Soup

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Ingredients

1 T. extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion (chopped)
1 russet potato (peeled and grated)
3/4 pound cabbage (about 1/2 medium head) (cored and shredded)
Salt to taste
5 C. vegetable stock
1 Parmesan rind
Freshly ground pepper to taste
2 C. milk or half and half
1 C. grated Gruyere cheese
3 russet potatoes (peeled and cut in medium chunks)
Garnish with French bread croutons, additional grated Gruyere cheese, grated carrots, minced fresh chives

Instructions

Heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Saute onions until they are tender (about 5 minutes). Add grated potato, shredded cabbage and 1/2 t. salt to the pot. Stir. Add stock, Parmesan rind, salt and pepper to taste. Bring soup to a simmer, cover with a lid, and cook for about 30 minutes. You want the vegetables to be tender.
Meanwhile, bake/boil/microwave three russet potatoes until they are tender. Peel the potatoes and cut them into medium-sized chunks. Set aside.
Add milk to soup pot and gradually add the Gruyere cheese, stirring constantly until the cheese has melted into the soup. Be careful not to boil the soup at this point. You don't want the milk to curdle. Add the cooked potato chunks and additional salt and pepper to your taste. Remove the Parmesan rind and discard.
Serve garnished with crispy croutons and your choice of colorful garnishes.
This soup is best on the second or third day after it is made. By that time, the flavors of the cabbage and other ingredients have matured.