Blue Cayenne

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 good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”

Here is a late entry for your holiday table.

I saw this recipe in the September/October issue of a great healthy-cooking magazine, Eating Well. The idea of roasting squash and apples together and then topping them with roasted pine nuts and dried cherries seemed like it would be a perfect dish for the holiday table. I tweaked the recipe a bit by drizzling on some of the left-over cranberry sauce I had in the refrigerator from the gingerbread recipe I recently posted on Blue Cayenne. The squash and apples tasted great and were beautiful to look at, too. A winner, I think.

Here is the recipe for the cranberry sauce I used in this recipe: Cranberry Sauce. There are, by the way, several excellent recipes for cranberry sauce on Blue Cayenne. You can find them here, here, and here. Incidentally, the recipe for Not My Mother’s Cranberry Relish  is one of the most popular recipes I’ve posted on Blue Cayenne.

Squash and apples

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Ingredients

• 1 medium acorn squash (I used a medium peeled butternut squash)
• 2 medium apples
• 3-5 T extra-virgin olive oil (I used 5 T.)
• 3/4 t. ground cinnamon (or more)
• 1/2 t. ground allspice
• 1/2 t. ground coriander
• 1/2 t. salt
• 1/2 t. ground pepper
• 1/4 C. dried cherries
• 1/4 C. toasted pine nuts or pepitas
• Garnish with cranberry sauce and chopped parsley

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees F. Prepare a rimmed baking sheet by lining it with foil.
2. Roast pine nuts (or pepitas) in a cast iron pan on your stove top. Be careful. They can quickly burn. Set aside.
3. Peel and halve the squash and scoop out the seeds. I usually put hard squashes in my microwave for a couple of minutes before I try to peel them. The microwaving makes things a bit easier and safer. Core (don't peel) the apples. (The Eating Well recipe suggested using apples that hold their shape when roasted such as Pink Lady, Braeburn, and/or Winesap.) Cut the squash and the apples into 1-inch wedges.
4. Put cinnamon, allspice, coriander, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Whisk in the oil. Pour this mixture into a large zip lock bag. Add the squash and apples to the bag and shake the bag to coat the vegetables with the marinade. Leave the bag on your counter to marinate the vegetables while you are doing other jobs in the kitchen. My squash and apples were left on the counter for a couple of hours.
5. Spread the oil-coated vegetables on your prepared baking shet. Roast until the squash and apples are tender. This took me about 40 minutes at 425 degrees F.
6. Remove from the oven and arrange the roasted vegetables on a large pretty plate. Drizzle with cranberry sauce and sprinkle the roasted pine nuts and dried cherries on top. Garnish with chopped parsley. Serve slightly warm.

7.8.1.2

163

https://bluecayenne.com/squash-apples-and-a-little-sage-advice-for-the-holidays

It’s Blue Cayenne’s Birthday!

This improbable journey started on a blustery October day three years ago.  I desperately wanted to be a better writer, a better cook, and a better photographer, but I needed a nudge–a structured project to bring all those elements together in my life. I needed deadlines, too.

So, after a lot of false starts, my direction became obvious. I would start a food blog. How hard could that be?

Well…

I remember the electric moment when Blue Cayenne went live. I had worked on the project for a couple of months. I’d told no one except my sainted photography teacher. I guess I wanted to see if he laughed riotously when I broached the possibility of posting my photographs on the Internet. (He didn’t. He is a keeper.)

I’ll be honest. My struggles with the technical details of starting a blog were daunting. I didn’t know a plug-in from a widget, but finally, in October of 2015, I had pages ready to publish. All I needed was the courage to actually do it. That was the hard part–the personally risky part– and I’ll admit that I sat staring at the “Publish” button for a very long time.

Could I? Should I? Would it work?

Then, in a moment of wild abandon and fortified by a couple glasses of very good Malbec, I pushed the button and Blue Cayenne was born.

That first blog post featured a black-eyed pea salad recipe. Black-eye pea recipes augur good luck, or, at least they do on New Year’s Day. Blue Cayenne, I knew, needed a whole lot of good luck. We were wading into a very crowded field. (Here is a link to that original recipe if you haven’t tried it: Senegalese Bean Salad. It’s a great recipe.)

For those of you who have wondered about the name, blue–saturated and intense– is a favorite color and spicy and impossibly hot cayenne pepper is a favorite spice. So, Blue Cayenne it was and we became bluecayenne.com.

Since that first post, I have posted 257 recipes. Whew!  (I try to publish five recipes a month.) Blue Cayenne’s readership has grown over the three years to somewhere between a very respectable 100 and 200 readers on an average day. Our best day ever was 544 readers. We’re ad free, too. We’re all about food.

Our operation is spartan. This is a one person (me) and a one pup (Juliet) operation, so our overhead is very low. I work for free. Juliet works for pumpkin treats and an occasional bowl of strawberry ice cream.  I cook, write and photograph. Juliet is the face of Blue Cayenne–our “Betty Crocker.” She appears on all of our pages. Blue Cayenne’s Juliet is a looker.

Thank you for reading this blog.  We’re still having fun and we’re ever so glad you are here.

Now, will you share a piece of fudgy pecan birthday torte with us?

Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Torte

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Ingredients

For Cake
• 1 1/2 C. toasted pecans
• 1 C. (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 8 ounces bittersweet (not unsweetened) or semisweet chocolate (chopped--I used a mixture of bittersweet and semisweet)
• 1 C.sifted unsweetened cocoa powder
• 6 large eggs
• 1 1/2 C. sugar
• 1/3 C. bourbon
For The Glaze
• 1/2 C. whipping cream
• 1/4 C. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
• 10 ounces semisweet chocolate (chopped)
• 1 C. chopped toasted pecans
• 12 pecan halves

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch-diameter springform pan with sides that are at leasst 2 1/4 inches. Line the bottom of your springform pan with parchment paper. Dust the pan with flour and tap off the excess.
2. Using a food processor, finely grind the pecans. Watch them carefully, if you over-grind the pecans you will turn them into pecan butter. Pecan butter is wonderful, but not for this recipe. You just want a fine dry grind.
3. Melt butter in a heavy saucepan over low heat. Add the chocolate to the butter and stir the mixture until the chocolate is melted smooth. Add the cocoa powder to the melted chocolate and stir. Remove this mixture from the heat and set aside.
4. Put eggs and sugar into a bowl and whisk just until blended. Add the chocolate mixture and whisk to blend. Add the bourbon and the ground pecans and mix. Pour this batter into your prepared springform pan. Bake for about 45 minutes. You want the sides of the torte to be set but the center of the torte will jiggle a bit when the pan is shaken. Put your baked torte on a rack and cool completely.
5. To make the glaze, put butter and cream in a heavy medium saucepan and bring the mixture to a simmer. Add the chocolate and stir until it is melted and smooth. Remove from the heat and let the glaze sit for about 5 minutes. You want it to be a bit cooler but you want it to be pourable, too.
6. Remove the torte from the springform pan by releasing the sides. Invert the torte onto a 8-inch cardboard round or plate. Remove the parchment paper. Set the cardboard round or plate on a cookie sheet (to catch the excess chocolate) and pour the glaze over the torte. You want the glaze to competely cover the top and the sides of the cake. Use a spatula to spread the glaze onto the sides of the torte. Put the torte in the refrigerator and let it chill for about 10 minutes. This will allow the glaze to partially set but still a little sticky. Remove from the refrigerator and press the chopped pecans around the sides of the torte and decorate the top of the torte with the pecan halves. Refrigerate overnight. Before you serve the cake, let it sit on the counter for a while. Ideally, you will want to serve it cool but not cold. You will also want to move the torte onto a clean cardboard round or a clean plate. I used a long spatula to safely move the cake.

Nutrition

Calories

6972 cal

Fat

540 g

Carbs

394 g

Protein

68 g

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

7.8.1.2

160

https://bluecayenne.com/lets-party-with-chocolate-bourbon-pecan-torte-blue-cayenne-is-three

This recipe is an adaptation of one that appeared in Bon Appetit Magazine.

There is an old Italian saying O mangi questa minestra o salti dalla finestra. That roughly translates to “Eat the soup or jump out of the window”–an exclamation for those times when inaction is off the table and you just have to do something–anything. Take it or leave it.

I don’t know about you but, for me, fall is a beautiful transitional season that sometimes leaves me at loose ends. I know I can’t hang onto the lazy days of summer forever. And, yet…

Even my Juliet seems wistful about the changing seasons this year. Increasingly, the melancholy little pup spends her days seeking out the dwindling rays of summer sunlight filtering through the windows in her favorite rooms. (Fortunately, I can lift her mood with her favorite pumpkin treats.)

So, this week I’ve vowed to shake off my end-of-summer lethargy. I need to do something interesting to embrace the new season. Some serious fall cooking comes to mind. What better way to accept the end of summer than by embracing fall’s distinct flavors?

But, what to make?

While I may not be ready for anything as fall-radical as pumpkin latte, these increasingly chilly late afternoons and nights have put me in the mood for a rich, hearty bowl of Italian soup.

One of my cooking heroes, Marcella Hazan, once wrote of Italian soups: “The one common link Italian soups have, the single distinguishing feature, is their substantiality. Some may be lighter than others; some may be thin; some thick. In some soups, the beans or the potatoes may be pureed through a food mill. In no soup, however, is the texture, consistency, weight–the physical identity of the ingredients–wholly obliterated. There are no food processor soups, no cream-of-anything soups in the Italian repertory.” (From Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.)

So, I’m with Marcella. No wimpy cream soup for me! Not now. I’m making a hearty minestrone.

Minestrone is one of the cornerstones of Italian cooking. Originally, minestrone was a thick vegetable soup made up of a hodgepodge of leftovers–a cucina povera (poor kitchen) dish with rustic and rural roots. There was no fixed-recipe. If you had a leftover, it went into the ever-changing soup.

Later, when more fresh vegetables were available (including tomatoes and potatoes from The New World), Italian cooks turned minestrone into a splendid stand-alone soup rich in fresh vegetables, herbs, beans, and pasta.

There are lots of minestrone recipes out there. This, I think, is a particularly good one but feel free to make it your own.

Eat this soup.  No need to jump out of any windows.

Happy fall.

Minestrone.

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Ingredients

• 2 T. olive oil
• 1 medium onion (chopped)
• 1/4 C. fennel bulbs (diced)
• 2 T. garlic (minced)
• 1 C. thinly-sliced green cabbage
• 1 t. fennel seeds
• 1 t. fresh rosemary (minced) optional
• 1 t. fresh thyme (minced) or 1/2 t. dried
• 7 C. water or vegetable stock (I used vegetable stock)
• 1 15-oz. can chopped fire-roasted tomatoes or equivalent fresh Roma tomatoes
• 1 can V-8 juice
• 1 15-oz can garbanzo beans (drained) or equivalent freshly cooked garbanzos
• 1 15-oz can cannellini beans(drained) or equivalent freshly cooked white beans (I used Rancho Gordo Marcella beans)
• 1 medium russet potato cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1/2 C. celery (chopped)
• 1/2 C. carrots (chopped)
• 1/2 C. zucchini (chopped)
• 2 T. tomato paste
• 1/4 C. soy sauce (or to taste)
• 1 T. balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 C. elbow pasta or rotini
• 2 T. Italian parsley (minced)
• 1 T. basil (fresh-minced)
• 2 t. oregano (fresh-minced) or 1 t. dry
• 1 t. sea salt (or to taste)
• 1/2 t. black pepper (ground to taste)
• Shredded Parmesan (for garnish)
• Basil (chopped- for garnish)
• Basil Pesto (for garnish)

Instructions

1. Heat olive oil in a large pot. Add onion, diced fennel, garlic, cabbage, fennel seed, thyme and rosemary (optional). Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally as you cook.
2. Add water or broth, tomatoes, V8 juice, beans, potato, celery, carrot, zucchini, and cook for about 25 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Stir occasionally.
3. Add tomato paste, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, pasta and herbs and cook for an additional 10 minutes until the pasta is done.
4. Garnish with shredded parmesan cheese and chopped fresh basil. Just before serving, spoon a dollop of basil pesto on top of each serving of soup. Let your guests stir the pesto into their soup.

Notes

Because this soup contains pasta, it will thicken quite a bit when refrigerated. You can add additonal vegetable broth or water to thin the soup.

Nutrition

Calories

3022 cal

Fat

85 g

Carbs

292 g

Protein

60 g

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

7.8.1.2

157

https://bluecayenne.com/minestrone-a-wistful-pup-and-letting-go-of-summer

This recipe is loosely adapted from one that appeared in the 2007 cookbook Vegan Fusion. That cookbook is available here.