Blue Cayenne

To my delight, I’ve realized that I have some holes in my cookbook collection. My Middle Eastern cookbook shelf, in particular, is a little thin. I say “to my delight” because, believe me, I welcome any excuse to buy new cookbooks. Picture me with a cup of steaming tea, Juliet napping at my feet, Yo Yo Ma playing on my Echo, a plate of warm cookies and a pile of cookbooks nearby. Heaven.

This week, Salma Hage’s The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook joined my Ottolenghis and Karamardians on the shelves in my office. (You can buy it on Amazon.)

Hage is a Lebanese cook living in London. Her previous book was The Lebanese Kitchen. This book has received positive reviews on several cooking sites I read and won a coveted James Beard Foundation award this year in the “best vegetable cookbook” category. (Truth be told, the recent spate of “This Year’s Best New Cookbooks” articles has been a dangerous read for me. I’ve added a number of new books to my shelves–Deborah Madison’s In My Kitchen, Dorie Greenspan’s Cookies, Tessa Kiros’ Provence to Pondicherry, Patricia Wells’ My Master Recipes, Katie Parla and Kristine Gills’ Tasting Rome. And…I have my eyes on a few more. Like I said, it’s an addiction.)

Interestingly, the forward to Hage’s book is written by Alain Ducasse, whose restaurants have won twenty-one Michelin stars. Ducasse knows good cooking and his forward to Hage’s book is glowing.

The pretty dish pictured above immediately caught my eye as I thumbed through Hage’s book. I was not attracted to this recipe for its beauty alone, though. One of the key ingredients in the dish is eggplant–my nemesis. I confess that I struggle with eggplant. In truth, struggle is a generous word; I’m downright eggplant phobic. Eggplant is kind of like brussels sprouts and (ugh!) kale for me. I want to like it. I know that, prepared properly, it can be delicious. (My neighbor makes a truly delicious eggplant parmesan.) But, alas, my forays into cooking eggplant have yielded recipes that have earned a decided meh from guests.

But I’m not giving up on eggplant. I’m not a defeatist by nature. (My cooking friend says I’m like a dog with a bone. That’s a compliment. Right?)

Eggplant may be my Moriarty, but I can do this! This tasty recipe is, I think, a very  good start.

Yields 4 Servings

Middle Eastern Eggplant Rice

25 minPrep Time

45 minCook Time

1 hr, 10 Total Time

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Ingredients

• 1/2 C. uncooked brown rice (long-grain)
• 2 eggplants cut into 3/4 inch cubes
• 2 T. extra-virgin olive oil (plus more to sauté onions and garlic)
• 2 onions (finely sliced)
• 4 garlic cloves (finely sliced)
• 2 C. cherry tomatoes (halved)
• 1 t. ground cumin
• 1 t. pepper
• 1 small bunch chopped cilantro (or parsley)
• Salt
• Roasted pine nuts

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Cook brown rice until it is done but still a bit al dente.
3. Do not peel the eggplant. Cut it into 3/4 inch cubes and mix with olive oil and a generous pinch of salt in a large bowl. Put the eggplant cubes on a large baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes at 400 degrees F. Remove from the oven when the eggplant cubes begin to blacken on the edges. Set aside.
4. Add a small amount of olive oil to a skillet and sauté onions and garlic over medium heat until they soften and just begin to brown. Add tomatoes, cumin, pepper and salt and stir. Continue cooking for about 15 minutes.
5. Add eggplant cubes to onion/tomato mixture. Add cooked rice. Sprinkle with cilantro and roasted pine nuts and serve.

Notes

According to Salma Hage, from whose cookbook this recipe was adapted, this dish improves dramatically by letting the flavors marry overnight. She also points out that this dish is often considered best when served at room temperature. I found this to be true. The flavors in the dish, particularly the flavor of the slightly caramelized onions, absorb into the rice and make for a wonderful dish when stored overnight in the refrigerator and allowed to warm to room temperature before being served.

Nutrition

Calories

75 cal

Carbs

17 g

Protein

2 g

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

7.8.1.2

60

https://bluecayenne.com/middle-eastern-eggplant-rice

Join Juliet and me as we conga around the kitchen island singing Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song .

Got you in the mood for a banana recipe?

The way I figure it, everyone needs a few good banana recipes. Bananas are a health food, after all. According to the LiveStrong site: “The high levels of potassium and carbohydrates in bananas make them a good source of fuel for athletes. The fiber in bananas can help to lower your risk for intestinal problems, high cholesterol, heart disease and diabetes. The fiber can help fill you up and keep you feeling full for longer, helping you keep from eating more calories than you need and gaining weight.” What’s not to love?

I figure everyone also needs a few great banana recipes to use up those unsightly overripe bananas that inevitably end up in your fruit bowl–you know, the ones that shrivel, turn black and ooze out of their skins without the least provocation. (You can, by the way, freeze those over-ripe banana bad boys and use them –right outta the freezer– in any cake recipe that calls for bananas.)

In my home, in addition to my conga-loving rescue pup, Juliet, banana obsession extends to my  27-year-old umbrella cockatoo, Moti. Woe be it to me if I don’t promptly deliver a food dish with a few banana slices to her cage early each morning. I’ve been known to make a sleepy-eyed  early-morning banana run to the supermarket to keep Moti in bananas. Trust me, there is no sunshine in in anyone’s day if Moti doesn’t have her morning banana.

Moti is smart, too. Early each morning, perched on one foot next to her water bottle, she ever-so-carefully places pieces of her other foods onto the velcro-like sticky surface of her banana slices where they stay as she eats a little banana and then a little of her other foods, washing it all down with big gulps of fresh water. (What can I say? Everyone is a foodie in my house.)

Fortunately for us all, bananas have been around forever. Well, almost forever. Food historians trace the domestication of bananas to New Guinea around 8000 BCE, making them perhaps the first cultivated fruit. Later, Muslim traders spread the banana across Asia and into Europe and, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese explorers brought the plant to the new world. In today’s America, the average American consumes 27.9 pounds of bananas each year.

By the way, the plant in the photo (above) is a yellow African begonia, a Staudtil microsperma, from Nigeria by way of Andy’s Orchids in Encinitas.  For my gardening friends who are reading this blog, here is the link to Andy’s website:  Andy’s Orchids .  Prepare to be overwhelmed by the collection Andy has put together.

This truly wonderful banana cake recipe is adapted from one that appeared in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. Here is a link to that book: Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

From everyone here, Day-O! to you and yours.

Yields 16 Servings

Banana Cake

20 minPrep Time

1 hr, 5 Cook Time

1 hr, 25 Total Time

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Ingredients

• 3 C. all-purpose flour
• 2 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. salt
• 8 ounces unsalted butter (at room temperature)
• 2 C. sugar
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs (room temperature)
• 5 large very ripe bananas (mashed)
• 1 C. sour cream (or plain yogurt)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Carefully grease your bundt pan.
2. Whisk flour, baking soda and salt together. Set aside.
3. Add butter to the bowl of a stand mixer and mix until the butter is creamy. Add the sugar and beat until the butter/sugar mixture is pale in color and fluffy in texture. Add vanilla to the butter mixture. Add eggs (one at a time) and mix thoroughly after adding each egg--about one minute after adding each egg. Lower the speed of your mixer from medium to low an add mashed bananas. Then, add one half of the flour mixture and mix. Add the sour cream and mix to combine. Add the remainder of the flour to the batter. Mix until ingredients are combined.
4. Using a spatula, scrape the batter into your prepared bundt pan. Rap the bundt pan on your counter once or twice once all the batter is in the pan. This will remove any air bubbles from the batter.
5. Bake on the middle rack in the center of your oven at 350 degrees F. for 65 to 75 minutes. (Cover your cake loosely with tin foil for the last 15 minutes of baking.) Your cake will be done when a toothpick or wooden skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of the cake.
6. Let cake cool on your counter and unmold onto your serving plate. Serve plain dusted with powdered sugar or drizzle a powdered sugar glaze (powdered sugar mixed with a little milk) onto the cake. You can serve this immediately or wrap it in plastic wrap and serve the next day. According to the original recipe, the texture of the cake improves when wrapped overnight and served the next day.

Nutrition

Calories

2352 cal

Fat

101 g

Carbs

300 g

Protein

51 g

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

7.8.1.2

57

https://bluecayenne.com/day-o-banana-cake

These days many food sites exhort us to “eat the rainbow”–a colorful visual cue to remind us of the importance of incorporating a variety of nutrients into our daily diets.  Good advice. I know I need the nudge.

Here is a recipe for a rainbow in a bowl, a nutritious roasted edamame salad redolent in garlic and marinated in a delightful basil vinaigrette. It is so good that I’ve found myself raiding the refrigerator late at night for this salad rather than the usual desserts. How funny is that?

Edamame?

Edamame are (Aargh! Is edamame plural or singular? )  young soybeans and they are powerfully nutritious–high in protein, dietary fiber and micronutrients.

While records indicate they were first available in the United States in the 1920s, they didn’t take off here until the 1980s when, depending upon the food writer you read, the Shogun series hit U.S. TVs and American interest in everything  Japanese  (including Japanese food)  spiked or the U.S. organic food movement took off. Maybe it was a bit of both.

Edamame has long been a staple of Asian cuisine. In fact, the consumption of young soybeans in China and Japan predates American interest in the food by a couple thousand years. It was the Japanese who gave the young beans their modern name edamame, beans on a branch.

In Asia, edamame was consumed for both its culinary flavor and its medicinal applications for conditions as varied as diabetes and hypertension. A 17th Century Chinese writer even claimed that beans would “kill evil chi.”

Modern nutritional research has validated many of the earlier beliefs about edamame’s value in the human diet, noting that the bean is a complete protein with all the essential amino acids and a single serving provides substantial amounts of your daily dietary needs: 17% Iron, 78% folate, 26% vitamin K.  A cup has only 120 calories but 10 grams of protein. Wow!

Try this great and great-for-you recipe. Who doesn’t need to exorcize a little evil chi anyway?

Yields 4 Servings

Edamame Salad

15 minPrep Time

15 minCook Time

30 minTotal Time

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Ingredients

• 12 ounces frozen shelled edamame (about 2 cups)
• 1/2 C. fresh corn kernels
• 1/4 C. finely diced scallion
• 1 clove garlic (minced)
• 1 T. olive oil
• 3/4 t. kosher salt
• 1/4 t. freshly ground black pepper
• 1 C. chopped fresh tomato
• 1/4 C. chopped fresh basil leaves
• 1 T. red wine vinegar

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine edamame, corn kernels, diced scallion, minced garlic, olive oil, kosher salt and black pepper in a bowl and toss to combine all the ingredients and coat them in the olive oil.
3. Spread vegetable mixture on a rimmed metal tray and bake for 10-15 minutes. Remove roasted edamame mixture from the oven and chill in your refrigerator for 30 minutes.
4. Add tomato, chopped basil leaves and red wine vinegar to the chilled edamame mixture. Toss to combine. Adjust your seasonings to your taste and serve.

Nutrition

Calories

52 cal

Fat

4 g

Carbs

3 g

Protein

1 g

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

7.8.1.2

55

https://bluecayenne.com/edamame-salad

This recipe is an adaptation of one that appeared on The Good Network. Here is the link: Roasted Edamame Salad

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