Blue Cayenne

A potato pancake under your salad?

Who woulda thunk it?

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in  Brooklyn-based Hetty McKinnon’s wonderful new book Tenderheart, A Cookbook about Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds. (Tenderheart is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here. )

McKinnon is a James Beard Foundation finalist and the author of four other cookbooks–To Asia, With Love; Family: New Vegetarian Comfort Food to Nourish Every Day; Neighborhood: Hearty Salads and Plant-Based Recipe From Home and Abroad; Community: Salad Recipes from Arthur Street Kitchen.

Tenderheart is a collection of vegetable-forward recipes woven with a tender reminiscence of her father, Wai Keung Lui. “Ken” (his adopted first name after immigration from Guangdong, China, to Sydney, Australia, in the mid-1950s), worked in Flemington Markets, Sydney’s largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market. In Tenderheart, McKinnon celebrates his short life, his career, and the foods that he taught his family to enjoy.  (He died when she was 15.).

As McKinnon puts it in Tenderheart, ” Food has always been emotional to me. It is tied to my identity, my heritage, my family and my community. It represents the experiences of the generations before me, and it is a legacy for my children. In food, I find my home, and in this vegetable life I have found a way to stay connected to my dad.”

This recipe for a Potato Pancake With Apple Salad was inspired by McKinnon’s enjoyment of German Potato Pancakes With Applesauce, a culinary delight that she enjoyed while visiting Nuremberg’s Christkindelsmarkt. The recipe presents an interesting juxtaposition of  a perfectly prepared crispy potato pancake against the tart tanginess of apple slices marinated in a vinaigrette.

I think you’ll enjoy this recipe. It presents beautifully and the combination of sweet apples and savory potatoes will surprise your taste buds.

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 a spectacular Blueberry Cornmeal Shortbread Tart . You can find the  original recipe here.

You don’t want to miss this great recipe…again.

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.

Ah, Julia!

I had friends over for a party recently and decided to delve into Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking for something special to bake. And there it was! Reine de Saba cake!

The cookbook is part of a two-volume masterpiece co-edited by Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck and first published in 1961. ( The Reine de Saba cake is in volume one.) The cookbooks are available in your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Reine de Saba or Queen of Sheba cake is a wonder. It is exquisitely chocolatey, melt-in-your mouth moist and iced with an incredible buttery chocolate frosting. (I confess that I loved the frosting so much that I frosted my cake with a double batch.

My guests were wowed by Julia’s cake. You will be, too. 

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