Food, Photography and Bons Mots
Anyone out there love mushrooms? I’ve recently rekindled my love affair with the Long Beach Sunday Farmers’ Market and there are two delightful mushroom vendors. I love their fresh mushrooms and enjoy the snappy conversation. I’ve searched for recipes worthy of their beautiful mushrooms and…
I lost my admittedly limited self-control at the local farmers’ market the other day and bought a flat of strawberries. Whoa! That’s a lot of strawberries for one cook and a sweet pup who enjoys a fresh strawberry treat now and then. What to make?…
I’m a unashamed stone fruit devotee. I particularly love plums. This is my season!
There were perfectly ripe plums at my local farmers’ market this week. So, it being summer, I decided to make ice cream.
This is a David Lebovitz recipe from his cookbook The Perfect Scoop. The cookbook is available through your local bookstore. Lebovitz is a Paris-based cookbook author whose early career included a stint at Berkeley’s Chez Panisse.
This ice cream would be a perfect light end to an elegant meal. It is an intense plum pink color and, with the cup of cream, is just creamier than a sorbet. The plum flavor is intense.
Here is the ice cream 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 Plum Conserve–perfect for slathering on your morning toast or for incorporating into your pastry recipes. (Here…
This recipe brings back fond memories of parties in my home. On my buffet table, a three bean salad was always a reliable dish–easy to put together, flexible, and interesting. Recently, my local Farmer’s Market has been offering beautiful yellow was beans that reminded me…
It is the height of the tomato season and what a season it is!
My farmer’s market has a great selection of heirloom varieties and I’ve been delving into some of the interesting versions of Gazpacho. (We’ve featured Gazpacho before on Blue Cayenne– here and here and they are both wonderful recipes. See them pictured below.)
This recipe, a Melissa Clark recipe from her book Dinner in French, caught our attention because it features watermelon. The watermelon gives the Gazpacho a hint of sweetness and a very pretty color. We can’t recommend this recipe highly enough.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
This is one wonderful salad dressing. A real keeper. This Creamy Sesame-Ginger Dressing is a Samin Nosrat recipe from The New York Times. You can find the original recipe here. Nosrat is the gifted author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, an exceptional cookbook that should…
My beautiful friend Michelle had the good fortune to visit San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe recently and enjoyed a glass of their legendary Irish Coffee. As she described the coffee’s deliciousness, I knew I needed to try this. And, of course, it was wonderful. Here…
Apricots and I go back a long way.
Growing up, I always had a “Paradise Cake” for my birthday. The cake was two layers of yellow cake slathered with a tangy dried apricot puree and covered in coconut. I’ve tried to find the recipe online but, so far no luck.
This year the apricots here have been subpar until last Sunday when I found some beautiful ones at the large Long Beach (California) Farmer’s Market on Second Street. They were about twice as large as the golf-ball sized apricots in my local supermarkets. And, they have that sweet tang that, I think, distinguishes the apricot from most of the other stone fruits.
So, I was off to make an apricot cake. This recipe if from Yossy Arefi’s widely-acclaimed little cake cookbook, Snacking Cakes. Her cookbook is available through your local bookstore or on Amazon here. It’s a small cookbook with a large collection of inventive cake recipes. It is such a favorite of mine that I’ve gifted it to several friends.
Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.
It’s flaky. It’s tender. It’s sweet. It’s savory. There is a bit of a sour feta bite. It’s wonderful. This is a riff on Greek Tiropita–layers of crisp and flaky phyllo dough stuffed with pungent feta cheese. This recipe brings back memories of glorious stays…
