Hello weekend! Sacramento can’t decide if it wants to be hot or cool right now. But the weather has been cooperating gloriously recently, with lots of sun, perfect for relaxing on the patio with tortilla chips and some coctel de camarones, or Mexican shrimp cocktail. I love this version of shrimp cocktail, it’s sort of like a virgin bloody mary with cucumber, celery, red onions, avocados and lots of shrimp. Perfect for dipping, or eating with a spoon. Or picking out the shrimp pieces with a fork, then the avocado pieces, and then eating the rest with a spoon as if it were gazpacho. Oh dang it, now I want to make it all over again!

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Have you ever played around with sriracha hot sauce? It’s that spicy red sauce you often find at south east asian restaurants in the plastic bottle with the rooster on the side. It’s sort of an “in” thing these days, a great combination of sweet, spicy, garlicky, and sour, with the consistency of ketchup. People are finding all sorts of culinary uses for sriracha, check out these mean buffalo wings with sriracha sauce from my friends Diane and Todd. For an experiment we thought we would jack up the humble hot dog with this sauce. We added a little Chinese mustard and topped the dog with asian coleslaw; it turned out great, we loved it! Even my dad, who tends to hold back on hot chilies gobbled up his. Do you use sriracha in your cooking? If so, please tell us how in the comments.

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It’s the beginning of blueberry season over here; let the parade of baked goods begin! I had a basket of blueberries giving me the eye the other morning, as well as some ricotta cheese in the fridge begging to be used up. Hmmm. Blueberry muffins maybe? blueberry pancakes? or pound cake? A lemony blueberry pound cake won the toss this time, a pound cake made even more dense and silky rich with the substitution of ricotta for some of the butter and flour. This ricotta pound cake was declared a winner by all who tasted it. Enjoy!

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Are you a lover of books? My father, the English teacher, instilled in us an appreciation for literature. When I find a book I love I want to yell about it from the mountain top. Instead, my friends are the beneficiaries of this enthusiasm, since I typically find every excuse to send them a copy of the new favorite. Last year the book my friends received was The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens van der Post. This year it will be The Honey Thief, a beautifully written collection of fictional stories by Najaf Mazari, a Hazara Afghani refugee living in Australia, and his collaborator, novelist Robert Hillman.

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Please welcome my dear friend, guest author Steve-Anna Stephens as she shares a Southern classic, just in time for Mother’s Day! ~Elise

Do you have a sweet tooth? Truth be told—I do not. At all. Pass me a second helping of beef tenderloin at dinner, thank you very much, and you can have my dessert. So, the Hummingbird Cake perplexes me, because, well, I can’t stop eating it. Maybe it’s the pecans that lure me in, or the way the taste fools me into thinking I might just be eating a fancy piece of banana bread with a little cream cheese. Good for you, right?

This has to be the one of the sweetest, most scrumptious cakes around. Given their love for sugary nectar, one has to imagine hummingbirds would love to feast on this cake. But tough luck, hummingbirds! No one’s leaving this cake outside unattended.

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Of all the ways there are to cook salmon, baking it is one of the easiest. Just brush the fillets with a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and cook in a hot oven on a foil-lined pan for 10 minutes. No fuss, no mess, no difficult clean-up. One of my favorite things to serve with salmon is avocado. In this recipe we are gently tossing avocado with a little chopped mango, red onion, serrano chile, and lime juice for a sweet, sour, and savory salsa (try saying that five times fast!) Perfect to adorn our simple baked salmon. Enjoy!

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On any given day after a run to the farmer’s market, you’ll find a bowl full of red radishes, greens and roots lopped off, soaking in water in my parent’s refrigerator. My father loves radishes. Whereas some parents put out cookies and chips for their kids for snacks, my dad put out radishes for us, and still does. Crunchy and cool, they’re a great snack. Cut up and tossed with some lemon, oil, mint, and pistachios, they make a great little salad too, or a lovely side for steak, Mexican pulled pork, or tacos. We tossed the radishes with toasted pistachios; I’ve also made with with toasted sunflower seeds, equally good.

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Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You know why there is no ice cream in my home? Because if it’s there, I’ll eat it all. Chips and crackers? Their days are numbered in hours, or maybe minutes. So my pathway to moderation is just to not buy the things that I shouldn’t be eating all the time. Or I will. Eat them all the time. (Here’s the point where I blame my parents, you know, the ones who never fed us enough growing up; of course when I mention this to them you can practically see the indignation steaming out of their ears.)

Back to danger. There are three staples that you can always find at my house—corn tortillas, oil, and salt. This is all you need to make the most wonderful, fresh, crunchy, perfectly golden, homemade tortilla chips. In fact, if you are cooking light, you don’t even need oil. So there’s no excuse not to make them, only every ounce of will power I possess.

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Chicken, corn tortillas, avocados, lime. These are ingredients that simply love each other. Pretty much anything you make with them is bound to be good. The following soup is a relatively easy version of “Sopa de Lima” or “Lime Soup”, a specialty of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It’s a chicken soup flavored with fiery habanero, cinnamon, clove, and tangy limes. The limes that are used in the Yucatan are a slightly different variety than what is easily available here, but standard Persian limes will work fine. The soup is tangy from limes, smoothed with the buttery richness of avocados, and enjoys a little crunch from fried tortilla strips added for garnish. It’s reminiscent of both pozole and tortilla soup, but with somewhat different spices and a strong hit of lime. ¡Happy Cinco de Mayo!

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I made a serendipitous discovery the other day, a discovery that countless bakers have made throughout time eternal. On a quest to make chocolate chip cookies it was discovered by my young charges that no chocolate chips remained in the cupboard. Instead, we found a bag of Hershey bars. So, we chopped them up into large chip-sized pieces and used them instead. You know what happens when you use chunks of chocolate bars instead of chocolate chips in cookies? First, they’re bigger, so you get these pockets of chocolate explosions when you eat the cookies. Second, the edges melt into the cookie dough, permeating more of the cookie with chocolatey-ness. Chocolate chips are formulated to hold their shape while baking (less cocoa butter); chocolate bars are made to melt the moment they enter your mouth.

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