Culinary Adventures with Camilla

I am still fairly new to the baking group called Bundt Bakers, but I am already enamored with the bloggers and their creative baked goodies. #BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. You can see all our of lovely Bundts by following our  Pinterest board . We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient. Updated links for all of our past events and more information about BundtBakers, can be found on our  home page . Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm is hosting February's Bundt Bakers group. When I read her prompt - "Share a Bundt that you made to show your Valentine(s) how much you love them" - I immediately thought of a Persian Love Cake. I have made Persian Love Cake before. It's a fragrant rose-scented cake flavored with ground cardamom and almond flour. And it's topped with crushed pistachios and candied rose petals. So, I  decided to adapt that into a ...

It's hard to believe that it's already October! I am sharing my new favorite cookbook with  Foodie Reads Challenge :  The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen by Yasmin Khan. * I picked this up while I was reading Persepolis  by Marjane Satrapi. You can read about that book here . I love cookbooks with delicious recipes, sumptuous stories, and delectable photographs. This book has it all. I am considering an entire Persian feast for our Thanksgiving table this year. So, stay tuned. I plan to get a lot of use out of this book.  On the Page This is a really wonderful book. The recipes to be written well. The anecdotes made me feel as if I were sitting down and sharing a meal with the author. If you like to travel the world by tabletop as I do, you need this book in your collection. "...eating isn't just about filling your stomach.... It is an opportunity to sit with one another, to talk about your day, to share your problems, your thoughts, yo...

It's #SundaySupper time again. And this round we are stuffing, rolling, and wrapping. What a fun theme! I considered stuffing grape leaves, tomatoes, peppers, and even apples. But in the end, I wanted to make something with eggplants.  A couple of years ago, I hosted an eggplant dinner for two friends' birthday celebration; I called it 'Ode to an Aubergine.' Little back story: one of our friends claimed to not like eggplant. I took the challenge to come up with an entire dinner menu made with eggplant...from Eggplant Boats to Creamy Eggplant Soup and Braised Lamb Over Eggplant Puree to dessert. Yes! Even dessert. I made an Italian dessert - Melanzane al Cioccolato  - with eggplant and chocolate. And, of course, I ordered eggplant hats for everyone. The dinner was a wild success and the eggplant-averse friend declared, to my delight, Okay, I like eggplant now! So, for this edition of #SundaySupper - Stuff, Roll, Wrap - I decided to do my own versi...

This round Rachel, at The Crispy Cook , selected Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas for our April-May 2014  Cook the Books   project. There's an Amazon-affiliate link at the bottom of this post. Funny in Farsi  is a memoir written by an Iranian-born author who immigrated to California when she was 7 years old. It's - as you would expect from the title - funny. Really funny. But it's also heart-wrenching and mortifying. Imagine having your name's pronunciation slaughtered at every turn. My name, Firoozeh, chosen by my mother, means 'Turquoise' in Persian. In America, it means 'Unpronounceable'.... One mom at her children's school refused to learn her name and, instead, started calling her 'F-Word.' Dumas writes with candor and her accounts truly convey the immigrant experience. I, myself, am first generation, but I have heard stories from my parents and my grandparents. So, I can relate by ex...