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Recipe: tonkatsu (japanese pork cutlet)

The fall shoot is yellow-overload for me. I tend to go where the aspens are and that means gold against dark pine green here in Colorado. It took some getting used to since I grew up on the East Coast and spent many a graduate school year in the northeast where maples are ablazing in glorious reds, oranges, yellows. That’s not to say that we don’t have our share of the reds here. We do! Those plants that gave us glorious wildflowers in summer do double duty and provide striking splashes of red in the backcountry as evidenced on a recent hike.

sticky geranium leaves turning red

more sticky geranium

columbine leaves growing in a rock crevice

fireweed

king’s (or rose?) crown

September has always been my favorite month because it is my birthday month and my birthday usually coincided with the first day of fall. The first day of fall is an abstract concept in places like southern Virginia. But in Colorado’s high country, fall plays for reals and I love it. Jeremy and I got to the trailhead in the dark and hiked via headlamps for the first hour in sub-freezing temperatures. When the sun made her intentions known, we shut off the lamps and admired sunrise from a high vantage point. We continued on and marveled at the frost that encrusted the ground, the plants, even the tiny late season wildflowers. Alpine plants are tough. Coming around a bend in the trail, I looked up and gasped, silently grabbing Jeremy’s arm as he walked up behind me. In the bluish light of dawn under the forest canopy stood an enormous bull moose. He was massive and towered above us even 20 feet away. At once, the moose reared its head up and back, the entirety of its enormous body flowing fluidly behind the head and diving into the woods, silently and effortlessly.

sunrise on the valley

the frost

jeremy walks ahead of the sun

We heard bull elk bugling in the distance and saw a handful of mule deer feeding in the meadows. It’s a busy time of year for everyone. While we are secretly doing our snow dances every day, this is our favorite weather for hiking when you can see your breath on the air into mid-morning and the sun is regarded as a welcome friend rather than an oppressive tyrant.

a few of the early aspens

a few snowfields linger in the chutes

After a hike, we’re always hungry because we rarely eat much for breakfast (it’s hard to stomach much food at 4am) and we typically graze infrequently on the trail. The temptation to make a beeline straight from the trailhead to a burger joint or the pizza shack is high, but we try to avoid it by having good leftovers at home to heat up and dig into immediately. In this case, I had tonkatsu – Japanese pork cutlet – in the refrigerator. I like to make extra because Jeremy loves it for lunch. It’s a dish I’ve seen on just about every menu in a sushi bar, but I never ordered it because I’m such a nut about sushi and sashimi. After seeing Marc post about it, I bookmarked the recipe and didn’t look at my bookmarks again until a few months ago.

start by slicing cabbage

and soaking it in water

A traditional accompaniment is sliced cabbage and since you soak it in water for about an hour, it’s advised that you start with that step first. Once you get the cabbage soaking, break out the pork loin! Well, I used pork loin chops. You just need pork loin chops, salt, pepper, an egg, flour, and panko (flaky Japanese bread crumbs – flaky as in texture, not in terms of reliability). And oil for frying.

pork, egg, panko

trim any fat or silverskin from the pork

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chicken tikka masala

It used to be that I would measure a mile by the number of times (four) around the track. Then it became segments of a route through a lush residential neighborhood during field hockey practice runs. When Jeremy and I met and began hiking and backpacking together, I loved to stand on a high point and look back at where we had started. A short six miles could wind up a valley, around a mountain, over a ridge, and climb to a pass. It’s one thing to read it on the topo map and understand this in a cerebral sense. It’s another thing entirely to behold the majesty of the landscape before you.

golden grasses and rocks mantle the peaks and ridges

We had not hiked Mount Audubon since my birthday almost four years ago. Back then, Kaweah was still strong enough to summit with us and I was unaware I had cancer. A lot can happen over the course of four years and yet the trail was as we remembered it, more or less. When we ski in the backcountry, we’re always looking up and around us. When we hike, we’re usually scanning the trail ahead. I remember that cairn, that split boulder, that bifurcation of the trail, that stream crossing, that trail junction. I know where to expect to see families of marmots, pika, and ptarmigans. I like to think of the mountain structures changing on their geologic time scales – that is, they seldom change in our lifetime – and the mountain environment changing with diurnal or seasonal cycles due to avalanche, rock slide, fire, rain, vegetation, freeze and thaw, wind.

this pika is harvesting plants for the long winter ahead

adolescent ptarmigan in hiding

another pika checking us out at 13,000 feet

jeremy on summit

New trails are exciting, but familiar trails are comforting for me. I suppose it’s like that for cooking or anything for that matter. As far as food goes, my usual progression is to like a dish that has been served to me and then crave it such that I want to learn to make it myself. Except with Indian food. I had this mental barrier. Despite most of the ingredients being things I’ve used or at least heard of, I just didn’t know where to begin. My good friend, Manisha, has been so patient with me. I ask her the same stupid questions over and over and she patiently replies over and over and yet I still didn’t have the guts to make my own Indian food… until last week. It’s such a westernized Indian dish, but it is a favorite to be sure. I had to make chicken tikka masala.

chicken, yogurt, lime, garlic, oil, and spices

mince the garlic, juice the lime, dice the chicken

Everyone says it’s easy to make. They’re right. It is. It’s just a pain to make it for the first time and shoot it too. I tripled the batch to make up for the time investment (hey, you can freeze it). First marinate the chicken in a mix of plain yogurt, lime juice, oil, garlic, and spices. The range was 1 hour to 24 hours. I like the idea of marinades, so I went for 24 hours. Booyah!

put it all in a bowl

mix well then refrigerate

When the chicken is ready, you can either bake it or grill it. I chose to grill it. Just skewer the cubes without packing them too tightly together (because you want the chicken to cook evenly) and grill or bake until they are cooked. Turn them over half-way through the cooking time. On our grill it took a total of seven minutes: four on one side and three after flipping the skewers. Lovely.

skewer

grill (or bake)

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chinese dry-cooked string beans

It’s the last day of spring and there is a winter weather advisory issued for our mountains until 6:00 this evening.

I am not complaining.

3-8 inches of fresh snow in addition to the 30+ feet in the backcountry is our reprieve for the zero (0, nada, nil) days of skiing we managed in March when so much glorious powder fell at the big ski resorts. We were busy, we were traveling, I got sick… We’re still busy, but we’re not traveling (at least not in June) and thankfully, we aren’t sick!

yes, still skiing

the lower alpine lakes are thawing

Yesterday was Father’s Day. On Mother’s Day you expect every brunch joint to be packed out the door. On Father’s Day, we brace ourselves for the onslaught of families who want to take Dad to the mountains for a hike or to burn things (I really do not understand the obsession of people from the flats who come up to our mountains to burn stuff). But this year, the campgrounds remain under snow in late June. The trails are under snow. Even the parking lots have a few feet of snow lingering about where cars would normally be. I like it like that, for obvious reasons…

putting the skins away after the climb up

the anticipation of skiing out makes my mouth water

wooo! jeremy gets his turns in (in june!)

Also, this is my 1001st post. 1000 is a nice round number, but it was a special post for my dad, so I didn’t want to detract from it. 1001 is a palindrome, which I love more than round numbers – so there. The only significance of my 1001st post is that I clearly never shut up.

String beans (green beans) are in the markets and they’re looking pretty good. I’ve been wanting to make Chinese dry-cooked string beans for a while, but it always goes to the bottom of the list because Jeremy has a slight allergy to string beans. They make his throat itchy. That’s a real shame because my mom cooks them up better than any one or any restaurant I know of. Oh well… more for me.

string beans

trimming the ends

I suppose the name “dry-cooked” refers to the fact that there isn’t much liquid used in the recipe. I found that a little confusing considering that the beans are essentially fried in oil – a lot of oil. But you don’t consume all of that oil, thank goodness. Aside from the beans, the other main ingredients are ground pork (this is optional), dried shrimp, and Sichuan preserved mustard green tsa tsai. The dried shrimp and preserved mustard greens you’ll most likely have to get at an Asian grocery store.

dried shrimp and sichuan preserved vegetable

cut the beans into 3-inch pieces (i just cut them in half)

**Jump for more butter**