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Recipe: california roll burger

You can’t fight the weather. The best thing you can do is roll with it. That’s what I’ve been telling myself anyway. Now that the crud in my chest is clearing and I no longer sound like Kathleen Turner, we’ve been getting outside to assess the snowpack. Total spring conditions: ice in the morning, corn snow in the afternoon. We noticed over the weekend that our front yard aspens are already forming buds a month early.

still getting nice color in the mornings and evenings

walking on hardpack

The spring equinox is a day away and all of this increased daylight prompts me to think of spring and summer cooking. Normally we’d be shoveling a few feet of Rocky Mountain powder from the driveway, but it looks like spring has come early for Colorado. My friends in Southern California, however, are always in perpetual spring-summer. Allison posted a photo of a California roll burger on her Facebook page a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to shake the idea since. A little Google action brought me to 26 Beach Restaurant’s California burger roll. Oh. My. Freaking. Goodness.

a lot of components, but totally worth the trouble

It’s pretty much what you’d guess it to be – a hamburger with the components of the revered fusion California roll. How could this not be amazing? Throughout the week, my mind would wander to the California roll burger. What would I put on mine? It’s heavy enough with the beef patty and the bun, so I opted out of adding sushi rice. In addition to the traditional lettuce and tomato, I figured there would be crab salad, avocado, masago (capelin roe), pickled ginger (gari), toasted seaweed (nori), and wasabi mayonnaise. Instead of our standard potato roll buns, I picked up some challah rolls. And if we were going to do this right, why not some shredded king crab legs for the salad? You could use krab (surimi), but I find real crab to be beyond awesome.

shelling the crab

mix mayonnaise with shredded crab meat

make the wasabi mayonniase: stir some wasabi powder into the mayo

**Jump for more butter**

If you know me even a little bit, you know that I love sushi. Going to college in southern California sealed my fate in so many ways including sushi and Jeremy. My litmus test for my first dinner date with Jeremy was at a popular sushi bar in Pasadena. If he couldn’t handle the fish – out the airlock! But he loved it. Good thing too! When we first moved to Colorado, we were stunned at the number of sushi restaurants in Boulder. There are several – at least ten off the top of my head. But not all sushi restaurants in Boulder, Colorado are created equal. It didn’t take long before I zeroed in on my favorite.

sushi tora in spring

Sushi in Boulder is not inexpensive if your reference point is a major city on a coast. Once you get over the initial sticker shock, you come to learn that there is bad expensive sushi and good expensive sushi. Sushi Tora obviously boasts the Good Sushi. I’m no expert. I just know what I like. Their fish is consistently the freshest, best-prepared, and highest quality. I should note that I’m more of a sashimi and maki girl than a nigiri girl. It’s where I take out-of-town guests who have a hankering for sushi. It’s where I take my parents. They LOVED Tora and my folks are the first to wrinkle their noses and point out when a restaurant doesn’t serve satisfactory food (that’s where I get it from). I had to forgo sushi during my chemotherapy in 2008. Can you guess the first place we went for dinner when I got the all-clear from my oncologist? Tora, of course!

kampachi (amber jack) crudo with tobiko, orange oil, garlic, pepper

There have been some changes since I started going to Sushi Tora in 2006. Change in ownership for one. Change in head sushi chef too. For the past few years, my dining schedule has been pretty busy with so many places to choose from. I try to keep the variety alive and well. I’d go to sushi for more lunch meetings than anything else and that was always easier at the tables than at the bar. Sitting at the bar is the finger on the pulse of a sushi joint – sitting at a table is neither here nor there, but my white friends tend to prefer it. I saw the changes, but they didn’t register in my head until I was invited to come in and meet the new chefs last December. I’m slow on the uptake, okay.

beef short rib and cabbage fried wontons with sweet soy sauce and spicy mustard

pork and ginger gyoza with ponzu

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: plum blossom sushi roll

I walked up to the register and placed a pair of sunglasses and a Camelbak pack on the counter. I mustered the friendliest smile I could, as it had been a long and hot day. That counter felt so nice and cool on my hands that I was tempted to stretch my upper body across the surface and roll around on it, I was so flush from the sun and heat. The REI employee asked me what I was going to do this weekend, it was Memorial Day weekend after all. I was caught off guard. Holiday weekend? I knew it was a holiday weekend, but I didn’t actually have anything planned other than work. “I need to work this weekend,” I offered with another smile – this one more from embarrassment than trying to mask my exhaustion. Apparently, that was the wrong answer. He was mortified. “You can’t work! It’s going to be beautiful! It’s a long weekend – you should be drinking cold beers and kicking back!” I neither drink cold beers nor do I kick back. I opened my mouth to start explaining how I a) love what I do and b) live where people go on vacation, but he cut me off insisting that I promise I would have some fun this weekend. Yes, yes of course.

Friday was brutal for this mountain girl as I had an afternoon bridal shoot in Denver… and the high was 93°F. It didn’t even get to 90°F when I was shooting in Death Valley – this was the hottest I’ve experienced so far this year *gah*. It wasn’t a heat wave, it was a heat smackdown. As Erin deftly negotiated Denver’s Memorial Day weekend traffic and Manisha navigated the way to the botanical gardens, I was jerry-rigging a bouquet in the backseat. Flowers don’t lie. Those suckers wilted before I could fire off the first set of photos. Bummer.

oh, that’s sad

Luckily, Kitt had a nice bunch of peonies that Erin wrapped into a pretty bouquet while the hydrangeas were dying before our lenses. We lucked out: a giant cap of clouds hovered above us and our bride remained cool as a cucumber. At the end of the shoot, Manisha grinned and said, “You suffer for your work, girl!” I was sweating like a pig. 93°F is why I live in the Rockies and not on the Great Plains.

kitt with living flowers

a laughing erin walks kitt to the next bridge

wearing her mother’s wedding gown – very special

You can see more photos from the shoot on my photoblog. After three hours, we hugged Kitt good-bye and piled into Erin’s car to go roast in more Friday-afternoon-of-a-long-holiday-weekend-Denver-rush-hour-compounded-by-poorly-timed-construction traffic. I was hot, tired, dehydrated, sticky, smelly… I had goose poop and tree sap stuck between my sandals and my feet. Jeremy took me to happy hour so I could rehydrate with water in one hand and lemonade in the other. Boulder’s Pearl Street was hopping Friday evening.

another beautiful day in paradise boulder

And here we are at the end of May. I’m looking around wondering where the heck THAT month went. Our weather is finally stabilizing up here in the mountains such that it’s safe to put the deck furniture out without worry that another 4 inches of snow (or 12 for that matter) will blanket everything. I did not lie to the man at REI – we’ve been working all weekend. You know how some people winterize their house? We summerize ours. That entails putting ultraviolet-reflecting stickers on our windows to prevent bird crashes (especially the cute little hummingbirds), house maintenance, sanding and oiling our deck furniture, designing a system to keep us from incinerating on the deck during daylight hours, making multiple trips to the hardware store, and so on and so forth. Did I mention that I love my power sander? Well, I do.

while jeremy put the stickers up, three hummingbirds flew right up to him

kaweah supervises the progress

However you spent your weekend, I hope it involved some good food, great people, and happy memories. Boulder County Public Schools are out for summer and the neighbor’s trampoline has been getting non-stop use since Thursday afternoon. Instead of hearing children squealing and laughing in the evenings, we hear it all day. It’s awesome. Now that Nature has rubbed my face in summer, I’m over the initial shock. I am loathe to turn on the stove or the oven if I can avoid it on those hot days (however, it’s a dry heat), which is why sushi is so delightfully perfect.

start with masago (flying fish roe) scallops, avocado, and maguro (tuna)

mix up the scallops and masago with a little mayo

**Jump for more butter**