use real butter

Recipe: brain teaser bars

**You can still enter to win an iPod nano! You have until midnight, September 27, 2009! MST**

Thanks for all of the birfday wishes, folks! Very sweet of you :) I’m going to begin a pre-post -birfday celebration with Helen, Todd and Diane, and so many others very shortly! By the time you read this message, I will either be en route to or in San Francisco for the BlogHer Food conference. Hey now! that doesn’t mean you can all go slacking off! There is some important business at hand – so let’s get to it.

Today, Good Bite is launching the Awaken Your Senses Challenge sponsored by Quaker Instant Oatmeal. use real butter is a part of this campaign to help food charities. Twelve food bloggers have been asked to share some of their favorite food memories with Good Bite. Using those food memories for inspiration, Chef David Lawrence (of Good Bite – and a total cutie!) will create an assortment of oatmeal dishes combining Quaker Instant Oatmeal and other ingredients. Every two weeks, a new round of videos will be posted on youtube at quakertalk where you can vote for your favorite topping. Semi-finalists will be selected from each round and at the end of eight weeks, the blogger with the most votes wins.

But what do they win?

Each food blogger is championing a food charity in this challenge. The winner will have $10,000 donated to their charity. That is a lot of money, but more importantly it will help a lot of people. The charity I have selected is the Farm to School Program which promotes a mutually beneficial community relationship between local farms and school lunch programs nationwide. Here is what they do in a nutshell:

Farm to School connects schools (K-12) and local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing agriculture, health and nutrition education opportunities, and supporting local and regional farmers.

As food bloggers, as people who love food and cooking and eating, it might be hard to imagine that there are others who go without food more often than not. For some kids, their best meal of the day is the school lunch. Sure, we all joke about school cafeteria lunches with the puke green mystery vegetable mush – but what if that was your only exposure to vegetables? Kids who grow up eating fresh fruits and vegetables have a better chance of making those choices a part of their daily lives as adults. The Farm to School Program seeks to improve school lunches and instill good eating habits in children while at the same time creating a demand for what our local and regional farmers work so hard to provide. It benefits two very important groups: our farmers and our children – but ultimately, it is for our collective future.

Okay great! I’m jazzed – what do I do?

VOTE for your favorite topping (or vote for your favorite blogger or favorite charity) each week at www.youtube.com/quakertalk! Let’s see if we can make the semi-finals on our way to winning $10,000 for the Farm to School Program. I would love to have your support, but honestly, all of the charities are Good Causes. And thank you for doing this.

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This summer I received a free copy of Julia Usher‘s new cookbook Cookie Swap for review, but never found a moment to actually make anything until a few weeks ago. That was fine though, because as timing goes, Ms. Usher will be in Boulder in a couple of weeks. Folks in the Boulder/Denver area can catch her at the Boulder Book Store on Wednesday at 7:30pm on October 7, 2009 for a talk and a book signing.



If you love decorating with icing and pretty things, this might be the book for you. The detail in Ms. Usher’s decorating is delightful, ranging from elegant cookies to whimsical cookies. As busy and as impatient as I am, I skipped all of those cookies looking for a recipe I could make quickly. Thankfully, she had some of those easier recipes for people like me.

ah yes, butter

**Jump for more butter**

Whoa! So much is going on this week that my head is spinning. If you haven’t entered the iPod nano giveaway, please do so! Did you know the iPod nano does video? I did not. I just found that out from Andrew… Hurry up and enter before I change my mind! ;) You have until midnight, Sunday September 27th. Just tell me what quintessential autumn is for you.

Not long after my last post, I woke up to fog as thick as pea soup. Next thing I heard was a peal of thunder so loud the house shook and suddenly a million balls of ice began pelting the whole world. Within minutes the hail blanketed everything in white and just as suddenly as it had started, it turned to soft fluffy snowflakes. We got four inches of snow on the last day of summer. That’s my kind of summer!

accumulation on kaweah in one minute

three seasons in one day: (last day of) summer, fall (colors), and winter (snow)

And today (the 23rd) is my birthday, but there isn’t any time to celebrate. All September celebrations in this house are being postponed to late October! So knock it off with the singing and the candles already – I’m STILL 37, got it?! Ha!

Today’s post is the first in a series of photowalks. Something that fascinates me is seeing how fellow photographers view the world through their lens(es). It’s not just that we may look at an object or a scene differently, but that we may be drawn to completely different things. I had the privilege of having lunch with Mr. Andrew Hyde yesterday, and afterward we went for a short walk… a photowalk. Of course, any time I am with Andrew I meet new people. But this time, we ran into Michael Brown, that pleasant fellow who silenced the packed Boulder Theater last week at Ignite Boulder 6 with his amazing and inspiring talk on Reward and Risk. Still unassuming and very sweet – I have great respect for this man. Okay, so the rules of the photowalk: we take turns picking a location to stop and shoot approximately 5 frames each.

meet andrew (yes, he’s wearing flip flops and a scarf)

Andrew: Canon EOS 5D Mark II with an EF24-70mm f/2.8L
Jen: Nikon D3x with Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED

The day was overcast and cool. We strolled a few blocks down Pearl Street pedestrian mall in Boulder where just last week this time the place would have been bursting with people. Instead, it was very mellow… nearly empty. Here is a sampling of what we saw:

andrew location #1: shot 4

jen location #1: shot 2

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: alfajores macarons

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have a group of people who are willing to work hard together. On Friday I met with a group of ladies for a bridal shoot. No, I am not a wedding photographer AT ALL, and here I was teaching a couple of friends about shooting weddings! We had a lovely bride-to-be who was willing to drive up to Boulder and don her beautiful new dress and sit in the dirt and dry, prickly weeds for our shoot in the hot sun and blowing dust.

who wouldn’t marry this woman?

it’s all about the accessories

Lynn was a dream to work with: cooperative, patient, very sweet, and she looked awesome. Beth and Erin were terrific assistants and when it came time for each of them to shoot, they each did a great job. Considering we were shooting at the worst time of day, it went really well and Lynn loved the photos.

in the grasses

beth and erin resting in the shade of my car after a long and hot shoot

And now fall is really here! There were plenty of leaf peepers around the mountains today. I’m glad to see that so many people enjoy the fall colors although I’ll be happy when they are out of my frame while I am shooting during the week :)

hint of reds

still lots of green aspen

There is snow in our forecast for the next several days, which I’m quite excited about. It’s not even technically autumn yet. I used to associate fall with the start of a sports season – whatever sport I was playing (field hockey or volleyball). These days my thoughts immediately turn to the fall shoot, fall hikes, snow, and… ski season :) I also find my cooking mojo kicking into gear once more now that it’s cool enough to turn on the stove or oven. That has me thinking about apples, pomegranates, persimmons, roasting vegetables, hot spiced drinks, crock pot recipes… and a GIVEAWAY! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? That’s because I couldn’t decide on what to give away. That is, until I got one of these:

a 16Gb ipod nano

It came with my new laptop, but Jeremy and I both have iphones, so we were like, “We don’t need the nano.” The lady at the Apple store said it was free, so I said, “I’ll take the nano.” But I’m not keen on keeping stuff that I don’t need and I figured it would make a great prize for someone who would like to have 16 gigs worth of music, podcasts, and other aural stimuli in a shiny, black device as big as a business card. It’s brand-spanking-new, slick, and comes in its own Apple Sleeping Beauty clear faux-glass (plastic) case. How ’bout that?! So how can you make this little pal your own?

The Rules: To enter, leave a comment on THIS post telling me what is quintessential autumn for you! Please, no novels. One entry/comment per person. Multiple comments by the same author will result in disqualification and deletion. You have until midnight (MST), Sunday, September 27th, to enter. The winner will be chosen at random (method was officially approved by resident astrophysicist) in San Francisco and announced on Monday, the 28th of September. I will ship anywhere in the world. Good luck!

**Jump for more butter**