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Recipe: vietnamese fried spring rolls (cha gio)

All signs point to “Back to School”. Crested Butte seemed to be emptying out this past weekend and our trail run Monday morning was particularly devoid of the usual summer gamut of hikers, runners, and bikers. We are now back home in the Front Range, navigating around freshmen and their parents as they arrive at the university. Folks are wrapping up their summer vacations and the commuter buses will be running at capacity once again. We spied a single aspen that had gone gold amidst a sea of green on our drive from Crested Butte to Nederland. Someone always jumps the gun, but fall is not far off for the mountains where splashes of red and yellow are already dotting the understory like little jewels. Speaking of little jewels, we’re seeing many wild berries ripening in the high country, too!

raspberries

my favorites: huckleberries

wild strawberries

The berries I find in the mountains are precious to me. No one tends to these plants. No one waters them. No one protects them from pests. No one throws blankets over them when there is an overnight freeze. And yet these wild and hardy plants produce the most intensely flavored little fruits. Treasures. When you explore the mountains year-round, you gain an appreciation for the struggles that all mountain life endures – especially when you pop a perfectly sweet and tart sun-warmed berry into your mouth. It is a short-lived berry season. The approach of fall looms large as my mind turns back to the kitchen, where it is starting to feel comfortable enough to cook. Let’s make some Vietnamese spring rolls or cha gio.

ground pork, shrimp, carrot, bean thread (cellophane) noodles, salt, pepper, egg, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, rice paper

While I love fresh Vietnamese spring rolls, I am a huge sucker for crisp fried things. That’s probably part of my motivation to keep active! The first time I had the fried Vietnamese spring rolls, was when our Vietnamese server misunderstood my order for grilled pork bun (rice noodle vermicelli) and brought me the grilled pork and egg roll combo bun instead. SO GOOD! I didn’t know such a thing existed.

chop the cellophane noodles with scissors

the filling: chopped cellophane noodles, minced shallots, shredded carrot, ground pork, chopped shrimp, fish sauce, beaten egg, salt, pepper, minced garlic

place all of the filling ingredients in a bowl

mix it together

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Recipe: tamagoyaki (rolled omelette) and chirashi bowl

The overnight low temperature read 33°F on our deck in Crested Butte on Saturday night. That’s just ONE degree above freezing. I am overjoyed. As we said our good-byes this evening at our annual neighborhood picnic, I noticed everyone had donned their fleece or down jackets. Despite warm (70s) temperatures in Crested Butte during the day, it is deliciously cool when the sun drops low in the sky. You can feel it – the turn that summer takes in the high country when it’s no longer hot from day to night, but hot and cool. A subtle change, but you feel the presence and some of us get a little giddy.

our lovely view on our hike

a carpet of huckleberry plants

Going from Nederland to Crested Butte has me shifting gears. There is a whole different set of trails to run, hike, or forage. Weather patterns are different. And instead of photographing towering moose who could charge me and my camera equipment in an instant, I am stalking adorable beavers swimming recreational laps in their lakes who pose zero threat to anyone who isn’t a tree.

two beavers paddling about like it’s adult swim

moseying along the shoreline

Shortly after we got our place in Crested Butte last year, our favorite sushi bar in town shut its doors for good. Jeremy was pretty heartbroken, but living in Colorado mountain towns, you get used to either doing without or doing it yourself. If it’s food-related, I generally go for the latter. As sushi goes, some recipes come down to whether or not you can source an ingredient. However, there are items you can make from pretty basic ingredients. One of my favorites is tamagoyaki, a Japanese rolled egg omelette.

you will need eggs, mirin, sugar, salt, and dashi (or instant dashi granules)

You can purchase tamagoyaki frozen from some Asian grocery stores, but I have yet to find one that tastes good. My local sushi bar in Boulder makes it in house and it is excellent. There are different levels of effort for producing these omelettes from a plain old egg sheet to a rolled omelette to a fancy one with fish. I decided to try my hand at the basic rolled omelette. For dashi, you can make your own (beyond the scope of this post), use liquid dashi concentrate, or use hondashi instant dashi granules. (I add one teaspoon of granules to a cup of boiling water to yield one cup.)

pour the dashi into the salt and sugar

add the mirin

beat the eggs in a medium bowl

beat in the dashi mixture

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Recipe: california hand roll (temaki)

Despite being the summer high season in Crested Butte, our time here has been pleasantly quiet and peaceful. Colorado mountain towns have long winters and short summers, but boy are those summers exploding with color, activity, beauty at every turn – both in the backcountry and in town proper.

the town of crested butte is simply charming

Our neighborhood is filled with the sounds of people greeting one another in the street while walking or heading out for a bike ride, children laughing and playing, and the jingle of dog tags as pups get their walkies in the fresh mountain air. Several of our wonderful neighbors have told us how sorry they were to hear of Kaweah’s passing. This is – as many mountain communities are – a dog-loving community.

our dear next-door neighbor even sent flowers

Jeremy and I took a few days to visit his folks in Pagosa Springs – a lovely mountain town in the-middle-of-nowhere, southwest Colorado. We got up early one morning for a trail run before everyone else had risen and greeted the sunrise as we paced through scrub oak and sticky mud from the previous day’s thunderstorms. Afterward, we sat on the porch with his parents watching throngs of hummingbirds spar over the hummingbird feeders. The Rufous hummingbirds are especially territorial and aggressive which made the bird watching all the more entertaining. It’s really quite spectacular.

sunrise on the trail

a lone rufous monitors the bird feeder from a nearby branch

then thwarts the attempts of an aggressor

and shows the other guy what’s what

We returned to Crested Butte in time to meet my friend Irvin and his partner who were road tripping through Utah and Colorado this summer. We spent 48 hours giving them a quick sampling of Crested Butte: checking out Mount Crested Butte, dining in Mountaineer Square, coffee and pastries at Camp 4, hiking to a great 360° view in the high country, pizza at Secret Stash, mountain biking, dinner at our place, browsing the farmers market.

a.j. and irvin on our hike

irvin grabs a slice of “the woodward” pizza at secret stash

Our multi-day non-stop schedule kept us rather busy and preoccupied such that we weren’t dwelling too much on the little black dog that was missing from our lives. Of course, we miss her terribly. But when people tell us they are sorry, I thank them and point out that Kaweah lived a very good and happy dog life. On our drive from Pagosa Springs to Crested Butte, I was finally able to verbalize how I felt about my time with Kaweah. She was a gift to us, both literally and figuratively. It was our responsibility to provide the absolute best life to her that we could and we took that task to heart. We were with her to the very end so that she was never alone, afraid, or unloved. Only now do I understand just how much of a gift she really was and will always be until my dying day. This is me finding closure.

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I know that some people consider sushi a summer food because of the raw aspect, but I maintain a year-round love affair with sushi. I crave it after skiing just as much as I crave it after (and during) summer backpacking, and we’re fortunate that Boulder has a lot of decent sushi on offer and Crested Butte has one sushi bar (they used to have two, but my favorite one closed its doors last year). We also make sushi at home. One of my favorites is the California roll – something I never order in restaurants, but often make in my own kitchen. It is a good gateway sushi roll because the crab is cooked. When we prepare California rolls at home, we tend to go for the hand rolls or temaki because they’re quick and easy to make and consume.

wasabi powder, sesame seeds, sriracha, nori (seaweed), sushi rice, masago (capelin roe), cucumber, avocado, mayonnaise, king crab legs

slice the cucumber into strips

stir wasabi powder into mayonnaise to make…

wasabi mayonnaise

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