use real butter

Recipe: lemon poppy seed cake

Driving from Nederland to Crested Butte last Sunday, we made a quick stop at Copper Mountain to let the puppy out for a potty break. As I recorded the time of her pee on my phone, I noticed the date – July 12. Ten years ago on July 12th, we arrived in the mountains of Colorado and moved into our very first home. It is, without a doubt, one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.

colorado, you are a part of me

hiking the lush banks of clinton reservoir

neva gets a swim

yet another stunning sunset in crested butte

wildflowers showing off their stuff

Sorting through my photo files, I found my earliest pictures of Neva when she was 6 weeks old. She has changed so much in these past weeks. We don’t notice it because we are with her every day, but friends who see her once a week or every 2 weeks do comment on her growth. She’s still a puppy, but she now resembles a little dog rather than the soft, chubby, clumsy, wee pup we brought home in May. Do I miss that bundle of sharp toothy cuteness? Maybe a little, but we are really loving the dog that Neva is becoming.

introducing neva to stand up paddle boarding

getting used to being on the water

much easier to paddle without a puppy running up and down the board

In addition to her SUP adventures, Neva continues her hiking training. Ultimately, we want to be able to hike, backpack, and trail run with her – but we can’t start running Neva until she has stopped growing (at about a year old) because it can damage her development. So hiking it is! We’ve been careful to increase the distance and elevation gain of her hikes gradually, and she’s doing great. She’ll be a strong little girl come winter (our thoughts are always on winter).

hiking up steep and rocky trails like a boss

at 12,200 feet – her highest elevation to date

obligatory selfie with puppy kisses

As Neva makes her way toward doghood, my forays into the kitchen have increased. I’ve even been able to bake a couple of times, although I’m not sure when I’ll get back to shooting recipes. All of the recipes you have seen here since the puppy arrived were shot BEFORE the puppy arrived, including today’s recipe for this bright lemon poppy seed cake. It’s great for breakfast, brunch, tea, or dessert. Do keep in mind that consuming poppy seeds can result in a false positive for heroine use (in case you have to take a drug test).

lemons, vanilla extract, sugar, flour, coconut oil, sour cream, eggs, baking soda, salt, butter, poppy seeds

zest and juice the lemons

prepped ingredients

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: grand marnier soufflé

Several weeks before Neva came home with us, we began getting the whole house in order, reading our puppy and dog training books (different methods than when we trained Kaweah), and trying to get a jump on our workloads. Let me tell you – since she came home: the entire house looks like a giant puppy playpen, we feel as if we’ve forgotten everything we read in the training books, and it seems that we are already falling well behind in work. It’s no doubt that part of the existence of Puppy Vortex is because I’m still sick – with bronchitis and no voice. Clearly, recovery is but a pipe dream on four hours of sleep a night.

Neva was getting plenty of sleep and plenty of playtime. However, Wednesday morning she had an episode of trembling and lethargy that was sudden and extremely uncharacteristic. Even worse? She refused food. My stomach dropped. There was only one time ever that Kaweah refused food, and that was the morning we said good-bye to her. I fought back tears and asked Jeremy to call the vet for an appointment. Neva was running a low fever and our vet prescribed some meds and asked us to call him in the morning for a status report. Almost as quickly as she had gone downhill, she bounced back within hours to her normal puppy self – biting everything in sight, romping around clumsily, and wanting to explore the whole world.

Despite the setback, we’ve been introducing Neva to new things. She loves the vet’s office as well as my neighbor’s daughter. She completely goes bananas for plain yogurt and peanut butter. And she loves snow. Since we still have lots of snow in the high country, we took her for her first introduction this week.

sitting for her treat from jeremy

happily munching on said treat

fearless bounding across the slushy slopes

having a blast digging pits in the snow

my sweet baby girl

Despite feeling truly crappy right now, I don’t want to get into the habit of punting each post by tossing up a bunch of puppy pics and calling it good. You good people deserve a recipe, and this one is awesome. It comes from my friend, John of Food Wishes, and I was inspired to make it after ordering a Grand Marnier soufflé at a French restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia. I served mine with a Grand Marnier crème anglaise (also from John’s site). I just don’t see how it can get any better! If you decide to serve the soufflés with a side of crème anglaise sauce, you should start the sauce a few hours earlier than the soufflés to give it time to cool.

the crème anglaise: cream, vanilla extract, grand marnier, sugar, salt, eggs (yolks)

heat the cream, sugar, and salt

whisk some of the hot cream into the egg yolks

cook and then strain the custard

stir in the grand marnier and vanilla extract

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chocolate budino

I am routinely guilty of tackling my “spring cleaning” in October – after the fall shoot is done, but before ski season kicks into high gear. And well, if ski season gets an early start, then we boot spring cleaning until next fall. Except this year we undertook a spring purge. Call it the decadal cleaning, because it’s time to puppy proof our house. We never had to do this for Kaweah because she was already 6 years old when we moved in and so good about leaving things alone like trash, compost, food that wasn’t hers, plants – everything.

But puppy… puppy will have to learn. And while we’re puppy proofing, why not go through all of our closets, cabinets, drawers, files, and basement? Oh, and let’s rearrange the furniture, too. It snowballed into a multi-day project in which most of the house was sorted for reorganization, recycling, donation, or trash. I’m happy to report that the smallest category was trash. Our car is loaded with old retired electronics and generations of computing equipment to be recycled responsibly at CHaRM in Boulder.

jeremy replaced our uv decals on the windows so birds won’t crash into our house

I’m glad to finally get this cleaning out of the way. For the past several days the weather has toggled between rain, snow, graupel, and hail. We’ve also had some mighty fine thunderstorms roll through in the afternoons and at night. The high country is getting snow – and that is a truly marvelous thing. Perhaps if the stars align, I’ll get to ski one more time before puppy comes home. The best part about this winter holdout is that she won’t have to wait until autumn to get her first taste of proper Rocky Mountain snow.

mist and snow up valley

storm front approaching

graupel falling on our deck

Even though I don’t do requests on this blog, when I last posted about Bacchanale, people had asked me if I’d recreate the recipe for their chocolate budino. I must admit that the thought had crossed my mind, but I didn’t put it into action until we had our neighbors over for dinner last month. I spent some time recipe testing (and I loathe recipe testing) to get it right, and I think we have a winner. I started the crust with a cookie crumb base because it is just the right crumbly, sandy texture to go with a super rich, thick, creamy pudding.

vanilla, sugar, butter, salt, chocolate sandwich cookies

melted butter, cookie crumbs, sugar, salt, vanilla

mix it all together

**Jump for more butter**