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Recipe: sashimi salad

It is nonstop head-spinning fun over here at Butter Headquarters. I got my phone fixed after it took a prolonged underwater tour of the lake, but I haven’t had much time to get back to the social media channels because real life is in high gear! It was nice to retrieve my photos though – the ones that were the whole reason the phone and I went swimming together.

see the carp?

Before we came home to Nederland, we took Neva out on the lake once more to practice climbing out of the water onto the stand up paddle board (SUP). It’s quite easy with her new life preserver because it has a nice low-profile handle on the top. Actually, it’s ridiculously easy as long as her tennis ball is on board. Neva is a lithe and lean 43 pounds now. Float her in the water with a life vest and I can practically lift her onto the board with two fingers. We had her diving off and climbing back on several times so she could get used to it. While Jeremy was inflating the board (we have inflatable SUPs) Neva’s friend, Bella, came bounding down the hill to play with her. Bella lives in Crested Butte and she is an adorable, chunky 2 year old black lab who happens to belong to a friend of mine. Neither Bella nor Neva care to be dominant or the boss of anyone, they just want to run and swim and play and be best pals. One day I’ll get a picture of the two together, but Bella and Neva are rather impatient for me to throw the ball.

up out of the water

and she gets her orange (must be orange!) tennis ball

We returned to the Front Range at the height of a heat wave the day before my parents arrived in Boulder for the summer. I got their condo ready with dinner, groceries, flowers, and my mom’s plants (the ones that suffer my care for 10 months of the year). Even though I just saw them in April, I took note of their health as I picked them up at the bus station. My parents are in remarkably good health for their ages, and yet I can’t help but observe that they are slowing down. It’s gradual. Very gradual. They are still machines when it comes to social engagements – they love a good party – so I threw a party over the weekend for my folks and a bunch of my friends.

dim sum with mom and dad

Party prep is a logistically involved endeavor for us in the high country because we have neither easy access to good groceries nor air conditioning to battle the heat of summer. I try to keep all oven use limited to nighttime. While waiting for meringues to bake, I set a large measuring cup of chocolate ice cream custard base out on the deck (well, on the grill shelf) to cool at 1 am. It was covered in plastic to avoid floaty or flying things from jumping in. Since our deck is on the second floor with no ground access, we’ve always set hot liquids out on the deck. In three short hours, Neva would be waking Jeremy up to go out to potty (what is it with this dog?), so I asked Jeremy to transfer the chocolate custard from the deck to the refrigerator when he took her out.

I mumbled into my pillow at 4 am asking if he remembered the chocolate custard. “Well, something happened.” I imagined he had dropped it. I imagined Neva licking it up. I asked, “WHAT HAPPENED?” Something about a hole and how much was there to start? I said four cups. Now there were two. “WHAT?” There were some footprints. “FOOTPRINTS?” I’m blinking into the darkness calculating how much cream, milk, and eggs I had on hand to start a new batch. I didn’t have enough eggs. “Not footprints, PAW prints,” he said. Bear? Squirrel? Someone who can climb a tree or a wood post. “Chocolatey paw prints. Too small to be a bear, maybe a squirrel or a raccoon.” In the breaking light of dawn, I looked at the chocolatey paw prints and Jeremy came out onto the deck with our book of animal paw prints. Raccoon. Apparently, our furry friend climbed onto our deck, found this cup of heaven sitting on the grill shelf, poked a hole in the middle of the plastic wrap and then shoved its schnoz into said hole and had the dessert of a lifetime. TWO CUPS! I envisioned a raccoon with a terrible tummy ache or worse somewhere in the forested foothills. Chocolate can be toxic for a lot of animals, not just dogs. It made me sad for the raccoon and anxious for my ice cream making schedule.

i guess the raccoon started the party early

i also made strawberry daifuku mochi

the most beautiful bouquet of flowers from kitt’s garden

and glowsticks – don’t be jealous

Great fun was had by all and we’ve been noshing leftover party food for the last few days. It’s nice to not cook when the sun turns your house into an easy bake oven. In summer, sushi and sashimi get more frequent rotation on our menu. But sometimes, even the thought of cooking rice can be too much to bear. It’s simple enough to swap out the rice for lettuce and have yourself a sashimi salad. There is absolutely no active heat transfer involved! Of course, passive heat transfer is always occurring – you can’t beat entropy, kids. The nice thing about salads is that the guidelines are quite loose. Choose the vegetables you like most. Omit the lettuce if you want. Pile on more carrot and cucumbers! It’s all up to you.

vegetables: mixed baby greens, shiso leaves, carrot, cucumber, red cabbage, daikon sprouts

for the dressings: neutral flavor vegetable oil, soy sauce, mirin, salt, sugar, lemon juice, sesame seeds

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: morel bourbon cream sauce

People can be so awful to others. They can also be wonderful to one another. There is no shortage of chatter about it all, and after a while my head hurts as much as my heart does. That’s when I really need to spend time outside to sort the spaghetti knot of feelings in my chest, free of that noise.

calypso orchids

hiking through the lupine

lightning strike on the mountain

We are keeping busy shuttling back and forth between Nederland and Crested Butte. I know a lot of people hate the word busy, but I don’t. Busy for me isn’t bad. Busy means a full schedule – that my time is taken up with both the things I have to do and the things I want to do. I realize I’m busy by choice, and I’m grateful for that.

Despite being over a year old now, Neva’s training is ongoing. She was introduced to the SUP (standup paddle board) last summer when she was a little puppy, but then she spent the next seven months learning to be a ski dog. While the rising snowline in the mountains translates into spring runoff, Neva is reacquainting herself with the liquid form of snow. Her first swim of the season was splashy and uncoordinated, but by the second dip, she was already getting her swim legs back and performing running jumps into the water. After a few days of confident swimming, it was time to see if she could ride the SUP and remain on the board. She only dove off a few times and once she even climbed back onto the board with a lift from Jeremy. She has a life vest coming in the mail soon, so I hope things will only improve with our little adventure pup.

she’s no longer nervous on the board, she is excited

watching for fish in the lake

I’m still keeping my eyes peeled around these parts for black morels, but they aren’t flushing like they were a couple of weeks before in one area. We scouted a couple of trails only to be left wondering if we’d lost our mojo or if the mushrooms were late, done, or just having a bad year? But on my trail run Friday morning, I found two single morels very far apart from one another – one in a somewhat unexpected environment and the other in what I consider typical surroundings. I left them in place to do their thing (send spores into the air) and kept my fingers crossed that the season isn’t over just yet.

short and squat, but in perfectly good condition

But in case the season IS coming to an abrupt end, I’ve got another winner of a morel recipe for you. This is far and away Jeremy’s *favorite* from my morel recipe testing session because it has morels and bourbon and cream, and it all goes on top of steak. This is the real reason I trail run…

cream, beef broth, pepper, morels, salt, butter, shallots, balsamic vinegar, bourbon

slice the morels in half lengthwise

rinse them clean and pat them dry

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: pan-seared pork chops

Colorado rarely makes the news when it snows in the mountains, but an inch of snow fall in D.C. and NPR can’t shut up about it. I think the only reason we got any coverage of this most recent storm is because it affected the flats, including the airport in Denver. Jeremy was notified on Friday that his Sunday morning flight to the East Coast was cancelled. The week leading up to the storm had everyone shouting “spring!” including myself. I managed to squeeze a couple of trail runs in before the weather turned cold and frozen. There is that period between bare ground and a mega snow dump when it’s just wet and boring outside. That was the perfect time to finish sewing eight baby quilts (flannel rag quilts).

dusted off my hokas for the return to trail running

waiting for a trip to a laundromat

Storms can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. Obviously, the exciting aspect for us is skiing. The nerve-wracking part is when you have to travel on slick roads with crappy drivers. Sometimes forecasts for big snow totals will fizzle leaving me to cry softly into my skis (just kidding – I only did that once…), but we cashed in on this storm. Mountain friends scattered around the Front Range posted their obligatory deck-full-of-snow photos and measured snowfalls. I kinda love that about the mountain communities. But the comments were full of condolences from people who live near sea-level and don’t get the gist of the mountain bubble. Please, people. Spring snowstorms are not unusual here, and without them, we’d be facing the threat of summer wildfires in our beautiful mountains. Plus? WE LOVE SNOW! Obviously. Neva had never experienced such deep snow before. She thought it was the best thing ever. I posted some videos of Neva being a goofball in the snow on my instagram.

fetching her tennis ball on the deck

a quick ski tour in our neighborhood

by sunday morning, the snow was taller than neva in places

jeremy breaks trail in four fresh feet of snow

This teeter-totter weather means we went from sushi and salads to ramen and chili in the blink of an eye. And I hear we’ll be swapping sunshine for snow and then back to snow through early May. So while we may be dabbling in warming foods and the rest of the country is thinking of picnics and deck parties, there is a nice compromise worth your attention. Pork chops.

pork chops, salt, pepper, vegetable oil, butter

A few years ago, we went to dinner with my parents at The Kitchen in Boulder. If you’ve never had the pleasure of dining there, they serve simple food prepared exceptionally well. My mom ordered the pork chop, something I rarely consider ordering for myself because it sounds so dull and usually is. Since we were sharing bites of our dinners with one another, I politely took a bite of the pork chop. Oh man. That was the best pork chop I had ever had. Juicy, tender, full of umami goodness. I experimented half-heartedly trying to achieve this level of amazingness with mixed results. In the last few months, I’ve renewed my quest. I interrogated restaurant chefs, butchers, random people – all giving me different tips. Bone-in. Boneless. Wet brine. Dry brine. Pan sear. Roast. Grill.

season with salt

set on a rack to chill 45 minutes to 3 days

**Jump for more butter**