use real butter

One of our favorite meals in Boulder is Community Night at The Kitchen. It’s a brilliant concept and so much fun. Every Monday night at 7 pm, diners who have signed up for Comm Night arrive and sit at a long table in the center of the dining room. There are usually 2 dozen people and reservations need to be made a few weeks in advance. No one knows what the menu is. You don’t order the food. The chef decides that day. When everyone is seated and has ordered drinks, the courses begin to parade out. Usually there will be three or four plates of one course passed around the table. You dine family style. It’s a social setting and you usually wind up chatting with your neighbors and getting to know other folks. You know… “community”. But more than just the community – people are there to sample some pretty amazing fare. All told, there will be anywhere from 9 to 13 different dishes that pass under your nose by the end of the evening. The best advice I can offer anyone going to Community Night: wear an elastic waistband.

a neighboring cocktail

mixed olives to start: picholine and niçoise

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Recipe: quiche

This past Saturday marked three years since we moved to Colorado. In celebration, we did nothing. We celebrate living here every day, folks. As if the ski and flower porn weren’t enough to convince you of how much we love it… Actually we did something this weekend, but it had nothing to do with the 3-year mark and everything to do with the summer bloom in the mountains.

yeah, puppy came along too

Talk to people around Colorado and many of them will swoon when you say the words Crested Butte. The skiing is phenomenal, the mountain biking world class, the wildflowers are some of the best in the country. The mountains and forests will take your breath away with dramatic expanses of wilderness in every direction. The town is charming, quaint and high end. Everyone has their reason for loving Crested Butte. It’s also a favorite for nature photographers.

poor air quality due to a wildfire 30 miles away

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Recipe: barbecue chicken

I have been posting daily since the calendar flipped to July because there is just so much going on that if I don’t write them up – posts will get buried! Not to mention, I’m on my steroid regimen again and I am running with the overflow of energy. I’ll probably crash and burn in 24 hours, but I’m okay with that. After feeling like complete crap for several months, it’s hard to take for granted the improvements I now feel. I can finally get out to see the mountains I love, find energy to cook wonderful food (and even taste and digest them!), and have the patience to capture the beauty of our summer season with my camera. These are happy times. I’m also wired and exhausted, but I relish it – I really do.

This morning we took another hike up to a lovely lake nestled in an alpine basin at roughly 11,300 feet. Invigorating! There was still plenty of snow, which is a good thing because it has been so hot here lately. Several more varieties of wildflowers were beginning to bloom, but the lake is still under a lot of ice and snow. I’m crazy for the mountains.

marmots out and basking in the sun

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