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Recipe: pan-seared black cod with summer vegetables

[I completely forgot about this interview with Friday magazine earlier this month! Click on over if you’re bored and haven’t heard enough of my yammering. It features some other food bloggers you might recognize too.]

It was hot this weekend! This is what they call Indian summer, right? Summer is pretty brief where we live, so we welcome it with open arms in the mountains. It’s glorious. As summer winds down, Jeremy and I are both pretty happy to move into autumn – which arrives right on schedule around these parts. Taking advantage of these last hot and sunny days, we distributed the compost in our yard to make room in the compost bin, cleaned out the basement, did heaps of recycling, and replaced our hot water heater. Okay, the hot water heater sort of demanded replacement when it died and flooded the basement, but I’m glad we took care of it in summer rather than winter.

and kaweah got a much needed bath

Our fall colors are arriving in full force to the south. I’m looking forward to a cool down because when I see yellow aspens, I want to be wearing fleece – not sweating my brains out in a short-sleeve t-shirt getting sunburned, which is exactly what happened on Sunday’s shoot. But have a gander at what we found. [See the full set on the photo blog.]

colorado gold on deep blue skies

healthy pines and golden aspens

a lovely mix of colors

brilliant

aglow in early afternoon light

When I was in Seattle, my friend Caroline had complained that they didn’t get a real summer and that she wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. One evening we went to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner. Hmmmm, what to make for dinner? Caroline went to grab some black cod to bake and Erin asked me to come up with a vegetable. I remembered Caroline’s comment about summer and picked up some summery vegetables for a simple sauté to go with the fish.

corn on the cob

slicing the kernels off

At home, I wanted to try the same vegetables with pan-seared black cod. I too didn’t want to let summer go just yet. There will be time for pumpkins, apples, pomegranates, and butternut squash. Our corn is still sweet. The zucchini are still plentiful. And tomatoes… I am a sucker for the sweet sweet lovin’ of summer tomatoes.

dicing zucchini

cherry tomatoes in the last light of summer

diced into jewels

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chocolate espresso crème brûlée

I got up before sunrise and tip-toed around the house this morning. We dipped below freezing overnight. Sticking my nose to the open window, I took several shallow sniffs then one deep inhale. No smoke. Scanning to the east I saw clear skies. The absolute best news? Calm winds. This in contrast to yesterday morning’s hostile 60 mph gusts that slapped our aspens around like rag dolls, ripping leaves off the branches. We found some wood siding from our house had been torn off by the winds as well. At noon, Manisha emailed to ask if we were all right. There was a fire near Boulder Canyon.

It’s September. In parts of the American West, this is synonymous with fire season: the driest (we had 4% humidity yesterday) and sometimes hottest time of year. Toss strong winds and bone dry vegetation in, and you are primed for a fire. We are no strangers to fire season having lived at the boundary of the Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The price one pays to live in Awesome. I hopped on Twitter and the stream of information was flowing fast. Boulder is a good place to be on Twitter. Those crazy winds whipped the wildfire into a nightmare starting in Four-Mile Canyon. It quickly spread in almost all directions and we followed news of evacuations and road closures. Good citizens updated maps in real-time or tweeted updates from the police scanner. When the reverse 911 system failed, authorities asked people on Twitter spread the word that they were going door to door to evacuate.

Smaller fires popped up around the area, but were quickly put out. It was the big one, now called the Emerson Gulch Fire, that was consuming homes and whole neighborhoods. If you look at the satellite imagery of the area, the houses are not next door to each other – they are scattered about, in the woods and canyons/mountains. It’s rough and rugged terrain (people are not on municipal services there – they have giant propane tanks for heating… which explode in wildfires). If someone dropped you into that scenario where several fronts are threatened, how do you go about deciding what to save, what to defend? It’s heartbreaking. That firestorm was so bad, the only thing authorities could focus on was evacuation. Photographs, video, descriptions and links to more information poured in on the hashtag #boulderfire. We watched as the evacuation zone expanded, inching closer to our home.

smoke from the fire was the only cloud in all of colorado (taken at dusk looking east)

When the zone was within 6 miles of our house and authorities closed Boulder Canyon, we began to gather our things. Things are just things. As I packed up letters from and photos of my sister, I realized that the only “things” I could not do without are Jeremy and Kaweah. The rest – even those cherished items that I had of Kris – I could let go of. But while we had the time, we packed what we might need if we had to evacuate and if ultimately the house was lost. [For those of you with an invested digital existence, it’s a handy thing to have an external drive (updated daily) to unplug and grab.] Without a doubt, my mind turned to Ivory Hut who just last week lost all of her worldly possessions to a fire. Thankfully, the winds had calmed considerably since the morning and tankers were finally able to fly in the waning light before nightfall grounded them.

the plume of smoke rising into the evening sky

By last night, the evacuation zone had extended again – to within 2 miles of our home. Evac zone and fire are not the same things, mind you, but we were ready. Here is an incredible time-lapse shot from Flagstaff Mountain last night. Right now Boulder lies choking under a blanket of smoke from the fire. I’m trying to reconcile those images with the clear, sunny day we are experiencing just west of the fire. Our hope is for containment. Thank you for all of your concerned and caring tweets, FB messages and comments, and emails. We are sending good juju to the victims of the fire and the incredible rescue, firefighting, and relief personnel.

Life goes on. My dear friend, Andrew, is leaving today to travel the world for a year, or two, or six. Boulder will miss you, Andrew. We will miss you. Thanks for spending an evening with us on Sunday. Thanks for being such a Force of Good in the community. Safe and remarkable travels, friend. Come back to us any time.

andrew on the terrace at the flagstaff house

perusing the wine list (the guys got cocktails instead)

crab- and salmon-stuffed squash blossoms with caviar (zomgdelicious!)

Well now, there is a recipe after all. This one dates back to my pre-blog days when I had a static website. I have a little sticky note (the virtual kind, not a paper sticky) on my desktop telling me to transfer some of those old recipes over. I think it might be one of Jeremy’s favorites.

chocolate, of course

espresso powder and cream

Chocolate espresso crème brûlée. The chocolate and espresso are enough to win most folks over, but crème brûlée will surely round up the rest of the holdouts. Crème brûlée is one of the more annoying things to have to type out, so I’m glad the fabulosity of the dessert itself far outweighs any inconvenience experienced in writing about it.

add chopped chocolate to the hot cream

whisking egg yolks, sugar, and vanilla

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: single-ingredient ice cream

Administrative news: The amount of spam accumulating in my filter is increasing and the amount of time I have to glance through and fish out the occasional legitimate comment is all but nil at this point. From now on, I’m deleting the hundreds of spam caught each day without a second glance. If you leave a comment and it does not show up immediately, you probably went the way of spam. Please feel free to email me and let me know so I can rescue you and keep you off the blacklist. Thanks!

I’ve been doing a massive purge of my second office, recycling old notes and literature that I no longer need. While doing so earlier this week I discovered a diagram that my favorite geomorphologist, Dr. Arthur Bloom, gave me in graduate school. Mineralogists will recognize this kind of diagram – except it doesn’t involve minerals. I thought this readership might get a kick out of it (at least I know Bridget will).

Needless to say, I kept that little gem.

Summer for some of my friends (those with school-age children) is coming to an end. They’ve been scrambling to squeeze the most out of the final days before school starts next week. But you know, learning does not have to be (and should not be) limited to the school year. The Perseids meteor shower is tonight and it’s a great opportunity to see Nature’s little light show if you can get yourselves to dark skies, away from city lights. I love me a meteor shower and the Perseids are my favorite – a solid and consistent performer if you get clear skies! Tonight and tomorrow night (Aug 12/13) should be at peak activity with approximately 50 meteors per hour. Start looking after dark (after the crescent moon sets) up until dawn. It’s fun to settle down in a lawn chair where you can find some good sky view (open sky with few obstructions), relax, and enjoy the show.

please please please clouds, take a break?

So what’s this ice cream for breakfast ridiculousness? Well, it’s true. I had ice cream for breakfast today. Actually, I had “ice cream”. I read about this one-ingredient ice cream on Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn months ago and was intrigued. That single ingredient would be:

bananas

i prefer them just spotted

I try, I really try to love bananas. It’s not them, it’s me. I like fruit that is juicy and bananas are not juicy. But bananas are so very very good for you and that is why I buy them, in the hopes that I’ll guilt myself into eating them. What usually happens is they start to turn brown, I chuck them into the freezer, and wind up making chocolate chip banana bread to give away to my friends. Or I’ll peel one open and split it with Kaweah. That’s why any time, any one, any where peels a banana, she suddenly appears at your elbow.

and there she is

slice into 1/4 to 1/2-inch disks

**Jump for more butter**