use real butter

Recipe: homemade mexican chorizo

It’s been an ordinary week around here. And ordinary is pretty spectacular! We’ve seen foxes running through our yard, lightning storms all around the house, and Jeremy and I ran into (almost literally, but just shy by 10 yards) a mother moose and her calf on a trail run! Just because awesome happens regularly, doesn’t mean it is any less awesome in my book. Same goes for awesome food, awesome friends…

the fantastic mr. fox

lightning in the daytime

lightning at night

Back in the day, few of my friends were much into food. Sure, they’d eat it, but I didn’t have many who were avid cooks or “foodies”. The flow of recipes via snail mail or email or even scribbled on a scrap of paper was practically non-existant. Then I found rec.food.cooking in the early days of the interwebs and now the leap to today… with all of these food blogs with PICTURES and great recipes and friendly people and even people you end up meeting or never meeting, but becoming close friends regardless. I love that stuff. LOVE.IT. I think it is responsible for more than 50% of the recipes I now try.

de arbol and guajillo chiles from savory spice shop in boulder

i added my new mexico reds to the mix

My friend, Mel, recently raved on Facebook about a recipe for homemade chorizo that she had gotten from Rebecca. Don’t you love how these recipes get passed on like chain letters without the annoying letters and implied guilt? Awesome. I had never heard of chorizo until a friend of mine had made it one of his secret ingredients in a chili cookoff many years ago. The chili was great, but with so many ingredients, I couldn’t pinpoint which one was the chorizo. This was an ingredient I read about, saw in photos, would occasionally enjoy as part of an ensemble at a creative restaurant, but never had at home…

apple cider vinegar, onions, ground pork, spices, chiles, salt, garlic

stemming and de-seeding the chiles

toast the chiles, chop the garlic and onions

That is, until I saw how flipping easy this recipe was. I had to try it. Remember how I have a hoarding problem with certain foods – like New Mexican chiles? Got plenty of those… Now I have a few less chiles, but a lot more Mexican chorizo! Booyah!!

place the chiles, onions, and garlic in a large bowl

pour heated vinegar over the ingredients

set a plate on top to weigh it down

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: peach jam

Our local wildflowers are going gangbusters. Or they were. I think they may be over the hump by now, but it’s still wonderful to step into the mountains and see green slopes dotted with blues, pinks, reds, yellows, whites, oranges, purples… I’ve made a point of getting out to assess the flowers along my favorite trails… of course, those trails are my favorites primarily because they have stunning wildflowers.

elephant heads

rose paintbrush

rose crowns

asteraceae and bluebells

Over the weekend, a friend of mine from high school was in town with his family. We met up at the Boulder Farmers Market Saturday morning as it was the only free time they had. Jeremy and I arrived early so I could scope out various produce for myself and for another friend. It’s kinda dangerous going to the market without a set list, because what I usually wind up doing is impulse buying fruits or vegetables for canning and jamming projects only to realize on the way to the car that I will have to forgo sleep to get all of it done before the produce goes south.

who needs sleep when you have organic purple okra?!?

I forget which of my wonderful friends clued me in on “seconds” at the farmers market, but I am eternally grateful. Seconds are produce that may have bruises and blemishes and sometimes odd shapes or sizes. They are perfect for canning and jamming and come at a reduced price compared to their premium cousins that are typically on display at the stall. A few weeks ago, I went to the Boulder Farmers Market on a Wednesday to score some ripe Colorado peaches. There are a few vendors at the market who sell peaches, but there is only one vendor who consistently commands a line as much as 40 deep: Morton’s Orchards of Palisade, Colorado out on the western slope. I was planning to grab a ten pound box of seconds (they’re certified organic), but when I saw the “20 lbs. seconds for $10” scribbled on the bottom of their board, I got greedy and went for it!

half of my haul

even though they don’t look perfect, they sure taste perfect

So I have this canning addiction, see? That twenty pounds of peaches is history and when we arrived at the market Saturday morning, I got the itch again. We stood in line for peaches. Fascinatingly enough, people would walk past the line, look at it with great interest, then hop into line at the end without even knowing for what they were standing in line. This time, the price was $10 for 10 pounds of seconds. I don’t know if that markup was for the Saturday vs. the Wednesday market or if it was for a different variety of peach, but I was happy to have more of these sweet, juicy gems.

let’s jam: peaches, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemons, liquid pectin

I’m not a jam person, mainly because I’m not a breakfast person – and particularly not a sweet breakfast person. Jams don’t really move in this house unless you like jam and happen to be a house guest. That said, I am in love with the idea of making jam and got overly ambitious with the first attempt. I doubled the recipe and found out too late that you aren’t supposed to double the recipe. This resulted in a double batch of somewhat runny organic Colorado peach jam. It’s still good and people don’t seem to mind receiving it (what they do with the jars after they take them home, I don’t know). So, if you’re just starting out, the first rule of jamming is… don’t talk about jamming don’t double the recipe. Just make two batches. I’ve since made four more batches the correct way and the result is enough to convince me that homemade jam is a different animal. A different, delicious, tasty animal.

get that lemon zest

blanch your peaches

peel the skins off

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: candied ginger

You could deduce that I am a rain lover simply because I live in a place that receives 300+ days of sunshine a year, but you’d be mistaken. I do love the rain, but I have in fact, always loved the rain. I even loved the rain when I lived in Ithaca, New York (during graduate school, no less) which boasts more days of precipitation annually (161) than Seattle, Washington (150). I truly came to appreciate those rainy days after living in Southern California. Winter or “the rainy season” was far and away my favorite time of year there. Of course, in Colorado, I prefer my precipitation in frozen form. That said, the rain is a lovely, beautiful, wondrous thing in summer. I had the privilege of foraging with two of my favorite ladies – Wendy and Ellen – in the suburbs outside of Denver on a deliciously rainy, cool Monday morning.

picking goosefoot in the rain

cute bumblebees keeping dry under this teasel bloom

ground cherries (not ready)

apricot haul

I don’t go foraging for the forage. Mostly, I like learning about and geeking out on plants with my knowledgeable friend. It’s also heaps of fun slogging through muddy trails, seeing local wildlife (snakes, bunnies, etc.), admiring what can thrive in the neglected corners of suburbia, and putting my pattern-recognition skills to good use. Oh, and of course there is the precious (tom)girl-time and post-foraging lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant!

And if that wasn’t a perfect start to a Monday, Jeremy and I capped off the evening dining in Boulder at The Kitchen, catching up with two long-time friends from graduate school. Julie and Tyler were both in Jeremy’s department – he is an astronomer and she is a planetary geologist. Julie and I were graduate student “cousins” as we shared two common faculty on our PhD committees (Julie had a minor in geology and I had a minor in planetary). I quite love these two. Anyone who claims that graduate school is the best time of your life should be regarded with deep suspicion. However, I will say of our Cornell years that we carry many special friendships from that time into the present day.

tyler and julie

jeremy’s halibut entrée

a nice finish to a great evening

That’s one of the upsides to sticking close to home this summer – getting to see both local friends and friends from out of town. Another positive? Kaweah is doing great. Aside from general aging, her medical issues have abated and you couldn’t find a happier pup. I think being home and providing her with a normal (i.e. non-travel) routine has helped tremendously. Yet another plus of staying local this summer? More kitchen experiments.

find some nice, tender, young ginger (spring is your best bet)

I don’t know when I developed my taste for ginger. I know it wasn’t until I was an adult because I avoided it as a kid. The flavor grew on me and I began to use it more and more in my cooking. During chemotherapy, ginger chews were a staple. I popped one into my mouth whenever I felt queasy. I kept a bag of them along with saltines by my bedside. Folks had said not to eat your favorite foods during chemo because you’d come to have bad associations with them after treatments ended. But you know what? I just wound up loving ginger even more. It wasn’t just the nausea, but anytime I have a cold or feel under the weather, ginger is that soothing flavor in chicken congee or ginger tea that Mom always made for me. I occasionally grab a bag of candied ginger for snacking – it’s such a pick-me-up candy. Then one day it occurred to me that this must be ridiculously easy to make. Ridiculously.

peeling ginger

slicing thin

boiled in water

**Jump for more butter**