use real butter

Recipe: grilled vegetable salad

Whenever I return from an out-of-town shoot, my friends always ask how it went. That’s partly because most of my friends are outdoorsy types and partly because they genuinely want to know how the shoot was. I always have two parts to my answer: what I thought of the shoot and how I felt about the trip. In general, the shoots are getting consistently better even if the conditions are less than ideal. I consider that to be progress. How I feel about a trip has gone up and down and up and down as I try to strike a balance between pushing hard enough to get the shots and not pushing so hard that I end up hating what I do or worse yet – wearing myself out so that I miss an opportunity.

mount crested butte

elephant head and indian paintbrush

This shoot came closer to that balance for me. Sometimes you need to step back and remind yourself of those things you love about what you do. Jeremy observed me nodding to myself or muttering words of satisfaction on occasion when I felt I had a good capture. It’s a labor of love to lie in the dirt, stand in the pouring rain, suffer the bugs that bite and the plants that stab you. But I do love it and it is totally worth it. I’m settling into a groove now.

my favorite fern understory

jeremy for scale (he’s looking appropriately camo there too)

We saw a second bear at the end of the trip. The first one was out early in the morning. The moment I spotted it, the bear bolted up a hillslope and disappeared into the woods before I could get my camera out. This second bear was out past sunset. It also made haste up the nearest (steep) hillslope, but Jeremy was able to spot it up high as it quickly worked its way through the dense growth of grasses and wildflowers. They are so fast and so quiet!

like watching the fin of a shark crest the water

this bear just wanted to do its own thing

You can view a sampling of the photos from this trip on the photo blog.

I love going on trips and I love coming home. But there is something to be said for eating food that you prepared. No matter how good the food is (and the food in Crested Butte is quite good), I know what I’m putting into my dinner when I cook. Over a month ago several of my SNB gals gathered at Nichole’s house to make wedding favors for Kitt and to, of course, eat. Nichole made a wonderful grilled vegetable salad that some of you had commented on. It didn’t take long before I was craving that salad.

tomatoes

along with onions, garlic, eggplant, and zucchini

It’s a flexible salad so you can futz with the ingredients, the way you cook them, and the dressing you use. Of course, if you don’t grill any of the vegetables, it can’t technically be a grilled vegetable salad – but I will let you deal with that issue. I didn’t grill my tomatoes (even though I love grilled tomatoes) because tomatoes have a habit of shriveling up and slipping down through the grating on my grill and into oblivion. That can be quite upsetting if you wanted to let’s say… eat the tomatoes. Instead, I roasted mine. I also roasted a bulb of garlic while I was running the oven.

a dash of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt

nicely roasted and still juicy

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: grilled salmon panang

You will never find me lying in the sun on a beach unless I’ve died there or aliens have replaced me with a fake Jen Yu… in which case I have a predetermined question that Jeremy must ask to see if it’s really me. Aside from not liking the sand (it gets EVERYWHERE) and the humidity, I am not a big fan of the sun. I spent most of my childhood summers roasting on a boat on the water. I got enough sun to last me three lifetimes.

I recently met with some gal pals for lunch out on the patio of Pizzeria Basta. We started in the shade and as lunch wore on, the sun crept across our tables. We shifted the tables back into the shade when Beth said she’d be happy to switch seats with anyone as she liked the sun. And suddenly I looked around at my friends and envisioned them with a weatherman’s sun or a weatherman’s cloud over their head.

pizzeria basta is located in a mixed development

beth and marianne ordered a lovely salad

drea and i split the cart-driver pizza (with salami b/c they were out of sausage)

When I have lived on the East Coast, the sun was just sort of there (and in Ithaca, it was sort of not really there). It rose, it set – whatever. Living in the west, the sun dictates a lot of what we do. In summer, we make plans around the sun. Hikes start at 5 am or earlier – we run or ride in the mornings or a few hours before sundown. We all hide in the coolest parts of the house at midday.

even on the cloudy days, kaweah tries to soak up every bit of sun

but i was quite delighted to get some rain

A lot of effort goes into avoiding the heat and that includes heat from the kitchen. I swore to myself that I would focus on quick and simple recipes this summer and I think it has put me in a happier mood. Let’s do cool, fresh, quick, easy! Sounds good, right? By the time our evenings start to dip back below freezing in September, I will be ready for those beloved stews and soups and slow-roasted nommy noms. For now, I love me some grilled food. Meat + Fire = Good.

gorgeous wild caught salmon

fish sauce, coconut milk, panang curry paste, paprika, sugar

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: korean bbq-style burgers

Administrative note: The strong undertow of the holiday season is fast sucking me down to the bottom of the sea. I will do my best to answer any pressing questions in the comments this weekend, my good people!

Jeremy and I met our pal for a quick happy hour yesterday evening and there were THREE parties going on at the restaurant. I guess Office Party Season has officially begun. We had one to attend ourselves last night. It’s more of an event though. Ignite Boulder 7 – another sold out crowd at the Boulder Theater! My friends Andrew Hyde, Ef Rodriguez, and heaps of wonderful coordinators, volunteers, sponsors, and speakers pulled off yet another hugely entertaining evening of presentations, music, and prizes. AND they donated all proceeds to The Food Bank of the Rockies. It’s great meeting so many people from my online communities in real life, plus some fresh out of the blue.

ef always warms up the crowd with his sweet voice, guitar, and wit

sold out crowd

fellow citizens play the intermission

What was I saying the other day about my love of summer food in winter? Right… I can’t help it. We had some record low temperatures smacking the Denver-metro area about recently. Last weekend, I was flipping through my copy of Jaden‘s Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. I know, everyone has already seen it. It was part of the schwag bag from the after party at BlogHer Food 09 and I had emailed in for my free copy a few months ago. I waited and waited. I saw tweets and posts from everyone and her sister raving about the book. I waited some more. Then one day, I whine-tweeted online that mine had yet to show up.

Then Jaden, aka Busiest woman on the Planet, said she’d fix everything. And she did.

i love this book almost as much as i love jaden

For as long as I have been aware of food blogs, Steamy Kitchen has always been one of my goto sites for rock-solid Chinese recipes. That and Jaden makes me laugh much like the way my sister made me laugh. But her book is more than just Chinese recipes. It has Thai, Viet, Korean and lots of great Asian fusion dishes like her Korean BBQ burgers.

look at all those goodies

they go *in* the burger

**Jump for more butter**