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Recipe: lahmacun (turkish pizza)

I hope those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one this past week. I’ll tell you about ours later, but I need to share this recipe with you before it gets buried in my queue of posts! A few weekends ago, my stitch-n-bitch crew got together at Nichole’s house for lunch. It had been quite a while since I had seen some of these ladies. I mean, one of my girlfriends got married since I last saw her, and another got her Ph.D. (actually, I skied with her last spring – but still!). We spent time catching up and everyone offered a dish to share as well as hands to help Nichole with prep. I brought the rolled pistachio baklava as well as a quart of precious huckleberry ice cream.

But the real star of the show was Nichole’s Turkish pizza or lahmacun. I had never had it before and I obsessed over it for days afterward until I begged her for the recipe. The flavors, the fresh ingredients – it’s all wonderful. I did a little research online and cobbled together a compromise between Nichole’s version and another more traditional version to excellent results. I love it when my friends introduce me to new foods.

ground lamb, olive oil, red peppers, onion, garlic, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, parsley, pepper, salt, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, paprika

brown the lamb

drain the fat

You can use lamb or beef, but because we have truly excellent local Colorado lamb, the decision was practically made for me. Some recipes cook the meat before mixing it with the sauce ingredients while others leave the meat raw because it will cook when you bake the pizzas. I opted to brown the lamb and drain off the fat (of which there was a lot). Nichole cooked and simmered her sauce for a few hours and I swear it was phenomenally good straight from the pot. I just didn’t have the time to simmer the sauce and wanted to see if my quicker method would work.

chopped vegetables and diced tomatoes

process to a thick sauce

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Recipe: bacon-wrapped venison and garlic-herb butter

Last week it was unseasonably warm and sunny, so Kaweah spent a good bit of time on the deck as I worked inside. While I love spending time with my pup, she can really get underfoot when I’m shooting or cooking anything involving meat, or vegetables, or fruit, or cheese or peanut butter… Basically, anytime I work with food (which is all the time) she is my little shadow.

perfect weather for a kaweah

And I needed to get a lot done without constantly dodging the dog or worrying about tripping over her while carrying camera equipment, sharp knives, or fragile dishware. I was trying to get a jump on my work schedule which seemed to have blown up in the span of two days. That, and my folks arrived in Boulder last week. Even though I see them a lot more than I used to, it’s important to me to spend time with them. We just have to agree on things that we all enjoy because I loathe shopping (they are avid shoppers) and they don’t do the outdoor stuff that Jeremy and I like to do – especially anything in the cold.

picking them up at the bus station with roses for mom (because i’m a good chinese daughter!)

we took my folks to try some awesome korean barbecue at dae gee in westminster

One evening when I took rolled pistachio baklava to my neighbors, Ann went into the kitchen to retrieve a plate to return to me. She set a little package wrapped in butcher’s paper on top and told me Herb had returned from his hunting trip in the Midwest (he’s a bow hunter). It was venison. She asked if I’ve prepared venison before and I said only once – when I had no clue what I was doing and Google didn’t exist yet. I assured her that I would find a good recipe. The next day, I was chatting with Herb and Ann in the driveway when Herb rattled off a quick and simple recipe for the venison. It sounded amazing.

let’s start with the garlic-herb butter: butter, parsley, garlic

chop the parsley

grate the garlic

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Recipe: porcini mushroom gruyère burgers

My good friend, Erin, is a native of Colorado, and yet she had never been to Crested Butte before. So we invited her out to spend the weekend with us hiking, eating, and even meeting some of my entertaining nature photog pals (who were here for the wildflowers). It’s the height of the wildflower bloom, so the hikes were especially beautiful this time of year.

erin jumping for joy on beckwith pass

erin for scale next to a green gentian stalk

close up of the green gentian flowers

a windy evening at the mountain

On Sunday, we did a 13-mile hike up to the high country. The pattern of summer monsoon storms has started in the last week and we’ve been getting some really productive rainstorms in the last few days each afternoon. At a trail junction around 11,000 ft. we paused to let a trail runner pass us. She chatted with us briefly about the trails and continued on. Just then, I spotted something familiar at the base of a tree… It was a mushroom, but not any mushroom – it was a Boletus edulis or King bolete or porcini. Wendy and I have been discussing when our local porcinis would flush this season for the past two months. I had no idea I’d find one in the wilderness outside of Crested Butte! [Note: DO NOT forage for mushrooms unless you are with or ARE a trained expert. Eating the wrong mushrooms can make you very ill or even kill you.]

erin models the porcini on the trail

How timely to find my first porcini of the season because I have a recipe I’ve been waiting to post since last year’s porcini season ended. Most of the year, if you are eating porcini, it has been dried and rehydrated. But during this magical period in summer when the rains come and the mushrooms flush, you can enjoy fresh porcinis. I had them with burgers.

little bouchons

butter, white wine, gruyere, porcinis, ground beef, brioche buns

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