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: spicy tuna roll burger

***Don’t forget you have until the end of Friday, June 1, 2012 to enter my giveaway. Five people will win a custom dog or cat collar for their favorite furry pal and I will also donate $20 to each person’s animal shelter or rescue of choice!***

The more Jeremy and I talk about it, the more I am convinced that a mountain bike is a great thing to have during the zombie apocalypse. And a bike repair kit. You’ll want a backpack for carrying weapons and other stuff.

oh, and you’ll want a wendy

When I first met Wendy, she was making a delivery of autumn forage to a restaurant: beautiful wild apples, wild grapes, sumac, juniper berries… “Wow!” I exclaimed, “where do you find those?” It was an innocent question, but I didn’t realize that is a question you DO NOT ask a professional wild foods forager. She pursed her lips and grinned like a Cheshire Cat, raising her eyebrows, tilting her head to give me the side eye. Thankfully, I had not offended.

We’ve been planning to go foraging together for months. So it finally happened this week! I drove down to the flats and met up with her in the morning because we both despise the heat. Foraging is a natural extension of hiking for me since I cover up (to protect from sun, bugs, and plants), I carry a pack, I do a lot of walking/hiking, and I identify plants and make note of what stages they are at. In this case, we do all of that AND gather edibles!

her list

Now, I was familiar with most of the plants we foraged, but I had never thought to eat them nor knew that one could. Wendy taught me about the edible parts, the poisonous parts, the stage to harvest, and taking great care to harvest a little bit to leave plenty for the wildlife and so the plants still thrive. She explained a good deal about medicinal and culinary uses of each plant, their typical habitats, and she knew a ton of information regarding the nutrition. Wendy is a bubbly, hilarious walking encyclopedia who sincerely enjoys what she does. You can’t really help but love her.

yucca blossoms

i had picked two and wendy had already picked all of these (okay, i was taking photos…)

milkweed

wear gloves to avoid the sticky white sap

I wasn’t in it for the food, I was really interested to learn how Wendy works and to watch a pro in action. We’re plant nerds, so we really had quite the time crawling about places to find the familiar and discover the new. It’s not terribly unlike some of the photography I do where I hike around and my eyes are in scan mode for a certain pattern or color. Pattern recognition. Wendy is quite adept at scanning for multiple plants among a field of what most everyone else would consider weeds. My brain was stuck in asparagus mode – maybe that’s because asparagus is the gateway plant to foraging for me? It’s something we’re all familiar with in the stores and markets, but to find it growing wild was so much fun!

end of the season here, but how precious is that asparagus!

wild roses (ten thousand times better than any domestic rose)

cattails

stinging nettles

From now on out, I don’t think I’ll be able to walk in green areas without going into search mode. Wendy did point out one lovely plant that stood about 6 feet high. “Don’t ever eat this, don’t even touch it to your mouth. This can kill you.” She explained that most of the plants in Colorado that are bad for you will make you sick, give you a headache, result in an allergic reaction, but not poison hemlock. Poison Hemlock is a neurotoxin and it is one of the few plants in the state that, when ingested, can result in death.

poison hemlock: deadly

We – well really it was Wendy – foraged enough to fill a large cooler. She tried to divvy up the loot and send me home with some, but I declined (except a small bag of elderflowers I had gathered). This is her food, what she lives on. The woman makes some impressive dishes with the ingredients too. I was mainly interested in seeing her at work and learning about the plants. I didn’t realize it would be as fun as it was fascinating. Wendy is a gem.

Another reason I didn’t take some of the wild foods home was because I already had a full fridge at home that demanded my attention. If you will recall that delectable California roll burger I made a few months ago, you can probably guess that I’ve been scheming to give a spicy tuna roll burger a shot.

ab-so-lutely

Spicy tuna sushi is no stranger in this house as we love the sushi and sushi bar-related bites. I get good sushi-grade maguro (tuna) from the Boulder Whole Foods seafood counter. Make sure you get sushi-grade which means the fish has been frozen to the appropriate temperatures (temperatures you won’t reach in your typical home freezer) for long enough to ensure the destruction of any parasites. Not so appetizing to discuss, but worth the alternative of not knowing…

mayonnaise, sriracha, green onions, maguro (tuna)

chopped onions and chopped tuna

mix in the mayonnaise

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: roast pork belly on pea purée

The ground is greening up with grasses and the leaves of familiar wildflowers around my house. I spy new bright green tips dotting the conifers on my trail runs and dog walks. It smells good – mountain spring. From my office window, I can see a not-too-distant ridge, white with snow thanks to that recent storm. Neighbors covered their planted flowers with buckets because pretty domesticated plants can’t take the abuse of mountain spring. Our native plants (read: weeds) are tough. They can survive the harsh and fickle changes in weather. Yay for natural (read: lazy) landscaping!

always a welcome sight

some elk noodling around

By the time we melted out last spring, it was summer. I live in the mountains, but shop for groceries down on the flats. So when I though it was finally springtime, most of the spring produce had come and gone and I had missed out. Not so this year, and I was quick to pounce on English peas when I found them. They are so green, so spring.

plump

round food is really appealing to me

I’ve never been a huge fan of peas. Snow peas and sugar snap peas, sure, but not English peas unless they were cooked to death in soup. Over the past few years they’ve grown on me as I’ve had them prepared in ways that emphasize the freshness and the sweetness. Also, I like shelling them more than anything else – something mindless to do while lost in thought. My intent was to make a pea purée that I had bookmarked on my friend, Chris Cina‘s blog. But I wanted to pair it with something different.

pork belleh(!!!), kosher salt, and sugar

trimming the skin off

Pork belly is the starting point for precious bacon, but pork belly itself is pretty wonderful noshing. You (we) see it on restaurant menus all the time around here, so I wanted to roast some pork belly at home, to gauge if it was something worth putting on our menu for dinner guests. I had a straightforward recipe bookmarked (it’s been on my mind for a while) and stripped it down to just a salt and sugar curing mostly because I didn’t have the other ingredients on hand.

cover the pork belly in the salt and sugar

place in a small dish, cover, and refrigerate overnight

**Jump for more butter**