use real butter

Recipe: pear ice cream and wine poached pears

It’s the right time for pears. I enjoy pears, but the fruit carries some baggage for me. In Chinese, the word for pear is a homophone of the word to split or to leave. My grandmother and mom never allowed splitting a pear between two people (for fear that you would be separated). However, splitting among three or more is okay. I never quite understood all of it, but they scared me so much with their superstitions that I follow it (and many others) to this day. I even consulted with my grandmother to find out if it was okay for us to share a pear with the dog. She gave it some consideration and concluded that yes, it was okay, since the dog is part of our family and that makes three.

About nine years ago, I was in Argentina for field work and the whole team was in camp together for one night. We usually paired off and only met up in town for supplies, downloading data, and meeting with local geologists. Ben and I dropped by a grocery store en route to camp and I picked up some ingredients for dessert to follow the asado. I made poached pears in red wine sauce and served it with vanilla ice cream (which I kept cool by tying the carton in a plastic bag and chucking it into a freezing cold stream on a leash). It was suprisingly good, but I think everything tastes better in the backcountry. Seeing pears on sale at the store stirred up those old memories.

First I made some ice cream – pear ice cream. Now with my copy of The Perfect Scoop in hand, I dabbled with DL’s pear and pecorino ice cream. Fruits like pear and lychee have such subtle and almost flowery flavors that they beg to be made as ice cream.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: beef stew

I think I caught a cold during the fall color shooting frenzy this weekend. As long as I got some good shots, it was worth the trouble. Sometimes travel can be delightful when you discover really good food – particularly cheap and delicious street food. But that stuff isn’t to be found in Colorado ski resorts where the mantra is to milk someone for every dime you can possibly dislodge from their pockets. I am constantly astonished whenever we get railroaded into eating in a ski resort village (which is rare). We pay far too much money for really pathetic quality. I think it’s a Colorado thing – they are located too close to the flats.

When we rolled into our driveway yesterday, I had two things on my mind: 1) nap and 2) beef stew. I had made a large pot of beef stew before we left for the weekend. I just didn’t want the beef going south on us during our trip and figured it would be nice to come home to a quick meal that only required some reheating. Couldn’t bring it in a cooler to nuke in our room because of the very bumpy dirt roads we were traveling. Trust me, I have experience driving in the field with a cooler full of foods that decided to unceremoniously merge in the back of the truck.

Back to the stew… I have a love affair with many foods, but it delights me to no end when you can take a cheap and tough cut of meat and transform it into the most tender and mouth-watering dish with some patient slow-cooking. And I think this is a dying art because people are short on time and short on the knowledge. This home-style food shows up on restaurant menus because no one does it themselves anymore. Sad, really. I bought a hunk of beef chuck and spent a good amount of time trimming the fat (they include a honking amount on these babies) while cutting into nice cubes. Kaweah sat not more than a foot away, watching devotedly and licking her chops every few minutes.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: choco-crisp cookies

One night during my pastry skills course, I was in a discussion with two other classmates over cookie recipes and how to achieve the proper texture at elevation. I’ve learned from Shan to try removing the leavening agent for my elevation and it seems to work well with most of the cakes I bake. He was passing by during our conversation and couldn’t help but interject, “freeze the dough”. I made a mental note to give it a try.

I used to bake a lot of cookies. It was easy in graduate school because I could bring in a double batch of cookies, set them in the office, and send the email out to the department. They’d be gone in a couple of hours. Graduate students are always hungry. I made cookies at least twice a week for stress relief and I fine tuned my recipes to the perfect texture – at sea level. When we moved to Colorado, I was disappointed with how many of my recipes had to be readjusted. I didn’t feel like wasting my time because I didn’t know where to start tweaking.

**Jump for more butter**