use real butter

Recipe: cranberry walnut pepita sourdough boule

Autumn feels good. We are starting to see frost patterns on our deck and I don’t have to take my jacket off when we go hiking because it remains nice and cool. Denver Erin and I spotted a majestic bull elk and a handful of elk cows and young bulls on our way to a trailhead one morning. Hiking through dark pine forests dotted with brilliant sunlit golden aspens on a chilly morning and hearing the not-so-distant piercing call of bull elk bugling from every direction is pretty freaking awesome. There are fewer people on the trails now and the woods carry that slightly fermented odor of decomposing leaves. Most leaf peepers stay in their cars or wander no more than 100 feet past the trailhead and I’m fine with that. Yuki is putting in her hiking miles and earning her Colorado mountain dog status.

on our way to some alpine lakes

pausing for a view over the valley

yuki and neva love their hikes

some nice orange aspens to match neva’s harness

It’s finally bread season around here. I haven’t lived with air conditioning since I left for college almost 30 years ago. As someone who is particularly mindful of the heat (I hate it), I’m quite dialed in to the moods of the weather. The oven and my sourdough starter have been more or less neglected since June until this week. As I type, I have a batch of sourdough autolysing in the kitchen to make sourdough baguettes and a bâtard! I’ve also been looking forward to making this cranberry walnut pepita sourdough bread again. It all begins with some sourdough starter. For those who are new to the sourdough game, ripe sourdough starter means your starter has been fed and allowed time (for me, it’s 8 hours on the counter) to produce some lovely gas bubbles. Use this starter to make the levain. My typical schedule is to mix the levain the night before and let it sit overnight, then start on the dough the next morning. The levain should be bubbly.

the levain: water, bread flour, whole wheat flour, ripe sourdough starter

mix it all together so there is no dry flour

the levain the next morning

In the original recipe, Maurizio used a little rye flour in the dough. I did, too. I think in the future, I’ll probably stick to a combination of just bread flour and whole wheat flour, but it’s in the recipe below with the option of substituting whole wheat for the rye (it’s a small amount). I also halved the recipe to make one 1-pound loaf instead of two loaves and added pepitas (pumpkin seeds).

levain, water, pepitas, dried cranberries, walnuts, whole wheat flour, bread flour, rye flour, salt

Stir the levain into most of the water (some has to be reserved for dissolving the salt later). If the levain is nice and bubbly, it should float (because bubbles). Once the levain has mostly dissolved, mix in the flours. You can use a sturdy mixing spatula, spoon, or the handy dandy dough whisk, but be sure that you don’t have any dry pockets of flour. Cover your dough vessel with plastic wrap or a damp cloth. I use plastic wrap because our humidity is quite low. Let that autolyse (absorb the liquid) for 40 minutes.

dissolve the levain in the water

stir in the flours

mix well then autolyse

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Recipe: chicken satay with peanut sauce

It’s now officially summer! To be honest, it has been feeling like summer around here since May with all the heat and pollen and wildfires. But this past week was spent in true summer fashion: hiking, paddling, trail running, and lots of time spent in the high country. We like to get those early morning starts to take advantage of the cool air, the solitude, and the chance to spot wildlife like moose, grouse, deer, marmots, and other mountain residents of the non-human persuasion. Oh, and the wildflowers are starting to look pretty amazing.

happy neva on a hike

mountain stream cascade flanked by wildflowers

jeremy and neva at the end of a 12-mile hike

blue columbines on my trail run

…and more columbines on my trail run!

After last week’s recipe for grilling sourdough pizzas, I’m still all about the grill. When people mention grilling season, I’m always baffled because we grill all year long – even when we have to shovel a path in 3 feet of snow to get to the grill. But I suppose summer is true grilling season when you don’t want to cook inside the house and you can stand in shorts, flip flops, and hold a cold beverage while tending dinner over a tamed fire – that thing which distinguishes us from all the other animals. No matter how or when you grill, I think this chicken satay with peanut sauce should get some rotation in your dinner and/or party schedules. It’s long on ingredients, but short on preparation. Start with the chicken. [Note: I made a half batch in the photos, but the recipe is for a full batch which serves 8.]

lemon grass, shallot, salt, turmeric, brown sugar, cumin, coriander, garlic, chicken, canola oil, fish sauce

coarsely chopped lemon grass, shallots, garlic

place everything but the chicken in a food processor

purée into a smooth(ish) paste

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Recipe: italian rainbow cookies

This was the scene Wednesday night: an assembly line of gift bags, gift boxes, tissue paper, cards, ribbons, cookies, candies, labels, and a checklist scribbled four times over with crossouts, notes, tick marks, and arrows. Maybe I was tired or maybe I am getting smarter, but as the clock spun ahead into the night, I began to unload cookies from my “to make” list like ballast from a sinking ship. French macarons? No. Peppermint kisses? Nope. Mini sour cream coffee cakes? Jettisoned from the list. I like people, but I like them more when I’ve had more than 4 hours of sleep.

holiday cookies and candies

After we had prettied up the packages and set them on the table to ship or deliver the next day, I let out a big sigh (more like an agonized primal scream) and said, “I’m not making anymore EXPLETIVE cookies! And I’m going EXPLETIVE skiing tomorrow!” We actually got four inches of snow overnight, so the logical next step was…

the lovely new high-speed lift that brings us to the powder 8 minutes faster

it was good while it lasted

And can you believe less than 48 hours after declaring NO MORE COOKIES, I was in the kitchen making… cookies? It’s true. I kinda blame Jennie Perillo for that. She posted a photo of her Italian rainbow cookies on Instagram last weekend, which prompted me to finally research the recipe and buy the ingredients – except I had all of those holiday cookies to crank out. I put the project on indefinite hold until Jennie posted ANOTHER photo of those gorgeous cookies on Thursday and I waved the white flag.

italian rainbow cookies

All my life, I had zero interest in Italian rainbow cookies and here’s why: I assumed they were the same as Neapolitan coconut candies – little sweet tricolor rectangles which I thought were disgusting when I was a kid. No one in my Chinese immigrant family set me straight on the distinction between the two, most likely because they had no idea either one existed. Then a couple of months ago we stopped at Whole Foods to grab a salad and their cookie bar was 50% off. For some reason, I decided to give an Italian rainbow cookie a try and to my delight, it tasted of almonds.

almond extract, almond paste, flour, sugar, chocolate, eggs, salt, apricot preserves, butter, red and green food coloring

There are a lot of recipes for Italian rainbow cookies on the web. They’re also called seven layer cookies or three layer cookies or Italian flag cookies, and they more or less follow the same process and list of ingredients. I found Deb‘s discussion to be quite helpful regarding the chocolate layers and the slicing, but decided on a smaller quantity for my first batch because you never quite know what you’re getting into when you decide to bake something at high altitude. Jennie’s recipe amounted to about 75% of Deb’s quantity and I liked the way she baked all three colors in one pan. So I reduced Deb’s recipe by a quarter and baked it up Jennie’s way. Either way, these are not quick cookies, so set aside a full day or parts of two days.

Most people whip the egg whites first and then make the batter, but I like to reverse that order because no good can come of letting whipped egg whites sit around and deflate while you make the cookie batter. Also, the recipe calls for almond paste, which is not the same as marzipan. Marzipan has a higher ratio of sugar to almond than almond paste. Some of you already know this, some of you do not. Remember what Gandalf said, “I’m trying to help you.”

beat the sugar and almond paste together

add butter

mix in the egg yolks and the almond extract

add salt and flour

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