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Recipe: french crullers

I went on my annual sandhill crane migration shoot in southern Colorado earlier this week with my shooting partner, Jason. We crammed driving to and from Monte Vista, four shoots, a half day at Wolf Creek (ski resort), and not a lot of sleep into 48 hours. The town of Monte Vista, Colorado holds their Crane Festival this weekend (March 9-11).

shooting at sunset

pre-dawn

tandem

silhouettes as the sun rises

A big shout out and thank you to Pro Photo Rental for supplying us with the 200-400mm Nikkor f4 and the 500mm Nikkor f4 on this trip. You can see the entire set on my photoblog. Lack of sleep combined with standing around in the dark and cold at 5 am probably resulted in the cold I came down with Wednesday evening. That made sifting through my 2,687 photos a lot of fun. But I’m on the mend now and it’s back to the business at hand. Let’s talk doughnuts. Specifically – French crullers.

all you need: eggs, flour, water, butter, salt, sugar

bring the water, butter, sugar, and salt to a boil

add the flour

French crullers are my favorite doughnuts. They are eggy and light, made from pâte à choux – a sort of fried version of the cream puff. These are the ones I always search for if we ever happen upon a doughnut shop. Jeremy goes for the chocolate-filled, drenched-in-chocolate, chocolate something or other, but I am perfectly happy with a delicate, simple French cruller.

keep stirring until a thin film forms on the pan

beat the eggs in one at a time

then beat in the whites until you get a smooth and glossy batter

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Recipe: blood orange curd-filled beet doughnuts

There is chocolate for the chocoholics and then there is fruity for the fruit lovers. It isn’t just that I love fruity flavors, but they tend to come in a nice array of colors too. Remember me? I’m a parrot and I love bright colors.

sometimes even pink

Today’s recipe is indeed intended for Valentine’s day, mainly because it is pink and cute. But it’s more than that because it is both fruity AND vegetable-y. I’ve been looking around for something sweet to do with beets. So, let’s get our vegetable on, people.

flour, milk, butter, powdered sugar, cardamom, oranges, beet, salt, yeast, egg, grand marnier, beet juice

peel and dice and don’t wear white

I found an interesting recipe for beet doughnuts on Almond Corner. Most recipes call for roasting beets, but I liked this one because it cooks the beets on the stove top, simmering them in orange juice. By the time the beets are tender (it takes a while) the orange juice has reduced considerably so there isn’t a whole lot of liquid left. I puréed the beets with the juice, which meant I added a little more flour to the dough later.

diced beets, cardamom pods, and orange juice

tender

puréed

Meanwhile, heat the milk and beet juice together. Now, beet juice isn’t something I commonly see. I worried that I would have to make my own beet juice, somehow, but thankfully I found an obscure bottle of organic beet juice at Whole Foods… from Switzerland. Because my beets had enough liquid from the orange juice for the purée, I just added all of the milk-juice mix to the yeast and let it foam up.

add beet juice to the milk

foamy yeast

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Recipe: chinese sweet red bean steamed buns

This past week was officially my little vacation. I mostly avoided my in-box, Twitter, the Book of Face, and the blog. Snowfall this autumn has been pretty paltry by Colorado standards and so we take what we can get. Last week, we were graced with a coveted snow dump at the local hill in which we christened our new skis in a foot of fresh powder.

frosty!

Jeremy and I spent the holiday in southwestern Colorado with his family including four of his cousins and their parents. It was a raucous good time and Kaweah was in doggy heaven considering the dog toys, dog beds, and cuddling with her grandma. We were keen to explore the local cross country trails as well as clocking a day at Wolf Creek which consistently boasts the most snow in the state (average annual snowfall is 465 inches).

cross country with the fam

We were home by Monday when the accidents began happening. Accidents as in Kaweah and her little puppy bladder. She had just finished her second course of antibiotics for an infection and so we didn’t know if the situation would improve with time or if this was Kaweah getting old. Normally, Kaweah doesn’t drink much water, but ever since her infection she had been tanking up quite a bit and we would let her out to potty every few hours. Our vet had explained stages of kidney decline and failure to us. His words hung in the back of my mind all week.

As Jeremy and I packed up for a backcountry ski, we decided to bring Kaweah along. This meant we would only cover a fraction of the distance we normally do, but this was really for her more than for us. And she loved it. She acted like her puppy self again: romping in the snow, bounding back and forth between us, shoving her schnoz in the powdery white drifts and sneezing with delight.

flopping ears

patiently waiting for her treat

Kaweah was exhausted that evening in a good way. But the accidents kept happening. Our vet asked us to restrict her water for a day and bring him a urine sample. She looked so sad and confused when she kept searching for her water bowl. I was feeling quite low and so was Jeremy. Of course, when we arrived at the vet’s office, Kaweah practically dragged Jeremy into the building. And when Doc Newton entered the room she was all wiggles and waggles. The infection was gone. That’s good news. The inability to concentrate her urine means her kidneys are now in decline. He gave us a medication to help with her leaky bladder and Jeremy asked what sort of signs to expect when her kidneys begin to fail.

Doc Newton has a kind smile and his voice reminds me of Baxter Black, the Cowboy Poet. He is the best vet we’ve ever had. He squinted at us and said, “By the time you see symptoms of kidney failure, it’s usually too late.” I blinked quickly while my hand rested on Kaweah’s rib cage. She continued to wiggle, her attention shifting from Doc Newton to the treat jar to Doc Newton to the treat jar. “Why don’t we do a blood test for a baseline and to see what stage her kidneys are at?” he suggested.

An hour later, the phone rang. “Her blood is perfect! She’s a healthy girl and we’ll test her regularly so when we start to see signs in her blood work, we can adjust her diet to make it a little easier on the kidneys. Have a happy new year!” We love Doc Newton so much.

my happy girl

So we broke into the champagne a little early to toast Kaweah’s health and a happy start to the new year. I have nothing profound to say. I’ve already recapped 2011 in photos. I don’t do resolutions. I’m not interested in what’s hot. 2012 is going to be awesome because that’s the best option.

fizzy bubbles

Even though the tradition applies to Chinese New Year, we’ve always done so with the western New Year as well. We eat something sweet first thing in the morning on New Year’s day so sweet things come out of your mouth all year. I don’t claim that it works, I just do it. I made Chinese sweet red bean (azuki) steamed buns for us to eat this New Year’s Day.

flour, yeast, baking powder, shortening, sugar, warm water, red bean paste

warm water between 105° F and 115° F

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