use real butter

Recipe: chinese char siu bao (barbecue pork buns)

Fork. Stick it to me. I am done. Done with the frenzied holiday baking schedule! And just in case you might be racking your brain for a few ideas, I wanted to share some of the other items we tucked into the gift bags for Jeremy’s wonderful staff. Supporting local businesses is pretty easy if you live in Boulder. We make a point of going to Savory Spice Shop on Pearl Street for creative and beautiful gifts. This store is perfect if you are looking for a variety of little items which you can taste to help you decide. They have something to suit cooks, non-cooks, and unknowns. You can also mail-order from them.

cute little jars of two kinds of cheese sprinkles

Just a few blocks east, we stopped by Atlas Purveyors so Jeremy could grab a latte (shopping makes him drowsy like… instantly) and pick a loose tea from their impressive selection. He went with the Carrington Blend of black tea, lemongrass, orange peel, eucalyptus, and wildflowers.

citrus and floral

Of course, we had to drop a mini bar of Chocolove into each bag. They’re local, make terrific chocolates, have love poems inside the wrappers, and are all around Boulderlicious.

A few weeks ago I made a double batch of char siu pork and I’m sure some of you knew where that double batch was headed (I mean, besides mah belleh). I love char siu pork, but what I really, truly, deeply love are the steamed Chinese barbecue pork buns, char siu bao.

the revered bao

I made one filling, but tried two different doughs because I didn’t care for the first dough. The first dough was cakey and sweeter than I’m used to, although it could very well be my elevation. The second dough was spot on to what I was looking for – a yeast-based dough that is delicate, elastic, fluffy, and less sweet. Let’s start with the filling.

it’s a lot of stuff, but comes together lickity split

dice the char siu pork

everything diced, measured, and ready to go

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: cranberry bar cookies

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving weekend whether you celebrate it or not. The nicest surprise of the day for me was seeing my “Christmas” cactus bloom. They always call them Christmas cacti, but all of mine bloom at Halloween (yay!) or Thanksgiving. My Halloween blooms are red, but my Thanksgiving blooms are white and they came from cuttings that my mom had brought me a while ago. I let her know on Thanksgiving that there were pretty flowers opening. Hers was blooming too and she told me that Grandma had originally given her the cuttings for her plant. That tugged at my heart. Everything my grandma touched was special.

thanksgiving cactus

We kept our Thanksgiving low key and enjoyed a gorgeous day out in the snow working up an appetite. It’s early season. There’s decent snow in the backcountry, but a lot of the approaches are still sketch with bare spots, wind drifts, and plenty of ice – so we hoofed it in until we reached solid snow and could skin in. I happened to pack turkey sandwiches for lunch (why not?) which we scarfed down in the trees on our way out. Turkey never tasted soooo good.

enough snow to switch to the skis

lunch break

I refused to shop Black Friday.

But the day after… Have you heard about Shop Local Saturday? It’s a push to support small local businesses. I had been researching waxless touring skis for over a year and we decided it was time for an upgrade. Neptune Mountaineering is my favorite mountaineering store in Boulder. They have a great selection of technical gear (it really puts REI to shame) and their staff is wicked knowledgeable because they DO IT ALL. We did our part and supported this beloved local business. We supported them A LOT because we each got boots, bindings, and skis.

we’ll call this a health and fitness investment

See, we needed something to counteract the weight we were gaining from eating treats out of this book:

it’s cakespy!

CakeSpy is Jessie Oleson, a delightfully quirky, talented, funny, and creative woman in Seattle. And she is so SWEET! I had the pleasure of meeting Jessie this past Spring at her shop/gallery and instantly fell in love with her illustrations of cupcakes, cakes, pies, doughnuts, and any other sweet you can imagine. So her publisher sent me her book a few months back. It has ridiculously cute recipes like cupcake-stuffed cupcakes, s’moreos, blondie topped brownies, toaster pastry ice cream sandwiches, and red velvet cake shake to name a few. What caught my eye was the section on seasonal sweets – in particular the leftover cranberry sauce bar cookies. A way to use up leftover cranberry sauce after Thanksgiving. Clever.

flour, sugar, brown sugar, salt, butter, eggs, cranberry sauce, almonds, light corn syrup, vanilla

to make the crust: flour, butter, salt, sugar

mixing the dough

pressing into the pan

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: blackberry macarons

What a weekend! We had some pretty crazy (read: extremely high) winds in Colorado Saturday night, clocking as much as 115 mph at Breckenridge. Based on our 6+ years in this house, we gauged it probably gusted to 90 mph here… and this wasn’t even the worst wind storm we’ve experienced. We watched in moderately alarmed curiosity (before the power went out) as the front wall of our great room flexed with each gust. Of course, it would have to be the weekend that my in-laws were visiting, but thankfully the guest room is on the ground floor. Our bedroom is on the third floor and so we endured 8 hours of the Northridge earthquake. Kaweah slept (happily) through the whole thing. Ah well, there’s always a price for paradise.

Aside from the windstorm, we took my ILs into Boulder for some shopping and dining. We enjoyed a beautiful family dinner at The Kitchen one evening and introduced them to The Pinyon and Chef Theo.

the kitchen: rabbit leg confit

the kitchen: alaskan halibut

the kitchen: apple doughnuts

the pinyon: butternut ravioli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms in brown butter sauce

Before the winds went cuckoo, we did have some really beautiful clouds set up over the house last week. Even if I didn’t have some background in atmospheric science, I would still be 100% completely enamored with our Colorado skies. Who needs television?

wave cloud at sunset over my house

still there long after sunset

And now, I’m happy to be home to work on long-term projects and resume a much-needed routine! No more travel or house guests for over a month! All of the local ski hills are either open or opening within the next week. My list of recipes to try is growing almost as fast as the list of things we need to fix and do around our neglected house. Speaking of recipes, I came across these macs that I made earlier this year. Even though blackberry season is over, you can use frozen blackberries for the curd and the buttercream. I find frozen organic blackberries to have decent sweetness and flavor.

sugar + red + blue = purple sugar

whipped whites with purple sugar

**Jump for more butter**