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Recipe: pan-seared black cod with summer vegetables

[I completely forgot about this interview with Friday magazine earlier this month! Click on over if you’re bored and haven’t heard enough of my yammering. It features some other food bloggers you might recognize too.]

It was hot this weekend! This is what they call Indian summer, right? Summer is pretty brief where we live, so we welcome it with open arms in the mountains. It’s glorious. As summer winds down, Jeremy and I are both pretty happy to move into autumn – which arrives right on schedule around these parts. Taking advantage of these last hot and sunny days, we distributed the compost in our yard to make room in the compost bin, cleaned out the basement, did heaps of recycling, and replaced our hot water heater. Okay, the hot water heater sort of demanded replacement when it died and flooded the basement, but I’m glad we took care of it in summer rather than winter.

and kaweah got a much needed bath

Our fall colors are arriving in full force to the south. I’m looking forward to a cool down because when I see yellow aspens, I want to be wearing fleece – not sweating my brains out in a short-sleeve t-shirt getting sunburned, which is exactly what happened on Sunday’s shoot. But have a gander at what we found. [See the full set on the photo blog.]

colorado gold on deep blue skies

healthy pines and golden aspens

a lovely mix of colors

brilliant

aglow in early afternoon light

When I was in Seattle, my friend Caroline had complained that they didn’t get a real summer and that she wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. One evening we went to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner. Hmmmm, what to make for dinner? Caroline went to grab some black cod to bake and Erin asked me to come up with a vegetable. I remembered Caroline’s comment about summer and picked up some summery vegetables for a simple sauté to go with the fish.

corn on the cob

slicing the kernels off

At home, I wanted to try the same vegetables with pan-seared black cod. I too didn’t want to let summer go just yet. There will be time for pumpkins, apples, pomegranates, and butternut squash. Our corn is still sweet. The zucchini are still plentiful. And tomatoes… I am a sucker for the sweet sweet lovin’ of summer tomatoes.

dicing zucchini

cherry tomatoes in the last light of summer

diced into jewels

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: grilled vegetable salad

Whenever I return from an out-of-town shoot, my friends always ask how it went. That’s partly because most of my friends are outdoorsy types and partly because they genuinely want to know how the shoot was. I always have two parts to my answer: what I thought of the shoot and how I felt about the trip. In general, the shoots are getting consistently better even if the conditions are less than ideal. I consider that to be progress. How I feel about a trip has gone up and down and up and down as I try to strike a balance between pushing hard enough to get the shots and not pushing so hard that I end up hating what I do or worse yet – wearing myself out so that I miss an opportunity.

mount crested butte

elephant head and indian paintbrush

This shoot came closer to that balance for me. Sometimes you need to step back and remind yourself of those things you love about what you do. Jeremy observed me nodding to myself or muttering words of satisfaction on occasion when I felt I had a good capture. It’s a labor of love to lie in the dirt, stand in the pouring rain, suffer the bugs that bite and the plants that stab you. But I do love it and it is totally worth it. I’m settling into a groove now.

my favorite fern understory

jeremy for scale (he’s looking appropriately camo there too)

We saw a second bear at the end of the trip. The first one was out early in the morning. The moment I spotted it, the bear bolted up a hillslope and disappeared into the woods before I could get my camera out. This second bear was out past sunset. It also made haste up the nearest (steep) hillslope, but Jeremy was able to spot it up high as it quickly worked its way through the dense growth of grasses and wildflowers. They are so fast and so quiet!

like watching the fin of a shark crest the water

this bear just wanted to do its own thing

You can view a sampling of the photos from this trip on the photo blog.

I love going on trips and I love coming home. But there is something to be said for eating food that you prepared. No matter how good the food is (and the food in Crested Butte is quite good), I know what I’m putting into my dinner when I cook. Over a month ago several of my SNB gals gathered at Nichole’s house to make wedding favors for Kitt and to, of course, eat. Nichole made a wonderful grilled vegetable salad that some of you had commented on. It didn’t take long before I was craving that salad.

tomatoes

along with onions, garlic, eggplant, and zucchini

It’s a flexible salad so you can futz with the ingredients, the way you cook them, and the dressing you use. Of course, if you don’t grill any of the vegetables, it can’t technically be a grilled vegetable salad – but I will let you deal with that issue. I didn’t grill my tomatoes (even though I love grilled tomatoes) because tomatoes have a habit of shriveling up and slipping down through the grating on my grill and into oblivion. That can be quite upsetting if you wanted to let’s say… eat the tomatoes. Instead, I roasted mine. I also roasted a bulb of garlic while I was running the oven.

a dash of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt

nicely roasted and still juicy

**Jump for more butter**

Hai! There’s a giveaway buried deep at the end of the post. Cool stuff that I know you will love. What is cooler? You have the chance to win x3 because Tartelette and White on Rice Couple are also holding giveaways! Great minds… (okay, we planned it that way, but still!) You should totally enter all three.

Few things keep me from this blog for long: chemotherapy, emergency surgery, and apparently food photography workshops. I should say running food photography workshops. Who knew?!

I sort of knew, but now I really know. It’s an enormous amount of work and I can honestly say that Food and Light could not have happened without the logistical and technical support of Todd and Diane (veterans of organizing and running workshops), Jason (single-handedly built our workshop a new network when the venue’s network was brought to its wobbly knees), and my Jeremy (for everything) – four people who consistently go above and beyond without ever being asked to. They did me a solid. Thanks, guys.

todd and diane present on artificial lighting techniques and equipment

… to an attentive group

Don’t even start to think that this workshop rocked on the efforts of just five people. No way. Helen, The Maestra, pwned the styling like nobody’s business, always happy to share tips and experiences with workshop participants. She even demonstrated how to turn unsightly bean dip into something marvelous. Pro Photo Rental provided us with several beautiful professional lenses for folks to try out. Matt and Nicole graciously presented stunning pastries to the workshop each morning for shooting (and eating!). Special thanks to Lisa, Anita, Dana, and Annie for staying behind to help us break down the venue (and break out happy hour at The Kitchen Upstairs).

watching helen work her artistry on bean dip

attendees look on

Most of all, I cannot emphasize enough how wonderful our workshop group was. We had good people. I mean, we had truly kind, generous, friendly, enthusiastic people in attendance. You could not have picked a better crew. They listened, asked questions, shared with one another, helped each other, and created an excellent atmosphere for learning.

diane styles greens and peas

And that is what the workshop was all about – learning. Having spent a billion years in graduate school watching some good and a lot of bad instruction, I have my (strong) opinions about teaching. We didn’t want to load the workshop with lecture after lecture. Heck, if that were the case we instructors would have walked out on ourselves! Two-thirds of the in-session workshop was reserved for hands-on, one-on-one, run-with-it time. They ran with it.

annie practices bounce fill

kelsey styles her shot

**Jump for more butter**