use real butter

Recipe: roast pork belly on pea purée

The ground is greening up with grasses and the leaves of familiar wildflowers around my house. I spy new bright green tips dotting the conifers on my trail runs and dog walks. It smells good – mountain spring. From my office window, I can see a not-too-distant ridge, white with snow thanks to that recent storm. Neighbors covered their planted flowers with buckets because pretty domesticated plants can’t take the abuse of mountain spring. Our native plants (read: weeds) are tough. They can survive the harsh and fickle changes in weather. Yay for natural (read: lazy) landscaping!

always a welcome sight

some elk noodling around

By the time we melted out last spring, it was summer. I live in the mountains, but shop for groceries down on the flats. So when I though it was finally springtime, most of the spring produce had come and gone and I had missed out. Not so this year, and I was quick to pounce on English peas when I found them. They are so green, so spring.

plump

round food is really appealing to me

I’ve never been a huge fan of peas. Snow peas and sugar snap peas, sure, but not English peas unless they were cooked to death in soup. Over the past few years they’ve grown on me as I’ve had them prepared in ways that emphasize the freshness and the sweetness. Also, I like shelling them more than anything else – something mindless to do while lost in thought. My intent was to make a pea purée that I had bookmarked on my friend, Chris Cina‘s blog. But I wanted to pair it with something different.

pork belleh(!!!), kosher salt, and sugar

trimming the skin off

Pork belly is the starting point for precious bacon, but pork belly itself is pretty wonderful noshing. You (we) see it on restaurant menus all the time around here, so I wanted to roast some pork belly at home, to gauge if it was something worth putting on our menu for dinner guests. I had a straightforward recipe bookmarked (it’s been on my mind for a while) and stripped it down to just a salt and sugar curing mostly because I didn’t have the other ingredients on hand.

cover the pork belly in the salt and sugar

place in a small dish, cover, and refrigerate overnight

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: butterscotch and milk chocolate puddings

Were any of you able to catch the full moon this past weekend? Since the moon was at perigee (closest approach to Earth) for 2012, it appeared 14% larger and 30% brighter than typical full moons. Everyone was saying it would be a “supermoon”. For us, it certainly was if only for the fact that clouds were building all day, sitting like a giant cap on top of our region. Sheer luck and strategic planning gave us a tiny window from the horizon of the Great Plains to the base of the cloud deck. For all of ten minutes we were able to witness and capture something beautiful.

supermoonrise

As the moon disappeared into the clouds, I looked up from the camera and shouted, “I love it here!” We have good skies, clean air, quiet mountain roads, and a topography of mountains, foothills, and canyons that dramatically abuts a flat, expansive plain. The storm eventually committed itself on Sunday and brought a shower of wet, heavy snow upon us. Moisture is welcome now, in any form.

kaweah wanted to check out the snow

It was most definitely a super weekend – super moon, super snow, and I recreated a lovely treat I’ve enjoyed from Pizzeria Locale in Boulder (part of the grand Frasca dominion).

call it super pudding

Last month, I was on assignment to shoot a fun annual event in downtown Boulder – Taste of Pearl. Local restaurants, Colorado wineries, and shops on Pearl Street triple up to create 15 tasting stations for attendees to sample and peruse and mingle. It’s festive and lively. People get friendlier and friendlier as the afternoon progresses, I’m guessing because of the wine! As I was working, I didn’t eat or drink until the end. The fellas at Pizzeria Locale were handing out cute little cups of their butterscotch pudding. If you said “butterscotch pudding” to me in the past, I would have politely declined. After having sampled this butterscotch pudding twice (first time at the restaurant, second time at this shoot), I was SOLD. But you know me… something this good needs to be tested at Butter Headquarters.

vanilla, bourbon, milk, eggs, brown sugar, butter, salt, cornstarch

mix melted butter with the brown sugar and salt

I don’t develop recipes. I just don’t. That kind of activity makes me crazy and cranky. I seek out good recipes from trusted sources and proceed to test them out. After searching my library and looking online, I settled on David Lebovitz’ butterscotch pudding, because he puts BOOZE in his pudding. Whiskey, to be specific. I went to my wine and booze adviser (Jason at Boulder Wine and Spirits – he is the best) and grilled him about whiskeys. What is whiskey? Can I use bourbon instead of whiskey? What the heck is scotch? Jason deserves a batch of cookies just for putting up with me. In the end, I decided to save myself $30 and use the bourbon I already had.

whisk milk and cornstarch

whisk in eggs

stir milk into the brown sugar mixture

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: vietnamese bun bo xao

Stormy weather. I love it! I like watching the clouds roil overhead as they blot out the sun. Usually, I’m on the lookout for lightning, because it’s one of those elusive, dangerous, exciting, and beautiful things – both to capture with my camera and to witness with my eyes. However, I’m never one to pass up a good show of mammatus clouds. They’re more common down on the Great Plains (Boulder/Denver and parts east) where atmospheric instability is pretty common in summer. Mammata are common up here in the mountains too, but they don’t get a chance to develop as much nor are they as long-lived as they are down on the flats. But we’ve been getting some stormy days and nice displays.

gone in seconds

dissipating mammata and a nice vertical draft over the continental divide

and right over my hizouse!!

Some of you might be aware that I’ve been doing a lot of sandwich research of late. A LOT of sandwich research. Last week I asked some gal pals if they wanted to grab non-sandwich fare for lunch… I had a hankering for Vietnamese food – particularly the rice noodle salad. And so we did and it was great, but… how hard can it be to make this at home? Not that hard at all, it turns out.

bun (bún): rice noodles

I did a little snooping about on the interwebs and found this lovely video (with Aussie accents – bonus!) on how to make Vietnamese bun bo xao (beef noodle stir-fry). When I went to Asian Seafood Market in Boulder, I asked Maria if the rice vermicelli package was the right one to make bun. She grimaced and said, “That too skinny!” and snatched the package from my hand, disappeared down the aisles, and returned with the right kind – a thicker rice noodle. “Use this for bun!” So don’t get the skinniest vermicelli, but rather the noodles that look about 1/16th of an inch in diameter (reference a ruler if you don’t know what I’m talking about because super skinny noodles will kinda suck).

While I was digging around among the bags of herbs in the back of the store, I happened upon what looked like Vietnamese mint. I didn’t know for sure though, because the video was the first I had ever heard of it. I brought it to Maria and asked if this was Vietnamese mint. She smiled and said yes, she likes to use it in salads and soups. She opened the bag and tore a leaf off for me to smell. “You put this with noodles!”

(left to right) basil, mint, vietnamese mint, thai basil

vietnamese mint up close

I know that Pacific Ocean Market (in Broomfield) and H Mart (in Aurora) carry fresh perilla – which is also called sesame leaves or shiso leaves – but I didn’t have the time to drive out that far. I asked Maria if she had shiso leaves. A sharp “no!” was the response. Then I asked if it was okay for me to substitute basil for shiso in the bun bo xao. She squinted her eyes at me and said yes, use basil – why would you use shiso? Great, I was all set.

sliced beef, bean sprouts, herbs, cucumbers, lemongrass, garlic, onion, rice noodles, fish sauce

minced lemongrass, sliced onion, minced garlic, sprouts, sliced cukes, beef (flank steak)

**Jump for more butter**