use real butter

Recipe: huckleberry pie

Housekeeping Update: Subscribers may have received an email burp of use real butter post summaries recently. We’re not sure what Feedburner is doing, so I apologize. We are in the process of migrating your use real butter subscription to a new service while minimizing any further weirdness you may encounter. Until the new service is in place, we haven’t cut off Feedburner, but you can self-subscribe in the little subscription box on the upper right of the blog. Thank you so much for your patience and thanks to Lesley for recommending follow.it. -jen xo

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September sways between summer and autumn and occasionally dips a toe in faux-winter here in the mountains. The month began thick with greenery and hot sun, and ended draped in the golden leaves of autumn as the high country backdrops were accented in white from recent snowfall. I find it a refreshing reprieve from relentless awesome summer doings. Like much of the wildlife around us, we are tending to those responsibilities we shirked all summer in favor of foraging mushrooms and huckleberries.

Labor Day is an unofficial bookend of summer, which means we spent our birthdays in relative peace and quiet. Relative because… pups. Per Jeremy’s request, I prepared a multi-course seafood dinner for his birthday dinner and baked a hazelnut almond dacquoise with fresh berries and chocolate mousse for dessert. For my own birthday, my 50th, I made chicken porcini pot pie, had a scoop of non-dairy store bought ice cream, and defeated several armies of hostile alien forces. No midlife crisis, just midlife casual no-drama low-stress appreciation for the ordinary. We were in Crested Butte last weekend to winterize our place and do a little leaf peeping.

birthday boy and yuki side-eye

neva enjoying outside time (yuki did not want to climb onto the boulder)

everybody happy

aspen and spruce

this will never get old

walking through golden aspen stands

lovely views in every direction

It’s late in the season to be posting a huckleberry recipe, but I know people are still foraging them to the north and west of Colorado. We had a pretty good huck season locally. If you were diligent about picking and freezing these tiny flavor bombs this summer, you might have enough to make a pie. If (like me) you use your precious huckleberries sparingly, then a full-sized 9-inch pie might be too great a demand of your stash. A 4-inch pie requires a mere 1 1/2 cups. Thankfully, frozen huckleberries work just as well as fresh in this pie, so one could conceivably create a blast of late summer any time of year. And as always, if you don’t have huckleberries, you can substitute with wild blueberries or regular blueberries.

a tremendous season full of big little huckleberries

Truth be told, I’ve never made a life-size huckleberry pie. 6-8 cups is a full day of picking in the BEST of seasons in Colorado. So the recipe below is for a 9-inch pie, because apparently there are locales where the huckleberries are large and plentiful and you don’t have to crouch on the ground for hours on end to get them. The process I photographed here is the making of a 4-inch pie. I also ditched the pie dough in the Saveur recipe because Kenji’s pie dough is now my trusted go-to recipe.

flour, salt, sugar, butter, ice water

pulse sugar, salt, 2/3 of the flour, and cold butter together

cut in the remaining flour

drizzle with cold water

press and fold the dough together

holding shape and ready to chill

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Recipe: meatless meatballs

Housekeeping News: Google has eliminated FeedBurner’s email subscription service which means you won’t be receiving emails announcing a new use real butter post from now on. I did research other email subscription services, but soon realized my goal is not to grow this blog; I simply want to document recipes and some memories. I typically publish a new recipe once a month and I announce those on my @userealbutter and @jenyuphoto Instagram accounts. Thanks for reading! -jen

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All of my grand plans for summer converged on the month of August. Foraging insane amounts of wild mushrooms, family visits, so much cooking, celebrations, hiking, and many overdue house projects left me short on sleep, heavy on backaches, but ultimately delighted. I’m happy it came together and even more thrilled to let out a big sigh as I crawl across the line to September.

marking kris’ birthday with lilies

so.many.porcini

the chanterelles were off to a great start

jeremy found our first ever blue chanterelles

visited jeremy’s parents and took them porcini hunting

my niece toured the university of colorado in boulder

celebrated mom’s 80th birthday

spent many hours hiking with this crew

And now we can finally get to these fantastic meatless meatballs that were promised since spring. The recipe comes from my friend, Jennifer Perillo (Jennie) – a talented, intuitive, and skilled cook and baker. I’ve made these several times in the last six months. The flavor is excellent and the texture is great. We don’t miss the meat. Even when I flubbed a batch, it ended up more like meat sauce than meatballs and was still terrific. I now keep a few dozen meatless meatballs in the freezer at any given time for a quick weeknight meal.

The bulk of the meatless meatballs comes from cooked lentils. I like that Jennie uses vegetable stock (I use Better than Bouillon vegetable base) and other aromatics to cook her lentils. French (puy) lentils give me the best and most consistent results, but you can use other types. Just watch that they don’t overcook like my green lentils did – because your meatless meatballs will be more inclined to disintegrate during frying (sad) or while eating (manageable). There is usually an extra half cup of cooked lentils which are great in salads, as a side, or spooned straight into your mouth. You can also purchase cooked lentils to save yourself a step. I’ve seen cooked lentils in stores, but have never tried them.

french lentils, shallot, garlic, bay leaf, salt, pepper, vegetable stock

bring it all to a boil and simmer until tender

ready for meatless meatballs

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Recipe: roasted porcini with gremolata

I keep my summer expectations low to minimize any disappointment. It’s a strategy I apply to life in general, but it serves me particularly well when dealing with the realities of mushroom season here in the Colorado Rockies. Some years it’s great. Some years it’s terrible. Some years it’s okay. This year, it’s been strangely, weirdly, amazingly phenomenal. I have been logging many miles and many many pounds of beautiful porcini this season. Foraging all day, cleaning and processing (drying, freezing raw, sautéeing and freezing) all night, closing my eyes and seeing mushrooms in my dreams. Repeat.

still make time to see my folks who made chinese lobster noodles for us

and looking up to appreciate the stellar wildflower displays

everywhere we went, porcini

tucked among the huckleberries

our red-capped rocky mountain rubies (porcini)

My last post bumped meatless meatballs for chocolate chip cookies and I’m bumping those meatballs again, this time for a simple roasted porcini recipe that I promised my friend and foraging pal because fresh porcini wait for no one.

The original recipe specifies a mix of wild and cremini mushrooms, but my refrigerator was FULL of fresh porcini and it made perfect sense to use up some of the firm, perfect bouchons. Also, I think the gremolata – while tasty – is not necessary at all. Roasting the mushrooms with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a couple of smashed garlic cloves is heaven enough.

fresh porcini bouchons, flat-leaf parsley, pepper, olive oil, parmesan, garlic, bread crumbs, salt, lemon

For this preparation, I don’t recommend washing your mushrooms (I never wash my mushrooms except for morels). I brush the mushrooms of debris from top to bottom and wipe any remaining particles with a damp paper towel. Slice the mushrooms to 1/2-inch thickness and quarter or halve any really small bouchons. Since the oil is easily absorbed, I drizzle half of the olive oil over the mushrooms/smashed garlic and toss, then drizzle another tablespoon and toss, then one more tablespoon for a more even distribution. Season with salt and pepper and toss once more. Arrange the slices and pieces in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet. I line my sheet with parchment paper because I like how it allows the food to crisp without sticking.

drizzle some of the olive oil over the mushrooms

toss with salt and pepper

roast in a rimmed baking sheet in a single layer

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