use real butter

Recipe: cream of mushroom soup

Happy new year, my butterlings! I hope you all rang in 2013 in various fabulous ways. We kept it low-key partly because we were tired from a day of ski touring and mostly because we are boring. I like it that way.

snow on new year’s eve

lovely wondrous sparkling flakes of snow

It snowed here on New Year’s Eve and not just any snow, but the kind that falls as giant fluffy flakes and doesn’t stick to anything because it’s so dry and cold. They sparkled in the sunlight like diamonds falling from the sky and when you looked at the ground you could see perfectly preserved crystals glistening back at you, winking. Piles of delicate snowflakes slid over my skis as I glided along the trail through the woods. Jeremy and I would seek out pockets of deep snow and whoop and holler diving into the sugary stashes.

skiing out: a great way to see 2012 off

skiing into 2013 on new year’s day

I don’t typically make resolutions on the new year, but over the holidays I spent a little more time away from the interwebz and it was fantastic. It’s a good thing to assess where and more importantly how your time is invested. So that may be one of the things I change up… stepping away more often from the whole navel-gazing vortex of social media and taking that time to concentrate on other things, like my well-being. Who knows. I’m still feeling 2013 out, but I think I’m headed in the right direction. That direction also includes soup, because it’s winter and soup is good food – particularly when you make it yourself.

criminis, dried porcinis, shitakes, onion, butter, garlic, white pepper, salt, herbs, cashews, chicken broth

thyme and sage

I foraged a good deal of porcinis this past summer with my friend, Wendy. I told her to keep most of those mushrooms because I just didn’t have the time to deal with them and the worst possible thing you could do after acquiring such precious forage is to let them go bad, go to waste. Wendy is a real champ and she immediately processed untold quantities of the summer porcini harvest and presented me with a couple of jars of dried porcinis this fall… our porcinis! Sure you can purchase dried porcinis in the store, but can you hold a jar of your summer spent clambering along the wooded slopes of the mountains, popping huckleberries into your mouth as you scour the ground for porcinis?

dried porcinis

rehydrate with boiling water

I waited until winter to use my porcinis, when I knew the aroma would be most welcome after a day of backcountry ski touring. If you’ve never used dried porcini mushrooms, you should know that the soaking liquid is not to be discarded, ever. That soaking liquid is also known as liquid gold. It’s a heady broth with the concentrated essence of porcinis, this lovely umami. So make sure you keep that.

sliced garlic and onion

garlic, onion, porcini broth, porcinis, sliced fresh shitakes, sliced fresh criminis

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chinese sweet peanut soup

Skiers know when it’s going to be a bad summer. We knew this back in March and April when we were skiing snirt (snow-dirt) instead of snorkeling hip-deep powder. A paltry snowpack has big implications for the wildfire season. We’ve been hoping against it all winter, dreading it all spring. That summer solstice cooldown was merely a tease. The current full-on heat wave has been dealing triple digits to the plains and temperatures in the 90s here at 8500 feet. That is hot. Unusually hot. Terribly hot. Fire fighters are playing whack-a-mole around Colorado as wildfires spring up and grow with a ravenous appetite, fed by drought and these hot, dry conditions. And it’s only June.

grateful when the sun goes down (little clouds casting long shadows)

if only those bad boys would deliver on the rain

Despite the weather, I hosted a tea party this past weekend. In the tradition of our stitch-n-bitch crew which hasn’t knit a single stitch in the last 3 years of gatherings, we had a tea party where not a one had a cup of tea. Figures, right? It was just too damn hot. The ladies opted for a lavender lemonade, strawberry soda, mimosa, or good old ice water.

setting up

plenty of delicious noms

For the uninitiated, it’s a curious thing to witness the routine of (my) food pals greeting one another. They squeal or tilt their heads and sing, “Hiiiiiiiiiiiii!” with arms outstretched for hugs and kisses, but hands full of stuff. What stuff, you may ask? It’s practically a swap meet when we congregate. We make food things or hunt down cool finds and we gift them to our friends. I’m realizing more and more that people who don’t engage in this behavior are just plain missing out on some serious love. I received two jars of homemade kimchi, homemade Greek yogurt with cherries, homemade Indian lemon pickles, foraged cattail pollen (!!), foraged black currants, an elderberry rose hips elixir (foraged, of course) for Jeremy who was feeling under the weather, handcrafted caramels, and Fresh Paper for extending the life of produce (organically).

check it

Oh, and my pal, Kat, brought me a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup so I wouldn’t have to make imposter (aka Yankee) ANZAC biscuits anymore! The only thing I could imagine being more fun than a food gang is if all of my friends were Patagonia distributers… right?!?!

In this ass hot heat, I only want to eat cold things. Every now and again, you can find me searching for something in the freezer and then suddenly plunging both arms into said freezer just for a few seconds of relief. If I had a walk-in freezer, I would indeed be walking in. A few months ago (this heat has been getting to me since we rose above 60°F) I had a hankering for a soup I used to love when I was a kid. Soup? Yes, soup. You can have it hot or cold and I’m sure you can guess how I’ve been enjoying it. I found a recipe on Bee’s site that looked absolutely perfect.

start with peanuts

and soak them overnight

Use unsalted peanuts, because this is a sweet peanut soup. I just happened to have a ton of peanuts in the shell leftover from the Lunar New Year. Don’t worry if you can’t get the skins off the peanuts, because when you soak them in water overnight, the peanut skins slip right off the next morning. After removing the skins, give the peanuts a rinse and then drain them.

place peanuts and fresh water in a pressure cooker

yes, a pressure cooker (set on high)

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: parsnip chowder

From the moment we entered the month of March, life got busier. It wasn’t unexpected because I could see the colored tags that flooded my calendar starting in March into April through… November. It’s all good in my book. We kicked it off with a special 15th anniversary dinner at Frasca. I think Frasca is Jeremy’s favorite restaurant. In fact, I know it is. From the moment I placed the reservation, he could not shut up about going there for dinner. It was phenomenal, just like every other time we’ve been there.

appetizer sampler: cured meats, grissini, frico caldo, batter-fried shrimp

tortelloni: agribosco borlotti bean and house-made mortadella

maine sea scallops, caviar, cauliflower, meyer lemon

torta di cioccolato: chocolate cake, passionfruit caramel buttercream, mac nuts, dark chocolate gelato

sfogliata: puff pastry, brown butter-hazelnut frangipane, banana, hazelnut crumble, custard gelato

I think March also stands for Maintenance because we’re doing a lot of that with the cars, the house, our outdoor gear, my photo equipment, finances, the dog, and well… everything. Perhaps it’s that spring cleaning thing? And speaking of spring, some of my friends in other parts of the country have started talking about the arrival of strawberries. We here in Colorado are months off from strawberries. For me, spring is merely a sunnier, warmer, corn-snowier, cheery version of the winter ski season. Soup is still on the menu.

so are parsnips

potatoes, parsnips, onion, parsley, milk, half and half, butter, bacon

peeled parsnips, washed potatoes and parsley

We always forget how much we love parsnips until we taste that sweet, earthy spice of this root vegetable. It looks like a white carrot with exaggerated proportions. They are cousins. I willingly eat the hell out of both. So this recipe for parsnip chowder appealed to me when I was looking to change up our soup rotation. A big pot of soup lasts for several days around here.

diced: parsnips, potatoes, onions

oh, did i mention there is bacon?

**Jump for more butter**