use real butter

Recipe: spicy tuna roll burger

***Don’t forget you have until the end of Friday, June 1, 2012 to enter my giveaway. Five people will win a custom dog or cat collar for their favorite furry pal and I will also donate $20 to each person’s animal shelter or rescue of choice!***

The more Jeremy and I talk about it, the more I am convinced that a mountain bike is a great thing to have during the zombie apocalypse. And a bike repair kit. You’ll want a backpack for carrying weapons and other stuff.

oh, and you’ll want a wendy

When I first met Wendy, she was making a delivery of autumn forage to a restaurant: beautiful wild apples, wild grapes, sumac, juniper berries… “Wow!” I exclaimed, “where do you find those?” It was an innocent question, but I didn’t realize that is a question you DO NOT ask a professional wild foods forager. She pursed her lips and grinned like a Cheshire Cat, raising her eyebrows, tilting her head to give me the side eye. Thankfully, I had not offended.

We’ve been planning to go foraging together for months. So it finally happened this week! I drove down to the flats and met up with her in the morning because we both despise the heat. Foraging is a natural extension of hiking for me since I cover up (to protect from sun, bugs, and plants), I carry a pack, I do a lot of walking/hiking, and I identify plants and make note of what stages they are at. In this case, we do all of that AND gather edibles!

her list

Now, I was familiar with most of the plants we foraged, but I had never thought to eat them nor knew that one could. Wendy taught me about the edible parts, the poisonous parts, the stage to harvest, and taking great care to harvest a little bit to leave plenty for the wildlife and so the plants still thrive. She explained a good deal about medicinal and culinary uses of each plant, their typical habitats, and she knew a ton of information regarding the nutrition. Wendy is a bubbly, hilarious walking encyclopedia who sincerely enjoys what she does. You can’t really help but love her.

yucca blossoms

i had picked two and wendy had already picked all of these (okay, i was taking photos…)

milkweed

wear gloves to avoid the sticky white sap

I wasn’t in it for the food, I was really interested to learn how Wendy works and to watch a pro in action. We’re plant nerds, so we really had quite the time crawling about places to find the familiar and discover the new. It’s not terribly unlike some of the photography I do where I hike around and my eyes are in scan mode for a certain pattern or color. Pattern recognition. Wendy is quite adept at scanning for multiple plants among a field of what most everyone else would consider weeds. My brain was stuck in asparagus mode – maybe that’s because asparagus is the gateway plant to foraging for me? It’s something we’re all familiar with in the stores and markets, but to find it growing wild was so much fun!

end of the season here, but how precious is that asparagus!

wild roses (ten thousand times better than any domestic rose)

cattails

stinging nettles

From now on out, I don’t think I’ll be able to walk in green areas without going into search mode. Wendy did point out one lovely plant that stood about 6 feet high. “Don’t ever eat this, don’t even touch it to your mouth. This can kill you.” She explained that most of the plants in Colorado that are bad for you will make you sick, give you a headache, result in an allergic reaction, but not poison hemlock. Poison Hemlock is a neurotoxin and it is one of the few plants in the state that, when ingested, can result in death.

poison hemlock: deadly

We – well really it was Wendy – foraged enough to fill a large cooler. She tried to divvy up the loot and send me home with some, but I declined (except a small bag of elderflowers I had gathered). This is her food, what she lives on. The woman makes some impressive dishes with the ingredients too. I was mainly interested in seeing her at work and learning about the plants. I didn’t realize it would be as fun as it was fascinating. Wendy is a gem.

Another reason I didn’t take some of the wild foods home was because I already had a full fridge at home that demanded my attention. If you will recall that delectable California roll burger I made a few months ago, you can probably guess that I’ve been scheming to give a spicy tuna roll burger a shot.

ab-so-lutely

Spicy tuna sushi is no stranger in this house as we love the sushi and sushi bar-related bites. I get good sushi-grade maguro (tuna) from the Boulder Whole Foods seafood counter. Make sure you get sushi-grade which means the fish has been frozen to the appropriate temperatures (temperatures you won’t reach in your typical home freezer) for long enough to ensure the destruction of any parasites. Not so appetizing to discuss, but worth the alternative of not knowing…

mayonnaise, sriracha, green onions, maguro (tuna)

chopped onions and chopped tuna

mix in the mayonnaise

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: california roll burger

You can’t fight the weather. The best thing you can do is roll with it. That’s what I’ve been telling myself anyway. Now that the crud in my chest is clearing and I no longer sound like Kathleen Turner, we’ve been getting outside to assess the snowpack. Total spring conditions: ice in the morning, corn snow in the afternoon. We noticed over the weekend that our front yard aspens are already forming buds a month early.

still getting nice color in the mornings and evenings

walking on hardpack

The spring equinox is a day away and all of this increased daylight prompts me to think of spring and summer cooking. Normally we’d be shoveling a few feet of Rocky Mountain powder from the driveway, but it looks like spring has come early for Colorado. My friends in Southern California, however, are always in perpetual spring-summer. Allison posted a photo of a California roll burger on her Facebook page a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to shake the idea since. A little Google action brought me to 26 Beach Restaurant’s California burger roll. Oh. My. Freaking. Goodness.

a lot of components, but totally worth the trouble

It’s pretty much what you’d guess it to be – a hamburger with the components of the revered fusion California roll. How could this not be amazing? Throughout the week, my mind would wander to the California roll burger. What would I put on mine? It’s heavy enough with the beef patty and the bun, so I opted out of adding sushi rice. In addition to the traditional lettuce and tomato, I figured there would be crab salad, avocado, masago (capelin roe), pickled ginger (gari), toasted seaweed (nori), and wasabi mayonnaise. Instead of our standard potato roll buns, I picked up some challah rolls. And if we were going to do this right, why not some shredded king crab legs for the salad? You could use krab (surimi), but I find real crab to be beyond awesome.

shelling the crab

mix mayonnaise with shredded crab meat

make the wasabi mayonniase: stir some wasabi powder into the mayo

**Jump for more butter**

If you know me even a little bit, you know that I love sushi. Going to college in southern California sealed my fate in so many ways including sushi and Jeremy. My litmus test for my first dinner date with Jeremy was at a popular sushi bar in Pasadena. If he couldn’t handle the fish – out the airlock! But he loved it. Good thing too! When we first moved to Colorado, we were stunned at the number of sushi restaurants in Boulder. There are several – at least ten off the top of my head. But not all sushi restaurants in Boulder, Colorado are created equal. It didn’t take long before I zeroed in on my favorite.

sushi tora in spring

Sushi in Boulder is not inexpensive if your reference point is a major city on a coast. Once you get over the initial sticker shock, you come to learn that there is bad expensive sushi and good expensive sushi. Sushi Tora obviously boasts the Good Sushi. I’m no expert. I just know what I like. Their fish is consistently the freshest, best-prepared, and highest quality. I should note that I’m more of a sashimi and maki girl than a nigiri girl. It’s where I take out-of-town guests who have a hankering for sushi. It’s where I take my parents. They LOVED Tora and my folks are the first to wrinkle their noses and point out when a restaurant doesn’t serve satisfactory food (that’s where I get it from). I had to forgo sushi during my chemotherapy in 2008. Can you guess the first place we went for dinner when I got the all-clear from my oncologist? Tora, of course!

kampachi (amber jack) crudo with tobiko, orange oil, garlic, pepper

There have been some changes since I started going to Sushi Tora in 2006. Change in ownership for one. Change in head sushi chef too. For the past few years, my dining schedule has been pretty busy with so many places to choose from. I try to keep the variety alive and well. I’d go to sushi for more lunch meetings than anything else and that was always easier at the tables than at the bar. Sitting at the bar is the finger on the pulse of a sushi joint – sitting at a table is neither here nor there, but my white friends tend to prefer it. I saw the changes, but they didn’t register in my head until I was invited to come in and meet the new chefs last December. I’m slow on the uptake, okay.

beef short rib and cabbage fried wontons with sweet soy sauce and spicy mustard

pork and ginger gyoza with ponzu

**Jump for more butter**