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make it simple

Tuesday, May 30th, 2017

Recipe: strawberry butter

It’s been a good week in Crested Butte. We’ve been out on the trails daily, either hiking, running, or foraging. Neva has enjoyed plenty of exercise and play and snacks. I love watching the mountains shed their winter tones to reveal brilliant spring greens and yellows and blues. Spring cleaning is underway, although the actual “cleaning” has yet to happen (it will…). Spring Administration is probably the more appropriate term. That includes mapping out our summer, which makes me simultaneously excited with anticipation and disappointed that it is so brief. At the end of each day when I turn out the lights, I reach over to hold Jeremy’s hand in the dark and give it a squeeze before we fall asleep.


a fast moving storm brought on cotton ball-like mammatus clouds

the aspens are starting to leaf out

neva inspects my sewing project

found a morel on my trail run



Today’s recipe is wonderful and simple, because it’s strawberry season and because I have a ton of dandelions to pull out in the yard. Strawberry butter is best made when you have access to ripe berries. And since butter is the main ingredient, I recommend using a good quality unsalted butter. Make sure the butter and strawberries are room temperature before you start.

butter, strawberries, powdered sugar, a pinch of salt



Hull and wash your strawberries, then pat them dry. I find that any excess water on the berries tends to dilute the flavor of the butter and the berries. Obviously, the more ripe and juicy the berries, the more flavorful the strawberry butter. I dice my berries pretty fine. As long as the berries are ripe, they should mash nicely into the butter. If you aren’t using ripe berries, then a finer chop should make up for their lack of mashability.

minced strawberries

add sugar and salt to the beaten butter



**Jump for more butter**

drive this: pink cadillac

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017

Recipe: raspberry syrup & raspberry pink cadillac margaritas

It’s rare that I plan ahead to shoot a relevant recipe and have a post ready before some holiday with an associated food theme. Honestly, I hadn’t planned this one at all because I don’t usually care. But it just so happens that Jeremy and I had been testing cocktail recipes (I made them, he drank them) and one was a margarita. That wouldn’t have meant anything except I heard mention of Cinco de Mayo on NPR and realized this would be a good and timely recipe to share with folks. Regardless of Cinco de Mayo, it’s a perfect cocktail for the summer season – a raspberry pink Cadillac margarita. The pink part comes from a raspberry syrup, which is straightforward to make and doesn’t have to break the bank. I like using frozen organic raspberries for the syrup because they’re much cheaper than fresh and the flavor is top notch because they are frozen when they are ripe and in season.


frozen raspberries, lemon, sugar, sugar, water

combine the raspberries, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a cup of water

when the raspberries have broken down, add the rest of the water and the lemon juice

simmer for a few minutes



When you strain the seeds out, you can press on the fruit pulp to get as much out of it as you can, but doing so makes the syrup a little cloudy as opposed to clear. I’m okay with slightly cloudy because no one notices these things when you say the words “raspberry syrup”.

strain the solids out

about 2 cups of raspberry liquid

add 1 1/2 cups of sugar and boil

now you have raspberry syrup



**Jump for more butter**

not soon enough

Sunday, April 16th, 2017

Recipe: strawberries and cream malasadas

Okay, the confusion is over. Spring has sprung and is springing all over the place. I am okay with this. In fact, I’ve decided this year that instead of dreading summer and feeling like I’m walking under a broiler all day, I’m going to attempt to acclimate myself to the heat a little earlier. I’ll see if it makes summer more tolerable (probably not). I mean, I grew up in southern Virginia for 18 years and lived in Southern California for another 10. You’d think I’d be used to heat by now. One of my strategies includes baking loads of Neva’s treats while it is still cool – enough to get us through the summer so I don’t have to turn the oven on! Another plan is to ramp up my trail running now, while the temperatures are mild, so that I am not ramping up and adjusting to the hot weather at the same time. Lofty goals, I know. Should I fail, at least summer is a forgiving season.


neva likes all of the treats i’m cranking out

my mint is sprouting after an apocalyptic haircut

jeremy and i enjoying a backcountry ski (sans neva)

pasque flowers in full force on my trail run

the ball bounces higher (and so does neva) when the field is clear of snow



I’ve been following my friend, Jennie, as she documents her Year of Pie on Instagram. The other day, she made a strawberry pie because she couldn’t wait any longer for the berries to come into season. I hear ya, sistah. Strawberries are the ones that bust open the berry floodgates of summer because they arrive in spring, except they never seem to arrive soon enough. I can’t tell you how many weeks I’ve been scrutinizing the strawberries in the grocery store, squint-frowning at the ones that are more white than red. But this week, they are all beginning to take on that blushing hue. I’m probably jumping the gun by a couple of weeks, but the time has come for strawberries and cream malasadas.

water, vanilla extract, freeze-dried strawberries, flour, sugar, eggs, butter, salt, yeast, evaporated milk



The idea I had was to make plain malasadas (those fried Portuguese doughnuts you find in Hawai’i that are the very definition of ono kind grindz) and fill them with strawberries and whipped cream, but then I found some freeze-dried strawberries in my pantry and decided to make the malasada itself strawberry-flavored. Freeze-dried strawberries turn to powder when you crush them. Dried strawberries with the texture of raisins will not turn to powder, they’ll just get squashed – so don’t use those. If you have dried strawberry chips that snap when you break them, those might work if you can pulverize them to a dry powder. I got my freeze-dried strawberries from Trader Joe’s, but you can also find them in health food stores and I may have seen them in Whole Foods. I subbed a half cup of flour with a half cup of the strawberry powder. It’s pretty potent stuff.

crush the freeze-dried strawberries into powder

it should be a pretty fine powder

mix it into the flour



**Jump for more butter**