use real butter

Recipe: grass jelly and ai-yu jelly

I love the idea of summer. It’s when everything is happening. It’s a visual overload in the mountains. The thing I have trouble with is the heat, and by trouble, I mean I hate the heat. I have sworn enemies in this world and the heat is one of them. It makes me cranky and sad and angry all at once. Jeremy and I both recognize this, so there are things we do to minimize the crankiness like hiking, biking, or trail running early in the morning when the air is cool, the sun is low, and the mosquitoes are still slow. It also means we have the trails mostly to ourselves, which is awesome.

wildflowers greet the mountains

flowers fill an alpine meadow

the view from the trail

If we are lucky, the monsoons bring moisture into Colorado from the south and we get a daily cycle of glorious and dramatic thunderstorms and rain every afternoon like clockwork. Our bluebird skies turn into menacing, roiling clouds over the mountains. Cool winds and heavy rains seem to wash away the dreaded heat, even if only for an evening. It’s wonderful.

storm building over crested butte

But sometimes the storms fizzle and there is no relief. Times like these require taking matters into your own hands. We don’t have the benefit of air conditioning because we rarely need it. I try cooling off with ice cold drinks, sorbets, frozen treats, and one of my childhood favorites: grass jelly. I know it sounds odd, but it is really wonderful stuff. It’s like an herbal tea gelatin. Another similar jelly that I preferred when I was younger (probably because it was sweeter) is ai-yu jelly, made from the gel of a seed of a variety of fig.

grass jelly and ai-yu jelly

you just need the jelly, lemons, and sugar

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: blueberry scones

Right now, part of my work involves getting up early and hiking to alpine basins to assess the state of the wildflowers. You don’t always hit pay dirt, but I like that it gets me outside into the backcountry and that I’m not sitting on my bum all day. And in summer, you’re almost always guaranteed to be greeted by many familiar friends in the high country. I saw several favorites up high in marshy alpine meadows.

mountain bluebells

magenta paintbrush

I paid the price for those flowers too… in blood, so to speak. I wake up each morning with new mosquito bites despite my efforts to don pants and long-sleeves when I’m hiking and photographing. I have two requests for enterprising individuals: 1) please make a sunblock that I can take in pill form and 2) please make a mosquito repellant that I can take in pill form. I would pay good money for those things. And some mornings I want to see things a little faster than the pace of a hike, or even a trail run.

mountain biking makes it harder for the mosquitoes to get you

and then you ride to the local coffeehouse and wait in line with a random cute dog

Another part of my job is knowing when certain slopes or basins are reaching peak bloom and what time of day or which conditions are ideal for the images I want to capture. It starts to feel a little frenetic if you cover a wide area, especially if it takes half the day to reach some of these places. And by evening, when the mosquitoes are in their swarming frenzies, my mind often wanders to questions like, “Why haven’t more creatures evolved to hunt and eat mosquitoes?” Why, indeed.

tall larkspur

iphone behind the scenes (courtesy of jeremy)

Jobs have been on my mind lately because I recently sent a package of baked goods to my friend, Jamie, to thank her for the beautiful cutting boards she made. I sent it USPS priority and they said it was delivered two days later – except she never received it. She inquired after the package and with a little digging, I think the USPS realized that THEY SOMEHOW LIED ABOUT THE DELIVERY because they found the package and gave it to her 11 days after it was supposed to have been delivered. WTH?! More like USPOS. Of course, the baked goods were dead on arrival, because they were blueberry scones made with fresh organic blueberries. Smooth move, USPS. At least I had sense enough to send the second package via UPS (and those guys wear cute brown shorts). So let’s make some blueberry scones and have sense enough not to entrust them to the US Postal Service EVER AGAIN.

you’ll need: blueberries, flour, butter, lemon, eggs, sanding sugar, granulated sugar, baking powder, salt, cream, and vanilla

whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together

cut the butter into the flour

grate lemon zest into the dry mixture

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: pistachio rose shortbread cookies

This year, our town of Nederland decided to have a giant picnic instead of the annual Fourth of July fireworks. So we decided to get to Crested Butte a week ahead of my wildflower shoot to catch their fireworks. My parents came along to visit us as they’ve never been to the town and they wanted to see our new place. They are terrible at hiding their emotions, so I was rather pleased when they kept exclaiming how much they love the house, how much they love Crested Butte, and how much they are enjoying themselves. Sadly, it looks like the fire bans across Colorado counties caught up to us here too. The usual fireworks at the base of the mountain were canceled. But it’s okay, because the flowers are quite good already.

arrowleaf balsamroot

lupine

scarlet gilia

Wild roses are also peaking in the mountains and several bushes were gracing our yard with an incredible fragrance last week. I happened to be researching a recipe for a rose shortbread when a light bulb went off in my head. Recipes that call for rose petals always instruct you to source organic unsprayed roses. That’s because you don’t really want all of those chemicals in your food. The wild roses in my yard are chemical free and the flavor is more intense than any commercial rose.

my wild roses

My pal, Wendy, told me that roses have cooling properties. That makes them particularly wonderful in summer. However, I also love the floral essence that roses impart to food. Ever since I bought that bottle of rosewater, I’ve been looking for other things to make with it. I found a lovely recipe on Julia Usher’s site. She offers an alternative to rosewater, which is to infuse the sugars and butter with rose petals. I met her halfway and infused the sugars, but still used the rosewater.

a cup of wild roses, granulated sugar, confectioner’s sugar

half cup of rose petals in each bowl of sugar

**Jump for more butter**