use real butter

Recipe: cranberry bar cookies

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving weekend whether you celebrate it or not. The nicest surprise of the day for me was seeing my “Christmas” cactus bloom. They always call them Christmas cacti, but all of mine bloom at Halloween (yay!) or Thanksgiving. My Halloween blooms are red, but my Thanksgiving blooms are white and they came from cuttings that my mom had brought me a while ago. I let her know on Thanksgiving that there were pretty flowers opening. Hers was blooming too and she told me that Grandma had originally given her the cuttings for her plant. That tugged at my heart. Everything my grandma touched was special.

thanksgiving cactus

We kept our Thanksgiving low key and enjoyed a gorgeous day out in the snow working up an appetite. It’s early season. There’s decent snow in the backcountry, but a lot of the approaches are still sketch with bare spots, wind drifts, and plenty of ice – so we hoofed it in until we reached solid snow and could skin in. I happened to pack turkey sandwiches for lunch (why not?) which we scarfed down in the trees on our way out. Turkey never tasted soooo good.

enough snow to switch to the skis

lunch break

I refused to shop Black Friday.

But the day after… Have you heard about Shop Local Saturday? It’s a push to support small local businesses. I had been researching waxless touring skis for over a year and we decided it was time for an upgrade. Neptune Mountaineering is my favorite mountaineering store in Boulder. They have a great selection of technical gear (it really puts REI to shame) and their staff is wicked knowledgeable because they DO IT ALL. We did our part and supported this beloved local business. We supported them A LOT because we each got boots, bindings, and skis.

we’ll call this a health and fitness investment

See, we needed something to counteract the weight we were gaining from eating treats out of this book:

it’s cakespy!

CakeSpy is Jessie Oleson, a delightfully quirky, talented, funny, and creative woman in Seattle. And she is so SWEET! I had the pleasure of meeting Jessie this past Spring at her shop/gallery and instantly fell in love with her illustrations of cupcakes, cakes, pies, doughnuts, and any other sweet you can imagine. So her publisher sent me her book a few months back. It has ridiculously cute recipes like cupcake-stuffed cupcakes, s’moreos, blondie topped brownies, toaster pastry ice cream sandwiches, and red velvet cake shake to name a few. What caught my eye was the section on seasonal sweets – in particular the leftover cranberry sauce bar cookies. A way to use up leftover cranberry sauce after Thanksgiving. Clever.

flour, sugar, brown sugar, salt, butter, eggs, cranberry sauce, almonds, light corn syrup, vanilla

to make the crust: flour, butter, salt, sugar

mixing the dough

pressing into the pan

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: basic cranberry sauce

announcements
I’m a contributor on Punchfork, which is a great food porn site that publishes in real time. I love it!

You can also find some of my Thanksgivingesque recipes along with tons of other great contributions from favorite food bloggers over at Pasplore.

Gojee launched their drinks section about a week ago and I’m a contributor there as well as on their regular food recipes section. It’s a beautiful site to peruse although the navigation might make you a little batshit.
end announcements

Soooo, it’s Thanksgiving this week in the United States. I’m struck more by the fact that it’s now November than the crush of holiday recipes on the blogosphere. I’ll be frank (because I don’t really know how else to be). I don’t dig on Thanksgiving dinner these days. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like Thanksgiving, as in giving thanks. I give thanks daily. All year. I have so much to be thankful for! I think the concept of giving thanks is a very very good one. Be thankful for what you have and while you’re at it, you can also help one(s) who is (are) less fortunate. That part, I love.

The part I’ve come to fall out of love with is the dinner. I’m just not that into it. I don’t like stuffing myself silly (perhaps that comes with getting older? I dunno) and the idea of going to so much trouble for a meal that no longer elicits mouth-watering anticipation but more of a meh from me. We are particularly fond of getting outside when others are traditionally inside (presumably hung over, opening gifts, cooking, and whatnot): Thanksgiving day, Christmas morning, New Year’s morning, and Superbowl Sunday. That leaves little time to prepare a big turkey feast and I’m fine with that. We usually opt for something that is quick and satisfying after a day spent out in the snow. It just feels better.

I find myself shying away from the holidays lately, seeking quality time with Jeremy and Kaweah over shopping and planning a giant celebration with excessive amounts of food. I need to concentrate on life maintenance, health, work, and a recalibration of priorities right now. These things always get screwed up and lost in the frenzy of travel, work, blogging, socializing… As the holiday season shifts into high gear, I am trying to slow the pace down and reassess.

kaweah is slowing down too

opening day at the local hill

but we also like the solitude of the backcountry

skiers only, bitches :)

jeremy breaks trail in fresh powder

Of all the Thanksgiving dishes to adorn a traditional table, there is one that I love – cranberry sauce. It is a bright, tart, vibrant dish that livens up the plate. When I learned to make it from scratch, I was astounded at how easy it was. It made me wonder why anyone would buy canned cranberry sauce if you could 1) make it yourself for not much additional effort and 2) know EXACTLY what you’re putting into it. Call me a control freak. I’m a control freak.

organic cranberries, organic sugar, and organic water (ha ha! i’m kidding about the water)

combine sugar and water

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: blackberry macarons

What a weekend! We had some pretty crazy (read: extremely high) winds in Colorado Saturday night, clocking as much as 115 mph at Breckenridge. Based on our 6+ years in this house, we gauged it probably gusted to 90 mph here… and this wasn’t even the worst wind storm we’ve experienced. We watched in moderately alarmed curiosity (before the power went out) as the front wall of our great room flexed with each gust. Of course, it would have to be the weekend that my in-laws were visiting, but thankfully the guest room is on the ground floor. Our bedroom is on the third floor and so we endured 8 hours of the Northridge earthquake. Kaweah slept (happily) through the whole thing. Ah well, there’s always a price for paradise.

Aside from the windstorm, we took my ILs into Boulder for some shopping and dining. We enjoyed a beautiful family dinner at The Kitchen one evening and introduced them to The Pinyon and Chef Theo.

the kitchen: rabbit leg confit

the kitchen: alaskan halibut

the kitchen: apple doughnuts

the pinyon: butternut ravioli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms in brown butter sauce

Before the winds went cuckoo, we did have some really beautiful clouds set up over the house last week. Even if I didn’t have some background in atmospheric science, I would still be 100% completely enamored with our Colorado skies. Who needs television?

wave cloud at sunset over my house

still there long after sunset

And now, I’m happy to be home to work on long-term projects and resume a much-needed routine! No more travel or house guests for over a month! All of the local ski hills are either open or opening within the next week. My list of recipes to try is growing almost as fast as the list of things we need to fix and do around our neglected house. Speaking of recipes, I came across these macs that I made earlier this year. Even though blackberry season is over, you can use frozen blackberries for the curd and the buttercream. I find frozen organic blackberries to have decent sweetness and flavor.

sugar + red + blue = purple sugar

whipped whites with purple sugar

**Jump for more butter**