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Recipe: sous vide pork chops

Hello readers! I just want to point out what for some might not seem obvious. No one is forcing you to read my blog. If you cannot abide by my taste in recipes, you hate my dog, you are sick of seeing photo after photo of my husband skiing, you dislike nature, or you don’t want to read my words and stories, you are well within your rights to not read use real butter. If it’s just the recipes you want, you are welcome to click on the link at the start of each post next to the thumbnail which will jump down to the recipe, bypassing any potentially upsetting content. If this is too much of a burden on you, then I wish you well on your journey through the interwebs. I am totally okay with that. This is not just a food blog, it is MY blog. It is available to people for free, but this blog is not a service. I maintain use real butter at my own expense. I write it for me. I have always written it for me. I detest writing and I especially hate writing when some company or person(s) tell me what to write or what not to write. So for those who want to tag along on my mundane life, I offer a friendly smile and I’ll scoot over to make room for you. For those who find the blog unbearable to read, I invite you to stop wasting your time and move on to better things.

well, at least 5280 magazine likes my mindless drivel

some kelvin-helmholtz-ish clouds at sunset

crescent moon behind a veil of pink clouds

jeremy finds fresh tracks in the glades

This past summer, my dad asked me if I had ever heard of sous vide and was it any good. Yes, I had heard of it years ago. I had no idea if it was good or bad because it was prohibitively expensive back in the day and I had dismissed it as impractical. Dad inquired because he is on a never-ending mission to cook the best steak possible (to go with his red wine, of course). Fast forward a few months to when I was team cooking with Andrew (and our friend, Ben) for one of his popular community dinners at his house. We always nerd out on food and cooking before the guests arrive and he was testing sous vide ribs versus ribs from the smoker. This was my opportunity to learn more about sous vide, which literally translates into “under vacuum”. It involves vacuum-sealing food in plastic bags and cooking them in a low-temperature water bath (you can cook eggs in their shells). Then Andrew says, “Here, why don’t you borrow it? I’m going to be out of the country for a few months, so I won’t be missing it.”

andrew’s anova precision sous vide cooker

easy setup, just clamp it to the side of a large pot or vessel filled with water

I have tested it on three different cuts of steak, barbecue pork ribs, and now pork chops. I will eventually get around to seafood, chicken, eggs, tempering chocolate, and other nifty things, but it’s really to give my dad some feedback on sous vide and to be able to prepare a nice dinner for him when I see him this summer. Also? I bought one of my own, because they’re now as affordable as a typical small kitchen appliance. Andrew is still in Australia, but another friend had one for sale that was practically new, so I sprang for it. The pork chops I used came in a complimentary shipment of several pounds of grass-fed beef (steaks, ground, etc.) and heritage breed pork – no antibiotics, no hormones, no GMO – from Butcher Box, a monthly high quality meat subscription service.

butcher box’s pork chops were my favorite

simple: pork chops, vegetable oil, black pepper, kosher salt

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chanterelle ravioli with sage brown butter

School is starting and summer is winding down even though we have a good month of it left before we can officially declare autumn’s arrival. We spent the beginning of last week getting outside with Neva to explore and play and continue “training” her – whatever that means. Our neighborhood lake in Crested Butte had some strange water biochemistry going on, so we took little Neva to a nicer lake with cleaner water. This required a much longer drive on bumpy backcountry roads, but instead of puking or drooling or crying, Neva had her nose out the window and she was quite excited about our destination. Our little girl may have finally (finally!!) turned the corner on the car ride! I don’t know what we’re going to do come winter when we can’t open the window if it is -20°F outside, but I’ll take what I can get.

sometimes neva’s life jacket looks like a superhero cape from the front

the happiest, dorkiest dog

Jeremy and I also spent our final morning in Crested Butte hunting for chanterelles as they were starting to flush. Normally I would wait to forage after more time had passed so they would be larger, but we were leaving and I wanted to bring some chanterelles home to make a special birthday dinner for my mom. I only took the biggest ones and left the littles to grow and spore and do their happy mushroom thing. If you’re wondering how I prepared them, I sautéed the chanterelles and fresh local sweet corn in butter and served them alongside a small hash browned potato with two seared scallops on top (drizzled with pan sauce, natch). That was the second course of four.

neva likes to sniff chanterelles

a perfectly mossy home

clean and beautiful

toasting mom’s birthday with some bubbles

I hadn’t planned on trying a new recipe with the chanterelles, but we managed to forage enough that I could make some chanterelle ravioli. I’ve always wanted to make ravioli from scratch and by hand. My mother-in-law gave me some ravioli stamps and a ravioli pasta cutter last year, so I really had zero excuse to not try this. Start with the ravioli pasta dough.

flour, eggs, olive oil, salt

Most pasta I’ve made from scratch involves flour and eggs, but this one had a little salt and olive oil added to the dough. The flour doubled as an ingredient and a bowl because all of the wet ingredients went into a well in the flour. I thought that would be terribly messy, but it was actually rather tidy as long as you didn’t breach the well wall. The recipe called for four cups of flour, but you don’t use all of that flour in the pasta dough. I incorporated as much as needed and then sifted the remaining unused flour and kept it around for working the pasta.

make a well in the flour and add the rest of the ingredients

stir flour into the eggs until the mixture is too thick to stir

then work more flour in with your hands

when the dough won’t take on any more flour, knead it

it’s ready when you poke it and the dough bounces back

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: handmade pappardelle

The last ski resort for which we had access to has closed for the season here in Colorado. But the season isn’t done. At least not today it isn’t. It snowed at our house (along with rain, graupel, sleet, and sunshine) and I’m pretty sure the clouds dropped a few quick inches in the high country. From now until the start of the 2016-2017 ski season, it’s only backcountry skiing for us (skinning uphill and skiing down). Actually, we’ve been doing that exclusively since early April. Here’s what May looked like in our backyard last week.

skiing the powder before the sun turns it to slush

a nice 360° view was had

token selfie before skiing out

…aaaaand the snow is now mashed potatoes

Daytime temperatures soared well above freezing and the snow didn’t freeze overnight at higher elevations. Days like these leave us choosing between running wet, muddy, and patchy trails or skiing slop. We chose both. On our last ski tour, Neva was off leash the whole way down to the trailhead and she was incredibly good. She didn’t run off, she didn’t cross in front of our skis, and she always kept an eye on where Jeremy was (I bring up the rear in case little pup decides to run off).

neva takes a break between digging pits in the snow

skiing out under the hot sun

Jeremy took Neva on her first trail run last week, too. We’ve been slowly gauging how she takes to running on trails by running her for short distances (like 50-200 feet at a time) while we walk or hike. When she was a wee puppy, Neva would jump on your legs and try to bite your pants if you started running. That was (thankfully) short-lived. She did exceptionally well on her first real trail run (a short 5k) – cuing off of Jeremy’s pace, keeping a good distance so no one tripped, and responding to voice commands. So while Neva works up to longer distances, Jeremy and I are both concentrating on uphill climbs – because the prettiest runs are up high in the mountains and we want to be ready when they melt out.

racing a storm back to my house (i’m slow, but the storm was slower)

I regard this time of year as the uphill slog when days get longer and hotter. I don’t consider us to be over the hump until late July even though the summer solstice is in late June (it has to do with the thermal latency of the atmosphere – the same applies in winter). But there is plenty of good adventuring to be had in summer to tide us over until we can glide on snow once again.

Some of that adventuring will involve finding porcini and chanterelles in the forests. An easy meal preparation involving the mushrooms we forage is to sauté the mushrooms in butter and garlic, add white wine and cream, and serve it over pasta. My favorite pasta is pappardelle – wide elegant ribbons of pasta that hold sauces well and wrap around other ingredients. Unfortunately, I can’t buy pappardelle in our little town and I really try to limit my trips to Boulder to once a week. Mountain folk tend to be self-sufficient types and it occurred to me last summer that I knew how to make my own pasta for lasagne, so how different could it be from making my own pappardelle?

all you need: eggs, egg yolks, flour, fine semolina

beat the eggs and egg yolks

pulse the semolina and flour together in a food processor

add the egg mixture to the flour mixture while the processor is running

**Jump for more butter**