use real butter

Recipe: bacon corn hash with chanterelles

School is starting or has started for a lot of students this week as evidenced by the uptick in dorm room bean bag and laundry basket purchases at Target. Heavier than usual traffic clogged the roads last week heading east from the mountains. No one heads east (toward Denver) from the mountains unless they have to… the school year commenceth. Our last few days in Crested Butte were a whirlwind of activity as we wrapped up summer in our special mountain hamlet. Truth be told, I think it’s normally a windstorm of activity, but Neva turns everything into a whirlwind.

dinner with good friends

puppy was so tuckered out, jeremy carried her the last 50 feet

finding more gems on and off trail

i see you!

The day before we returned home to the Front Range, I was picking my way along a deer trail that was lined with chanterelles. Jeremy and I refer to it as the Trail of Happiness. I had watched the mushrooms grow over the past week and was ready to harvest some to take home. The rains in and around Crested Butte had been stoking the chanterelle (and everything else!) flush and they just kept coming. I’m careful to only harvest a fraction of what is growing, cutting rather than plucking (it’s better for the preservation of the patch and continued fruiting throughout the season). Besides, there were so many that I couldn’t put a dent in the mushrooms even if I wanted to. Looking back up the slope I had just foraged, I couldn’t tell that I had picked any at all! Just then my phone buzzed the side of my leg. Mom texted me and asked what I was doing. I replied that I was foraging chanterelles for her birthday dinner.

quite a few chanterelles and a handful of porcini to boot

Since my parents spend their summers in Colorado, I get to celebrate my mom’s birthday with her and that means a lot to me. My mom always puts everyone else first. She takes care of others before thinking about her needs or her wants. This birthday wasn’t a special number – 16, 21, decadal, or whatnot – but that doesn’t matter. It’s a birthday. It was my mom’s birthday and I wanted to do something nice for her because I can… Something to ease the pain of Kris’ birthday just 2 weeks prior. Something to let her know how much I love her. I learned that my friend’s mother had passed the morning of Mom’s birthday and my heart ached. Loss is never easy, but it always reminds me to cherish the relationships I have while I can.

mom and dad upon arrival

a toast to the birthday girl (sparkling rosé of pinot noir)

light appetizers

lobster and chanterelle vols au vent

mom’s favorite: shredded kale salad

crowd pleaser: cioppino

lime cheesecake for dessert

i hope she made a good wish!

At one point, Mom came into the kitchen to watch me plate the vols au vent. She asked about the chanterelles and I showed her one of my many brown paper bags of fresh chanterelles in the refrigerator, pulling a particularly beautiful and delicate one out for her to smell. People say they smell like apricots, but if you close your eyes, I find they smell more like almonds and ever so faintly of bayberry candles – the kind you found in the 1980s in Colonial Williamsburg gift shops around the holidays. I think the gorgeous color is what prompts that whole apricot notion. They say if porcini are the kings of the mushroom world (they are called king boletes) then chanterelles are the queens. Finding a king in the woods is akin to a high-stakes Easter egg hunt. Porcini are heavy and hefty in your hand – solid and stout. Thrilling. Stumbling across a chanterelle patch is essentially striking gold. Delicate and frilly as if they came from the sea – chanterelles are especially coveted by me because they don’t have worms. Super bonus awesomeness. I am enchanted.

Mom asked what on earth I was planning to do with all of those chanterelles. Funny she should ask. I spent the 5 hour car ride home from Crested Butte brainstorming recipes to make and shoot with chanterelles. I even had a container of one recipe for her to take home. So in addition to the leftover party food, Jeremy and I have been wading through chanterelle recipe after chanterelle recipe. Jeremy tells me this is a hardship he willingly endures. This bacon corn hash recipe comes from Deb at Smitten Kitchen, because I can’t resist the sweet ears of Colorado Olathe corn that are in season right now. I just modified it with chanterelles fried in bacon grease, because it was the right thing to do.

corn, potatoes, salt, green onions, thick-cut bacon, pepper, chanterelles

chopped and sliced

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: fried polenta and porcini on roasted carrot purée

We had a busier than usual schedule last week because Jeremy was hosting his astrophysics retreat. This was his third one, but it seemed more harried than usual because of the additional puppy-wrangling. Without going into too much detail, the retreat is an “unconference” that eschews the traditional scientific conference format. It is a small gathering of select (young) experts in astrophysics who come together for 4 days of intense, high-powered brainstorming for the love of science. Running any sort of workshop or conference is exhausting, but for someone like Jeremy – my dearest introvert – it is doubly so. Once he had caught up on sleep and other work, I suggested we spend a relaxing evening under the stars together… with Neva… in a tent.

neva tries out the sleeping bags as the sun goes down

Actually, this was just a continuation of puppy training. The plan is to go backpacking this fall with the pup, but first we need her to get used to being in a tent. When our neighbor’s kids were little, they used to camp in a tent on their deck because the youngest would always get scared before 9 pm and run back into the house. I thought this could work for Neva, too. We could camp on the deck and if she got unruly or upset, we would bail and go inside. But there was no need to abandon ship because she was very sweet and cuddly throughout the night. She probably slept better than either of the humans. I think this backpacking thing just might work.

it’s a loungy puppy life

if we’re going to camp out, we may as well eat outside, too

blue moon rising

ready for zip up and lights out

Jeremy’s astrophysics retreat takes place in Boulder with the exception of one day held at our house in the mountains. My minor contribution is to help host the participants which includes a sit down dinner. Living outside of Boulder, we are accustomed to accommodating the restricted diets of our friends, but I got a stumper in this group: gluten-free vegetarian. In my opinion, gluten-free is pretty easy and vegetarian isn’t terrible, but the combination really whittled down my options. There were two ideals I had to balance: 1) that not serving meat to your guests is rude (per Chinese tradition) and 2) it is unacceptable to serve sub-par food to vegetarians. But I was up for the challenge, particularly because the one guest who was gluten-free vegetarian happens to be a genuinely nice and good person. Luckily, porcini are in season NOW.

here’s a pretty specimen (plus one in the background)

two buddies chilling out off trail

The idea was to serve something that everyone could enjoy and then the omnivores could have some kind of animal added to their dish. I decided to go with fried polenta cakes and pan-seared porcini. It was easy enough to hike up into the mountains to nab some choice mushrooms only because I knew they were flushing and I knew exactly where to look. For some extra color, I thought a nice roasted carrot purée would brighten the plate and lend some sweetness to the dish.

white wine, olive oil, vegetable oil, carrots, polenta, butter, thyme, salt, porcini

I started the day before, as I didn’t want to heat up the house cooking all day before dinner. I made the polenta and then pressed it into a baking dish to cool and solidify. A loaf pan works too if you want to slice your polenta that way. Once the polenta had set (about an hour or so), I popped it into the refrigerator to chill.

stir the polenta into the boiling water

when the polenta is done, stir in a pat of butter

pressed into a baking dish to cool

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: butter-seared porcini-crusted salmon

Wow, it’s good to be home in Nederland. While I know Jeremy prefers to be in Crested Butte (and I love it there, too), there is something extra special about this time of year in the Front Range. The pine pollen has gone away, the high country is melted out and bursting with wildflowers, and the moose happily munch away in the meadows. Neva continues hiking longer distances and steeper climbs. Her little body grows stronger, more nimble, and bigger each day, yet she is still my affectionate little pup who comes running when I call her and curls herself against my legs like I am home base. Just the other day we walked past Kaweah’s favorite rock outcrop. I directed Neva to the top, wondering if I was being silly to hope that she might recognize how special this hunk of weathered granite was to Kaweah and in turn, how special Kaweah was to me. Dogs are not deep thinkers… at least the two shallow-thinking dogs I’ve had aren’t, but Neva did oblige me and it tickled my heart.

queen of the hill

she is finally fetching

moose sighting after our hike the other day

here’s a closeup of that good-looking boy

One of the reasons I’m so jazzed to be home is that the porcini are flushing. Okay, they are flushing in Crested Butte as well. I know this because we found some on our hikes last week. We even trained Neva to sniff them out without eating them and she did a great job. But for me, the part I love most is foraging porcini (and then huckleberries) with my fellow mountain pal, Erin. Erin and I share a special knowledge and love of these local mountains and this is an especially beautiful time of year. But we don’t just visit when mushrooms flush or hucks ripen – we walk or ski this land throughout the year. This is our home. We joke that we understand one another because we’re WAMPs (weird-ass mountain people – a term coined by my other WAMP friend, Andrew).

We’ve been out a few times with Neva and found some nice porcini specimens that she completely ignored. Turns out that once we climb into marmot territory, Neva turns her nose off to mushrooms and on to marmots. It’s just as well, though. There’s quite a thrill when you find your own king bolete (porcini). While gathering several perfect kings and laughing with Erin and Jeremy over Neva’s dismal performance, I demoted Neva from Porcini Pup back to Silly Little Pup and all was well with the world.

such a beauty

neva learns the scent of a porcini

the look she gave me when i asked why i found them before she did

I did not seriously expect Neva to become a porcini-sniffing pup, but she did show some promise at the start. Jeremy and I are merely having fun training her to do all sorts of things because she’s so willing to oblige. So far, we have not fed her ANY human food. That’s intentional, because we don’t want it to detract from her training for the first year. It’s important that she thinks her dog treats and kibble are the yummiest things in the world. I’ve witnessed a woman feed her dog scraps from the dinner table only to wonder aloud to the rest of us why the dog won’t eat its dog food – that made my head hurt. Neva’s kibble and some of her treats are salmon, which made me wonder how she would react when I prepared some fresh Coho salmon the other day. Her nose shot straight into the air when I unwrapped the fillets, but then she resumed happily defuzzing a tennis ball. Good girl.

Salmon is in season and so are porcini, but even if you can’t get your hands on fresh porcini, you can make this delightful recipe because it uses dried porcini powder. You can get porcini powder from specialty spice shops (check out Savory Spice Shop) or dried porcini from Whole Foods or other gourmet stores if you don’t dry your own. The recipe is short on time and big on flavor – isn’t that how summer meals should be?

salmon, salt, pepper, dried porcini, chardonnay, butter

put the dried porcini slices in a spice grinder and blitz

porcini powder

**Jump for more butter**