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Recipe: kalbi meatballs

Winter is trying to make its way into Colorado, but it has been a slow process. Little storms sandwiched between warm and sunny spells aren’t conducive to good skiing, or any skiing for that matter. At least the storms are finally coming, and hopefully they are gathering strength. The past couple of weeks have been an emotional slog for me, so it was nice to pack up our little family and head to Crested Butte for Thanksgiving week. I don’t want to be social. I just want to be with my pack (Jeremy and Neva), work, and get some damn snow to ski.

sometimes neva insists that you play with her

last week, we got the first snow in over a month

jeremy and i hopped out for a quick ski tour

neva relaxes in crested butte

Of course, our version of Thanksgiving is very un-Thanksgivingish. We’re not having turkey (we’re having ribs) and we aren’t spending it with extended family. It’s the introvert’s Thanksgiving. This suits Jeremy just fine because he is an introvert through and through, but even extroverts (me) can only take but so much before they need to lie low and recuperate. However, we ARE thankful for so much: good people, health, kindness, compassion, love, opportunity, wild spaces, one another, and that crazy furry baby dog. I hope you all enjoy and/or survive your Thanksgiving festivities with as much love and thanks as your hearts can give and then some more. That’s what it is really all about.

Today’s recipe is most definitely un-Thanksgivingish. Maybe it’s in part because I am not a fan of turkey, but mostly it’s because you should file this away for the holiday season and beyond. I am a huge fan of Korean barbecue – particularly galbi. But Korean barbecue short ribs require marinating time and can be messy to eat. Put this in the form of a meatball and you have shaved off quite a bit of time and everything is packaged into a delicious little morsel. Kalbi (I see it spelled both galbi and kalbi) meatballs, people.

ground beef, honey, ginger, asian pear, garlic, onion, bread crumbs, bread, eggs, black pepper, soy sauce, sesame oil, chardonnay, rice vinegar

grate the ginger

prep the ingredients

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: chanterelle toast

Happy autumn, everyone! Fall has arrived to our beautiful Colorado mountains. The colors go off in patches across the state with certain areas turning before others – they always follow a schedule more or less. After shooting fall colors in the mountains for the past 12 years, I know the general timing for my favorite locations. Waves of weather overlay these bursts of gold activity in our Colorado Rocky Mountains, ranging from cloudless bluebird skies to raging winds and rain to snow.

sunrise on an early morning start

thimbleberry (yellow) and huckleberry (red)

neva had a blast hiking through the colors

and hiking more local colors

jeremy and neva pause above a beautiful expanse of gold aspens

At the end of last week, Jeremy and I set out in a caravan for Crested Butte. We drove through toasty temperatures in the Upper Arkansas River Valley then climbed into clouds and falling snow over Cottonwood Pass. From there, the weather remained cold and snowy all the way to Crested Butte and beyond. We pulled into our driveway, teeth chattering and mud caked to our cars (we drive some dirt road short cuts which become mudfests when there is precipitation). Fall colors are great and all, but snow always makes for more interesting viewing. Plus, it was snowing on my birthday, which I think is the best kind of birthday present! We quickly unpacked the cars, got Neva settled into her bed, grabbed my photo gear and off we went to leaf peep for the two remaining hours of daylight.

snow dusted spruce and aspens

powdered sugar branches

a ray of sunlight peeks through the clouds

With the weekend over, Jeremy is back home while Neva and I stay the week in Crested Butte to shoot more fall colors. And if the colors finish a little earlier than is typical, then it’s an opportunity for me to tackle some work and get hikes and trail runs under my belt before the season ends. But for you, my good people, I have an indulgent little recipe to share. After my last haul of chanterelles from the mountain forests of Crested Butte, I debated whether to sauté them in butter and freeze them for the winter or to try some new recipes. Turns out, I had enough to do both. This recipe for creamed mushroom toasts is simple, yet decadent. And for my gluten-free friends, you can either use gluten-free bread or spoon the creamed mushrooms straight into your mouth. I may or may not have done that…

chanterelles, cream, kosher salt, butter, pepper, flake sea salt, brioche slices, white wine, shallot, chives

cut the mushrooms into a medium dice

prepped and ready

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: seared duck breast with huckleberry gastrique

I bet you think I think about winter all the time. Well, it’s true. When I’m running up a trail in summer, I imagine skiing back down if only it were winter (or even just running straight into a snowbank to cool off). But the converse is also true. I think about summer in winter. Just the other day I took Neva for a hike on the local trails when the snow was falling at a good clip, and pointed out places on the white ground where shinleaf, pasque flowers, and other flora bloom in the months of long daylight. For me, it’s all about the place and how it changes so dramatically from season to season, but still remains constant in my heart. I have noted where the best aspen stands reside. I have strong mental associations with those special locales that offer up chanterelles, porcini, wild strawberries, wild raspberries, and most of all – huckleberries. Even more so if I can ski there in winter!

neva digs this weather, and any weather for that matter

Perhaps I’m mistaking my obsession with huckleberries as “thinking about summer” despite the fact that they only make their entrance in the last half of the season. I forage for (and freeze most of) those blessed berries like crazy for a few weeks and research ways to prepare and share them for the rest of the year. This week I finally tested a seared duck and huckleberry gastrique (a sweet and sour sauce) recipe that has been on my brain for a long while and it just so happened to coincide with our wedding anniversary! Truth be told, our anniversary sneaks up on us each year. We rarely plan anything around it. On a whim, I picked Jeremy up from work and took him to The Kitchen for a light snack of oysters and sparkling rosé as a “celebration”. Once home, I realized we had some leftovers from my recipe testing, so I said, “How about that for dinner?” and Jeremy nodded enthusiastically.

happy 19th anniversary!

The biggest obstacle for me to make this recipe was not huckleberries, but duck. I’ve had a lot of trouble tracking down duck breasts in Boulder (go figure – locals, if you have a source, please share the information with me!). As luck would have it, my friends Erin and Jay gave me a couple of frozen wild duck breasts recently. They happen to have friends who like to hunt duck, but don’t care to eat them (what the!??!). While that was happening, I went ahead and ordered some frozen farmed duck breasts online. So now I had two kinds of duck breasts! The farmed duck is White Pekin and the flesh is much lighter in color and milder in flavor than the deep burgundy and more “gamey” wild duck. I was psyched to compare the two. The wild duck breasts didn’t come with skin, which is a bit of a shame because duck skin is the best thing ever.

duck breasts (farmed and wild), huckleberries, roast chicken stock, beef and chicken stock blend, zinfandel, sugar, red wine vinegar, salt (not pictured: black pepper)

Searing the duck is no big deal and pretty straightforward. Making the huckleberry gastrique is what takes up the bulk of the time and effort – mostly babysitting liquids as you reduce them to syrups. I used roast chicken stock instead of duck stock, because I happen to have that on hand at any given time. [I tend to save all roast chicken carcasses and bones in gallon freezer bags and make large batches of stock in my pressure cooker.] I couldn’t find veal stock anywhere and decided to substitute half beef broth and half roast chicken stock instead. The things you can learn from a Google search! If you have access to huckleberries, use them. If you don’t, consider ordering frozen hucks online. I don’t know how well blueberries will work in place of huckleberries – probably fine, but blueberries lack the nice acidity and floral notes that make the huckleberry so special. As for the zinfandel, the original recipe appears on the Dry Creek Vineyard website and calls for the Dry Creek Heritage Zinfandel, obviously. We were really underwhelmed with the 2014, so I think you can perhaps save yourself some coin and buy a fruity, low-tannin zinfandel for the gastrique.

To start the gastrique, you essentially make a caramel syrup from the sugar and the red wine vinegar. This is what gives the gastrique its signature tart-sweet flavor which pairs so perfectly with huckleberries and duck. I reduced the vinegar-sugar mixture down to about a third of the initial volume until it was syrupy, but not too syrupy. It will thicken quite a bit when it cools.

combine the sugar and red wine vinegar

reduce until syrupy

it should be thick, but flowing when cooled

**Jump for more butter**