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Recipe: quinoa with sautéed mushrooms and kale

Planning my schedules is easy. Planning my schedules around other people’s schedules is where I start wanting to tear my hair out. Last week it got to the point of maximum chaos trying to coordinate several travel shoots. I even thought I was going to have to dig around for someone to come with me to Hawai’i! But just as things seemed impossible to nail down, I did manage to get it all settled in time for the weekend.

it was a snowy weekend

There is a lot going on around here and this past weekend was no exception. For example, there was PodCamp Boulder 3 – the Unconference. I attended PCB2 last year and it was tremendous. There is a lot of knowledge in this community – a lot of sharing, discussion, creativity, laughter, networking, and good people. I love that. I came away with some new friends and more ideas to mull over in my head.

levar and terry lead a session

bryan and jason discuss social development in children

And because Kathya was at PodCamp too, we ventured into downtown Boulder to try out a new eatery for lunch. I went on my friend Denise‘s recommendation. Pizzeria Locale had been open for just over a week and it sounded fabulous. I’ll be writing more about them soon.

the perfect arugula salad

Since last week was Chinese New Year, I kinda loaded the Chinese recipes (or Chinese-related posts) on you. We’re back to mixing things up here, which brings me to quinoa. Jeremy and I are quite fond of quinoa, but I haven’t cooked with it all that much. Mostly, we have had it in restaurants. I was reminded of how much I enjoy it when Danny whipped up some lovely quinoa with chanterelles, summer corn, and peppers for breakfast one morning when I was visiting with him, Shauna, and Lu.

dried quinoa (tiny!)

local oyster mushrooms

kale, oyster mushrooms, diced onion, cod filets

I purchase my organic quinoa in bulk from Whole Foods. There is also a red quinoa that I wanted to try, but the bin was EMPTY. I settled for white quinoa. I’ve heard people say that you can treat quinoa like you would rice. It’s lighter than rice and the texture is more springy. There is a nutty flavor to the quinoa which works beautifully with vegetables. I chose to cook it with some kale, onions, and mushrooms.

fluffy cooked quinoa

sautéed mushrooms

chopped kale

**Jump for more butter**

I’m not much of a coffee girl which might explain why I don’t get the coffee culture surrounding coffee houses, cafés, whatever you call them. And contrary to what some might think, I don’t get around downtown Boulder as much as the typical Young Urban Hipster (granted, I am NOT a young urban hipster). Half the time when friends suggest a place to meet in town I have no idea what they are talking about and the only reason I get there is because of Google. But I am slowly learning my way around. One of my favorite places in downtown Boulder happens to be a coffee shop.

atlas purveyors

My friend Andrew introduced me to Atlas Purveyors a year ago when I was looking for a coffee shop to supply the caffeine for our Food and Light participants. Actually, Andrew introduced me to Chris Rosen, one of the owners of Atlas and a genuinely kind and good individual. Chris is the one I blame for my addiction to tea slushies. I’d blame Kit, Brandon, and the rest of the staff at Atlas too, just that I usually hit Atlas during Chris’ shift. I always considered myself immune to the lure of coffee houses because I don’t drink coffee, but Atlas is much more than coffee.

atlas is part of our community

Boulder has a ton of good coffee houses in the downtown Pearl Street area. I once overheard someone walking on Pearl sarcastically remark, “Another coffee shop opening in downtown Boulder? Yeah, I guess we don’t have nearly enough!” But based on how full Atlas is at any given time, one might actually be led to believe that we don’t have enough coffee houses in Boulder. It’s popular and there are many regulars who frequent the establishment to have meetings, to work, and to just hang out.

i enjoy the chalk art and chalk graffiti

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: taro tapioca soup

gong xi fa tsai!

Xin nian kuai le. Wan shi ru yi.

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s the year of the Rabbit. Rabbits are lucky little guys, so I wish you all a very lucky, happy, healthy, and fruitful year ahead. The house has been busy here at urb-central as it always is before Chinese New Year. We have spent the past few days preparing food, cleaning the house, following the news, and hunkering down during the wicked cold spell that had a hold on much of the country recently. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Kitt had posted a cool video of a young woman throwing boiling water into the -40°F air. Can you guess what happened? As Jeremy watched the outside temperature plummet the other night to -25°F, we wondered if we could get that same phenomenon to work. So we went outside on the deck to give it a try.

cool (literally)

love the droplet trails

The water evaporates in the air before hitting the ground. I’m pretty sure our neighbors thought we were on crack tossing water off the deck and firing the flash several times in the night. [I guarantee you we are the most sober residents in this town.] The next morning, it was still -23°F. So before Jeremy left for work, he humored me and we tried another boiling water toss off the deck. And because it was daytime, I was able to shoot a nice sequence of it. You can see more of the nighttime shots and larger daytime shots on the photoblog.

science!!!

That was pretty COLD. Kaweah kept wanting to come out onto the deck with us because she equates baking her brains in the sun with walking onto the deck. But we’ve been keeping her inside the warm house since her old body gets very stiff when it’s cold. A few times Jeremy has had to go and rescue her at night when she was let out to potty because she got stuck in the snow when her paws got so cold she couldn’t walk. She’s more susceptible to temperature extremes as she has aged, but she’s not any smarter.

that’s okay, we’ll just keep her on the snuggy blankets

Right now, our house is clean and our refrigerator is full of lucky foods. Per tradition, we always clean the house on Chinese New Year’s Eve because you can’t clean the house for the first two weeks of the new year or else you will sweep out the good luck. This put me in a bit of a panic because I’m hosting something during that time period at my house. I also made a small feast for our New Year’s Eve dinner – each dish or component represents some form of health, luck, fortune, and happiness.

fu is luck and it is upside down on our front door – it means “luck arrives”

potstickers, soybean sprouts, lucky ten ingredient vegetables, lucky bean thread noodle soup

And then there is dessert. I almost always make western desserts when we entertain because most people I know aren’t that thrilled with Asian or Chinese desserts. When I was a kid, the typical dessert in my house was fruit. On special occasions, my dad would make almond jello or sesame bananas, reading the recipe from a fat book packed with delicate, thin pages covered in Chinese characters. Kris and I would get so excited. At the real Chinese restaurants (the ones where the waiters can barely speak English), they would serve a warm sweet soup of some kind for dessert. Sometimes it was sweet red bean soup, sweet green bean soup, tapioca coconut soup, black sesame soup, or sweet peanut soup… Soup. And there was taro root soup.

taro root

coconut milk, taro root, sugar, tapioca

**Jump for more butter**