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Recipe: cocktail meatballs

Sunrise is so late these days that I keep missing it because I’m already up and doing things by the time it happens. But this week I’m still at battle with that not-quite cold. It’s right on the threshold, yet I manage to keep it at bay each day. A little extra rest seems to help, which meant that I was able to see sunrise this morning. So glad that I did. Every sunrise is a gift.

fiery color for a few minutes, then the rest of the day was overcast

The winds have been pretty horrible, too. Sometimes we get nice cloudscapes AND nice weather, but usually the most interesting cloud formations occur when the winds are crazy terrible. That’s life on the boundary layer for you. Life on this part of the boundary layer has been all about wrapping up this year and getting ready for the next one. I dropped by the vet after taking four pairs of skis in for tuning (I hope we’re beyond rock season now), to ask about Neva’s microchip. It appears to have migrated to her front leg. Nothing serious, but they want to be sure that the chip is still scannable. While there, I got to hang out with Aspen, the Giant White Dog of Nederland. Aspen could give Jon Snow’s Ghost a run for his money. Neva looooooves Aspen. Actually, I think she loves everyone. In many ways, Neva channels our beloved Kaweah.

aspen knows how to shake

aspen’s mom gives him a treat (he is as tall as her when he stands up)

Lately, I’ve received the best kind of packages in the mail – the ones that aren’t sent for an occasion, but just because. I say packages, but they are gifts. Gifts that were crafted or grown, and shipped because of friendship and love. Gifts from hearts and hands. Jamie was test driving new equipment in her woodshop and cranked out several gorgeous custom bottle openers. And then Todd and Diane sent a box of fresh, fragrant Buddha’s hands from their (ridiculously amazeballs) garden to my doorstep in snowy Colorado.

i don’t even drink, but i opened a pear hard cider just to use the opener

neva peers into the box of california sunshine

Times like these, when my head is a little foggy from congestion, are when I’m most grateful for my cookie distribution spreadsheet. It’s the only way to keep track of how many cookies, which kind of cookies, to whom, when to bake, and when to deliver. Timing is everything because everyone skidaddles starting as early as a week before Christmas, and fresh baked cookies are freshness wasted if they aren’t eaten until after the start of the new year. But my window grows short because I don’t make edible gifts when I’m potentially sick, so I’ve had to work on other things.

You know what I crave most when I’m deep into cookie making season? Appetizers. I love me some savory appetizers. It’s a good thing I don’t attend sportsball parties, because I would dive straight into the appetizers only to require extraction at the end of the game. Some day, when I have the time and brainwaves to plan a party, I’ll have to add these cocktail meatballs to the menu. They are like little meatloaf bites, but with more surface area dedicated to the tangy sauce.

salt, worcestershire sauce, sherry, water, vegetable oil, bread cubes, milk, mace, mustard, red currant jelly, paprika, black pepper, ketchup, eggs, onion, ground beef

prepped for the meatballs

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Recipe: chocolate-dipped key lime pears

Oh weekend, I hardly knew ya. We are always up for a ski, provided there is decent snow. But we haven’t had much snow lately, so we took Neva for a hike to scope out part of the high country. It was rocks and dirt, then ice, then snow, then snirt and more rocks. Patchy conditions annoy me more than anything because it’s a pain to get your skis on and off every twenty feet, but it also sucks to have to get microspikes on and off your shoes. I suppose we could snowshoe, except we swore off snowshoing the day we learned to ski in the backcountry. The mere thought of going back to snowshoes is a major snoozefest (sorry snowshoers, but I speak the truth). Eventually we reached consistent snow cover, then really decent snow for skiing (which meant not so great for hiking). Snow began to fall from the sky and Jeremy squeezed my hand through our gloves.

which way to go? jeremy looks left and neva looks right

The snow didn’t last long and then the winds arrived to make the snowpack sucky. I battled kitchen disasters then went to bed early to ward off a potential cold. Instead of trying to make a ski day the next morning, we opted for a round of fetch at the elementary school soccer field and then spent several hours cleaning out the basement. Neva thought the fetch part was great, but had a lesser opinion of the house cleaning.

catching the ball in mid air

floating back to earth

I always forget how much I enjoy pears until they are practically screaming at me from the produce aisle in November. For a while when we were without a dog, Jeremy and I adhered to a strict rule of not sharing a pear between two people. It’s a superstition that Grandma and a lot of Chinese people follow – because the Chinese word for pear sounds the same as the Chinese word for “split up”. Now with Neva, we can all three share a pear safely (Neva is loving little nibbles of pear).

A few years ago, I was in San Francisco visiting Recchiuti Confections when I spied their key lime pears – wafer thin slices of pear soaked in key lime juice and dipped in dark chocolate. I purchased a box to bring home for Jeremy, because he likes pears and he loves chocolate. They were spendy, so each slice was precious. Each slice really was precious. I became obsessed. When I returned to San Francisco later, I decided to purchase Michael Recchiuti’s cookbook for the sole purpose of getting the recipe for the key lime pears. My pal, Lisa (whose blog is Lisa is Bossy, but my mom has since named her “Lisa is the Boss”), asked if I was going to blog it. I said yes, of course. That was more than a couple of years ago. So it’s time to make good on my word.

water, sugar, bartlett pears, key limes, and chocolate

A word on ingredients. The recipe instructs you to use bartlett pears that are green and hard. Please do this. I have made this recipe twice. The first time was with bartlett pears that were green and rock hard. They turned out beautifully (as you will see). The second batch that I attempted this past weekend was a lot harder to deal with because I couldn’t find bartletts (I only went to one store), so I used the hardest variety I could find – red D’anjou pears. Those didn’t work well at all. The flesh is too soft and they nearly disintegrate during the soaking process. So absolutely follow the recipe on the pear variety and hardness unless you like to make yourself miserable. For chocolate, please use a good quality dark chocolate. There aren’t many ingredients in the recipe, but the quality makes all the difference. And finally, if you can’t find key limes, you can use regular limes. You won’t need as many because they’re much larger.

make a sugar syrup with water and sugar

juice the key limes

add the lime juice to the syrup

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Recipe: massaman beef curry

December already. Neva is now just over eight months old and we are falling into a nice routine. Nice enough that I could get out today for my first skate ski of the season at the nordic center. Keeping active in winter is essential for me, but keeping active outside is the icing on the cake. Winter in the mountains can be long (the longer the better!!!), so the strategy of holing up inside and biding my time until summer is a cop out. It’s probably my dad’s fault because he has always been the type who could never be inside for more than 24 hours before growing aggitated and insisting that we go sailing or fishing or camping or anything OUTSIDE. I do find that getting out into “green spaces” or “open spaces” does both me and Jeremy a world of good when it comes to our mental outlooks.

skate ski day #1, ski day #10

The other night I told Jeremy I am so happy that we don’t live down in Boulder or anywhere on the flats. In the mountains, we spend our time working and playing. When I lived in Southern California, it was far too easy to feel bored and go spend money to unbore yourself – to buy things you didn’t really want and certainly didn’t need only to clutter up your house, your life, and fall into the trap of needing a bigger place and more shit. That’s stressful living. I’m sure plenty of people find the mountains come with their own stressors, but it’s a simpler way of life. And I’m a huge fan of making life simpler if possible.

One thing that has greatly simplified my life is my pressure cooker. I try to incorporate it into recipes whenever possible because it reduces energy consumption, shortens cooking time, and achieves pressures that can’t be reached with conventional cooking methods at our high altitude. A few months ago, a high school pal sent me a note that he had made a few of my recipes on the blog and that they were a hit with the family, but that he wanted to attempt massaman beef because it is his favorite Thai curry. Well, it’s my favorite Thai curry, too! For nearly two decades, I have casually played around with massaman beef to moderate results (still better than any of the Thai restaurants around here), but my friend’s message prompted me to take another shot at it – with my pressure cooker. Don’t worry if you don’t have a pressure cooker, you can still do this with a Dutch oven. So Kevin, this one is for you!

potatoes, massaman curry paste, salt, brown sugar, roasted peanuts, onions, chicken stock, beef chuck, vegetable oil, fish sauce, soy sauce, tamarind concentrate, coconut milk

Most of the ingredients are easy to find in western grocery stores except possibly the tamarind paste and the curry paste. You could make the curry paste from scratch, but I have had good results with Maesri brand curry pastes (based on a tip from a fellow grad student who happened to be Thai). I have also heard good things about Mae Ploy brand curry pastes. [Edit: I’ve had a couple of folks ask if they can substitute red curry paste for massaman curry paste. The answer is flat out no – unless you WANT to make red curry with beef. I’m not being one of those asshole purists – it’s just that massaman curry paste is an essential ingredient for making massaman curry. This is like asking if you can substitute white chocolate for dark chocolate in a dark chocolate soufflé recipe and still get dark chocolate soufflé.] For tamarind, I have tamarind concentrate in my refrigerator, but you can also make tamarind paste from blocks of dried tamarind (Saveur has a nice tutorial). Select smallish potatoes. While most recipes recommend using waxy potatoes, I couldn’t help but use yukon golds, because they have the best flavor. The texture worked out just fine, too.

slice the onions

lightly char or brown the onions

scrub the potatoes clean

cube the beef

toss with salt

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