use real butter

Recipe: blackberry macarons

What a weekend! We had some pretty crazy (read: extremely high) winds in Colorado Saturday night, clocking as much as 115 mph at Breckenridge. Based on our 6+ years in this house, we gauged it probably gusted to 90 mph here… and this wasn’t even the worst wind storm we’ve experienced. We watched in moderately alarmed curiosity (before the power went out) as the front wall of our great room flexed with each gust. Of course, it would have to be the weekend that my in-laws were visiting, but thankfully the guest room is on the ground floor. Our bedroom is on the third floor and so we endured 8 hours of the Northridge earthquake. Kaweah slept (happily) through the whole thing. Ah well, there’s always a price for paradise.

Aside from the windstorm, we took my ILs into Boulder for some shopping and dining. We enjoyed a beautiful family dinner at The Kitchen one evening and introduced them to The Pinyon and Chef Theo.

the kitchen: rabbit leg confit

the kitchen: alaskan halibut

the kitchen: apple doughnuts

the pinyon: butternut ravioli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms in brown butter sauce

Before the winds went cuckoo, we did have some really beautiful clouds set up over the house last week. Even if I didn’t have some background in atmospheric science, I would still be 100% completely enamored with our Colorado skies. Who needs television?

wave cloud at sunset over my house

still there long after sunset

And now, I’m happy to be home to work on long-term projects and resume a much-needed routine! No more travel or house guests for over a month! All of the local ski hills are either open or opening within the next week. My list of recipes to try is growing almost as fast as the list of things we need to fix and do around our neglected house. Speaking of recipes, I came across these macs that I made earlier this year. Even though blackberry season is over, you can use frozen blackberries for the curd and the buttercream. I find frozen organic blackberries to have decent sweetness and flavor.

sugar + red + blue = purple sugar

whipped whites with purple sugar

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: pumpkin bread pudding with bourbon vanilla sauce

Indian Summer continues her reign over here in Colorado. It’s been positively beautiful weather and a perfect time to get together with old friends and meet new ones. My small group of gal pals got together for another foodista night, but this time closer to home at my beloved Frasca. Excellent food made even better with good company. The service, as usual, was beyond stellar. Extra-stellar.

frico caldo – shredded potato and cheese pancake

part of the wine flight

clearly having far too much fun

Kat stayed at my place overnight because she lives pretty far away. Kaweah was thrilled. She loves having house guests. You know… new pants to lick, new hands to sniff, someone to cuddle with and make mooney eyes at. The next morning I took Kat to the Indian Peaks Wilderness for a little hike in the snow. The sun was shining down and the powdery snow crunched underfoot. I spied ski tracks and I think I started salivating at the thought of ski season. It’s great to share a favorite place with a friend and have her understand how much you love it there. Kat and I have so much in common we joke that we may have been separated at birth.

that smooth part is ice on the lake

We grabbed lunch at Sushi Tora in Boulder before hopping over to The Pinyon to meet up with Kat’s friend who is a professional forager (and a generally cool chick all around). I couldn’t believe the beautiful stuff she found HERE – as in, SOMEWHERE IN THE WOODS. That blows my mind. I love it. I also met chef-owner Theo, a friendly and funny guy who talked about creative uses for various foraged ingredients.

gorgeous, tiny wild grapes

chef theo at work

It’s a super food-centric week for me because my dear friends Todd and Diane fly into Denver today to join me and Manisha at the Denver Botanic Gardens (their site seems to be having some server issues at the moment) for our lecture and workshop program. If you’re a local, please come join us! If not, here’s a (pretty good!) consolation prize… pumpkin bread pudding.

this could easily be awesome pumpkin french toast

pour melted butter over diced bread (i used challah)

Fall puts me in a mood – the best kind of mood. Warm spices, golden light, and pumpkins. I love little pumpkins because they’re cute. I didn’t realize until a few years ago that the cute little pumpkins were usually pie pumpkins or sugar pumpkins. When I was in fourth grade, a neighbor had dropped off a pie pumpkin at our house. It sat for a week and then I learned of a pumpkin carving contest. I carved a happy little face on the pie pumpkin and went to the neighborhood Halloween festival that night. I walked up with my pumpkin and my pace slowed as I stared wide-eyed at the masterpieces on the table. Giant pumpkins, some of them strangely deformed, carved into elaborate works of terrifying and beautiful art. I stood for a moment, unsure of what to do with my pumpkin. My pumpkin had no business being there, ever.

mix everything but the bread and butter together

don’t forget the bourbon

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: black cod with miso

Over a year ago, I was contacted by the program director of the Denver Botanic Gardens about giving a lecture and doing a workshop for their Bonfils Series. We met over tacos at Pica’s and I cobbled together a proposal – something to inject a little ethnic culture and cuisine into Denver. I asked my friends Manisha, Todd, and Diane if they wanted to join me and then we worked out a date… October 20-21, 2011. That seemed quite far off, and now look – it’s next week!

If you’re near the Denver area, we’d love to have you come to our lecture: Three Food Blogs, Three Cuisines, Infinite Inspiration on Thursday, October 20, 2011 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. If you want to arrive early (5:30 pm) there will be some great Denver food trucks to grab a nosh! On Friday, October 21, 2011, the four of us will lead a workshop in the kitchen facility where we will share and demonstrate Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese recipes and cooking techniques. The workshop runs from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm with a short break in the middle for participants to grab lunch. So come join us for great stories, fantastic food, and heaps of laughter. We can’t wait to meet you!

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I see more bare branches than aspen leaves around my neighborhood, thanks to the winds that whipped through here a few days prior. While walking Kaweah on the local trails this evening, I could see the skeletal dried flowers, puffballs, and solitary leaves shivering in the cold. They make a sad rattling noise as the winds race along the ground. They crunch underpaw when Kaweah goes careening off the trail to sniff something. Sunset comes earlier each day and practically sneaks up on us. When we came home from Boulder on Monday, I looked out the window to see some Kelvin-Helmholtz waves over the Continental Divide. These clouds are typically short-lived, but to get them at sunset? SCORE! Jeremy and I love to geek out on beautiful examples of fluid dynamics at work.

indicative of high shear aloft (SCIENCE!!!)

We had no such glorious clouds at sunset today, but that’s okay because I had something glorious going on in the kitchen. On my fall colors recon/40th birthday long weekend, Jeremy and I spent a couple of days in Aspen. One evening, we went to Matsuhisa for dinner because so many had recommended it. I have to say, I was pretty underwhelmed with the sushi and sashimi which was decent, but seriously overpriced. However, the items we ordered from the kitchen were pretty phenomenal like their heirloom tomato salad with cilantro dressing or the black cod with miso. Let’s talk about that black cod with miso. Melt. In. Your. Mouth. I’ve been obsessing over it ever since.

white miso paste, mirin, sake, sugar, black cod fillet

Flipping through some of my own books, I found a miso black cod recipe. But a quick search on the internets led me to the recipe from Matsuhisa on Food and Wine! The anticipation was crushing. I checked my local Whole Foods and asked my buddy Dustin (he’s the head of Seafood) when they’d have some black cod in. We talked about the recipe and he nodded, “That’s good stuff.” I just had to be patient. Upon my return home from my road trip, I picked up some groceries at Whole Foods and saw they had black cod fillets on ice. YES, PLEASE.

pour the mirin and sake into a small saucepan

whisk the sugar in with the miso, mirin, and sake

pour the miso marinade into a baking dish to cool

**Jump for more butter**