use real butter

Recipe: fried fennel slices

The past few days have been about savoring those wonderful, fleeting things in life. I used to be more of a planner than a spur-of-the-moment type. I still am, but my life’s lessons have taught me that there are times when you have to put down what you are doing and just drink in the good things before they are gone. Like…

getting into the backcountry before the snow melts away

carving turns on untouched terrain

storm clouds hugging the continental divide as the sun drops

spring blooms in boulder

the striped bass special at the pinyon

You might be wondering about that last one. I got a frantic text Friday night asking me if The Pinyon was closing. Surely not! After much pinging with my contacts, it was confirmed that Sunday brunch would be their final service. I immediately made a reservation for Saturday dinner. I understand that restaurants come and go – especially in a town like Boulder. The Pinyon was a place we liked to go for its wildly creative, playful, and satisfying food that was casual and didn’t break the bank. Dinner Saturday was bittersweet. The place was packed with regulars who wanted to get in there one last time. You could tell there was a lot of love going around.

chef theo and his dad at the pinyon’s last stand private party

We popped by The Pinyon Sunday evening for their closing party (that says a lot because we avoid going into Boulder on weekends). Theo was busy cooking up EVERYTHING and setting platters out for guests. I pinched a corner of Steph’s chess pie slice – that was about all I could stomach. Folks were grabbing at the food (some men are pigs), but we didn’t come for the food. We came to wish Theo and his staff well and meet up with other friends who supported The Pinyon. I know Theo will be cooking up something wonderful in Denver soon enough. As I gave him a hug good-bye, I promised (threatened?) I’d follow him anywhere.

I guess I just thought they’d always be there. Silly. I know nothing is forever. Grab it by the hojos.

Not sure if I’ve ever talked about fennel here before, but it’s not because I don’t like it. I quite love it, especially raw in salads. But every now and again you have to get naughty with your vegetables. And by naughty, I mean frying.

lovely fennel

all you need: fennel, salt, pepper, flour, bread crumbs, eggs

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: california roll burger

You can’t fight the weather. The best thing you can do is roll with it. That’s what I’ve been telling myself anyway. Now that the crud in my chest is clearing and I no longer sound like Kathleen Turner, we’ve been getting outside to assess the snowpack. Total spring conditions: ice in the morning, corn snow in the afternoon. We noticed over the weekend that our front yard aspens are already forming buds a month early.

still getting nice color in the mornings and evenings

walking on hardpack

The spring equinox is a day away and all of this increased daylight prompts me to think of spring and summer cooking. Normally we’d be shoveling a few feet of Rocky Mountain powder from the driveway, but it looks like spring has come early for Colorado. My friends in Southern California, however, are always in perpetual spring-summer. Allison posted a photo of a California roll burger on her Facebook page a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to shake the idea since. A little Google action brought me to 26 Beach Restaurant’s California burger roll. Oh. My. Freaking. Goodness.

a lot of components, but totally worth the trouble

It’s pretty much what you’d guess it to be – a hamburger with the components of the revered fusion California roll. How could this not be amazing? Throughout the week, my mind would wander to the California roll burger. What would I put on mine? It’s heavy enough with the beef patty and the bun, so I opted out of adding sushi rice. In addition to the traditional lettuce and tomato, I figured there would be crab salad, avocado, masago (capelin roe), pickled ginger (gari), toasted seaweed (nori), and wasabi mayonnaise. Instead of our standard potato roll buns, I picked up some challah rolls. And if we were going to do this right, why not some shredded king crab legs for the salad? You could use krab (surimi), but I find real crab to be beyond awesome.

shelling the crab

mix mayonnaise with shredded crab meat

make the wasabi mayonniase: stir some wasabi powder into the mayo

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Recipe: blood orange curd-filled beet doughnuts

There is chocolate for the chocoholics and then there is fruity for the fruit lovers. It isn’t just that I love fruity flavors, but they tend to come in a nice array of colors too. Remember me? I’m a parrot and I love bright colors.

sometimes even pink

Today’s recipe is indeed intended for Valentine’s day, mainly because it is pink and cute. But it’s more than that because it is both fruity AND vegetable-y. I’ve been looking around for something sweet to do with beets. So, let’s get our vegetable on, people.

flour, milk, butter, powdered sugar, cardamom, oranges, beet, salt, yeast, egg, grand marnier, beet juice

peel and dice and don’t wear white

I found an interesting recipe for beet doughnuts on Almond Corner. Most recipes call for roasting beets, but I liked this one because it cooks the beets on the stove top, simmering them in orange juice. By the time the beets are tender (it takes a while) the orange juice has reduced considerably so there isn’t a whole lot of liquid left. I puréed the beets with the juice, which meant I added a little more flour to the dough later.

diced beets, cardamom pods, and orange juice

tender

puréed

Meanwhile, heat the milk and beet juice together. Now, beet juice isn’t something I commonly see. I worried that I would have to make my own beet juice, somehow, but thankfully I found an obscure bottle of organic beet juice at Whole Foods… from Switzerland. Because my beets had enough liquid from the orange juice for the purée, I just added all of the milk-juice mix to the yeast and let it foam up.

add beet juice to the milk

foamy yeast

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