use real butter

Recipe: cranberry bar cookies

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving weekend whether you celebrate it or not. The nicest surprise of the day for me was seeing my “Christmas” cactus bloom. They always call them Christmas cacti, but all of mine bloom at Halloween (yay!) or Thanksgiving. My Halloween blooms are red, but my Thanksgiving blooms are white and they came from cuttings that my mom had brought me a while ago. I let her know on Thanksgiving that there were pretty flowers opening. Hers was blooming too and she told me that Grandma had originally given her the cuttings for her plant. That tugged at my heart. Everything my grandma touched was special.

thanksgiving cactus

We kept our Thanksgiving low key and enjoyed a gorgeous day out in the snow working up an appetite. It’s early season. There’s decent snow in the backcountry, but a lot of the approaches are still sketch with bare spots, wind drifts, and plenty of ice – so we hoofed it in until we reached solid snow and could skin in. I happened to pack turkey sandwiches for lunch (why not?) which we scarfed down in the trees on our way out. Turkey never tasted soooo good.

enough snow to switch to the skis

lunch break

I refused to shop Black Friday.

But the day after… Have you heard about Shop Local Saturday? It’s a push to support small local businesses. I had been researching waxless touring skis for over a year and we decided it was time for an upgrade. Neptune Mountaineering is my favorite mountaineering store in Boulder. They have a great selection of technical gear (it really puts REI to shame) and their staff is wicked knowledgeable because they DO IT ALL. We did our part and supported this beloved local business. We supported them A LOT because we each got boots, bindings, and skis.

we’ll call this a health and fitness investment

See, we needed something to counteract the weight we were gaining from eating treats out of this book:

it’s cakespy!

CakeSpy is Jessie Oleson, a delightfully quirky, talented, funny, and creative woman in Seattle. And she is so SWEET! I had the pleasure of meeting Jessie this past Spring at her shop/gallery and instantly fell in love with her illustrations of cupcakes, cakes, pies, doughnuts, and any other sweet you can imagine. So her publisher sent me her book a few months back. It has ridiculously cute recipes like cupcake-stuffed cupcakes, s’moreos, blondie topped brownies, toaster pastry ice cream sandwiches, and red velvet cake shake to name a few. What caught my eye was the section on seasonal sweets – in particular the leftover cranberry sauce bar cookies. A way to use up leftover cranberry sauce after Thanksgiving. Clever.

flour, sugar, brown sugar, salt, butter, eggs, cranberry sauce, almonds, light corn syrup, vanilla

to make the crust: flour, butter, salt, sugar

mixing the dough

pressing into the pan

**Jump for more 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: macadamia shortbread cookies

It’s almost midnight and I’m sitting here in my skivvies because I’ve packed the pants I was wearing just ten minutes ago. It’s always like this the night before travel. Clean the house, pack the gear, check the weather forecast, run around looking for summer clothes that haven’t seen the light of day since… last summer. It’s definitely not Summer, but this barely even qualifies as Spring down in Boulder.

the tulips are up, but spring is late

so many varieties abound on the pearl street pedestrian mall

hard to pick a favorite

We rarely go to Boulder on the weekends if we can help it. Just nicer to be in the mountains since we usually work in town during the week. However I had a gig to shoot: Downtown Boulder’s Taste of Pearl on Sunday. This event teams local restaurants, local wineries (or meaderies), and local shops together for a tasting tour along beautiful Pearl Street. It sold out pretty quickly which meant I had to duck and dodge many a participant while trying to get my shots. Most of the venues were packed!

art galleries hosted

delectable tastes from the black cat bistro

executive chef of the flagstaff house, mark monette

boulder creek winery

chicken liver pâté from mateo

bobby stuckey (frasca) slices la quercia prosciutto

Although Boulder is beginning to green, the trees are still behind schedule and have yet to really leaf out. I suspect when I return home, the place will have exploded with color. It’s a good time of year. While Colorado tries to shake winter like a bad ex-boyfriend, we are going to be plunged into the perpetual summer of the tropics. I have mixed feelings about this because I’m really really really not a fan of hot weather, but I sure do love a lilikoi shave ice (ice shave for the locals). To get my mindset out of the Colorado Rockies and onto the Big Island, I thought it was fitting to try a Hawai’ian themed recipe.

macadamia nuts

coarsely chopped

People love macadamia nuts. Whenever someone returns from Hawai’i they always bring back Kona coffee and mac nuts. Just don’t feed them to your pups – they’re toxic for dogs. I found this recipe which is a lovely combination of mac nuts and my favorite cookie to bake at elevation: shortbread. See, shortbread doesn’t have leavening issues which makes it ideal for me to bake in the mountains.

adding flour to butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla

mix in the mac nuts

**Jump for more butter**