use real butter

Recipe: french crullers

I went on my annual sandhill crane migration shoot in southern Colorado earlier this week with my shooting partner, Jason. We crammed driving to and from Monte Vista, four shoots, a half day at Wolf Creek (ski resort), and not a lot of sleep into 48 hours. The town of Monte Vista, Colorado holds their Crane Festival this weekend (March 9-11).

shooting at sunset

pre-dawn

tandem

silhouettes as the sun rises

A big shout out and thank you to Pro Photo Rental for supplying us with the 200-400mm Nikkor f4 and the 500mm Nikkor f4 on this trip. You can see the entire set on my photoblog. Lack of sleep combined with standing around in the dark and cold at 5 am probably resulted in the cold I came down with Wednesday evening. That made sifting through my 2,687 photos a lot of fun. But I’m on the mend now and it’s back to the business at hand. Let’s talk doughnuts. Specifically – French crullers.

all you need: eggs, flour, water, butter, salt, sugar

bring the water, butter, sugar, and salt to a boil

add the flour

French crullers are my favorite doughnuts. They are eggy and light, made from pâte à choux – a sort of fried version of the cream puff. These are the ones I always search for if we ever happen upon a doughnut shop. Jeremy goes for the chocolate-filled, drenched-in-chocolate, chocolate something or other, but I am perfectly happy with a delicate, simple French cruller.

keep stirring until a thin film forms on the pan

beat the eggs in one at a time

then beat in the whites until you get a smooth and glossy batter

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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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Recipe: blood orange curd

When we moved to Colorado, we quickly learned that you don’t wait for an opening in your schedule to do things around here… you take advantage when the opportunity presents itself. I’m referring to the weather, but it applies to life in general. But it’s the weather that dictates everything around here. These past few days have been perfectly calm, cold, and snowy. Calm is the operative word. Calm means the snow isn’t scoured from the trails. Calm means 4°F feels pretty warm in the sun. Calm is when you get out into it.

into the snow, that is

I had a lovely solo ski tour one snowy afternoon. Solo because Kaweah stayed home. I love taking her with me, but it’s always a short 3-4 miles with her. I wanted to explore further and really feel that burn in my legs, back, and arms.

solitude and the path you take

drinking in the vistas

And then we were greeted with five more inches of snow in the morning, which is the true Breakfast of Champions. Winds still calm. Grab the day by the bazingas! Here’s a little bit of what an awesome day looks like to me:

what a morning, what a view

bluebird here, socked in with clouds on the flats

lunch at sushi tora (in boulder)

meeting jason’s new puppy, buck!

While we’re talking about making the most of a good thing, blood oranges are in season! They’re in my local Whole Foods and I’ve been enjoying them as a snack or in salads. In my head, I think the blood oranges are less acidic and have a touch of a cherry flavor to them compared to let’s say, navel oranges. That could be me cuing off the visually striking red color, with which I must confess to being completely enamored. We love reds in fall colors, in sunsets, in birds, in flowers, in fruits and vegetables.

blood oranges, eggs, lemon, sugar, butter

zest and juice the oranges

Originally, the plan was to make a half recipe of blood orange curd. Then I found a cute recipe to pair it with and decided to go ahead and do the full quantity. It only really requires two blood oranges, but I kinda went grab-happy at the store last week.

more: butter, egg yolks, orange zest, blood orange juice, lemon juice, sugar

add blood orange juice to the yolks, sugar, and lemon juice

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