use real 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: kale pepita cranberry salad

I am really looking forward to some downtime in about… a month. But I’m also thoroughly enjoying the crazy time which is now. We have visitors, house guests, travel, events, and all manner of goings on that my head is spinning just looking at the calendar. Are you the type who prefers to spread busy out evenly or cram it all together? I guess I didn’t plan to have a smooshed schedule, but that’s how it seems to have shaken out. Actually, I think October is always like this for me.

from crested butte a few weeks ago

My parents are in town for a few weeks and we celebrated my dad’s birthday last Friday with dinner at The Black Cat. I really get a kick out of how much they are enjoying each new restaurant we introduce them to around here. Of course, it helps that Boulder has no shortage of great places to dine.

amuse bouche: radish and mustard terrine on toast

We like to cook as much as we like to dine out, so my folks came up to our house for dinner this evening. Actually, as my dad said, “I would like to see Kaweah.” Kaweah loves my dad. Ever since he first met her when she was a puppy and he kept “accidentally” dropping peanuts on the floor, he has pretty much secured his place as #1 favorite person in her tiny brain. Anyway, it was a great excuse to introduce them to this kale salad which Jeremy and I are addicted to. It’s all Shauna’s fault. Actually, it’s Danny’s and Jennie’s faults for tweeting about this salad after they had it for dinner one night. I asked if the recipe was on either of their blogs… and within a week, Shauna and Danny posted it. Thank you, friends.

dinosaur kale

I don’t really know if that is dinosaur kale. What happened is that I went to Whole Foods looking for dinosaur or Lacinato kale and found this. It was above the sign for dinosaur kale. It didn’t quite look like what I typically see listed as dinosaur kale, but that’s what they had. I think it’s pretty.

you’ll need: kale, olive oil, fish sauce, lemon, pecorino, dried cranberries and pepitas

strip the stems

chiffonade

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: membrillo (quince paste)

It’s so good to be home after a week of driving around Southwest Colorado and shooting fall colors alone. I don’t mind being alone, but it gets mentally exhausting because I’m all up in my head with myself from before sunrise to well after sundown assessing weather, light, topography, and of course the aspens. After a couple of days traveling backroads I noticed a lot of drivers in their trucks with their dogs. Colorado is a dog-lovin’ state, to be sure. It made me miss Kaweah and it almost made me wish that she were along for my trip. I say almost because Kaweah is a very annoying (read: bad) car companion. She associates car rides with hikes. She loves hikes. She gets so excited she just cries the whole time. Sometimes for several hours on end. Kaweah becomes a giant stress ball so we try to avoid subjecting her to that. I guess in some ways we are trying to avoid subjecting ourselves to it too. There’s something to be said for shooting the fall colors in peace.

in crested butte

off ohio pass road

anthracite range

[See the whole set from Crested Butte on my photo blog.]

When reports posted winter weather advisories for the mountains, I debated if it might be wise for me to wrap up the shoot in Crested Butte and hightail it back home before the storm arrived. Instead, I took that window and drove south to the San Juans and I’m glad I did. Places with big sky, big mountains, big weather, big swaths of pine and aspen – they take my breath away. There were times when the visibility went to pea soup, but the weather is so dynamic that you could count on it changing from hour to hour if not minute to minute.

the scrub was also in full color

from the dallas divide

hillslope

sunset on the sneffels range

rising clouds from fresh snowfall

[You can view the rest of the set here.]

We had five inches of snow on our deck Saturday. A-basin and Loveland have begun their race to make snow with a jump start from the cold snap. And Wolf Creek opened this weekend with 44 inches of snow from the storm! But it’s not winter. The snow has melted (mostly) from our deck and the days ahead will be sunny and warm. That’s autumn for ya. I’m happy to get as much of it as I can including in the edible form. Our local Whole Foods is carrying quince now, and despite the fact that it costs an arm and a leg to buy it here in Colorado, I couldn’t resist. I know of people from various parts of the U.S. who have had quince trees… and never once knew what to do with the fruits. Seriously? That makes for sad pandas everywhere.

related to the apple and pear, but you can’t eat quince raw

cut, cored, cubed

I first tasted quince paste – membrillo – in Argentina over a decade ago. Becky and I were in the field on a GPS campaign and dropped by to visit with a farming family she knew from the previous field season. They were warm and friendly, inviting us in to join them for snacks and a game of World Cup Soccer: Argentina vs. England. Slices of a mild, soft cheese were paired with slices of the deep rose-colored quince paste. Floral, fruity, and sweet bouncing off the creamy, salty cheese. Because I didn’t know a lick of Spanish, I learned to speak the way Argentinians speak. I didn’t say mem-BREE-yo, I said mem-BREE-zho. Lots of je je je sounds. It’s so beautiful. By the way, Argentina won that game which made for a country full of happy people.

slice lemon rind

simmer in a pot with lemon peel, vanilla bean, and water

**Jump for more butter**