use real butter

Recipe: chanterelle ravioli with sage brown butter

School is starting and summer is winding down even though we have a good month of it left before we can officially declare autumn’s arrival. We spent the beginning of last week getting outside with Neva to explore and play and continue “training” her – whatever that means. Our neighborhood lake in Crested Butte had some strange water biochemistry going on, so we took little Neva to a nicer lake with cleaner water. This required a much longer drive on bumpy backcountry roads, but instead of puking or drooling or crying, Neva had her nose out the window and she was quite excited about our destination. Our little girl may have finally (finally!!) turned the corner on the car ride! I don’t know what we’re going to do come winter when we can’t open the window if it is -20°F outside, but I’ll take what I can get.

sometimes neva’s life jacket looks like a superhero cape from the front

the happiest, dorkiest dog

Jeremy and I also spent our final morning in Crested Butte hunting for chanterelles as they were starting to flush. Normally I would wait to forage after more time had passed so they would be larger, but we were leaving and I wanted to bring some chanterelles home to make a special birthday dinner for my mom. I only took the biggest ones and left the littles to grow and spore and do their happy mushroom thing. If you’re wondering how I prepared them, I sautéed the chanterelles and fresh local sweet corn in butter and served them alongside a small hash browned potato with two seared scallops on top (drizzled with pan sauce, natch). That was the second course of four.

neva likes to sniff chanterelles

a perfectly mossy home

clean and beautiful

toasting mom’s birthday with some bubbles

I hadn’t planned on trying a new recipe with the chanterelles, but we managed to forage enough that I could make some chanterelle ravioli. I’ve always wanted to make ravioli from scratch and by hand. My mother-in-law gave me some ravioli stamps and a ravioli pasta cutter last year, so I really had zero excuse to not try this. Start with the ravioli pasta dough.

flour, eggs, olive oil, salt

Most pasta I’ve made from scratch involves flour and eggs, but this one had a little salt and olive oil added to the dough. The flour doubled as an ingredient and a bowl because all of the wet ingredients went into a well in the flour. I thought that would be terribly messy, but it was actually rather tidy as long as you didn’t breach the well wall. The recipe called for four cups of flour, but you don’t use all of that flour in the pasta dough. I incorporated as much as needed and then sifted the remaining unused flour and kept it around for working the pasta.

make a well in the flour and add the rest of the ingredients

stir flour into the eggs until the mixture is too thick to stir

then work more flour in with your hands

when the dough won’t take on any more flour, knead it

it’s ready when you poke it and the dough bounces back

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: morel bourbon cream sauce

People can be so awful to others. They can also be wonderful to one another. There is no shortage of chatter about it all, and after a while my head hurts as much as my heart does. That’s when I really need to spend time outside to sort the spaghetti knot of feelings in my chest, free of that noise.

calypso orchids

hiking through the lupine

lightning strike on the mountain

We are keeping busy shuttling back and forth between Nederland and Crested Butte. I know a lot of people hate the word busy, but I don’t. Busy for me isn’t bad. Busy means a full schedule – that my time is taken up with both the things I have to do and the things I want to do. I realize I’m busy by choice, and I’m grateful for that.

Despite being over a year old now, Neva’s training is ongoing. She was introduced to the SUP (standup paddle board) last summer when she was a little puppy, but then she spent the next seven months learning to be a ski dog. While the rising snowline in the mountains translates into spring runoff, Neva is reacquainting herself with the liquid form of snow. Her first swim of the season was splashy and uncoordinated, but by the second dip, she was already getting her swim legs back and performing running jumps into the water. After a few days of confident swimming, it was time to see if she could ride the SUP and remain on the board. She only dove off a few times and once she even climbed back onto the board with a lift from Jeremy. She has a life vest coming in the mail soon, so I hope things will only improve with our little adventure pup.

she’s no longer nervous on the board, she is excited

watching for fish in the lake

I’m still keeping my eyes peeled around these parts for black morels, but they aren’t flushing like they were a couple of weeks before in one area. We scouted a couple of trails only to be left wondering if we’d lost our mojo or if the mushrooms were late, done, or just having a bad year? But on my trail run Friday morning, I found two single morels very far apart from one another – one in a somewhat unexpected environment and the other in what I consider typical surroundings. I left them in place to do their thing (send spores into the air) and kept my fingers crossed that the season isn’t over just yet.

short and squat, but in perfectly good condition

But in case the season IS coming to an abrupt end, I’ve got another winner of a morel recipe for you. This is far and away Jeremy’s *favorite* from my morel recipe testing session because it has morels and bourbon and cream, and it all goes on top of steak. This is the real reason I trail run…

cream, beef broth, pepper, morels, salt, butter, shallots, balsamic vinegar, bourbon

slice the morels in half lengthwise

rinse them clean and pat them dry

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: fried morel mushrooms

Two weeks away from the technical start of summer and the mountains are just beginning to sport their spring green. But what a lovely spring green it is – so brief and yet dazzling like little jewels under the intense spotlight of the high sun. After reading about all manner of “indicators” for black morels in the mountains, I’ve come to the conclusion that it basically means “when spring arrives and things start growing”. Makes sense. I’m seeing tiny pink calypso orchids, pasque flowers (still!), aspen leaves, oregon grape in bloom, false morels (toxic) and on and on and on. It’s wonderful in part because it isn’t terribly hot yet, which means foraging is more bearable when I’m crawling through forest debris. Come chanterelle and porcini seasons, I get a little cranky when the mercury rises.

refreshingly green and blue

pretty little things

a prize find

Back here on the Front Range, the morels in my area are taking their time. I’ve found a few early bolters, but that’s about it. I’ll probably miss the start of the proper flush, but I’m sharing my trail observations with my shroom buddy, Erin, because I want to know how the areas progress while I’m in Crested Butte and because I want her to get some black morels! Meanwhile, Neva is getting lots of running and playtime not associated with foraging morels. She makes it infinitely harder to concentrate on finding mushrooms and then when we do find them, she (like most dogs) will invariably and unwittingly step on at least a couple of them. I think we’re all quite happy to see the progression into spring because we know that summer will arrive like the flick of a switch. Good things happen in the mountains when the days are warm.

neva, orange tennis ball, and a big field of dandelions

sleeping (on the couch) with her tongue out

jeremy admires the view at sunset

I brought about half of my morel haul home to Nederland for recipe testing. The rest of the morels were either consumed in Crested Butte or given to devoted mushroom foragers who had never tasted black morels before. Oddly enough, when I was passing through my local Costco down on the flats, I found black morels for $8 per half pound. That is quite a good deal. I picked up two boxes out of curiosity and to supplement my supply for a morel recipe testing fest over the weekend. The store-bought morels were picked wild in the Pacific Northwest and they had good flavor, but they also came with plenty of small worms who apparently also appreciate the flavor of morels. I hate mushroom worms. Thankfully, my own foraged black morels were worm free and really clean. I used the small ones for this classic recipe of fried morels. Also, I made a half recipe (the recipe below is the full recipe) to conserve my limited supply of morels.

flour, black pepper, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, milk, egg, morels

There is a wide swath of this country that insists the only way to eat morels is fried. I think morels can be enjoyed in a variety of preparations, but I’m not going to turn my nose up at a fried morel! So I went in search of a good recipe. When it comes to wild mushrooms, I find that Hank Shaw’s blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, is a great resource for solid information and reliable recipes.

i leave the small ones whole

you can see they are hollow inside

a large morel gets the chop chop

hollow inside – this is how you know it’s a morel and not a toxic look alike

**Jump for more butter**