use real butter

Recipe: cookie butter marshmallow swirl chocolate ice cream

This has been such an excellent winter for us snow-wise. Sandwiched by sunny bluebird days, this last storm dropped nearly a foot in the local mountains on Tuesday. And it was a cold storm which meant nice sugary powder.

untouched snow on the trails

looking across the valley

It’s funny how we use food to describe snow: champagne powder, sugary, mashed potatoes, chocolate chips (technically rocks on snow), buttery, death cookies, corn snow. Recently, when I drop into a big pocket of powder, I’ve been thinking of it as marshmallowy. That jogged my memory of these amazing candy bars that a client (Robin Chocolates) developed last fall: dark chocolate ganache, marshmallow, and cookie butter topped with crisped rice pearls and dipped in dark chocolate. You have to see it to believe it.

insanely good

I had never had cookie butter before until Robin gave me a taste (and then she gave me some of the candy bar to sample). Whoa. Cookie butter, where have you been all my life?! I bought a jar last week for some inspiration, and settled on making an ice cream version of Robin’s candy bar. Damn straight. Are you ready? Start with chocolate ice cream.

egg (yolks), sugar, salt, chocolate, dutch-process cocoa, cream, milk, vanilla

whisk cocoa and cream together

stir chopped chocolate into the heated chocolate cream

stir in more cream

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Recipe: beef porcini pot pies

Spring forward. Spring forward. I rather think of it as pouncing forward. It’s a bit jarring, the darkness in the morning and the extended daylight in the evening and whoa, when I sit down to work on the computer I have one less hour than I thought I did. Jeremy is a fan of Daylight Saving Time. He said he feels like he’s in fog all winter until the clocks jump forward. He loves the stacking of extra daylight on the other end of the day. Kaweah, we discovered, does not care for Daylight Saving. We tried to coax her awake Sunday morning, but she was having none of it. She’d open one eye, look at me, and then plop her head back onto her soft, warm bed. So we let her sleep until her little appetite clock said it was time to eat.

spring wha?

We had a nice wallop of snow Friday (great powder at our local resort) and then the snow clouds gave way to bluebird skies and the mercury soared into the 50s this weekend. Jeremy and I got out to ski tour Saturday, but the backcountry snow was already turning to mashed potatoes under the power of the sun and warm air temperatures. But it was gorgeous and my brain is already transitioning to spring skiing mode.

i never get tired of the colorado high country

It’s March, and I’m starting to poke about in the corners of my freezers and pantries to see which treasures I squirreled away last summer are still around. I have heaps of roasted green chiles, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, jams, summer corn, peaches, huckleberries, pickled things… and dried porcini. Those porcini are such a labor of love. Wendy and I slog many miles in the mountains searching for these gems of the forest. Then she cleans every single mushroom (and sometimes there are a lot of them) that very evening, breaks them down, and begins dehydrating them. No small feat. To let them spoil or go to waste is to beg the tree gods to animate and smack you upside the head for being such an ungrateful douchecanoe. When I flipped the calendar to March, I set about making some beef porcini pot pies.

olive oil, red wine, salt, pepper, dried porcini, onion, potatoes, flour, rosemary, thyme, garlic, tomato paste, boneless beef short ribs

rehydrate the porcini

strain (and reserve) the porcini liquid

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Recipe: baby bok choy with miso ginger dressing

It’s been an exhausting few days while Jeremy was out of town. I’m running on fumes here, so this will be a quick post. I’ll just say there was a major poopocalypse Tuesday that was in essence: Kaweah pooped on wall-to-wall carpet, stepped firmly in poop, wandered all over wall-to-wall carpet and dog bed while I was in town running errands… yay. I spent four hours scrubbing pretty much everything and now I have a date with a rental steam cleaner this week.

Let’s look at some snow porn, because I really need it.

trail markers (blue diamonds) are normally 7 feet above ground, this was as high as my thigh

ripping ten fresh inches of powder

I know I’ve inundated you with heaps of indulgent posts lately, so I’m going to switch gears to something healthier and far easier to make. Sometimes I wonder if I love green vegetables in part because I love the color green. I’d like to think that the visual component plays a role in my enjoyment, but then how does one explain refritos? In any case, baby bok choy is mildly sweet and tender. I used to only find them at the Asian grocery store, but now you can find a few varieties in western grocery stores.

bok choy, miso, ginger, garlic, lime, rice vinegar, sesame oil, vegetable oil, sriracha, mirin (ignore the soy sauce)

cut the baby bok choy in half

beautiful cross-sections

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