use real butter

Recipe: lamb burgers

It’s that time of year when the weather becomes volatile with raging windstorms, except it has been pretty calm as autumn goes for the past few weeks. That’s why Colorado’s fiery gold aspen leaves remained on the trees for so long. It was really pleasant (because windstorms around here can be so unpleasant). It’s taken me several days, but I’ve finally culled and processed my photos from the fall shoot. It was a long trip for me, even with Jeremy’s weekend visit. Clothes started to smell bad and then they smelled worse. There was mud and dirt everywhere (kinda like when you get peanut butter on your sleeve without knowing it and then suddenly there is peanut butter all over the place). I talked to myself a lot.

self-portrait, because it’s just me, the trees, and the camera

I met some great people toward the end of my trip though – other Colorado (and out-of-state) photogs chasing the fall colors, sharing stories, talking gear, making plans. I appreciate how lucky I am to live in a place with access to so much wilderness and beauty and I feel like these guys get that too. Once home, I forced myself to slog through the images, because if I don’t then it just spirals out of control. So here’s what the rest of the trip was like.

You can find more photos on the photo blog: Crested Butte Sampler, southwest Colorado, more Crested Butte, and the San Juans. This mellow weather couldn’t hold out forever though, and our winds kicked up something fierce earlier this week sending showers of yellow aspen leaves flying sideways. The winds always rage ahead of a front – and this one is going to bring snow! Ah, but autumn also means the elk are in rut and Rocky Mountain National Park is a great place to view them. So my shooting partner, Jason, and I grabbed some big glass from Pro Photo Rental to see what was what yesterday morning.

that’s what

bugling

You can see the rest of the set on the photo blog.

It’s good to be back in my kitchen and cooking, even if it’s only for a couple of weeks. I easily tire of road food and it’s not uncommon for me to start obsessing about recipes while I’m driving or hiking or standing around waiting for sunrise or sunset or clouds to move in or move out. For the last 300 miles, these juicy lamb burgers at The Kitchen kept dancing about in my noggin. So it was the first thing I made when I got home.

simple: roasted red peppers, ground lamb, fresh rosemary

chop it up, and don’t forget the salt and pepper

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: apple fritters

Home never felt so good and happy. When I walked up the stairs to the baby gate and peered around for Kaweah, she was lying in her dog bed probably thinking, “It’s that Jeremy guy… ho hum.” But when she saw it was me and I called her name, she jumped up and wagged furiously, pawing at the gate before I could even open it. Then she lunged at her stuffed toy hedgehog and shook it around violently (this is what she does when she’s excited) until I was able to put my bags down and give her a belly rub hello. I’ve got heaps of photos to sort through and will share them eventually, but there is other more urgent business at hand. Like the business of choosing two winners of the Colorado care packages!

meet the executor of selection

We took Kaweah outside into the front yard with the intention of hiding a treat, timing how long it took her to find the treat (in milliseconds), and then calculating the number of the winner based on the number of milliseconds modulo the number of comments (407). A little review of math here… modulo is the remainder after division. Kaweah had a hard time figuring out the rules, so we had a few test runs first to explain the game to her (mostly because she just stood in front of Jeremy wondering why he wasn’t giving her a treat). Eventually, she did get it…

45 seconds (she’s even pointing, if you can believe that)

1 minute and 56.91 seconds (it’s hidden in the wild roses)

So our winners are #23 Cathy and #295 Deb in Indiana!! Congratulations, ladies! I will be in touch with you to get your mailing addresses and your t-shirt choices and sizes. Also, a huge thanks to all of the commenters who entered the giveaway. Your interesting facts about you are not just interesting, but entertaining and touching and awesome. Thanks for sharing a part of you with me (and everyone else – no small feat there!) and thanks, as always, for being the best readers ever.

Summer is over. September is done (in an hour). I think to myself that I will miss summer, until I remember that there is snow on the high peaks. This weekend while I unpacked and put my gear away, I made a note to myself to start transitioning our bins. Soon, the bike and hiking gear bins will be replaced with winter and ski gear bins. Now, when daylight fades, I marvel that I have more than a couple of hours before I should be getting to bed! And the sweet fruits of autumn are making their way into the markets next to the big fat orange pumpkins that signal the arrival of my favorite holiday, Halloween!

colorado organic jonagolds

How thrilled was I this weekend when I went to get groceries and wasn’t limited to things that fit in my cooler, or could be prepared by adding hot water? To really cook again in my own kitchen is a beautiful and happy feeling. I grabbed three varieties of apples and decided we’d have a little treat at the House of Butter. Apple fritters.

apples, beer, sugar, butter, spices (ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice), salt, flour, and eggs

separate the eggs, melt the butter, measure the beer

If you walk into a doughnut shop and find apple fritters, they are usually a conglomerate of apple bits and dough and cinnamon and sugar. That’s not the kind of apple fritter I have in mind when I want apple fritters. I like mine to be heavy on the apple with a light batter. The recipe that caught my fancy was the one that called for beer in the batter, because even though I don’t drink beer, I love it in food – especially battered and fried food.

mix the batter ingredients together (except for the flour)

now whisk in the flour until just combined

You can slice your apples up however you like, but I wanted apple rings – thick, juicy, sweet apple rings that you can sink your teeth into. Just peel the apples and core them. I don’t have an apple corer, so I sliced my peeled apples into 1/2-inch thick rings first, then I cut the core out with a cannoli dough ring. If the hole is too small, then the batter will fill it up when you fry it. You may or may not care, but I wanted rings, not disks.

peel

slice

core

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: barbecue chicken pizza

If you haven’t entered to win a Colorado care package yet, you have until the end of the day (midnight) this Friday, September 28, 2012. GO ENTER!!

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Autumn in Colorado is psycho. I mean this in a good way. You get those sunny days that are still warm (nay, hot) and dry. They can be sporadically intermingled with storm tracks that rain down and turn everything underfoot to mud, but leave a powdered sugar dusting of snow on the high peaks. If you are lucky, you might manage a photograph of the leaves turning colors and the mountains brushed in broad strokes of white. That is magic combo meal #1. Toss in a dramatic sunset and you have magic combo meal #2. Aw heck, and if you can combine all of that with FURRY BABY ANIMALS then you’ve pretty much got the holy grail right there. I’m only half kidding.

It’s not uncommon for me to encounter autumn storms while on the fall shoot. We like to think of them as early winter storms – sometimes snowing as much as two feet on the last day of summer! This year there has been a lot of rain and fog and clouds. That can be a bummer when the fog is so thick you can’t see anything or it’s pissing rain so hard that you don’t dare take your camera gear out of your pack. I usually rejoice at the rain and the snow. Bluebird skies and sunny days make for fine photographs, but the onset or clearing of a storm adds a different dimension to a capture.

you can’t have rainbows without rain (mt. crested butte at sunset)

I’ve been all up in my head this week because I’m driving around the mountains alone, assessing the weather every two minutes, and constantly scoping out the trees and the mountains. I was excited when I read rain in the forecast, because it meant snow up high. I got less excited when that soaking rain extended for several days. I started to wonder if it would ever let up.

this kinda sucked (iphone)

Frustrating as the rain can be, it pays to be vigilant and ever hopeful. Otherwise you could miss things if you decided to duck into a café and fritter away the time.

like a hot air balloon

or a cute gate to a ranch

or lovely sunset #1

and lovely sunset #2

So I’m glad I stuck it out, ignoring all the reasons telling me to just pack it up and go home where Jeremy and Kaweah are, where I have a nice comfy bed, where I get regular exercise, and where I eat proper food and have access to my kitchen. As you can imagine, posting a recipe just makes me want to get back to real cooking!

leftover barbecue chicken?

I know it’s hard to imagine having leftover barbecue anything, but it can happen if you make double or triple batches! We generally plow through this barbecue chicken recipe, but I set a few aside to make some pizza the other day.

roughly chopped

pizza time! pizza dough, barbecue chicken, mozzarella, barbecue sauce, red onions, fresh cilantro

The first time I had a barbecue chicken pizza was probably at California Pizza Kitchen in the late 80s in southern California. Talk about back in the day… Now, we tend to make our own pizza at home because they are easy and really quite good. Pizza is flexible like a sandwich – put whatever you fancy on the pizza and omit whatever you dislike. I tried to keep it simple with barbecue sauce, barbecue chicken, mozzarella, red onions, and cilantro. Tempting as it may be to load your pizza full of goodies, a little restraint will result in a better pizza. For reals.

spread barbecue sauce on the dough

cheese, chicken…

ready to go (i recommend adding the cilantro after the pizza is done cooking)

**Jump for more butter**