use real butter

Recipe: brunswick stew

My local hill got five inches of powder last night, so I grabbed my teles and headed out this morning. There’s no more powder, because I skied it all up. Powder feels like silk – except when you biff (and I did one very nice skis-over-head tumbler), but even then it’s a lovely way to wipe out.

Recipe: chocolate stout chili

It can get pretty cool where we live… sometimes down to -20F. I don’t mind the cold. I actually enjoy stepping out into the winter air and feeling the inside of my nose crackle when I breath in. The only real hardship of winter that we encounter is the wind (because snow isn’t hardship, it is recreation). And we encounter it up to 100 mph at times. So while I might not feel cold in 10F, I will feel chilled to the bone at 32F with a wind whipping away every unit of heat my body produces (and I produce a lot of heat – some may call it hot air). It’s blowing today and I can hear the loose sections of roofing flapping in the gusts. I sincerely hope the roofers call before the pieces go flying off into… Kansas.

Soups and stews are so utterly perfect for cold weather days. When I was a graduate student in central New York, I would rally a chili cookoff among the graduate students during this time of year. We always had an impressive array of chilis that included: curry, chocolate, beer, vegetarian, chicken, or the hottest hot you could imagine. It was always a geochemist who went for entering the hottest chili. That’s when my friend Ben thought he made chili from the butt of a pig. He kept chuckling, “Mine is made from Pork Butt.” We finally told him he was an idiot and that the pork butt is part of the shoulder. I should also note that the majority of our cookoff participants were men!

My most recent incarnation of chili involves two of those inspired variations from the cookoffs: chocolate and stout. Chocolate stout, to be precise. I have one of those prize-winning recipes that requires throwing in chorizo, a cow, and a pig, and a million other ingredients, but I like this simple recipe because it’s something you can whip up fairly quickly and because the guys at the local liquor barn get a kick out of my food-related booze purchases.

Recipe: beef stew

I think I caught a cold during the fall color shooting frenzy this weekend. As long as I got some good shots, it was worth the trouble. Sometimes travel can be delightful when you discover really good food – particularly cheap and delicious street food. But that stuff isn’t to be found in Colorado ski resorts where the mantra is to milk someone for every dime you can possibly dislodge from their pockets. I am constantly astonished whenever we get railroaded into eating in a ski resort village (which is rare). We pay far too much money for really pathetic quality. I think it’s a Colorado thing – they are located too close to the flats.

When we rolled into our driveway yesterday, I had two things on my mind: 1) nap and 2) beef stew. I had made a large pot of beef stew before we left for the weekend. I just didn’t want the beef going south on us during our trip and figured it would be nice to come home to a quick meal that only required some reheating. Couldn’t bring it in a cooler to nuke in our room because of the very bumpy dirt roads we were traveling. Trust me, I have experience driving in the field with a cooler full of foods that decided to unceremoniously merge in the back of the truck.

Back to the stew… I have a love affair with many foods, but it delights me to no end when you can take a cheap and tough cut of meat and transform it into the most tender and mouth-watering dish with some patient slow-cooking. And I think this is a dying art because people are short on time and short on the knowledge. This home-style food shows up on restaurant menus because no one does it themselves anymore. Sad, really. I bought a hunk of beef chuck and spent a good amount of time trimming the fat (they include a honking amount on these babies) while cutting into nice cubes. Kaweah sat not more than a foot away, watching devotedly and licking her chops every few minutes.

**Jump for more butter**