use real butter

A yellow dusting of pine pollen appeared on *everything* just two days ago. Pine tree sex has begun in earnest. Before long, nothing that remains outside will be safe from a plastering of yellow pollen - NOTHING! I don’t mind the pollen powder getting all over the place as long as I don’t think of it as a major orgy going on in my yard… But it does wreak havoc on my allergies. It didn’t seem to bother Kaweah much while she sprawled out on the deck this afternoon.

what, is there something on my face?

We were all chilling out on the deck this afternoon because our second visitor P.C. (post chemo) arrived at noon. My dear friend was in the state for a wedding and dropped by our mountain abode for lunch and a short stroll before flying home. Neither of us considers ourself to be an emotional creature, but we could not help a few tears when we greeted and embraced.

a lovely friend on a lovely day

I prepared a simple, yet incredibly satisfying and happy-making menu for this, the second day of summer. It was almost as delightful as the company!


orange and toasted almond salad with citrus dressing
grilled asparagus
yukon gold potato galette
grilled marinated flank steak
lychee panna cotta

salad

yukon gold potato galette with gruyère, parmesan, and shallots

slicing the flank steak

After lunch we went for a quick walk on a local trail to drink in the burst of blooming wildflowers and the lush forest and understory. The bloom is in full swing at our house elevation and we loved it! We also happened upon the mystery flower from the last post (I know it’s been driving poor Diane crazy). I think I’ve identified it now.

anemone multifida: ranunculaceae (buttercup family)

drummond’s rockcress

gorgeous green gentian

the tiniest orchid, a spotted coral root

i love aspen stands throughout the year

not a fan of the color orange, but i love orange wildflowers

Clouds had moved in and made for very pleasant walking conditions, adding a light and cool breeze. That is my kind of weather, and E was happy to have a break from the heat since she lives in So Cal. I missed an opportunity to shoot a red-winged blackbird (with my camera) because Kaweah was acting up…

finishing off the dandelion

e and the blinker

Once back at the house, we had enough time left to indulge in little shots of lychee panna cotta (recipe to come later). I won’t go on and on about what a phenomenal, brilliant, adventurous, creative, kind, deep, and utterly hilarious woman E is, because it will just make you sad that she’s not a part of your life ;) We had such a wonderful 4-hour visit with her. She is one special chica.

The recipe for the marinated flank steak is super duper easy and mucho mas mejor rico (delicious)! Another keeper I got from my ILs… along with my guy. If you have 24 hours to let it marinate in the refrigerator, you have the makings of a Great Meal.

i recommend fresh lemon juice and parsley

flank steak is a great cut for grilling

I like to drop the flank steak and all of the marinade ingredients in a gallon ziploc bag. It is a more efficient way to marinate and it takes up less space in my refrigerator where real estate is at a premium in the summer!

piling everything into the ziploc

After 24 hours of sitting happily with the likes of soy sauce, mustard, lemon juice, parsley, and other friends - the flank steak is ready for the grill. While it grills, I like to pour the marinade into a pot and bring it to a boil. I stir up some cornstarch and water to add and thicken it into a lovely sauce. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d make a small amount of roux for thickening… but I get lazy at times.

let the flank steak rest a few minutes before slicing

slice and serve to the adoring applause of your guests

Grilled Marinated Flank Steak

1-2 lb. flank steak
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp soy sauce
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tbsp yellow mustard
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup vinegar (I use red wine vinegar)
1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced
1 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp garlic powder

Combine all ingredients in a ziploc bag and marinate for 8-24 hours in refrigerator. Grill the steak on high heat to desired doneness (we find 3-4 minutes a side gives us a nice medium rare to rare color). Pour the marinade into a pot and bring to boil. Thicken the marinade by adding 1 tsp of cornstarch mixed with a tbsp of water. Once sauce is bubbling, remove from heat. Let the flank steak rest for 5 minutes before slicing against the grain. Serve the flank steak with the sauce.

I’m not cooking or baking as much as I’d like and that’s mostly because I’m dealing with unpleasant physical issues related to my least favorite of my chemo drugs. [I know that the last infusion was almost 6 weeks ago, but please tell that to the drugs…] I met with my oncologist this morning and he hasn’t seen it before in his many years of poisoning cancer patients. Great! I’m exceptional in every frakking way… Meanwhile, it would seem that all of my medical appointments have piled together lately such that I fell asleep on the table last night during my heart scan. Well, I’d rather sleep through Journey wailing over the speakers than listen to it while isotopes go racing through my heart.

[While waiting for my radiation appointment this afternoon, I’m killing time by blogging from a bakery in Boulder. Dude half my age just walked past and winked at me. WTF?]

Yesterday evening as Jeremy drove me to my heart scan down on the flats, I spied some mammata forming in the distance. Mammata clouds are typical precursors to tornadoes. In very simple terms, they indicate instability in the atmosphere. We see a lot of them in the summer around these parts.

mammata: look like giant grapes or… boobies

The breast-like shape of the clouds is where the name comes from, but a few years ago I was hiking with 5 female atmospheric scientists in the Rockies when we spied mammata forming in the sky. They insisted on referring to them as testicular clouds. So there you have it. I just think they’re very cool (both the clouds and the female atmospheric scientists).

We had a wonderful, albeit short visit with my aunt and her family over the weekend. Everyone enjoyed the time spent together, particularly Kaweah because she received 150% more attention and love than usual. She also found a nice big stick to drag around the lake.

our guests

the happiest pup

going home so soon?

The weather has been getting warm as summer fast approaches our corner of the globe. Although it is usually cool enough where we live that baking in the oven doesn’t make me homicidal, there is nothing quite like serving up homemade ice cream to cool off in the afternoon heat. While Jeremy’s requests usually center on one of three caffeinated flavors (chocolate, coffee, or matcha green tea), I had summer on the brain.

blackberries

I am so enamored with David Lebovitz’s custard-based ice cream recipes from The Perfect Scoop that I had no choice (no choice!!) but to try his recipe for raspberry ice cream - except I subbed blackberries for the raspberries so I could make the stains on my t-shirt even more permanent.

make a purée

David suggests 6 cups of fresh raspberries to yield 1 1/2 cups of raspberry purée. I used 6 cups of blackberries and I can assure you that you only need 4 cups, tops. I also realized that what has been missing in my life is a food mill.

strain out the seeds

Pressing the purée through the sieve is just an exercise in incessant swearing and several extra stains on your clothes (well, several on my clothes anyway). I complained about this on my personal blog and my buddy Rob is now sending me a food mill! What a sweetheart. Or maybe he just wants me to shut up about it already? *snort*

sugar and half-and-half

straining the custard into the cream

This batch of blackberries is, me thinks, early for the season. The flavor is nice, but it isn’t out-of-this-world bursting with sun-ripened goodness. Oh well. And ever since my girl, Peabody, wrote about how the first time she saw a man picking blackberries on the roadside, she thought he was taking a leak… That image is now permanently lodged in my brain. Thanks lady ;)

stirring in the purée

I served the ice cream to our guests over the weekend and heard a lot of mmm mmm mmming. It’s a smooth and rich treat to be sure. The quality is entirely dependent on your ingredients, specifically the berries. So be sure to procure some damn tasty berries to make it worth the effort. It’s a gorgeous color, no?

purple love

Blackberry Ice Cream
adapted from Raspberry Ice Cream in The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

1 1/2 cups half-and-half
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
4 large egg yolks
1 1/2 cups strained blackberry purée (from 4 cups whole blackberries)
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Warm half-and-half and sugar in medium saucepan. Pour cream into large bowl and set mesh strainer over top. In separate medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks. Slowly pour warm milk into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed egg yolks back into saucepan. Stir mixture constantly over med heat with heatproof spatula, scraping bottom as you stir until mixture thickens and coats spatula. Pour custard through the strainer and stir into cream. Mix in purée and lemon juice then stir until cool over ice bath. Chill thoroughly in fridge and churn ice cream according to ice cream maker’s instructions within 4 hours after making mixture (to preserve the fresh berry taste). Makes 1 liter.

Admittedly, I haven’t been cooking much lately. I’ve been having a few issues with my left arm as well as a few other annoying and lingering side effects, thanks to chemo - the gift that keeps on giving… or not. I’m doing my best to ride it out and be patient (ha!) because getting my panties in a wad over it isn’t going to make anything better. On Saturday, our pal drove up to our place and we all went for a nice hike with the crazy (Kaweah) in tow - or rather towing Jeremy along at the end of the leash. The spring runoff is the highest we’ve seen it in our three years here. We’re having a late thaw and we also had some nice late season dumps in the high country.

runoff was high

but that didn’t stop miss crazy from gettin’ her swim in

my chica is a polar engineer

the continental divide from the lake shore

globe flowers love the boggy streamsides

kaweah had the most fun

I am definitely improving in my strength, but it’s merely a fraction of what it used to be. That’s okay though, I at least know how strong I was and I’ve made it my goal to work back up to it and beyond this summer no matter how painful, how long, or how difficult. Besides, getting back in shape is pretty nice when you’ve got so much eye candy around you.

Today I managed some cooking, although it’s all stuff you’ve seen before (and if not, it’s in the archives). I do have some recipes squirreled away for just those times when I’m feeling culinarily uninspired or more accurately: physically hosed. I was first introduced to edamame in a sushi bar. Soybeans in their fuzzy pods are such a treat at the start of a sushi gorging. Only years later did I run across shelled soybeans in bags in the frozen section of various Asian grocery stores. Huh, what’s the fun of that? You don’t get to squeeze the beans out of the pods with all of the lovely salt crystals exploding on your lips. I ignored the bags of shelled soybeans.

bags like this

One day I took my good pal to the Asian grocery store in Ithaca, New York. She’s white and she’s a foodie. Claire was dying to check out the grocery store, but she didn’t want to go by herself (this is a phenomenon that happened with my white friends in So Cal who wanted to go to dim sum - they didn’t want to go without me - I got a little sick of dim sum after a while). She loaded her cart full of groceries after interrogating me about each one. By the end, she didn’t even ask me to identify anything and just chucked in anything that looked remotely interesting. During checkout, the proprietor of the store held up a bag of the frozen shelled soybeans and shouted (all of the Asian women store owners seem to have one volume of speech: shouting), “Dis is guuuuud! You know how to cook!? Stir fry with pork, chicken, beef, or shrimp - it’s all guuuud!”

pork, green onions, garlic

add cornstarch, sesame oil, and soy sauce to the pork

The funny thing about shouting lady was that she always shouted, but happily, at customers. She also shouted at her husband - a quiet and tired looking little Chinese man. I understood what she was saying, and it didn’t even remotely qualify as happy shouting. So, I don’t know if Claire ever went home and tried that combination, I mean - she practically purchased the contents of the entire store that day… But on my weekly shopping trip, I did grab a bag and I did try the shouting lady’s suggestion. Fantastic and so simple to make.

first sauté the pork

then add the soybeans

You can play with this recipe ad nauseum. Add shredded bamboo shoots or pickled mustard greens for more texture and punch to the flavor. I like to serve it with steamed rice, but it is also terrific in a hot bowl of noodles and broth. This is more pedestrian than the stir-fried flank steak, but it is incredibly satisfying.

stir-fried pork and soybeans

Stir-Fried Pork and Soybeans

1/2 lb. pork meat, cut into strips (I prefer dark meat)
1 lb. shelled soybeans (edamame), thawed
3 stalks green onions, cut into 1-inch strips
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
3 tbsps soy sauce
2 tbsps sesame oil
1 tbsp cornstarch
2 tbsps vegetable oil

Mix the pork meat with the cornstarch, soy sauce, and sesame oil until the pork is evenly coated. Heat vegetable oil over high heat in a large sauté pan (frying pan, wok, whatever). When oil is hot, add garlic and green onions and sauté until fragrant. Add the pork to the pan and stir-fry until pork is nearly cooked. Add the soybeans and sauté for another 2-3 minutes. Serve hot.