Edible Baja Arizona - July/August 2015

edible

July/August 2015 • Issue No. 13 • $4.99

BAJA ARIZONA

JUST ADD WATER No. 13 July/August 2015

A River’s Return: The Colorado Meets its Delta Making Local Food Make Sense • When Farmers Stop Farming

for the future

for the savings

for the environment Everyone has a good reason to go solar.

What’s yours?

ROC #185775, 204338

tfssolar.com | 520.740.0736

It’s a wild place of great mystery, where past and present come to meet.

silvercitytourism.org

4  July/August 2015

Features

Contents

6 COYOTE TALKING

8 ONLINE What’s happening at EdibleBajaArizona.com?

10 VOICES We asked the crew of Flowers & Bullets: What makes you proud to eat in Baja Arizona?

16 BOOK Megan Kimble talks to Gary Nabhan about her year unprocessed.

24 GLEANINGS The Sausage Deli; Time Market produce; Patagonia Pie Auction.

96 A RIVER’S RETURN A year ago, the Colorado River reached its delta for the first time in decades.

Now resource managers, scientists, and environmentalists are considering the impact of that water—on people and place.

30 THE HUNGRIEST FOODIE 37 THE PLATE 39 KIDS’ MENU Haile’s Healthy Swaps 43 EDIBLE HOMESTEAD New perspectives on managing summer’s bounty; what to plant now; healthy home canning.

52 GARDENER Q&A On their quarter-acre plot in midtown Tucson, Beth and Art Ledner are demonstrating the art of patient production.

56 FARM REPORT 62 IN THE BUSINESS Café Passe’s Sabine Blaese talks about Tucson’s sense of self.

120 QUITTING SEASON The decision to walk away from a farm is not one taken lightly. So why do farmers stop farming?

68 TABLE It’s Greek to Me is cultivating the culture of Greek yogurt.

76 FOOD TRUCK Nuevo camión de comida venezolana en Tucson es cosa de familia.

86 PHOTO ESSAY Capturing water: photos and text by Michael McNulty.

158 BUZZ Elevating the culture of tequila in the Old Pueblo.

168 BOOZE NEWS All the news that’s fit to drink.

176 SABORES DE SONORA Seeking the “soul of the soil” in Sonora’s best fresh and aged cheeses.

182 INK Book reviews: Chasing Arizona; A Modern Way to Eat; The Broad Fork.

140 FARM TO MARKET From farmers’ markets to wholesale markets, local food producers are seeking stability in sales and access to reliable distribution channels.

186 LAST BITE Max Cannon illustrates.

edible Baja Arizona

5

“BECAUSE, REALLY, ALL YOU CAN DO IS BEGIN.”—MK

COYOTE TALKING

T

wo years ago ,

we set off on a journey to discover, celebrate, and nurture something special that was taking root in this place we call Baja Arizona. We wanted to create a new voice that would tell the compelling story of the burgeoning local foods movement. In that first issue, we said “Eating locally isn’t a feel-good fad for foodies; it’s an incredibly powerful way for communities to reassert control over that most basic commodity: the food on our plates, the drink in our glasses, the very sustenance of our communities and cultural heritages here in Baja Arizona.”

In the last 12 issues, we’ve introduced readers to a wide range of people and organizations, chefs and bakers, brewmasters and winemakers, cheesemakers and food artisans, gardeners and farmers and educators … all engaged in the vital work of helping to “re-localize” our foodshed. We hope you have made discoveries, been encouraged to think more consciously about how you eat, and have celebrated the many rich cultural strands that make this region such an extraordinary place. There are so many more stories to tell—we feel like the journey is just beginning as we start our third year.

The comments and compliments we receive from readers never cease to amaze and inspire us. And we’re astounded by the depth and breadth of support from our advertising partners: nearly 300 local businesses that create a compendium of localism in our pages that is a wonder to behold. And thanks to the more than 1,200 readers who have become subscribers.

Deep appreciation to our contributors, an evergrowing and talented group of writers, photographers, and illustrators whose passion and artistry bring to life the people and topics we cover.

And last but not least, the staff of the magazine deserve your thanks: Jared R. McKinley has doggedly built relationships with our advertisers and provided his expertise on growing food in this challenging climate; Megan Kimble’s fine reporting and writing and her deft hand as an editor have been outstanding (and awardwinning); Steve McMackin’s combination of stellar art direction and technical prowess are fundamental to our success; Katy Gierlach has helped keep track of a million details; Kate Selby’s new contributions are expanding our digital horizons. And there any many, many others listed in the masthead who help make the magazine a reality every eight weeks. Thank you to all!

N

T ucsonan Michael McNulty worked for legendary Arizona congressman Mo Udall and was an influential water lawyer for 30 years. He is also a photographer who has built a 200,000-image library that he calls a “paean to the drumming heartbeat of the Sonoran Desert.” In a photo essay, we share a fraction of his documentation of the sacred and profane when it comes to the subject of water in the desert.

A year ago, the Colorado River reached its delta for the first time in decades. Melissa Sevigny chronicles this landmark experiment to restore a once vibrant riparian area. Notably, the water from the Colorado River is also what recharges City of Tucson aquifers in the Avra Valley and south of the city near Green Valley—after making a journey of more than 300 miles and some 2,000 feet in elevation, powered by coal burned at the Navajo Generating Station. Whenever you turn on your hose, remember that journey.

This quote from Debbie Weingarten’s story “Quitting Season” encapsulates her poignant story about why farmers stop farming: “No one wants to think about farmers calling it quits. It muddies the heroic glow cast around our food producers … But however hard it is to discuss, the rate at which farmers are walking away from their farms— whether by choice or by force—may be the most important measure for whether our food systems are actually working.” There is a serious problem here, and it has to do with a failure in our national food and agriculture system.

Which is a good segue to Megan Kimble’s story “Farm to Market,” which explores the ways local growers are seeking stability in sales and access to reliable distribution channels so they can keep growing food. Consider this fact: According to a study by Ken Meter—one of the most experienced food system analysts in the United States—if everyone in southern Arizona shifted just $5 of their weekly spending on food to a local producer, we would generate $287 million in new farm income. When it comes to creating change in the local food system, your dollars really matter.

We are beyond proud of Megan and her new book, Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food, published on June 23 by William Morrow. Get a copy. It’s a fantastic chronicle.

Finally, if you’re missing the 11 pages of Source Guide listings that are usually in the back of the magazine, don’t despair. We’re launching a digital version that will give you new and improved access at your fingertips, optimized for your mobile device.

As always, we’ll see you around the table. ¡Salud! ati ve

—Douglas Biggers, editor and publisher

6 July/August 2015

Editor and Publisher Douglas Biggers Associate Publisher Jared R. McKinley Managing Editor Megan Kimble Art Director

Steve McMackin

Digital Content Manager Kate Selby Senior Contributing Editor Gary Paul Nabhan Designer

Lyric Peate

Copy Editor

Ford Burkhart

Proofreader

Charity Whiting

Account Manager Katy Gierlach Advertising Consultants

Dhyana Wasson, Kenny Stewart

Contributors

Mary Davis, Bryan Eichhorst, Molly Kincaid, Kathe Lison, Michael McNulty, Lourdes Medrano, Linda Ray, Swetha Sharma, Melissa Sevigny, Haile Thomas, Debbie Weingarten, Suzanne Wright

Photographers & Artists

Jackie Alpers, Max Canon, Christopher Cokinos, Seth Cothrun, Julie DeMarre, Stephen Eginoire, Stephanie Epperson, Krysta Jabczenski, Liora K, Danny Martin, Michael McNulty, Steven Meckler, Molly Patrick, Bridget Shanahan

Distribution Carson Davenport, Royce Davenport, Mel Meijas, Shiloh Thread-Waist Walkosak, Steve and Anne Bell Anderson

On the cover: Water released from Morelos Dam, the final dam on

the Colorado River, at the peak of the pulse flow. The pulse flow mimicked spring flooding and released approximately 106,000 acre-feet of water. This, combined with 52,000 acre-feet of water secured by the Colorado River Delta Water Trust, equals a total of 158,000 acre-feet, or approximately 1 percent of the Colorado River Basin’s annual allocation. April 2014.

Photo by Seth Cothrun

Above: The arrival of water saw an explosion of wildlife and bird

activity along the river corridor. Photo by Seth Cothrun

We’d love to hear from you.

307 S. Convent Ave., Barrio Viejo Tucson, Arizona 85701 520.373.5196 info@edibleBajaArizona.com EdibleBajaArizona.com

Say hello on social media facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona youtube.com/EdibleBajaArizona twitter.com/EdibleBajaAZ flickr.com/ediblebajaarizona instagram.com/ediblebajaaz pinterest.com/edibleba

V olume 3, I ssue 1.

Edible Baja Arizona (ISSN 2374-345X) is published six times annually

by Coyote Talking, LLC. Subscriptions are available for $36 annually by phone or at EdibleBajaArizona.com. Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without the express written permission of the Publisher. Member of the Association of Edible Publishers (AEP).

edible Baja Arizona

7

Join the Conversation Edible Baja Arizona is always serving up fresh content online! Visit EdibleBajaArizona.com.

W

e’ve created a newsletter called Bocaditos; released every Wednesday, it’s packed with little bites to keep you going throughout your week, including: • 5 things to do in Tucson every week • An original recipe, exclusive to the newsletter • Great giveaways to subscribers, like free tickets to the Loft, and gift certificates to great local restaurants • Photo of the week, and more!

Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll send you the recipe to this amazing Grilled Corn Summer Panzanella Salad (below) by blog contributor Isadora Lassance!

T

hanks to our wonderful digital content manager, Kate Selby, we at Edible Baja Arizona have been doing some new and interesting things online! Here are just a few of the highlights.

W

e have a cooking show on YouTube! The first episode of The Sonoran Skillet features our own managing editor, Megan Kimble, joining writer Molly Kincaid to make pasta from local White Sonora wheat and local eggs, plus interviews with two local farmers and chef Chris Bianco.

Go to ediblebajaarizona.com/newsletter to sign up!

O

ur Instagram account has been bursting with photos from places we visit, restaurants we enjoy, gardens we grow (including that of associate publisher Jared McKinley), and behind-the-scenes looks at how we make the magazine.

facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona youtube.com/EdibleBajaArizona twitter.com/EdibleBajaAZ instagram.com/ediblebajaaz pinterest.com/edibleba

8 July/August 2015

(Left) Sally Kane of The Coronet draws sketches for her ads (see page 33).

(Right) The Hungriest Foodie’s garden harvest on May 13.

edible Baja Arizona

9

VOICES

From left to right: Alfonzo Chavez, Jacob Robles, Enrique Garcia, Marisela Reinhard, Dora Martinez, Javier Talamante, Esme Talamante, Selina Talamante, Ayden Alexander, Brandon Alexander, Jennifer Platt, Marcos Perez, Michelle Gradall, Jesus Romero, Alex Peterson, Esteban Voltares, Jeronimo Madril

We Are Flowers & Bullets

F

and bullets are the struggle. We are organizers creating outlets for under-served youth and communities, which highlight the life we live and the places that we come from. By sharing skills, promoting placebased and culturally relevant connections to the barrio, and listening to each others’ stories, we promote sustainable ways of living.

These ways of life address some of the traumas in our community, caused by disproportionate minority incarceration, drug addiction, physical and mental violence, food insecurity, health issues, and economic disparities. We believe food is a good way to address all these issues. lowers are the art

Photography by Steven Meckler edible Baja Arizona 

11

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

What makes you proud to eat in Baja Arizona?

Culinary traditions passed on from elder generations.

Alfonso “Fonz” Edan Chavez, 23

2

Fresh, home grown fruits, veggies, and traditional Mexican recipes handed down from our past generations. That makes me proud to eat here.

Selina Talamante, 37

I’m proud to eat in Baja Arizona because of the stories of our families, history, and traditions that are carried within the food.

Jacob Robles, 25

3

6 I enjoy eating food from here because of all of the beautiful native and Sonoran influences. Makes you proud to be from Tucson’s barrios.

Brandon Alexander, 24

I look at the food prepared by my people as a symbol of resistance.

Tortillas, frijoles, and rice are all you need to realize: la raza eats history, one spoonful at a time.

4

9

5

1

Enrique Garcia Naranjo, 20

There are many reasons to be proud of the food we eat here. I think it all boils down to connections. To the land, to the growers, to our relatives, to our history. Eating here provides us with a sense of place.

Dora Martinez, 27

7 There are many things that make me proud to eat here, from growing your own garden to raising your own meat and eggs. Just living off the land, going to farmers’ markets, trying new recipes and traditional ones.

8

Jennifer Platt

It’s easy to miss the culture traditions and languages that make up our city but if you look hard enough and smell around in the right Barrio, you’ll find Nana getting down on homemade tortillas—that’s what makes me proud.

Jesus “Tito” Romero, 26

12 July/August 2015

I am proud to eat in Baja Arizona because of all the different indigenous cultures that exist. Being Native American, I’m happy to see traditional foods have a presence.

Alexander Peterson, 22

10

I’m very proud to eat in this region.

Makes me proud to eat sustainably ... providing good food for my family, generations of traditional Sonoran recipes.

Esteban Voltares, 34

11

Eating local ingredients. From cooking in my own kitchen, using local produce from the Flowers & Bullets gardens, to getting ingredients from the farmers around Tucson. Growing and supporting local business is what makes me proud to just live in Tucson.

Jeronimo “Mo” Madril, 25

BOOK

A Year Unprocessed A chat with Edible Baja Arizona’s managing editor, Megan Kimble, about her book.

Interview by Gary Paul Nabhan

W

of reportage on local food production and procurement has increased exponentially over the last two decades, the amount of elegant, compelling, and memorable prose about food has not.

Kimble has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and years of experience as a working journalist. As she interviews farmers, ranchers, millers, wine makers, and beekeepers, she coaxes out of her interviewees original, honest information about their lives and livelihoods, embedding them into a literary narrative as cohesive as a good novel. As managing editor of Edible Baja Arizona, Kimble has become a voice in the food world that thought leaders are seeking out to move our conversations in new directions. In Unprocessed, Megan raises the bar for literary food writing, while engaging in new explorations of how the raw becomes cooked, why whole foods matter, and how the money we spend shapes our communities.

—Gary Paul Nabhan hile the amount

16 July/August 2015

Why did you write this book?

I’m not entirely sure why I stopped eating processed food. There was the environment—I’d come of age in an era when global warming was all but assumed, when natural resources were suddenly scarce and our food system was increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. There were political reasons, as I considered the enormous influence food companies wield in our national politics.

And there were economic reasons—I wanted to spend what little money I earned endorsing my local food system, one that I hoped was visible, accountable, and scalable. I was also broke, tired of reading about what I should do. I wanted, instead, to explore what I could do, given limited resources of money and time.

I also happen to love process—how this becomes that, and how that gets from there to here. It’s why I got into journalism— to figure out how the world works, unseen and assumed. I love digging into the seemingly simple questions of our food system.

How does a melon get from the soil in Sonora to a Safeway supermarket? How does muscle become meat? These are no longer simple questions with simple answers and I wrote Unprocessed to start to untangle these networks and to understand how I might sustain myself just a little closer to home. Conveniently, that’s also the mission of this magazine.

You touch on this in the epilogue, but how has your longterm relationship with food changed because of your year of reclaiming real food?

I eat better food. Better for me, but also better tasting. I eat real foods, so I’m usually full. Like so many women—and men—I’d struggled with my weight for years. Eating unprocessed taught me, finally, how to eat real food in moderate amounts—and how to do it without guilt or restriction, but with joy and communion.

More than three years later, I still eat about 90 percent unprocessed. It’s nice, though, to be able to venture out on a Friday night and have a Sonoran hot dog, if that’s what the night calls for. To celebrate birthdays with friends and cake, or holidays with family and Grandma’s stuffing recipe. My year of reclaiming real food taught me how important food is for our bodies, communities, and landscapes, but it also taught me the importance of relationships—and how, sometimes, it’s as much about the food as who you’re eating it with.

How did living in a desert city influence your city-dwelling year?

I was lucky to live in the sunny Southwest—my Community Supported Agriculture program runs year-round, so there was always fresh, local food. I ventured briefly into canning during summer’s bounty, but I would have had to be much more creative with food preservation if I lived somewhere like Minneapolis or New York City.

Because unprocessing my food meant finding sustenance closer to home, the Sonoran desert was an essential part of my 18 July/August 2015

year. I learned about the heritage foods of this place, foods that people have grown and cooked here for centuries. One advantage to seeking out place-based foods is that they connect us to our communities, introducing us not only to the flavors of a place, but also to the people that are growing, processing, and preparing these foods.

So much food writing today is dismissed as self-righteously holier-than-thou in its stance. What values allowed you to avoid that trap?

It was as much about circumstance as values—when I stopped eating processed food, I was busy, broke, and living in a tiny apartment with a janky, understocked kitchen. From the outset, one of my goals was to show that eating whole, unprocessed food would not cost significantly more money—and that preparing that food would not take significantly more time.

What we eat matters, and so I understand how easy it is to climb on a soapbox, to become self-righteous about what other people are eating. But what we eat is also a very complicated thing, influenced by how we grew up and where we live and how much we weigh—and earn. People often ask me, what makes food processed? And I spend a lot of time in the book trying to answer that very question. But I also think that we each have to answer that question ourselves, to find out where it makes sense to draw the line. Given constraints of time, taste, and income, what makes food too processed for you?

2740 S. Kinney Rd. | 520-578-4272 www.CatMountainStation.com

Buffalo Trading Post

Buy-Sell-Trade clothing & decor 520-578-0226

Tucson’s Unique Shopping in a Vintage Ranch Setting. Local Foods, Artwork, Jewelry, Vintage Spencer’s Observatory

Star Tours and Astrophotography 520-578-6085

Eco-friendly B&B in the desert 520-578-6085

Coyote Pause Cafe

Cat Mountain Lodge

Breakfast & Lunch. Comfort food with a Southwestern twist! 520-883-7297

tomorrow exchange buy * sell*trade

EASTSIDE: 6212 E. Speedway • 520-885-8392 | NEAR UA: 2001 E. Speedway • 520-795-0508 Buffalo Outlet in Nogales, AZ: 441 N. Grand Av. • 520-287-9241 | BuffaloExchange.com

edible Baja Arizona

19

You have worked as a bread-and-butter journalist, but also hold an MFA from the University of Arizona in creative writing and nonfiction. How do you balance those two sensibilities in the book?

When I started writing Unprocessed, I had read what many of us have read—how destructive factory farming is to our soils; how terrible industrial food is for our bodies; how inequitably our resources are distributed. But what I continued to struggle with was: So what then? Given what we know, how do we live?

How can we, collectively and individually, create solutions and make change? Answering these kinds of questions required the sensibility of an essayist more than a journalist, and so I was grateful to my years in the MFA program that taught me not only how to write—how to ask big questions and make words into sentences into attempts at answers—but also why we write.

Given constraints of time, taste, and income, what makes food too processed for you?

How did you conduct your research?

Initially, eating unprocessed appealed to me because it was something quiet and personal I could do, on my own terms and in my own kitchen, without inflicting yet another dietary restriction upon the world. But as I quickly realized how little I knew about how plants, animals, and minerals become food, I ventured out into my community to figure out the answers. I didn’t know how wheat became bread, so I interviewed a miller.

I researched supermarkets, visited with beekeepers, brewers, and vintners, and evaporated salt from the sea. I was raised by two vegetarians, so, to reckon with meat, I slaughtered, butchered, and processed a sheep. Unprocessed emerged through the accumulation of experiences as much as through the aggregation of research.

What experience during your year unprocessed makes you laugh with horror or disbelief when you look back on it?

I accidentally went on a date with a fellow who didn’t believe global warming was “a thing.” As it turns out, that’s a deal breaker. ✜ Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food (William Morrow) is available at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.), at HarperCollins.com, or wherever books are sold.

Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally celebrated nature writer, food and farming activist, and proponent of conserving the links between biodiversity and cultural diversity. He is the author of the award-winning Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land and Coming Home to Eat.

20 July/August 2015

gleanings

Chris Fanelli, the owner of Sausage Deli, credits the success of his business to the dedication of his customers—and his dedication to them.

The Sandwich Regular

Veggies at Sausage Deli are still freshly sliced, 35 years later.

By Kate Selby | Photography by Julie DeMarre

C

F anelli is not the original owner of Sausage Deli, but you’d never know it from the love he has for the sandwich shop located at Grant Road and First Avenue.

The Sausage Deli opened its doors in 1978 and quickly become a University of Arizona student favorite. But by 2003, the deli had fallen into obscurity; when Fanelli and his father, Joseph Fanelli, purchased it, it had been boarded up for a few months.

Fanelli describes those first years at the deli as being a family affair: his mom worked the register while his sisters and nieces staffed the kitchen. Eventually, Fanelli and his wife, Valerie, took over the business.

In 2012, after 35 years in the same adobe brick building on the east side of First Avenue, just south of Grant Road, development pressure from an incoming Walgreens presented Fanelli with an opportunity: the deli could relocate to a new building next to (and financed by) Walgreens. Fanelli described the new space as offering “a fresh look, more space for seating, and a larger patio without moving too far away.” Fanelli and his father designed the new restaurant together, and on Valentine’s Day of 2012, the original location of Sausage Deli closed its doors for the last time.

“We do miss the old shack,” says Fanelli. “We’ll never forget it, but we had an opportunity to build a bigger, better Sausage Deli.”

The former incarnation of Sausage Deli is not entirely forgotten: Shallow shelves line the walls surrounding the bar, showcasing as much of the original deli’s vintage beer bottle collection as would fit.

The bottles are not the only tribute to the Sausage Deli of old. The menu is pretty much the same as when Fanelli hr is

24 July/August 2015

and his father took over. While he has considered replacing the menu items that don’t sell regularly, Fanelli points to one customer in particular to explain why he hasn’t. “There’s the one customer a week who gets the liverwurst sandwich—he’s the liverwurst regular—and I can’t delete it, because it’s worth it to that customer.”

“The one reason we’re still around is because of our regulars,” he says. When asked if he worries about competition from major sandwich chains moving into town, Fanelli shrugs. “They do cut into business, but what you pay for is what you get.” Instead, he focuses on quality ingredients and taking care of his customers.

Sausage Deli’s bread is delivered from local wholesale baker Sun-Rise Baking each morning, and the meat and cheese is cut fresh daily, as are their vegetables—no previous-day prep for this sandwich shop. He counts on the quality of the deli’s food to create return customers.

When asked why people should support local businesses, Fanelli’s answer is simple. “We are what your community is made of.”

By the end of the day, roughly 20 dozen loaves of bread, one five-gallon bucket of pickles (also sliced fresh daily), and a lug and a half of tomatoes (about 64 tomatoes, Fanelli clarifies) will have gone into sandwiches. And there’s one more historical element of Sausage Deli that Fanelli is unwilling to change: the Italian dressing that creates the distinctive flavor of many of the deli’s sandwiches. “It costs $19 per gallon, but it’s the signature thing that ties everything together.”

Sausage Deli. 754 E. Grant Road. 520.623.8182.

SausageDeli.com.

100% bamboo 100% sustainable

Style and sustainablity fuse seamlessly in this beautiful, mid-century modern inspired, bamboo collection for your home.

45 years locally owned. bringing you quality and comfort in style.

PHOENIX 1701 E. Camelback 602-266-8060

SCOTTSDALE 15804 N. Scottsdale Rd. (South of Bell) 480-367-6401 TEMPE 2346 E. Southern (at 101) 480-838-3080 TUCSON 3660 E. Fort Lowell 520-795-0316

www.copenhagenliving.com

contemporary furniture & accessories

g

Martha Kelly (left) and Janet Winans expect more than 100 people to show up for the Patagonia Pie Auction, which benefits the community garden.

Pie in Patagonia

The Patagonia Pie Auction offers a glimpse of community in action.

By Kate Selby | Photography by Julie DeMarre

W

W oody and J anet Winans retired to Patagonia, it didn’t take long for Woody to become involved with the community garden. He had been part of the University of Arizona’s Cooperative Extension Master Gardener program, and became president of the board for the Patagonia Community Garden. When it came time to fundraise, the Winans recalled their experience of a pie auction up in Queen Creek, and thought it might be a hit in Patagonia’s tight-knit community. The first Patagonia Pie Auction event was held in 2004; since then, it has become “the event” of the year, according to the current board president, Martha Kelly.

“It’s more a ‘friendraiser’ than a fundraiser,” Janet Winans says. Kelly recalls how Woody Winans would describe it: “It’s not just a pie auction, it’s gathering the tables and chairs and bringing the community in.” While Janet Winans doesn’t consider herself a gardener, after her husband’s death in 2006, Winans says she had no choice but to step up and become honorary co-president of the Patagonia Community Garden in order to keep his spirit involved on the board. These days, Winans primarily takes care of things behind the scenes, which includes recruiting the piemakers and receiving donated pies on the day of the event.

She says, laughing, “I’ll be up to my elbows in pies.”

Every year, the auction raises money for improvements around the garden, such as new irrigation or improvements to old structures.

Tables and chairs for the event are borrowed from community members, further enhancing what Kelly describes as the “down hen

26 July/August 2015

home” feeling of the event. A portion of the money raised also goes to fund a college scholarship for a local graduating high school senior; Patagonia-based Borderlands Restoration matches the garden’s $250 scholarship gift, and the total amount is given to a student pursuing a degree in the field of agriculture. This year, Kelly notes, the recipient’s goals are a little different: graduating senior Verena Miller plans to attend the University of Arizona in the fall with the goal of becoming a scientist, because she wants to “help save the world.” As Kelly says, “How can you say no to that?”

Kelly says some people have been donating the same pies for years. Favorite pies have developed celebrity status; people wait for one particular chocolate pie to show up before they begin bidding. Other notables include a coconut cream pie brought in from Sonoita, and a five-pound mincemeat pie made by Tom Bartholomew of the Spirit Tree Inn B&B. James Fish, who auctions off livestock with tongue-twisting speed at the county fair, serves as auctioneer, and the extra excitement (as well as community goodwill) pays off: pies have sold for as much as $160. With the average pie selling for between $40 and $60, Kelly estimates the auction brings in around $3,000 for the garden, but emphasizes that they just want to “make sure people have a good time.”

The Patagonia Pie Auction will be held on Sept. 26 at 5 p.m., with $5 for entry and $15 for dinner. Contact the Patagonia Community Garden Association at 520.604.0300 or visit Facebook.com/PatagoniaCommunityGarden.

g

Lexi Coburn says she enjoys the artistic side of arranging Time Market’s produce into a fresh, colorful display.

Artful Produce

Time Market puts local on display.

By Kate Selby | Photography by Julie DeMarre

S

of the front doors at Time Market, colorful, well-lit arrangements of lettuce, carrots, beets, peppers, and mushrooms are stacked carefully on matte black shelves, making the refrigerated cabinets look more like the walls of a gallery than the shelves of a produce section.

Lexi Coburn is the person behind the appealing produce display. As Time Market’s produce manager, she brings an art-minded perspective to her work. “I enjoy the artistic aspect of creating our displays and preparing our greens,” she says. “I have an MFA in studio art from the UA, so I appreciate being able to use some of my design skills when I’m not at home making art.”

Coburn also brings a passion for filling her shelves with organic, hard-to-find, and local produce. A backyard gardener herself, Coburn worked for an organic farm in northern California as a teenager. She started working in the retail produce business after finishing her undergraduate degree, and learned about what it takes to manage a produce department working at the Food Conspiracy Co-op during graduate school.

She credits those early days working on the farm for inspiring her work with organic produce. “Working there definitely shaped my view and understanding of how important organics are for the planet and for living a healthy lifestyle. As I’ve gotten older, it’s become more important to me and I always want part of my life to be associated with it,” she says.

Working for Time Market holds a special appeal for Coburn, who says she likes that it is a small, family-owned business. “I appreciate that they are all about quality,” she says. The market’s emphasis on specialty and fine foods allows Coburn to pursue et just to the lef t

28 July/August 2015

more variety than the average supermarket. “I look for hardto-find items such as kaffir lime, black trumpet, and local morel mushrooms, and heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables, like Ashmead’s Kernel apples,” she says.

Another consideration for Coburn is where the produce she carries is grown and who is growing it. “Locally sourced produce is definitely a priority for Time Market, not only for the retail produce display but for the restaurant as well,” she says. Coburn is responsible for most of the ordering for both departments, and says she tries to source locally as often as possible. “The produce is just more vibrant, tastier, and lasts longer!” She points to this past spring, when most of Time Market’s bunched greens, including kale, dandelion greens, and lettuce, was sourced locally and looked “gorgeous.” Harvests like that, she says, “allow us to decrease our orders from California and keep the money here in our community.”

That said, even sourcing produce locally doesn’t mean it’s immune to the challenges of a Tucson summer. “There is a lot more stress on the coolers with summer heat and we have to be more vigilant with maintenance and cleaning,” says Coburn. “We give local items special attention because of the heat they might experience in transportation.”

If there is one thing Coburn wants people to know about Time Market’s produce section, it’s that they “strive to have the freshest, highest quality produce in town.” Thanks to Coburn, they certainly have one of the best arranged. ✜ Time Market. 444 E. University Blvd. 520.622.0761.

Facebook.com/TimeMarketTucson.

I

Aramsay

of knowing many inspiring culinary masters. One of those friends, Kusuma Rao, grew up in Tucson but now lives in Portland. Her family is from India and her cuisine fuses Mexican and Indian influences. When she comes back home every few months, she hosts original pop-up dinners, using ingredients from local gardens and businesses. I recently attended one of her seven course Aramsay dinners.

Aramsay, according to Kumi, is an Indian expression for a way of being, usually on Sonoran white gnocchi in lemon Sundays. You work hard mustard masala and verdolagas all week and then get a day where you drop all cares, rest your body, and fill your belly with great food. As a workaholic, I appreciate this concept very much. Indian and Mexican cuisines have a lot in common: dominance of legumes, use of flatbreads or tortillas for food delivery, and incorporation of chilies, to name a few. With dishes like Thai Kaffir Lime Meatball, White Sonoran Wheat Gnocchi, and Pathrode Lotus Leaves in Crème Fraîche, the culinary excursion was both exotic as well as comforting. Find Kusuma’s recipes at Ruchikala.wordpress.com. have the good fortune

A

Taco Mania

B er lin of the Arizona Daily Star committed to eating tacos every day for 100 days. Tucson Foodie had its month long Taco de Mayo photo contest. Everyone is talking tacos. But for many of us living in Tucson, tacos are just a 30 July/August 2015

ndi

Chilean sea bass and duck confit tacos

Silkworm taco

part of daily life.

I was up in the north side of town recently and dropped by Gringo Grill & Cantina (5900 N. Oracle Road).

My girlfriend, Katy, and I shared a mess of tacos—shrimp, Chilean sea bass, carne asada, duck confit—made by John Hohn, a 2014 Iron Chef winner.

We also had guacamole and tortillas with chipotle butter (yum). Everything was incredibly fresh and the guacamole was one of the best I have had north of the border.

Walking distance from my home near the University of Arizona is BOCA Tacos y Tequila (828 E. Speedway Blvd.). Maria Mazon is an Iron Chef contestant this year and the chef and owner of BOCA—they just celebrated their five-year anniversary. The food she serves is both authentic and innovative. When you go, expect to be wowed, but don’t expect sour cream. And don’t be in a rush. Most often she is there, making everyone’s food. And because everything is very fresh, it takes time. The food is beautifully presented, but unpretentious (tacos come on a piece of wax paper on a cutting board). Drop by for Exotic Taco Wednesday, when you can find tacos made with exotic ingredients like chicken liver, cow udder chicharrónes, or silkworm. I enjoyed the silkworm tacos—they were almost like eating gnocchi.

4

Burgers n’ Dogs

A venue D elicatessen (425 N. Fourth Ave.) is a little hole-in-the-wall deli, in the heart of downtown, known for hosting crazy hot dog contests and for its menu items named after some of Tucson’s more eccentric characters and landmarks. Half starved, I recently went in and had the T-Dog with bacon, jalapeños, onions, pepper jack, and spicy T-Town Mayo. There’s nothing like a hot dog to keep you going during a busy day.

Given where I work and live, I am downtown more than anywhere else in Tucson. When it is time Jalapeño cheddar to eat, I always try to eat somewhere burger with bacon I haven’t been, or somewhere I haven’t been to in a long time. Elliott’s on Congress (135 E. Congress St.) serves many locals and is often missed by those visiting downtown. It is also open fairly late, and is a great little stop just before you go out to the nightclubs (if you do that sort of thing). After having not been to Elliott’s in ages, Katy and I went in desperate for dinner after missing lunch. We shared a massive jalapeño cheddar burger and fries, and a penne pasta with vodka sauce, bacon, and green beans.

Food should be

delicious!

Foraged, local, modern

A James Beard honored restaurant

111. E. College Ave., Silver City, NM (575) 534-0337 www.CuriousKumquat.com

th

The T Dog

All new summer bistro menu, happy hour and the best

rosè list n! in tucso

Bakery • Friday Dinner Breakfast • Lunch

1803 E. Prince at Campbell www.ghiniscafe.com 326.9095

edible Baja Arizona

31

First Times

I

have been hearing about Wild Garlic Grill (2530 N. First Ave.) for a long time. The unassuming façade does not prepare you for the magic happening within. Chef Stephen Schultz has an advanced diploma Ecole De Cuisine from La Varenne in Paris, France, and is still the man at the helm in the kitchen, making him one of the few chefs in Tucson with that sort of training still sweating in the kitchen.

Rumor has it that many chefs in Tucson sit at the bar to watch him cook; the dining room is often populated with Tucson movers and shakers.

Speaking of new, the owners of the popular Prep & Pastry are opening a place for dinner. We went to the soft opening of Commoner & Peking duck Company (6960 E. Sunrise Drive) and shared two dishes: house made pasta with prosciutto, and flat iron pork. Plan your visit so you have time to camp out, eat, and drink.

Flat iron pork

I

At Home

a lot of heirloom chapalote corn in my house right now, leftovers from an event earlier this year, and I finally found time to make homemade masa. Chapalote (also known as pinole maiz) is an ancient heirloom variety, the first to enter the United States from Central Mexico and one of the celebrated Slow Food Ark of Taste ingredients (SlowFoodUSA.org). Today, we have bred (and genetically modified) corn to have much bigger kernels and bigger ears,

32  July/August 2015

have

and to produce more per acre, often at the cost of taste and nutrition. The old and ancient varieties may not be cash crops for the farmer, but they taste authentic and I prefer them as a consumer and gardener.

When you make masa at home, you have to start with a process called nixtamalization, which involves cooking and steeping the dried corn kernels in an alkaline solution, then cooking them until tender.

The masa I made was chunky and delicious.

With tamales on my mind, I flavored the masa with the juices and fat from some Sky Island Brand chuck roast and a homemade chili sauce, and stuffed the masa with shredded beef, cheese, and home-grown, Tamales roasted green chilis. Of course, following tradition, I did not forget to add two small green olives (with pits) in each tamal, which call the eater to eat with reverence (or risk chipping a tooth on an olive pit).

Follow my whole process of making masa and tamales at EdibleBajaArizona.com. ✜

Rustic Food Classic Drinks Live Music Lunch • Dinner • Brunch

Savory & Sweet Caterings

Events Calendar & Hours at www.cafecoronet.com On the corner of 4th ave. & 9th st. • 520.222.9889

Jared R. McKinley is the associate publisher of Edible Baja Arizona.

Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @HungriestFoodie.

SUMMER ROADTRIP MENU from

Masa grinder

MEMORIAL DAY

to

L ABOR DAY

(520) 323-7739 GRANT & TUCSON kingfishertucson.com edible Baja Arizona

33

34  July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

35

erican Grill Southwest Am

520-296-1631

6320 E. Tanque Verde Bar opens at 3pm Dinner 5pm nightly

36  July/August 2015

Tucson AZ jonathanscork.com

1

2

The Plate Plate the

4

3

That one thing they should never take off the food truck.

1234 Photography by Liora K

Bam Bam Steak Yakisoba Just the right mix of salty and sweet—these soba noodles come mixed with carrots, cabbage, squash, red peppers, green onions, cilantro, yakisoba sauce, Sriracha, and sesame seeds. $8 Facebook.com/Bam BamTruck

Pinup Pastries Salted Caramel Whoopie Pie The devil is in the details here—the salted caramel buttercream ice cream is made with a coarse grain French sea salt, balancing the sweetness of the buttercream. $3.50.

Facebook.com/PinUp PastriesTucson

Twisted Tandoor Samosas Some more samosa? The beef and feta samosas come stuffed with a filling of ground beef, potatoes, Serrano peppers, feta cheese, and Indian spices.

All that stuffed in a lard-free tortilla and deep fried? Yes please. $6 Facebook.com/TheTwisted Tandor

Visit EdibleBajaArizona.com to read more about these food trucks.

Zany Beaver Bacon Poutine French fries and crispy bacon.

Need we say more? Okay, here’s more: hand-cut twicefried French fries, locally produced jalapeno pepper jack curds, and extra crispy bacon melts together with a coating of original, secret recipe gravy, made with lots of love. $6.

Facebook.com/ZanyBeaver

edible Baja Arizona

37

a tradition of inspiring excellence

f OR OVER 30 YEARS, The Gregory School has provided an unparalleled educational experience that goes beyond strong academics. The school creates a supportive community where pursuing individual passion is encouraged and a love for learning is fostered. Our students graduate with the confidence to succeed in college and beyond.

Please Call for a tour. (520) 327-6395

Formerly St. Gregory College Preparatory School 3231 N. Craycroft Road, Tucson, Arizona www.GregorySchool.org

38  July/August 2015

KIDS’ MENU

Haile’s Healthy Swaps

By Haile Thomas | Photography by Jackie Alpers

W

in the triple digits, cooking is all about limiting the use of my stove and making my meals light, fresh, and flavorful. One of my favorite ways to do that is to cook with zucchini. I love zucchini. I love it raw on sandwiches, in salads, stuffed and baked, and cooked in stews.

It’s also great blended in sauces, but one of my favorite ways is spiralized into noodles. I call them zoodles and I serve them with any number of sauces or pestos. This recipe is definitely one of my favorite swaps using zucchini in place of pasta, and it’s perfect with the yummy and refreshing raw homemade Sundried Tomato & Basil Sauce.

As you can tell, in the summer months, I gravitate toward fresh and crunchy raw fruits and veggies made in creative ways.

They are perfect because they are easy to pull together, light, and full of nutrition to power my day. One of my favorite raw salads ith temps

is my Apple, Kale, and Carrot Salad. I love all of the different textures and flavors; it’s a really yummy combination that’s a fantastic substitute for salads filled with “typical” ingredients and coated in heavy salad dressings. I think you too will enjoy this recipe—sweet and savory, a little tart and a little crunchy.

I love whipping up my Mango Mint Chia Pudding for breakfast. You can put chia seeds in smoothies, salads, and even desserts, but for me chia puddings are so easy and delicious, and a great swap for sugary cereals or heavy oatmeal. The fresh mango makes this chia pudding perfectly sweet—and refreshing, with a hint of mint. And if you love coconut milk (like me), then this is breakfast heaven. And to top it off, you can make this recipe right before you go to bed, so you’ll have a delicious and nutritious insta-breakfast in the morning.

Zoodles with Sundried Tomato & Basil Sauce Ingredients: For the sauce

2 large tomatoes (quartered) ½ large sweet onion or 1 small yellow onion, diced (about 1 cup)

2 large garlic cloves, minced ¼ cup fresh basil leaves, minced

1 cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes (drained)

2 tablespoons fresh thyme

1 teaspoon dried oregano ¼ - ½ teaspoon fine grain sea salt freshly ground black pepper red pepper flakes (optional) For the noodles

5 medium zucchini, spiralized or julienned

Directions: Add all sauce ingredients into a blender.

Blend until incorporated but still slightly chunky. Spiralize zucchini. Ladle sauce over a bed of zoodles. (Sauce may also be heated, but I enjoy it fully raw for a fresh, light, and refreshingly delicious twist.)

Mango Mint Chia Pudding Ingredients: ⅓ cup chia seeds

2 cups coconut milk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 large mango, diced 5-10 mint leaves, thinly sliced

Directions: Mix the chia seeds, coconut milk, vanilla extract, and cinnamon together in a large bowl. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight. The next morning—or at least 5 to 6 hours later—remove the mixture from fridge. It should have a pudding-like consistency. Top with mango and mint and enjoy!

Apple, Kale, and Carrot Salad with Ginger Apple Cider Dressing Ingredients: For the salad

1 bunch kale, de-stemmed and chopped into slivers

1 cup shredded apple

1 cup shredded carrot For the dressing

2 tablespoons lemon juice

4 tablespoons apple cider

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 teaspoons fresh ginger

2 tablespoons honey or agave syrup

2 apples cored and sliced

Directions: Chop kale into thin slivers. Add shredded apple and carrot. Blend dressing ingredients and toss into kale mixture. Top with apple slices. Enjoy!

40 July/August 2015

Restaurant & Bar

Only a short stroll across the Arizona border, nestled in the historic Casa Margot is La Roca.

Savor classic Sonoran cuisine made with produce from Northern Mexico’s fertile valleys, the freshest seafood from the Sea of Cortez, and choice beef from the foothills of the Sierra Madres.

Plutarco Elías Calles, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico T: (520) 313-6313 www.larocarestaurant.com

edible Baja Arizona

41

[E dible H omestead ]

New Perspectives on Managing Bounty

By Jared R. McKinley | Illustrations by Danny Martin

S

ometimes what you do in your kitchen can totally

change how you view and manage your garden. I have a very good collection of books on food preservation, pickling, fermentation, and a lot of cookbooks. But one book has really opened up my perspective: Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipes, by Nicolaus Balla and Courtney Burns, chefs behind the famous San Francisco restaurant Bar Tartine.

They are fiercely devoted to quality ingredients, to the technique of good cuisine, and to eating with the seasons.

The challenge for me has always been: Now that I have grown all this produce, what do I do with it all? What makes this book so compelling are the options and techniques they present as solutions for those excess crops—the perfect way to manage the bounty of the garden.

I had long ago solved this problem with tomatoes. You can make sauce, sun dry them, preserve them in oils, make lacto-fermented tomatoes, or can them in various ways. But what about all the peppers, eggplant, squash; what about those bolting herbs? Balla and Burns provide creative and numerous solutions. How about charred eggplant that is dehydrated, powdered, and mixed with chili, onion, and huitlacoche powder to make an earthy, smoky spice mix?

How about infused fennel flower oil? How about pickled green elderberries or green walnuts? Wow. Slowly the commercial products in my pantry and refrigerator are being replaced by label-less and gorgeous jars of pickles, vinegars, oils, preserves, dehydrated herbs, vegetables and fruits, chutneys, and home ground spices. These products are far superior to what I find in the grocery store because they are fresher. And they look so darn pretty, without loud labels full of branding and marketing mumbo-jumbo.

Most of these techniques are light on preparation time (though sometimes they take some waiting time to ferment, dry, or infuse). And honestly, I think it’s a lifestyle improvement to spend some time in the kitchen slicing oranges to candy them, or stuffing peppers into a jar for pickling—at least, it’s much preferable to standing in line at the grocery store. All meals in my house now have something fresh and something pickled, embellished with these colorful spice and oil blends that make boring dishes extraordinary.

That leads me back to the garden. Suddenly I am not afraid of too much squash. And what if I pickle yarrow flowers? Or those green nasturtium seeds? As my garden yields more, I am wasting less and my quality of life is improving.

edible Baja Arizona

43

[E.H.] M onsoon Planting

T

he longer you live here, the

more obsessed you become about the summer rains. The summer really contains two seasons: the dry part of summer and the monsoon.

If you are new here, monsoon is characterized by an increase in humidity and precipitation. But don’t forget the wind.

The word monsoon is derived from an Arabic word “mausim” which refers to a change in the wind direction. During the winter in Baja Arizona, the primary wind flow is from the west, and any moisture we get comes in with those winds: slow, calm drizzles that influence our spring wildflower season. As we head into summer, the winds start coming from a southerly or southeasterly direction.

This pulls moisture from the tropical part of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, dumping torrential rainstorms with lightning and thunder.

As I write this in June, however, the weather has been unusual. We had a cooler than normal May, and June has already brought us remnants of tropical storms from the south. Is this the Super El Niño we keep hearing about? Supposedly, this El Niño is a monster.

So prepare for rain. And if you’re from here, you’ll also be prepared to be disappointed if it doesn’t happen. Because we live in a place where rain is elusive and unpredictable.

Once you get used to summer gardening, you will notice that your work yields more results when the humidity picks up. We may not love humidity, but plants love it, so long as their other needs are being met. This is a great time to plant tepary beans, amaranth, corn, cowpea, watermelon, and cucumber. And that humidity makes it possible for you to plant new seedlings of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. If you do plant any new seedlings this time of year, be aware they will need close observation. It’s much hotter than it was in the spring, and before they get established, those little rootballs can dry out fast. During this time of the year, always choose shorter growing season varieties of these sorts of crops.

W inter I s Coming

P

eople always look at me strangely when

I start talking about the cool season in the middle of summer, but during late July and August, you can get a head start on many winter crops, especially the longer sea-

44 July/August 2015

son varieties (varieties that need more time to develop). You can start seedlings of any leafy green vegetable, root crop, peas and cool season legumes like garbanzos and favas, cool season herbs like cilantro, parsley, and dill, onion and garlic starts, any perennial herb like thyme or oregano, artichokes and, of course, fruit trees. With the winter herbs, greens, and root crops, look out for slow bolt or heat resistant varieties. You most likely will get some bolting (premature flowering of annual crops), but the crops that get established are likely to have a great anchor into the season. Not to mention, getting ahead also means something besides beans, squash, and melon to eat. I always long for fresh cilantro.

M aintenance

I

f you have figured out how to successfully grow plants in the summer, some maintenance should be addressed. Your first crops, planted in the spring, by now are unruly, rangy, perhaps not producing like they did earlier. You may be keeping them alive hoping they will flush again with fruits when the weather cools. The summer garden is not like the winter garden. The rambling nature of these crops call for discernment. Why keep that overgrown, nonproducing tomato when you can yank it up, compost it, and start a fresh plant? Even if that overgrown plant could come back and yield fruit, it will take about the same amount of time it would take a young plant to grow and fruit.

Make room.

C rop Features

Mayo Watermelon This is the perfect crop to start during monsoon.

Seeds respond to the weather with quick germination; by the fall, you will have a lot of rich tasting, red-fruited watermelons. Plant in moderate- to well-amended soil with regular, steady water. Mayo watermelons are well-suited to our climate and require less time and energy than many other varieties. You can tell the fruit is ripe when the tendril (a spirally vining stem that helps vining plants climb) starts to turn brown and the underside of the fruit is yellowing; when you tap the fruit, it will begin to have a lower-pitched thumping sound (compare with clearly unripe fruits to gauge the difference). Fruits are small and round to oblong and large. Seeds are available from Native Seeds/SEARCH (NativeSeeds.org).

Silverbell Nursery

Family owned and operated Organic vegetables, fertilizers, soil & amendments Plants, shrubs, trees, cacti Premium dog & cat food, animal health products Mesquite firewood Landscape istallation & maintenance

2730 N Silverbell Rd.

520.622.3894

Futo-Spindle Bitter Melon Mormodica charantia Bitter melon (also known as goya) is an unusual fruit originating in India but planted throughout Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. This heat-tolerant plant will produce copious amounts of bitter, 6-8 inch warty fruits. The fruits are picked before they turn yellow, and are most often brined, and cooked in stir-fries, soups, and dim sum. There are also various pickle recipes for bitter melon. In China, the melon’s bitter flavor is sometimes used in place of hops as a bittering agent in beer. Young shoots and leaves are also eaten, usually stir-fried. Plants are vines and are easy to grow in regular garden soil. Seeds must be obtained fresh and are available at Kitazawa Seed Company (KitazawaSeed.com).

edible Baja Arizona

45

[E.H.] Remember: with tomatoes, beans, corn, eggplant, squash, melon, and peppers, your aim is to get the fruit. So you encourage flowering. But with basil and thyme, it is the opposite. You want to limit blooming because your aim is more leaves. Keep snipping off those flower buds to just above a leaf node (where new stems emerge on a branch). This also encourages lush, branching plants.

With success in the garden comes responsibility. A balance of life processes maintains healthy soil. Those processes are many, and besides plant growth, they include activity from bacteria, fungi, protozoans and other microorganisms, insects and annelida (earthworms and the like), manure from larger organisms, and of course, decomposing organisms of all sorts, big and small. As you encourage the plant growth, don’t forget about all these other processes that make your soil productive: fresh compost, worm castings (you can purchase from local plant nurseries or raise your own worms), bat guano, and organic fertilizers like kelp meal and fish emulsion. Also add a layer of straw or other top dressing as previously applied mulch layers decompose.

46 July/August 2015

M ake Your O wn Fish E mulsion

T

he problem with commercial fish emulsion is that it has to be rendered inert to store in a container.

That entails adding sulfur to kill microorganisms.

Some people don’t mind the addition of sulfur to their garden, but I don’t particularly want it in mine because it can damage microorganisms. Luckily you can make your own.

After a nice fish dinner, gather the skins, heads, fins, and any parts of the fish you did not eat (raw or cooked), and put them into a blender. Blend up the fish, adding water until it is almost a pure liquid. Strain out the solids (put them in the compost or feed to your chickens), and add liquid to water at 1 part fish juice to about 20 parts water.

Boom—fish emulsion. Add to the garden as necessary. ✜

Jared R. McKinley is the associate publisher of Edible Baja Arizona. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @HungriestFoodie. Visit EdibleBajaArizona.com for a schedule of his gardening classes.

edible Baja Arizona

47

[E.H.]

Keep H ealthy Foods H ealthy

By Linda Ray | Photography by Molly Patrick

A

t least once a year an outbreak of foodborne

pathogens sweeps the headlines. Salmonella and E. coli are common culprits. This year botulism and listeria have captured media attention.

Healthy adults and children may ingest tiny amounts of pathogens with few or mild effects—which is what we usually call food poisoning. Infants, elderly people, and anyone with a compromised immune system are always in danger. The threat of serious symptoms increases over time as bacteria grow in hospitable environments—not too hot or cold, with just enough air and not too much acid.

It’s important to remember that these cases are news because they are rare. But growing interest in whole food and raw food has increased the consumption of raw milk and related products, often the source of listeria. And successful home farming has led to increased interest in food preservation. Canned low-acid foods are uniquely subject to botulism proliferation.

Due to the success of the local food movement, production and handling considerations once relevant only to

48 July/August 2015

commercial manufacturers now pertain to home kitchens as well. But with the right equipment, scrupulous cleanliness, a supply of pH-measuring strips, and a USDA-approved recipe, experienced and conscientious cooks can fearlessly stock their pantries and load up their friends with safe canned gifts from their own kitchens.

There’s no substitute for a strict cleanliness regimen when handling food and everything that touches it. The most serious food pathogens are transmitted by contact with bacteria in feces. A little thought about potential sources can yield surprising insights about just how widespread the presence of such invisible bacteria may be in the home, and just how much they might multiply in food preparation and storage.

To communicate with and help home food-handlers, several government agencies related to food, agriculture, and disease control collaborate on an up-to-the minute site at FoodSafety.gov. The site’s homepage summarizes critical food-preparation basics with a rubric of “Clean, Separate, Cook, Chill,” presented in easy-to-digest videos. Even

Lab Tested & Proven for Effectiveness A FAIRFAX COMPANIES PRODUCT

Available at Fairfax locations

NORTHWEST 5300 W. Ina Road EAST 7301 E. Speedway

(turn north on Prudence)

The Best Organic Fertilizer for gardens, flowers, trees, and shrubs Restores the Nutrients and Biology to your soil.

Powered by Beneficial Soil Microbes.

TanksGreenStuff.com

1-800-270-TANK

edible Baja Arizona

49

long-time cooks can benefit from the refresher and may even find something new in recent research.

For the canning process, the best counsel comes from Cheralyn Schmidt, founder and senior program director of the UA’s Garden Kitchen. She cautions that safe canning requires an understanding of food chemistry and an abundance of respect for bacteria.

For proven techniques and recipes for safe canning, Schmidt recommends the USDA’s Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2009 revision, which can be downloaded for free at the website for the National Center for Home

50 July/August 2015

Food Preservation (Nchfp.uga.edu); and what’s known as the canning Bible, The Ball Blue Book of Preserving, in any edition since 1994. Both are technically comprehensive, amply illustrated, and indispensable for every skill level. Both also provide detailed information for safe alternative preservation through freezing and drying.

“Freezing and drying are much better ways to preserve things,” Schmidt says. “If you freeze something, you slow down the bacterial progression. If you dry something, you remove the water so the pathogens can’t grow.”

Pickling preparations canned in water baths are the least risky for southern Arizona’s common late summer corn and zucchini, both low in acid and vulnerable to botulism. The Complete Guide and the Blue Book both have recipes for several kinds of zucchini pickles.

Schmidt suggests freezing summer fruits and the juice of prickly-pear fruit, or tunas, coming ripe this season.

In winter, preserve a pomegranate crop the same way, as juice. Plan to boil and dry cholla buds in the spring, but nopales will require pressure canning by experts only.

“The pressure cooker is like the calculus of cooking,” Schmidt says. “You need to work up to it a little bit.”

Advanced canners may want to try a vacuum packing method to preserve their mesquite flour.

Some crops perhaps shouldn’t be canned at all.

Schmidt points out that canned goods should be used within a year, but potatoes and hard winter squash will do just fine on their own for six months when stored in a cool, dry place. Canning them could be a waste of time and tie up jars that could be used for something else.

And if it’s nostalgia for old family canning recipes that’s inspiring a venture into food preservation, Schmidt seems to respectfully suggest that you can it. “You never use a canning recipe that’s 50 years old,” she says,” because vegetables and pathogens can change over time.”

For instance tomatoes used to be a lot more acid, with a lower pH level. And did that heritage recipe originate at the same altitude? “Elevation changes the atmospheric pressure and the temperature at which water boils,” Schmidt notes. Boiling temperature, pressure, and pH level all require precision control for safe canning.

Schmidt says that in any case in grandma’s day canning was a party. It was a community event similar to the Tohono O’odham traditions of saguaro fruit gathering, and the Mexican tradition of tamale-making. For anyone curious about canning, she suggests a tomato-canning party with friends who have experience and a collection of the right gear, which can be costly to assemble.

The party is ideal for folks who’ve planted determinate tomatoes—plants that bear fruit at the same time.

Even better, you can organize and invite friends for a tomato-canning party at the Garden Kitchen, which frequently hosts such private and public events. The party could include training in knife skills as well as canning basics, and everyone can go home with new skills and great memories along with their freshly canned tomatoes. ✜ The Garden Kitchen. 2205 S. Fourth Ave. 520.621.0476.

TheGardenKitchen.org.

Linda Ray has written for the Tucson Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader. She and her valiant pup, Gozo, live in an unmanageable landscape in Central Tucson.

edible Baja Arizona

51

[E.H.]

Gardener Q&A: Beth and Art Ledner O n their quarter -acre plot in midtown T ucson, Beth and A rt L edner are demonstrating the art of patient production .

By Steve Renzi | Photography by Stephanie Epperson

B

eth Ledner was a secretary who dreamed of becoming

a farmer. Four years ago, her dreams became reality when she and her husband, Art, started the River Walk Farm, a small patch of land in midtown Tucson that borders the south bank of the Rillito. Beth and Art maintain fruit trees and grow several kinds of vegetables, including 15 distinct types of heritage tomatoes; they practice aquaponics, raise 50 chickens, and demonstrate that raising local food and eating healthy is possible for anyone.

How did you get started?

I was a legal secretary for 15 years [and] wound up as the office administrator for the Jane Goodall Institute.

Jane opened my eyes and working there changed my thinking about animals and the Earth. I wanted to eat healthy and grow my own food and just started planting tomatoes. [Now] we have organically grown vegetables, fruits, and herbs. We also raise chickens and have Java hens and a couple of Java roosters.

Originally, we farmed on our neighbor’s vacant two-acre lot.

Then he got arrested for money laundering and the federal government confiscated his property. The government gave us 30 days to move. We had to move everything from two acres back to the one-quarter lot surrounding our home—which we did.

52 July/August 2015

How did you manage?

We did it by readjusting our thinking. Instead of growing in big, long rows, we planted everything by the square foot. I learned about square-foot gardening by watching Mel Bartholomew on television. It is called intensive microgardening.

So on a one-quarter acre of land, we grow cucumbers, peppers, squash, zucchini, watermelon, herbs, oranges, lemons, grapes, and apples. We also plant using rows of raised trays where we grow tomatoes using aquaponics.

Art, how does aquaponics work in the desert?

Actually, we use about 80 percent less water than traditional ground farming.

Aquaponics uses the same water over and over again. The fish live in storage tanks and their waste fertilizes the water, which is then pumped and piped into the plant trays. The plant roots obtain nutrients from the fertilized water and that water is recycled back into the fish storage tanks and the cycle repeats. The only water lost is through evaporation.

The fish we use are tilapia, koi, and goldfish. We feed the fish, and the fish fertilize our plants. After about five months, we eat the fish—they taste great baked or cooked on the grill.

Art and Beth Ledner are making do with little space, cultivating dozens of foods on a quarter-acre of land.

edible Baja Arizona

53

[E.H.]

What’s it like living with 50 chickens? For one, you eat a lot of eggs.

Beth, how do you manage to grow your plants organically?

One method is called companion planting. For example, we’ll surround our tomato plants with basil, which will pull bugs away from the tomato plants preventing aphids and hookworms. Garlic will keep rabbits and squirrels away because they don’t like the smell. To prevent ground squirrels, moles, and mice, we spray peppermint oil mixed with water and a little dish soap on some of our plants and herbs. Finally, we sacrifice select plants that I call “trap plants.” Look at that tomato plant with the half-eaten tomato still on the vine. The bugs or rodents will concentrate on finishing that tomato off and hopefully leave the others alone. It’s an integrated pest management system; we have learned so much through trial and error and talking to and networking with other gardeners.

Who eats all the food you produce?

Our fruits, vegetables, and herbs are eaten by family members, neighbors, friends, and customers who come to buy eggs.

There is a new backyard growers market at the library called Tuesdays on Pennington. We’re going to be making our first foray into a market situation with our produce, eggs, and home baked goods. So we’ll see how that goes.

What’s it like living with 50 chickens?

Well, the roosters start crowing and the chickens wake up at 4 a.m., but I ignore them and don’t get out of bed until 7 54 July/August 2015

a.m. We’re allowed to have roosters unlike most of the City of Tucson. Most people have no idea about this area; we’re sort of hidden away, backed up against the Rillito wash and surrounded by horse stables. And we do get predators. Once, in the middle of the day, I scared off a bobcat that had three dead chickens lined up in a row. I also caught a red fox in our coop and had to let him out. Twenty of our birds are Java chickens, which are the second oldest American breed of chicken. They nearly went extinct but were brought back starting about 15 years ago, although they are still on the critically endangered list. Java chickens are excellent egg layers, very calm birds and very friendly—even the roosters. They also handle summer heat well.

What have you learned?

Patience. A lot of patience. We’ve had our setbacks, but I love doing this. I started because I wanted to be able to afford to eat healthy and share with others. When my granddaughter visits, she would rather eat one of my homemade pickles than a candy bar. ✜ Steve Renzi is a local freelance writer who has written about subjects ranging from raising chickens to dropping the atomic bomb.

edible Baja Arizona

55

[E.H.]

Farm Report W hat’s in season in Baja A rizona

By Sara Jones | Photography by Liora K

S

ummer reveals the essence of the

Sonoran Desert—the heat and monsoon storms are a defining characteristic of our region. This means that farming during the summer has its own challenges and rewards. Summer vegetables are a lot of work, require abundant space, and take a long time to produce compared to quick-growing, cool-weather crops. And the heat can take its toll on even the hardiest crops.

For plants growing this time of year, no amount of irrigation is as beneficial as a monsoon storm. Anne Loftfield of High Energy Agriculture says, “Irrigation water has more salts than plants need. Rain not only refreshes and cleans plants, but washes away accumulated salt. The increased vitality after a good monsoon is apparent almost immediately.”

The summer rainy season is a traditional planting time for native crops like tepary beans and corn. Many farmers take advantage of the rains to plant crops that will bear fruit late into the fall. But summer storms (or lack thereof ) can wreak havoc on the harvest. Torrential downpours can cause flooding or turn into hailstorms, damaging produce, hurting harvest, and even blocking farmers trying to get to market. Storms that flood one farm can leave a neighboring farm dry.

“I’ve watched storms come up from the southeast and literally split into two smaller storms, and move around the perimeter of our land, reconnect northeast of us, and carry on,” says Al Lakomis, formerly of Walking J Farm. Besides confronting us with erratic weather, monsoon rains and longer days encourage the growth of weeds. Squash and cucumber beetles, grasshoppers, tomato hornworms, and other large plant-eating bugs thrive in

56 July/August 2015

the summer and can decimate plants in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Despite these challenges, the rewards are great. These are the fruits and vegetables that people swoon over. Unless you’re growing your own, farmers’ markets and CSA shares are the best places to get summer vegetables bursting with freshness. Fruits and vegetables left to ripen on the vine accumulate more sugars, making for delicious yet highly perishable produce that is difficult for grocers to stock. Farmers can bring those crops directly to the market. This means they can harvest crops at their ideal ripeness and use heirloom seeds that produce all kinds of produce in strange shapes and colors. Shopping at the farmers’ markets or belonging to a CSA gives you a chance to try some of these tasty and distinct varieties.

Summer produce can be extremely delicate at its peak. Ready to burst and easily bruised, farmers have to be extra careful transporting and displaying these beauties. Be gentle when handling—ask farmers to help you select the best produce based on when you will be eating it. Less-ripe melons, tomatoes, and peaches can be left on the countertop to ripen for a few days if needed.

Peppers (sweet and hot), squash, eggplant, tomatillos, and okra thrive in the summer heat. These meaty veggies are delicious when stewed in dishes like ratatouille and gumbo. They are also great for grilling. Thread okra and small peppers on a skewer for easy handling. Tomatillos and large peppers are delicious blistered on the grill and puréed with onions and garlic for a green salsa. Squash and eggplant can be sliced into ½-inch thick pieces, marinated in a simple vinaigrette, and grilled until tender and lightly charred. Whether grilled, stewed, or

edible Baja Arizona

57

[E.H.] lightly sautéed , these summer vegetables taste great with pesto, made from bunches of basil available at markets or growing in your backyard.

Greens are hard to find at markets in the summer, but now shoppers will have another option. Larry’s Veggies has a new aquaponics system that they plan to use for delicate greens like lettuce, bok choy, and cilantro. Also, keep an eye out for heat resistant greens like amaranth and verdolagas, which are tasty raw or cooked. Both greens are great stirred into a bean soup or sautéed with onions. Verdolagas, or purslane, is particularly good chopped into a Mediterranean-inspired salad with tomatoes, onions, and feta cheese dressed in a light vinaigrette.

Many summer plants are decidedly thirst quenching, perfect for the sweltering heat. Keep an eye out for large Tohono O’odham yellow-fleshed watermelon, which are on the Slow Food Ark of Taste list for Arizona. Though traditionally planted with the monsoon rains, you can find these watermelon from early July into the fall. Another desert-adapted crop is the Armenian cucumber. The long cucumbers (usually between two and three feet) are actually more closely related to melons than the cucumbers we are familiar with at the supermarket.

Available in either a pale, ridged variety or a darkstriped snaking variety, Armenian cucumbers have mild, crisp flesh.

What can you do with a three-foot Armenian cucumber or a 30-pound watermelon? Make a refreshing drink! This drink is one of the best ways to beat the heat and keep your electrolytes balanced.

Don’t bother removing any seeds—they offer extra nutrition and flavor and any chunks will be strained out anyway.

Watermelon Cucumber Agua Fresca For 1 gallon you will need approximately: 3 quarts of any mixture of cucumber, watermelon, cantaloupe or honeydew, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon to 1/2 cup agave nectar 2-3 tablespoons lemon or lime juice Pinch of salt, if desired

In batches, purée in a food processor or blender chunks of fruit and/or cucumber, adding water as needed to make a mostly smooth mixture. Strain liquid into a pitcher and repeat with remaining fruit.

Taste the agua fresca for sweetness and add agave nectar and lemon juice to your taste. Serve over ice and topped with seltzer water, if desired. ✜ Sara Jones is a longtime employee of the Tucson CSA.

58 July/August 2015

IN THE BUSINESS

Anything but Passé Café Passe’s owner Sabine Blaese talks about Tucson’s sense of self, her desert family, and serving all of the community.

By Suzanne Wright | Photography Krysta Jabczenski

You left New York City for the Old Pueblo. That’s a big change.

The culture shock was quite significant, but I think it’s a culture shock to anyone who moves here. The Sonoran Desert is so vastly different from any other place, but I think that’s exactly the reason people love it so much. After 10 years in New York, I was ready for something very different. I didn’t want to live in another big city.

Did you open Café Passe as a way to keep a bit of the Big Apple with you and introduce a slice of it to Tucsonans?

I suppose I did, although not intentionally. When I first opened in 2006, this little dark space was a blank canvas. I had no vision per se; it was my first business and I just desperately wanted to succeed.

And how does Tucson feel to you today?

Tucson and the surrounding desert always felt ancient and sacred.

With all the new development, I hope Tucson will never lose its sense of self, its history, its food, and its culture. I love how close we are to Mexico and the ocean, this beautiful Sea of Cortez.

My daughter riding horses, kicking up dust, the Catalinas in the background, the fact that I can have chickens in the middle of a city, superior sunsets—these are things that make me smile every day.

And how about the people?

I have a small but amazing Tucson family. Tucsonans hold their own just like this desert does. The stillness and balance of the desert is what I gravitate toward in people these days. It took me years to walk a little slower and slow down in general, after New York. And the fact that I’ve been able to run a seven-day-a week cafe with weekends off, thanks to an incredibly supportive and understanding staff.

62 July/August 2015

A single mom and a restaurateur—that’s not for sissies!

Yes, at the time I had a 2-year-old toddler and I borrowed money from my family. Wanting to succeed had nothing to do with self-fulfillment or realizing a dream back then. All I knew was I have to pay everyone back and put food on the table, raise my daughter. Everything was put together in pieces. Only after a few years did I start seeing a bigger picture, and really, it was only after customers started telling me they’re reminded of Europe or New York that I started to see it, too. It was great to hear, of course—and it still is.

Does your daughter work in the cafe?

Lola is now 12 years old and she has no interest in it whatsoever.

But when she was 5, 6, 7, the school bus driver dropped her right in front of the restaurant. She strapped on an apron and I gave her a rag and she cleaned tables. People gave her a dollar and she loved it.

How do your German roots figure into the cafe?

I’m from a little southwestern town called Schwäbisch Gmünd, between Munich and Stuttgart. I always keep a few German bottled beers on the menu.

Can you explain why Germans love Arizona so much?

Spaghetti Westerns were huge in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.

And there was a TV series in Germany called Winnetou that was super cheesy. When I take friends and family out to the desert, over to Gates Pass, they remember the scenes of cowboys and Indians riding over the hills. Every time I’m there, I hear the theme music. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

Café Passe owner Sabine Blaese says that when she opened the cafe in 2006, it was a little, dark space waiting to be transformed ... which it has been, into a bright, airy, and open European-style cafe.

edible Baja Arizona

63

“The Sonoran Desert is so vastly different from any other place, but I think that’s exactly the reason people love it so much,” says Blaese.

I know artist types and students love your place, but what about others: soccer moms, hipsters, office workers?

Luckily we get customers from all walks of life; that’s what keeps a place interesting. We definitely want to serve all of the community, not just part of it. I love to see people play chess, read books, knit, work on their computers, or meet friends over a meal or a coffee. Tucson is full of people with incredible talent, creativity, ambition, and survival skills. Great musicians, photographers, painters, entrepreneurs of any kind—I’m blown away by this wave of crafts people of late, with a focus on handmade and locally made.

I know the cafe buys as much as possible from local producers and that you also donate compost to the Food Bank.

It is such an important redirecting of our purchasing habits; the focus is really on quality over quantity. The beer brewers, the farmers, metal and wood workers, and these young guys making quality jeans, bags, and whatnot.

They’re unique and they inspire; let them have their beards.

Are you still hosting live music?

We stopped hosting music earlier this year and now only have live music for special events and in conjunction with our in-house record store, The Wooden Tooth. It was a painful decision for me; I loved utilizing our patio stage and patio bar for shows. In the end, I just had to decide what to focus on going forward: is it going to be coffee and food or a venue for music? It can’t be everything.

I have the greatest admiration for Jo Schneider of La Cocina; she does it all. I don’t know how, but she pulls it off.

Tucsonans hold their own just like this desert does. The stillness and balance of the desert is what I gravitate toward in people these days.

You have gotten mostly online raves, but been knocked a few times, too, by diners. Care to comment?

Sometimes the food comes out wrong or it takes too long, but it’s never intentional. As a small-business owner, there’s only so many things I can control; sometimes, I’ve wished I had 12 of me. But to condemn someone’s life work, that’s hard to swallow.

64 July/August 2015

I wish people weren’t so quick to judgment. The Internet is too often a funnel for anger and instant gratification. It can do so much damage.

Do you showcase artwork?

The art on our walls rotates every two months and they’re all local artists. I think it only makes sense to grace the walls of a cafe with local art; it gives the artists an opportunity to show their work, hopefully to sell some. And we get to look at lots of cool art, too. It’s just another avenue to connect a place with its community, which is really the heart of a cafe anywhere. ✜

Café Passe. 415 N. Fourth Ave. 520.624.4411.

CafePasse.com.

Suzanne Wright is a Cave Creek-based freelance writer.

TABLE

Greeking Out It’s Greek To Me is bringing the culture of Greek yogurt to Catalina.

By Mary Minor Davis | Photography by Krysta Jabczenski

O

F riday night at It’s Greek To Me restaurant “A Jew and an Italian came together to open a Greek restauin Catalina, diners may be hard-pressed to find a seat at rant. These are three of the most food-centric cultures you can this restaurant known for its authentic Greek cuisine. have under one roof,” Bridge said. “We know food, and we know What won’t be hard to find are co-owners Jimmy Pastore and good food.”

Jeff Bridge walking among the tables, checking to make sure that The long-established restaurant had a loyal following for its every patron is enjoying themselves. classical Greek menu—spanakopita, dolmades, keftedes, Greek Pastore, an Italian from Chicago, and Bridge, a Jew from salads, braised lamb shank, and several versions of souvlaki and Baltimore, met in 1982 when both worked in the kitchen at gyros. Still, Pastore and Bridge knew that there was opportunity Harpo’s Restaurant on Tucson’s Fourth Avenue. They bonded to improve. over food preparation and vowed to someday own a restaurant Executive chef Pastore’s goal was to eliminate all premixed together. or prepackaged food items In 2013, that dream from the kitchen. finally became a reality The first change he when they purchased It’s made was to stop orderGreek To Me, an already ing the key ingredient of popular restaurant in Catamany of the sauces and lina. Although neither had desserts found on the any cultural ties to Greek menu—Greek yogurt. cuisine or knowledge of In 2014, It’s Greek how to prepare it, they To Me became the first had been frequent patrons restaurant in the region of the restaurant for more known to make its own than a year and seized the Greek yogurt. A yogurt opportunity to purchase doesn’t have to come the property when the from the homeland to be previous owner decided Greek, Pastore says. With to retire. Before he had the popularity of commerthought about buying it, cial Greek yogurt on the Pastore, an experienced supermarket shelves, he chef, was even asked to says, there can be a misperprepare a special menu ception about what makes one evening by previous Greek yogurt, well, Greek. owner George Varnasidis, “It’s the process through (Above) Grilled octopus, braised in extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar. just so he could try out the (Right) Co-owners Jeff Bridge (left) and Jimmy Pastore were frequent patrons of which it is produced, not kitchen.

It’s Greek To Me before they purchased the restaurant. where,” Pastore says. n any given

68 July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

69

Yogurt is produced by the bacterial fermentation of milk. The bacteria used to make yogurt are known as yogurt cultures. The milk is heated to 180 degrees to kill any “bad” bacteria and to “denature” the milk proteins so that they set together and don’t form a curd.

The milk is then cooled to about 112 degrees, the cultures are added, and then it sits for four to seven hours to allow fermentation. Fermentation of lactose by these bacteria produces lactic acid, which acts on milk protein to give yogurt its texture.

To make Greek yogurt, during cooling, whey from the milk is strained off, usually by storing the mixture in a cloth bag overnight, and removed before the active cultures are mixed in. This result is a creamier yogurt “with more bite, more body, and more flavor,” Pastore says.

The Greeks introduced this straining method hundreds of years ago—hence the title. Traditionally made with cow or ewe’s milk, the process produces a yogurt that is higher in protein, lower in lactose, and lower in carbohydrates.

Working with an original culture that has now reproduced more than 100 generations of bacteria—that is, 100 batches of yogurt—the restaurant currently produces about 40 gallons of Greek yogurt a week.

“By using our own culture, we keep the good bacteria alive and kicking,” Pastore says. “Having real Greek yogurt just goes along with supporting our mission to provide real and authentic food to our guests.”

The entire process takes about 62 hours from start to finish. Pastore says that in the slow season during the summer, the restaurant will use two batches a week, four in the busier months. They sell their yogurt at the restaurant, and occasionally attend the St. Philip’s Plaza Farmers’ Market when supplies allow.

Pastore and Chef Casey Yeaton have made other changes as well, including increasing their seafood selection, growing their own herbs on property, using local farmers’ products, and making every dish from scratch, with two exceptions: the gyro bread brought in from Chicago and the San Marzono tomatoes shipped from Italy. The tomatoes, Pastore says, are “the only thing in a can.” “Fresh grown tomatoes here are very inconsistent and we need that consistency in our sauces to maintain the recipes.”

The changes seem to have only enhanced the dining experience. Walking around the restaurant each night, both Bridge and Pastore pay careful attention to what their customers have to say, where they’re from, and how they enjoyed their food preparation.

“People tell us it’s like stepping out of Tucson and into Greece,” Bridge says.

“It all comes down to hearing our customers’ story and building a rapport with them,” Pastore adds.

“People don’t just come here for the food, they’re coming for the experience, and we’re part of that experience.”

70 July/August 2015

(Top) It’s sea to me: sautéed wild Mexican shrimp with a creamy feta sauce.

(Bottom) A classic Greek sweet: baklava.

Weekly Meal Program Evening Dining

Modern Vegetarian Cuisine Evening Dining BYOB Catering Cooking Classes Weekly Meal Program

On vacation July 4 - Aug. 4

Tue~Sat 5~9 | Reservations 520 250 9600 722 N Stone Avenue | Park free at rear entrance www.thetastefulkitchen.com

BeachFleischman, Tucson’s largest CPA firm, serves over 300 restaurant and hospitality clients throughout Arizona.

We tailor our services to meet your unique needs and allow you to focus on running your business.

Need

something taken off your

PLATE?

• • • • • • • • • • •

Financial Statement Audits, Reviews, and Compilations Income Tax Planning and Preparation Benchmarking Operation Reviews Due Diligence and Business Valuations Business Advisory Services Cost Segregation Studies Estate and Succession Planning Internal Control Evaluations Cash Flow and Comprehensive Performance Analyses Business Structure and Organizational Consulting

Contact Richard Bratt, CPA 520.321.4600 or rbratt@beachfleischman.com

Accounting | Audit | Consulting | Tax

1985 E. River Rd., Ste. 201, Tucson, AZ 85718 | 2201 E. Camelback Rd., Ste. 200, Phoenix, AZ 85016 | www.beachfleischman.com

edible Baja Arizona

71

It’s Greek To Me Yogurt Add 2 gallons of whole milk to a large saucepot. Set on low heat and raise to 180, being very careful not to scorch the bottom.

Turn off and drop the temperature to 140.

Add 1 quart of activator. It’s Greek to Me started with organic goat yogurt and has fostered additional generations to add to each batch they now make. You can purchase yogurt from the restaurant to start your own, or select any organic Greek yogurt. Stir, being careful not to scrape the bottom of the pot.

Wrap up and insulate pot with blankets to hold heat for 24 hours, then refrigerate for 24 hours.

Strain remaining yogurt in straining bags and discard the whey. Remove from the straining bags and you have fresh Greekstyle yogurt.The yogurt will keep for up to two weeks refrigerated, one to two months frozen. ✜ It’s Greek To Me Restaurant. 15920 N. Oracle Road, #120. 520.825.4199. ItsGreektoMeTucson.com.

Mary Minor Davis is a freelance writer who loves eating food almost as much as she loves writing about it. She lives in Tucson with her husband and a menagerie of mammals.

D-WINNING SOUTHERN CUISINE AWAR

b

BAKED OYSTERS BLEU

b

LUNCH DINNER LIVE MUSIC

T H E PA R I S H T U C S O N . C O M 6453 N. ORACLE ROAD 11 A.M. - MIDNIGHT 520.797.1233

edible Baja Arizona

73

FOOD TRUCK

Arepas, con Una Pizca de Historia Nuevo camión de comida venezolana en Tucson es cosa de familia.

Por Lourdes Medrano | Fotografia por Stephen Eginoire

In the following story, Lourdes Medrano profiles the food truck Ricuras de Venezuela Arepas & More. Marlene Baquet opened the food truck with her husband, Steve, in 2014. That her Venezuelan food venture has been so well received, and experienced healthy growth in the past few months, took Baquet by surprise. But it was something that her late mother, Esther Sifontes, whose picture hangs in the food truck, had no doubt would occur, Baquet recalls. Read the full story in English at EdibleBajaArizona.com.

D

de las recién llegadas loncheras a Tucson, la fotografía de una mujer madura se destaca en una pared del fondo. Ella sonríe ampliamente, como si aprobara de la intensa actividad que se desarrolla en la pequeña cocina sobre ruedas.

Este día en particular María Alvalle y William Zambrano sirven arepas, cachapas, empanadas, y otros platillos típicos venezolanos a clientes que esperan en las mesas situadas debajo de una carpa blanca. El olor a arepas, que son como gorditas de maíz, flota en el aire.

Andrew y Anna Nelson están probando algunos de los alimentos del país sudamericano por primera vez, y dicen qué Ricuras de Venezuela Arepas & More es una buena adición al gran número de camiones de comida que circulan en Tucson. Maxine Gallego estaba ahí otra vez con su nieta Alexandria. Ambas llegaron por arepas mechadas, que están rellenas con carne deshebrada.

“He traído a mis hijos y nietos aquí desde que lo descubrí”, dice Gallego, refiriéndose al restaurante móvil.

Es ahí en la esquina noreste de Grant Road y Fairview Avenue que Ricuras de Venezuela se estaciona de martes a viernes. Los fines de semana se localiza en el centro de la ciudad, donde los que se divierten en clubes nocturnos llegan de noche a probar las ricuras detrás del Hotel Congress. entro de una

76 July/August 2015

Que su negocio haya sido tan bien recibido, y que éste haya prosperado en tan solo meses, tomó a su propietaria Marlene Baquet por sorpresa. Aunque eso era algo que su difunta madre, Esther Sifontes, cuyo retrato está colgado dentro del camión, no dudaba que ocurriría, dice Baquet.

“Ella siempre hablaba de algun día poder abrir un restaurante venezolano”, agrega Baquet. “Ella decía que nos iría muy bien porque no conocíamos ningún restaurante en Tucson que se especializa en comida venezolana”.

Después que Sifontes falleció en mayo de 2014, Baquet se empeñó por cumplir los deseos de su madre y en la víspera del pasado año nuevo, Ricuras de Venezuela hizo su debut en el corazón de la ciudad.

Esa primera semana, Marlene tuvo a la mano 15 libras de carne para preparar los guisos que llevan sus platillos. Seis meses después unas 200 libras de carne duraban un poco más de una semana.

“Tenemos un producto único en esta área, y eso nos hace diferente”, dice Baquet. “Creo que es por eso que hemos tenido una buena acogida por parte de la gente”.

Los dueños de Ricuras de Venezuela Arepas & More, Marlene y Steve Baquet.

edible Baja Arizona

77

Los fines de semana, Ricuras de Venezuela se localiza en el centro de la ciudad, donde los que se divierten en clubes nocturnos llegan de noche a probar las ricuras detrás del Hotel Congress.

El negocio es un asunto de familia que implica no sólo a su esposo, Steve, sino también a sus hijos y otros familiares. Ella contrató unos cuantos empleados que trabajan en la lonchera mientras que ella y su marido dirigen una compañía de seguros. Pero cada semana, la cocina venezolana ocupa más de su tiempo. No es que eso le moleste a Baquet, pero ha tenido que ajustar su horario para poder dedicar más horas a preparar los guisos para el camión de comida en una cocina comercial en el sur de Tucson.

El otro día tuvo que llegar a la cocina antes de lo esperado debido a que su lonchera se había quedado sin picadillo, la carne molida que utiliza para rellenar empanadas de maíz. Es ahí, mientras mezcla la carne con especias, cilantro y cebolla picada que evoca las técnicas culinarias que aprendió observando a su madre cocinar en casa allá en el puerto de La Guaira, que queda a unas 15 millas de Caracas, la capital de Venezuela.

Su madre tenía un don para el guiso y cocinaba comidas excelentes para la familia con pocos y sencillos ingredientes, recuerda Baquet. “No éramos ricos, pero comíamos como reyes”.

Cuando los familiares y amigos cercanos le dicen que cocina igual que su madre, Baquet dice que es el mayor elogio que jamás podría recibir. “Si eso es cierto, entonces es la mano de mi madre que me guía”, añade.

78 July/August 2015

Aunque Sifontes había anhelado establecer un restaurante, las muchas obligaciones de su hija le hicieron a Baquet decidirse por una lonchera porque pensó que como negocio pequeño sería más fácil de sobrellevar. Baquet estaba a punto de renunciar a la búsqueda de un camión que podría equipar a su gusto cuando encontró uno nuevo que estaba en venta. Lo compró de inmediato y lo pintó de amarillo, azul y rojo, los colores de la bandera venezolana.

Para la mayoría de las personas que llegan a la lonchera por bocadillos venezolanos, los colores brillantes del camión simplemente se suman a un ambiente festivo marcado por la música salsa y la conversación. Pero para quienes conocen la historia de Venezuela, como los venezolanos que esperan a la lonchera en el centro todos los fines de semana, las arepas vienen envueltas en política y simbolismo. “¡Esa es mi Venezuela”! es un grito patriótico que se escucha por parte de algunos expatriados cuando ven pintados en el camión la bandera venezolana con siete estrellas y un caballo blanco que galopa volteado hacia atrás.

Baquet está consciente de que la bandera de su país natal ahora tiene ocho estrellas y que el caballo en el escudo de armas ya galopa diferente. El presidente Hugo Chávez impulsó los controvertidos cambios antes de su muerte en 2013.

En el camión de comida, las arepas se fríen ligeramente, se cortan por la mitad y se les quita el exceso de masa para luego rellenarse con carne.

Más Baquet quiere que los símbolos en su camión reflejen la Venezuela del pasado, no la que hoy día está plagada de disturbios civiles y dificultades económicas.

“Cuando yo dejé Venezuela hace unos 20 años, no tenía ninguno de los problemas que tiene ahora”, puntualiza la empresaria. “De alguna manera, quiero preservar el país que dejé atrás que era un hermoso país, un país rico.”

Y aquí, en su país de adopción, ella quiere compartir un trozo de Venezuela a través de su comida.

“Quiero llevar al food truck de Ricuras de Venezuela a un nivel diferente”, ella dice.

Su objetivo es que la gente disfrute de la comida como si estuviera siendo servida en un restaurante predilecto, por lo que utiliza ingredientes de alta calidad—algunos orgánicos—y se esfuerza por la autenticidad y buena presentación.

María Alvalle, que ha trabajado en el camión desde que éste se puso en marcha, dice que a pesar de que ella y otros empleados ayudan a cortar verduras y hacer las arepas y empanadas, su meticulosa jefa aún concina todos los guisos.

Alvalle, al igual que otros empleados que trabajan en la lonchera junto con familiares de Baquet, es originaria de México pero se ha convertido en una experta en hacer las populares arepas. En el camión de comida, las arepas se fríen ligeramente, se cortan por la mitad y se les quita el exceso de masa para luego rellenarse con carne.

80 July/August 2015

Alvalle, amiga de Baquet y su madre por varios años, dice que su jefa no es la única persona a la que Esther Sifontes sigue inspirando.

“Yo la veo en la foto, y siento su presencia aquí, ayudándome a hacer arepas”, dice Alvalle.

William Zambrano, el hijo de Baquet de una relación anterior, dice que aprendió hace mucho tiempo a hacer arepas porque creció rodeado de cocineras.

Pero en la lonchera él prefiere tomar pedidos y charlar con los clientes que quieren que su plato principal sea servido con un poco de historia.

“Los estadounidenses quieren saber más acerca de Venezuela y los venezolanos quieren platicar de cómo esta comida les recuerda a Venezuela”, dice.

Todo eso es música para los oídos de Baquet. Y aunque ella dice que el trabajo a veces puede resultar agotador, ya está pensando en una posible franquicia.

Si eso hace feliz a su esposa, Steve Baquet estará de su parte. “Esto es realmente la pasión y el sueño de ella y de su madre, y yo estoy aqui para apoyar”. ✜ Ricuras de Venezuela Arepas & More. 520.389.0690.

Facebook.com/RicurasdeVenezuela.

Radicada en Tucson, la periodista Lourdes Medrano comparte historias de ambos lados de la frontera. Síguela en Twitter: @_lourdesmedrano

520.219.2400

Join us for our Summertime Backyard BBQ now through Sept. 7. Rates start at just $89 for arrivals Sunday through Thursday! Rates for Friday and Saturday nights from $99 and with a stay of two nights or more receive a $50 food and beverage credit!

Enjoy dive-in movies, poolside DJ dance parties and family activities every weekend!

SUMMERTIME BACKYARD BBQ RATES START AT JUST $89 3800 E. Sunrise Drive : 520.742.6000 : www.westinlapaloma.com : #westinlapaloma

Please visit westinlapaloma.com/edible or call 866-716-8108 and mention promo code edible.

Rates subject to availability. Excludes holiday weekends.

edible Baja Arizona 

81

Historic photos courtesy of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum

B i s b e e , A Z An unusual art town built in a deep canyon...

U P C O M I N G

E V E N T S

● Every Saturday, 9am-1pm - Bisbee Farmers Market ● Every Second Saturday Bisbee After 5 ArtWalk ● July 18th & August 1st - The Old Bisbee Ghost Hunt

I N

B I S B E E

● Saturday, Sept. 5th 10am-4pm - Bisbee Bloomers 14th Annual Garden Tour ● Sunday, September 6th, 10 AM - 4 PM - Brewery

● August 8th - 5th Annual Pirates of the High Desert

Gulch Daze In Historic Brewery Gulch and Goar

● Aug. 22nd-24th - Paranormal & Ghost Hunting Weekend

Park. FREE!

● Labor Day Weekend - Saturday, Sept. 5th 8am-3pm 5th Annual Cars & Bikes

stay in

● September 11th, 12th & 13th, 2015 in Brewery Gulch Bisbee Blues Festival

bisbee, arizona

EXPLORE

BISBEE

eat & drink in bisbee

Historic photos courtesy of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum

eat & drink in bisbee

PHOTO ESSAY

Capturing Water Text and photography by Michael McNulty

A

Tucson, I am swept away by the beauty of southeast Arizona, every day. Wielding various cameras I have built a 200,000-image library of the desert Southwest that is less nature-photography documentary than it is a paean to the drumming heartbeat of the Sonoran Desert.

My background in politics (working for Mo Udall), government (working for the Arizona Department of Water Resources), and law (working as a water lawyer for 30 years) has not been especially helpful for my photography, since the overwhelming majority of my work has been imaging nature where there is no sign of the presence of man, at all. At the same time, my résumé has allowed me to understand some aspects of the landscape in ways that are not at all obvious.

We have spectacular monsoonal moisture: downpours and f loods, and mountain front creek discharge that can go on for months. But no one—neither farmers, nor water utilities, native of

86 July/August 2015

nor golf courses, nor industry—relies on those water sources for anything. It is too explosive. It is too expensive to store.

One hundred years ago, there were fairly well developed plans to dam Sabino Canyon to generate electricity, and to divert the f low of the Santa Cruz River to create lakes for use by Tucson Water customers. None of that came to pass because—well, because of the war-like fury of Chaac, the Mayan god of rain.

Rather, we stand by as the rain recharges our aquifers, and rely upon wells to pull it back up again. Because groundwater is invisible until it comes pouring up out of the ground, there is a serious void in our consciousness about what is actually going on down there. In the water regulatory arena, one comes to appreciate the skill and usefulness of hydrologists and to rely upon the science of hydrology, since there is no other way to understand what’s happening.

Monsoonal Adumbrations: In June, cloudbanks slowly build, and swell, and threaten, and ultimately explode into our annual monsoon. This is a photo taken in the infrared spectrum.

It’s counterintuitive to learn that there have been rising groundwater levels in much of Tucson Water’s service area over the last 10 years. Even more startling, there have been rising groundwater levels in the Marana area and northwest toward the lower end of Pinal County.

Why? First, Tucson Water has done an astonishing job of importing and recharging water from the Central Arizona Project (CAP), primarily in the Avra Valley, but also south of the city closer to Green Valley.

Second, with respect to the farming areas northwest of here, an enormous amount of our effluent has simply been abandoned into the Santa Cruz River for the last 20 years and left to flow north into Pinal County, recharging the aquifers of farmers; and, in order to obtain recharge credits, local utilities have been buying CAP water for some of those farmers, suspending their groundwater withdrawals—at least for a time.

But the flow of effluent down the river and into Pinal County has now come to an end. This is a result of Pima County spending $500 million on a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment facility that now generates such clean water that it recharges almost immediately. (Effluent that is not so clean serves to cultivate bacterial growth that once nearly sealed the bottom of the riverbed.)

All of these developments, and all of the reversals that will come when CAP water becomes less available, eventually are reflected on the landscape. And so the photographs I’ve taken that “show no trace of man” unavoidably end up capturing the otherwise invisible (and sometimes insidious) changes that man has made to the hydrological cycle by drawing down the groundwater levels.

Nothing is constant except change.

edible Baja Arizona

87

Land of the Water Barons: This is a typical scene of farming along the Colorado River. Due to fairly antique laws regarding “first in time, first in right,� the major irrigation districts along the river in southwest Arizona and southeast California have rights to water that will survive even if shortages result in rationing for urban residents in Nevada, California, and Arizona.

Vast, vast amounts of Colorado River water are used for farming. The reductions ordered by the State of California for farmers using water within the State of California have no effect on this corner of the world: these farmers use water rights under federal contracts that incorporate interstate treaties that make them all but invulnerable to state action.

The Navajo Generating Station: The Colorado River water that recharges aquifers in Tucson via the CAP has come a long way: 336 miles. The City of Tucson recharges more than 100,000 acre-feet per year (sometimes a lot more). There are more than 325 thousand gallons of water in each acre foot; at 8.3 pounds per gallon, that’s nearly three million pounds of water per acre foot. Now we have to lift 135 million tons of water some 2,000 feet, from the intake on the Colorado River to the City’s recharge basins. Think about how much energy that requires—and how much that energy costs, not only financially but environmentally. At a relatively frugal wholesale price of 4 cents per kilowatt hour provided by this power plant, that’s only 6 cents per acre foot. But multiply that one acre foot by 100,000, and one foot by 2,000 feet, and now you’re looking at costs of more than $10 million.

Does this make sense? In utility management, as in everything else in life, the answer is: compared to what? There’s a whole universe of alternative water management scenarios out there. And let’s just say—we’ll probably be exploring them sooner rather than later.

Pumping into the dust storm: Twenty miles north of Tucson, the Cortaro-Marana Irrigation District serves tens of thousands of acres of farmland, as it has for nearly a century. Its pumping resulted in the lowering of the groundwater table by hundreds of feet—although, for the last 20 years, many of those farms have relied on CAP water.

Black-necked stilts, Cochise Lakes: What does it say about us that many of our most beguiling “natural” areas are simply outfalls from our sewers? Migratory birds aren’t picky, and they can’t afford to be. Many hundreds of species stop by southeast Arizona to rest in the effluent lagoons of Tucson, Sierra Vista, and everywhere else towns and cities have sprung up. This photo was taken at Cochise Lakes; the water comes from the sewage treatment plant in Willcox.

Rapturous Raptor, southeast of Ragged Top: In all cultures, in every epoch, fields of grain have meant havens for rodents. This red-tailed hawk, north of Marana, uses the sign of a Phoenix real estate brokerage as a lookout. The subdivisions that will inevitably replace these wheat fields will not, unfortunately, be much of a haven for the red-tails.

edible Baja Arizona 

91

Discover

T u b a c, A r i z o n a Events in Tubac this spring:

Saturdays, July 11 & 25, 11am-2pm - Living History: Spanish Colonial Foods June 7 through September 30 - Exhibit:Trincheras Archaeological Site Sundays, July 12 & 26, and Saturday, July 18, 11am-3pm - Frontier Printing Press Demostrations Friday, July 17, 11am-2pm - Living History: Spanish Medicine August 1 - Gabriel Ayala Trio - Summer Concert August 1 & September 1 - Art Exhibit: The Arizona Cavalcade of History August 7 & September 4 - Friday Nightfall On Tubac Road August 14 - Twilight in Tubac

Stay in Tubac

Dine in Tubac

Explore Tubac USA Today Travel named Tubac 1 of 10 Best Places to Escape the Cold

Conde Nast Traveler Named Tubac 1 of 14 Up-and-Coming,

Must See Destinations in 2014

A River’s Return A year ago, the Colorado River reached its delta for the first time in decades.

Now resource managers, scientists, and environmentalists are considering the impact of that water —on people and place.

By Melissa Sevigny | Photography by Seth Cothrun

T

to the airport tower—“2112 Cardinal ready to taxi for takeoff.” The plane’s wheels lifted from the ground and we were airborne. The sprawl of Mexicali dropped away. Agricultural fields broke sharply at desert dunes, and the metallic ribbon of the border wall appeared and disappeared in Hollywood-yellow sand.

At Morelos Dam, our pilot, Bob Allen, radioed to the American side to warn them of our approach. “We probably won’t cross over, but it’ll be close,” he said. The four-seat Cessna tipped, the wing outside my window shifting to a stomach-lurching 45-degree angle to the ground, and I gazed down at the beginning of the end of the Colorado River.

The Colorado has reached its delta in the Gulf of California only intermittently since the 1960s, the last time during the wet El Niño winter of 1997-98. Much fodder for despair has been found in the lower Colorado, labeled “utterly devoid of vitality” by Philip Fradkin in his 1981 book A River No More.

But the river still has champions. In October 2002, 55 resource managers, scientists, and environmentalists met in Tijuana to discuss the region’s plight. They calculated that restoring just 1 percent of the river’s annual flow could help the delta revive.

Francisco Zamora, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Colorado River Delta Legacy Program, called their report “a map of the possible”—a listing of riparian areas that could be protected or restored.

The map of the possible was now a real map, spread out below me in the floodplain. Between March 23 and May 18, 2014, the gates at Morelos Dam opened to release 105,000 acre-feet of water for a spring pulse flow, which mimics the surge of snowmelt that occurs on undammed rivers. An additional 53,000 acre-feet would replenish the Colorado’s base flow during a five-year pilot program. Together, this amount totals about 1 percent of the Colorado’s annual flow, spread out over a five-year pilot program.

It was less than the scientists had recommended, but still a landmark moment: the first experimental release of water to the delta in history. he pilot r adioed

(Left) A single cottonwood at the Sonoran Institute’s Laguna Grande Restoration Site on the Colorado River. Laguna Grande is the largest restored site on the river south of the U.S.-Mexico border. This photo shows preparation work performed in anticipation of the pulse flow. January 2014 (Right) La Ciénega de Santa Clara, a 6,000-hectare wetland in Sonoran, Mexico. The largest wetland on the Colorado River Delta, it is maintained mainly by agriculture runoff from the Welton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District in Arizona. January 2014

edible Baja Arizona

97

Early-morning. The Colorado River estuary was an important habitat for many species of fish and birds. The straight line in bottom left is a Sonoran Institute project to attempt to improve connectivity between the river and the gulf to improve habitat. January 2015. Aerial support by LightHawk.

Below me, Morelos Dam stretched an L-shaped cement barrier over the river, white ribbons of water f luttering from the spillways. A broad canal diverted most of the water from the upright arm of the L, f lowing perpendicular for 800 feet before bending at a 90-degree angle to run parallel to the riverbed. The canal carries Mexico’s allotment of the Colorado to the electric-green fields of Mexicali Valley, where farmers grow wheat, cotton, alfalfa, green onions, and asparagus.

I didn’t recognize the Colorado itself until Allen pointed it out to me: a narrow channel trickling out from the center of the dam, less than a quarter of the canal’s width. This was all that 98 July/August 2015

remained of the river that provides water to nearly 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland. Millions more drink from the Colorado without knowing it, in the form of iceberg lettuce shipped from Yuma or strawberries from Imperial Valley.

The water made a shockingly slender thread—but it hadn’t existed at all just a few weeks before.

Our plane circled Morelos Dam again and then winged south, following the Colorado. The river forms the border between Baja California and Arizona for the next 24 miles—though the water’s path no longer exactly follows the surveyors’ looping marks on maps. We were headed to see how far the water had made it, on its history-making trip back to the sea.

edible Baja Arizona

99

T

her e’s somet h ing profound

about viewing a place from a great height. I flew that day with LightHawk, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes volunteer pilots to donate flights for conservation efforts. In the weeks leading up to my trip I skimmed through trillions of pixels compiled into time-lapse images from Landsat, a satellite program run jointly by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Fast-forwarding through three decades, I saw the blue squares of recharge ponds appear, the geometric blossoming of agricultural fields, and subtle pale blocks where cities ate into mountainsides. I stood witness to the delta’s demise as green turned ashen gray.

Karl Flessa, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, first saw the Colorado River from the air in the early ’90s. “I asked a friend who just got her pilot’s license to fly me over the delta,” he recalled. The view enthralled him. He returned on foot for a closer look: “The beaches were made of nothing but shells for as far as the eye could see. For a paleontologist, this was heaven.”

He could find no living specimen of the once-abundant clams. Solving this mystery dominated the next decade of his research, as he studied oxygen isotopes trapped in calcium carbonate shells, indicating whether the clam had grown in fresher or saltier water. Flessa’s sleuthing revealed that the delta’s productivity had fallen by 94 percent since the dam-building era of the 1930s.

Almost no fresh water reached the gulf after the 1960s.

The delta’s fate rests almost entirely in human hands now, a legacy that began with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divvied up 16.5 million acre-feet of water—more water than the river carries in normal years—among seven U.S. states. In the U.S.-Mexican water treaty of 1944, the United States agreed to leave an additional 1.5 million acre feet in the river for Mexico, roughly 10 percent of the river’s long-term average. Almost all of Mexico’s allotment waters the fields of Mexicali Valley, where more than 15,000 farmers rely on the Colorado River for their livelihoods.

Reconnect: mid-May 2014, when the river reconnected with the tidal waters of the Upper Gulf of California for the first time in over a decade. Photo by Francisco Zamora Arroyo with aerial support by LightHawk.

100 July/August 2015

During the pulse flow, hundreds of people would come down to the water for spontaneous celebrations of the river’s return. There were food vendors, beer, barbeques, kids playing, friends kayaking.

Once the water was gone, these celebrations ended. Photos courtesy of the Sonoran Institute. For more images of the pulse flow on the ground and in the air, visit Facebook.com/SaveTheColoradoRiverDelta

edible Baja Arizona

101

The need to balance the demands of cities, farms, and ecosystems drove the creation of Minute 319, an amendment to the Law of the River that allows the United States and Mexico to share both shortages and surpluses of Colorado River water. The agreement came at a time of deep concern over water, with California facing mandatory restrictions and Arizona officials predicting cutbacks to their Colorado River share as early as 2017. It was a strange time to consider restoring water to the environment, but that’s exactly what Mexico wanted to do. Minute 319 committed both nations to the experimental release of water to the Colorado’s final 75 miles.

The pulse flow came from Mexico’s allotment, stored temporarily in Lake Mead after an Easter Day earthquake in 2010 damaged irrigation infrastructure. The base flow (the year-round current normally fed by groundwater) was provided by the Colorado River Delta Water Trust, a binational coalition of environmental groups that purchases water rights from willing farmers. This water began irrigating trees in key restoration areas in December 2012, more than a year before the dramatic release of the spring pulse garnered the attention of national media.

Flessa now serves as co-chief scientist for the Minute 319 Science Team, which includes members of the Sonoran Institute, Nature Conservancy, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Arizona, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, and Pronatura Noroeste, a chapter of Mexico’s largest conservation organization. Their task is to evaluate the response of the ecology, hydrology, and biology of the region during the pilot program.

Officially, scientists aren’t tracking the social response to the restoration project, but some suspect it outstrips the euphoric response of cottonwoods. At San Luis Río Colorado, 20 miles downstream from Morelos Dam, hundreds of people gathered to watch the Colorado arrive. Flessa described the scene to me later: music blaring from the backs of pickup trucks, bottles of beer cracked open, and “literally a Mexican brass band” playing into the night.

The gathering began the day the gates at Morelos Dam opened. “Never mind that the water wasn’t arriving until Tuesday,” Flessa said. “They were having a good time.” Later, Flessa watched an elderly man help his mother bathe in the river beneath the bridge at San Luis, something she’d probably done as a girl. Nearby, children splashed and swam. Anyone below the age of 16 had never known the river as anything but dry.

The same bend in the river, before, during, and after the pulse flow. Photo by Dale Turner at the Nature Conservancy.

102 July/August 2015

104  July/August 2015

E

a few special places along the lower Colorado to focus their efforts to restore the long cottonwood-willow galleries that grace desert streams. The primary focus, Laguna Grande, is a 1,200-acre land grant from the Mexican government secured by the Sonoran Institute and Pronatura Noroeste. They hope to restore 750 acres of riparian habitat within Laguna Grande before the end of the fiveyear pilot program.

In advance of the pulse flow, ecologists bulldozed through thickets of exotic saltcedar trees and cleared areas for the cottonwood cologists chose

106  July/August 2015

Landsat 8 measured a 36 percent increase in "greenness" compared with the previous year.

and willow seeds to land. They planted seedlings by hand in some areas, broadcast seeds in others, monitored birds, and measured groundwater levels. Just six weeks after the simulated flood, researchers spotted two-inch high seedlings of willow and cottonwood pushing up through the riverbank debris, slender sprouts of optimism.

Saltcedar sprouted as well in the wake of the pulse flow, an undesirable but somewhat inevitable result. It’s too soon to know if willows and cottonwoods will be able to compete with the exotic trees. Flessa noted that the restoration of native vegetation

Agriculture fields in Sonora, Mexico, abutting the Colorado River, separated by an irrigation canal carrying Colorado River water. Sierra de Los Cucapah is in the background. Aerial support by LightHawk. Much of the winter greens consumed by people throughout the United States are grown in this region, including lettuce, kale, chard, onions, and cilantro. It is all irrigated with Colorado River Water. January 2015.

was most effective in areas where the ground had been “prescoured” with bulldozers, since the flood itself was not large enough to sweep clean the riverbanks and make a landing pad for seeds. “Instead of water doing the work, people did the work,” he explained. “That’s probably an efficient use of water, and of people, too.”

One immediate response to the flood was an increase in migratory birds. Birds have remained abundant in the river corridor over the last decade, but diversity has declined. Birds accustomed to farm fields and urban areas moved in, while native species that rely on riparian habitat and open water vanished. Scientists need

time to determine the long-term effects of the experimental release on bird populations. Hydrologic responses were clearer: the water table near the river rose rapidly after the flood, and then dropped again. Much of the water released from Morelos Dam infiltrated to the aquifer, where it remains available to trees.

Perhaps the most charming preliminary result from the experiment came from the Landsat 8 satellite, which has trained its imaging spectroradiometer on the river corridor since 2000. The satellite charted an increase in plant stress in the years leading up to the pulse flow. After the flood, Landsat 8 measured a 36 percent increase in “greenness” compared with the previous year.

edible Baja Arizona

107

E

The upper estuary of the Colorado River is where the river historically met the Gulf of California.

Sierra de los Cucapah is in background. January 2015. Aerial support by LightHawk

of soil is an act of faith. There’s no guarantee that water will continue to flow in the lower Colorado. At the close of the Minute 319 pilot program, the United States and Mexico will re-enter discussions about the delta’s fate. “I think a lot of people want to do it again,” Zamora said. “Are we going to be able to do it again? We don’t know.

But at least it’s different from five years ago. Now a lot of people are very supportive and willing to come back and talk about it.”

That’s a sea change in western water politics, which more often involves maelstroms of contention and dispute. The region’s decades-long drought has brought former antagonists to the negotiation table. Drought engenders change. It requires that we tackle the daunting task of deciding what we value, and make difficult choices that will shape the future. ac h s h ov e l f u l

108 July/August 2015

The view from above—if not as intimate as the celebration in San Luis Río Colorado, where people touched and tasted the water—offers, quite simply, perspective. Americans didn’t think to hold an Earth Day until after Apollo astronauts transmitted home a photograph of our planet suspended like a Christmas ornament in space, delicate as a soap bubble, swaddled in clouds.

I asked Flessa what he’d do if money and time didn’t limit the restoration work, expecting to hear something about purchasing more water, collecting more satellite data, or planting more trees. He was quiet for a moment. “There’s a railroad bridge a bit upstream from the Sonoran Institute’s restoration site,” he said finally. “I’d love to see a park at the site. It wouldn’t take much water to increase the water level there, and there’s shade,

edible Baja Arizona

109

Residents of San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, view the Colorado River near the peak of the pulse flow.

Many people in this community have never seen water in the river. April 2014

something that’s important to that part of the world. It’s an optimal place for people to reconnect to their river.”

“The whole idea about the delta restoration is that it’s not just about trees and birds and groundwater,” he added. “It’s really about the people.”

Scientists still have much to learn from the experiment about the intricate workings of the groundwater table, the needs of trees and birds and beavers. But it has already proven that we 110 July/August 2015

can design water policies to bend gracefully to environmental ethics in the decades ahead. Cities and farms can begin to look at ecosystems with new eyes: not as an intolerable competitor for water in an arid land, but as the provider of everything we will ever eat, drink, build, create, or imagine.

coming

THIS SUMMER ...

Certificate in

R U R A L DEVELOPMENT and local food production

Classes taught by Dr. Gary Nabhan, with guest speakers, field trips, and hands-on activities. Topics will be: u Seed Libraries Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land u Greenhouse Management u Hydrological Restoration Selecting, Grafting and Pruning for Desert Orchards u Direct Marketing of Farm and Garden Products u Propagation and Restoration of Native Plants (focus on Milkweed / Monarch Butterfly habitat restoration) u

u

To get on the mailing list for more information: Call us at 520-626-5093 or email us uace-info@email.arizona.edu

ce.arizona.edu/ruraldevelopment edible Baja Arizona 

111

A Changing CAP

By Melissa Sevigny | Photography by William Lesch

T

C entr al A r izona P roject , or CAP, canal cuts like a mirage through central Arizona, zigzagging through bleak desert scrub for more than 300 miles. Its stairstep journey begins at Lake Havasu near the town of Parker, where the first of 14 pumping stations lift the water 800 feet from the Colorado River into the Buckskin Mountain Tunnel, a waterfall moving backward. The canal ends on the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Nation, an elevation lift of 2,900 feet.

The CAP has deep roots in Arizona history. When the 1922 Colorado River Compact and ensuing negotiations and litigation promised 2.8 million acre-feet of water to Arizona, the water buffaloes of the era envisioned a canal to bring that water to farms in the central part of the state. The CAP soon became seen as a rescue mission to Phoenix and Tucson, whose growing populations were over-reliant on fossil aquifers filled up during the Pleistocene.

That was the CAP’s historic role in Arizona: water transportation. “Over time it became apparent to our leadership that we needed to engage in activities to protect the resource that we deliver,” explained Chuck Cullom, Colorado River Program Manager. Today, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, or CAWCD, which operates the CAP, is Arizona’s primary voice for water issues, along with the Arizona Department of Water Resources, or ADWR. This shift in perspective came about partly because of Arizona’s junior priority right to the Colorado River. In times of shortage, California can draw its full allotment before Arizona receives a drop. Arizona can reduce the risk of shortage by improving the efficiency of water management throughout the river basin. To that end, CAWCD has engaged in discussions with Mexico about water management for more than a decade, and more recently began collaborating with conservationists on adjustments to the Law of the River that acknowledge environmental needs. Along with its counterpart agencies in California and Nevada, CAWCD helped develop an agreement called Minute 319.

How does water for the environment fit into this ongoing discussion? That’s an open question, especially as persistent drought squeezes the Southwest’s water infrastructure to the breaking point. Will Worthington, a retired CAP engineer who began working on the project in the 1970s and saw it through to completion in 1992, said that recognition of environmental he

112 July/August 2015

concerns is a relatively new outlook for CAWCD and other municipal water agencies.

“As I look back on it, I don’t recall that there was any acknowledgment of what would happen to the river once we began pumping the flow,” Worthington said. “Certainly for us planners it was not a matter of concern that our project would dry up the river—in a sense, the last straw.”

For Worthington, that changed a decade ago when he joined LightHawk, a volunteer group that donates flights for conservation, as a pilot and took his first flight over the Colorado River Delta. “I really did not know that this had happened to our river, and that our project, along with many others, had caused it to happen,” he said.

For CAP, Minute 319 provides greater security with the shortage-and-surplus sharing agreement between the United States and Mexico. For conservationists, it’s a step toward securing water for ecosystems. Minute 319 is a powerful experiment in collaboration. Despite the widely differing perspectives and values of the people at the negotiation table, and the challenge of working over an international border, nearly everyone involved has reason to work for a renewal of Minute 319—whether it’s environmental health or long-term water supply in their minds.

“We have built new relationships that allow for the U.S. and Mexico to operate the Colorado River system in a more efficient and collaborative fashion than we have in the past,” Cullom said.

“As the system is stressed by drought and imbalance between supply and demand, having that relationship and openness will help us avoid unnecessary conflict and misunderstanding.”

Western history places water at the center of conflict—indeed, the creation of CAP is a story of lawsuits and political bargaining that left a bitter legacy in Arizona. Collaboration over water may be a better way forward in a future of scarcity, particularly if ecosystems such as the Colorado River Delta can find a voice at the negotiation table alongside of cities and farms. Worthington put it this way: “It’s a bit ironic that I spent a good part of my career taking water out of the Colorado, and now I’m trying to see what I can do to put it back.” ✜ Melissa Sevigny is a science writer from Tucson. She writes more about western water politics and river restoration in Mythical River, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

The Central Arizona Project canal extends 336 miles from the Colorado River.

edible Baja Arizona 

113

114  July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

117

118  July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

119

uitting Qseason The decision to walk away from a farm is not one taken lightly.

So why do farmers stop farming?

By Debbie Weingarten

120  July/August 2015

|

Photography by Steven Meckler

T

F e b r ua ry , Tina Bartsch, co-owner of Walking J Farm, sat cross-legged on the floor of my Tucson apartment. We ate lunch and watched my newly mobile baby move in curious circles around the room. For the last several years, Tina and I have provided each other with moral support as we navigated the precarious balance of farm and family. We’ve traded homeschooling curriculum and birthday party invitations; we’ve called each other in frustrated tears and celebrated yoga teacher certifications and new babies; we’ve cursed the glut of cheap redistributed produce at the farmers’ markets and spent hours together in meetings trying to solve the food system gaps in our community.

On this particular day in February, Tina told me that she and her husband, Jim McManus, had decided to stop farming. Though many of our conversations had touched on this as a potential inevitability, this time it was real. After five years of solid recordkeeping, the numbers showed the farm operating at a net loss every single year.

A month prior, Tina and Jim had traveled from Amado to Clarkdale to present their agribusiness success story at the second annual Arizona Food & Finance Forum. But over the course of a 20-minute presentation, McManus shared the farm’s sobering financial reality, hoping to spotlight the disconnect between the local food craze and farmers being able to make a living.

“What I’ve determined is that I can’t go on this way,” McManus said to the forum attendees. He explained that after calculating the full cost associated with producing a single beef cow, the farm was losing $62 per animal selling by the quarter, and averaging a mere $214 profit per animal selling retail cuts at the market. McManus announced that they had no choice but to raise their retail prices by 40 percent; the week before, a pound of Walking J ground beef had cost $8, and this week it was going to cost $11.

“Every year we’ve gone up three percent, five percent to match inflation ... but that hasn’t been enough,” he said, adding that, “We are running a big test here. We don’t know if the market will bear it, or what our customers are going to say. A lot of folks are going to really swallow hard when they see that their filet went up $10 a pound. But that’s what I have to do.

That’s what the numbers say.” h i s pa s t

Previous page: Fields that were once a farm return to desert scrub. Right: Tina Bartsch, during their last days at Walking J. 122 July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

123

After calculating that their business had been operating at a net loss for five years straight, Jim McManus realized, “I can’t go on this way.”

A month later, the results of Walking J’s experiment were in.

The market was not willing to bear the increase in price, and Walking J’s last effort to save the farm by charging prices based on the true cost of meat production was a flop. Since raising their prices, the farm had lost 30 to 70 percent of their client sales.

The customers had spoken loud and clear.

“It’s a no-brainer at this point,” Tina told me, as we sat together in my living room. “We have to quit.”

I have been that farmer who chose to step away from the farm, and though I chose it as surely as I chose the farm in the first place, it has been no less a loss. Barring a catastrophic event, the decision to stop farming is rarely made overnight. Depending on how you look at it, it is either a steady erosion or a slow coming-to. Farmers spend years crunching numbers, tweaking production methods, and trying to stay ahead of market trends.

There may be second or third jobs, a clambering for creative financing, or a reliance on government assistance programs such as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or state health insurance. Year after year, the decision to quit can be kept at bay by a successful season or the hope that next season will be easier. But at some point, for some of us, the scale just tips. The moment comes when continuing feels too risky, the path forward too unsure—when it makes the most sense to quit.

124 July/August 2015

I

n the beginning ,

Walking J hit the ground running with a smattering of products for the local marketplace, including chicken, turkey, pork, beef, eggs, and produce. Year after year, they ticked off the microenterprises that did not pay the bills. The heritage pork did not make money, nor did the Thanksgiving turkeys. The layer hens required too much outside feed, as did the broiler chickens. The farm’s pastured poultry system demanded bimonthly slaughters of 150 birds, which required an immense amount of time, skilled labor, and freezer space.

Jim and Tina embraced a direct-market sales model, typical for a small-scale diversified operation. They started a CSA group, for community supported agriculture; built partnerships with high-end restaurants; and began vending at the Tucson farmers’ markets. But as the number of those farmers’ markets increased and the pool of customers became diluted as a result, they were forced to seek out new markets. They drove to Nogales with product, tried to establish a CSA in the nearby town of Tubac, opened up a Saturday farm stand, started an online store, and eventually made their way up to Phoenix markets. At one point, they were staffing six farmers’ markets each week. In 2012, Walking J Farm received a USDA grant—which they had to match with a private loan from family members—to cover marketing costs, meat processing, and the purchase of butcher cattle.

SAVE THE DATE TMC and Tucson JCC Present the:

F Wellness FESTI AL Sunday, October 18, 2015 Noon – 4pm Shaw JCC

Akron

Sponsors and Exhibitors are Invited to Invest in Healthy Families!

Become a

teacher !

Beginning Aug. 2015

Your sponsorship or exhibitor booth will support this FREE community-wide event.

Cultivate Family Wellness while receiving significant program and product exposure.

200 hour & 300 hour advanced

teacher trainings

downtown | central | east

yogaoasis.com

Mission The mission of the Family Wellness Festival is to help educate our community on the importance of wellness and healthy lifestyle choices.

For more information on Sponsorship contact: Todd Rockoff at 520-299-3000 x101 or trockoff@tucsonjcc.org For Exhibitor information contact: Danielle Aguilar at 520-299-3000 x121 or daguilar@tucsonjcc.org

edible Baja Arizona

125

As they shut down operations, McManus sold off their remaining livestock, including this pig... the last one left on the farm.

Despite their exhaustive efforts to offer a variety of sales outlets, meet product demand, and create meaningful and profitable relationships with their customers, Tina says that it became clear that the business was not making money.

What followed Walking J’s announcement was a flurry of bewilderment and a general sense of shock among friends and customers. Supporters took to social media to encourage their friends to flood Walking J’s market booth with sales. Someone suggested an emergency Kickstarter. But urgent Facebook posts and new Twitter followers do not save a farm. Jim and Tina were financially, physically, and emotionally tapped.

No one wants to think about farmers calling it quits. It muddies the heroic glow cast around our food producers. It cuts through all of the feel-good chatter about food systems and local economies. Each time a farmer quits, a little piece of our new agrarian dream dies. But however hard it is to discuss, the rate at which farmers are walking away from their farms—whether by choice or by force—may be the most important measure for whether our food systems are actually working. Because although farmers’ markets are springing up everywhere—and although heirloom kale has never been more popular—the average smallscale farmer is barely surviving.

126 July/August 2015

For farmers like Jim and Tina, who believe in producing food by stewarding their land responsibly and supporting plant, animal, and microbe biodiversity, a direct-market relationship with customers who support those production values makes sense. But if our farmers cannot charge prices based on the cost of real production numbers, this model falls flat.

Consider these numbers from a 2011 study, which shows that southern Arizona farmers and ranchers on average sell a collective $300 million of food products per year, yet spend $320 million to raise those crops. The same study finds net farm income trends have been negative since 1989, which means that our farmers have consistently lost money producing food. According to the same study, southern Arizona farmers and ranchers reportedly lost $106 million in 2009, which equaled 39 percent of all sales that year. 2004 was the only recent year when southern Arizona farmers earned more than they spent producing food.

National numbers reflect our region’s numbers. According to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, farmers earned just 10 percent of their income from farm sales, while approximately 90 percent of their income came from off-farm occupations. The projected median farm income for 2015 is negative $1,558.

The rate at which farmers are walking away from their farms—whether by choice or by force—may be the most important measure for whether our food systems are actually working.

W

e are better local food consumers when we remember

that our farmers are not just growing our food—they are human beings, who are trying to refinance their mortgages, purchase dependable health insurance, fix their teeth, send their kids to college, and take a vacation once in a while. Behind the scenes, our farmers spend hours at the computer, wearily adding up market totals and expenditures.

It is here in this solitary lamp-lit space that farmers visit some very dark emotional places. It is impossible to convey the deep anxiety for everything at stake, the fear that accompanies the risk, and the wounds that this stress inflicts upon a psyche or a family.

Although the choice to stop farming is a personal one, there is a familiar narrative that repeats in quiet reverberations across our country’s farmscapes. Lisa and Ali Moussalli are the former owners of Frog Bottom Farm, a small-scale diversified farm in Appomattox County, Virginia. Having spent years apprenticing with other farmers, the Moussallis were firm in their resolve to build a business that could support their family without the reliance on off-farm income. This priority forced the couple to be absolutely diligent in their expenses and calculations.

130 July/August 2015

A harrow without a field.

“There was never a day when we weren’t thinking about the financial soundness of our business,” Lisa remembers. “Can we afford a second tractor? Are we charging enough for eggs?

What’s a reasonable debt burden? Should we drop this market?

Are cherry tomatoes and green beans worth the labor?”

When the Moussallis purchased their land, they planned to continue farming there for many years. And while they fell deeply in love with their farm and the lifestyle that it afforded their family, Lisa says, “It was the relentlessness of our worry that eventually wore us down.”

Though Frog Bottom Farm was never technically failing, they were always just scraping by. Lisa and Ali wanted to have a second child, and like any growing family, they craved financial stability. During a conversation in the fall of 2012, the couple made the heartbreaking decision to sell the farm.

“We were sitting in the kitchen discussing our finances ... and suddenly everything seemed very clear,” Lisa remembers. “Ali suddenly said, ‘Our family is more important than our farm.’

And there it was.”

Two years after their last season at Frog Bottom Farm, Lisa, Ali, and their two young children live a block away

Food and art lovers since 1981.

Kate Breakey: Still Life with Radishes, 2003, hand-colored gelatin silver print

Kate Breakey: Still Life with Limes in a Blue Bowl, 2003, hand-colored gelatin silver print

135 South 6th Avenue P: 520.624.7370 | T-S 11am - 5pm & By Appointment ETHERTONGALLERY.COM

edible Baja Arizona

131

from the Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey. Ali commutes to work as a full-time manager at Beach Plum Farm, where he and his crew work to provide produce, herbs, honey, eggs, and pork for three farm-to-table restaurants in the resort town of Cape May. With the support of Lisa and the kids, Ali is still farming, and as Lisa says, “His work is still full of the problem solving and tangible results he loves.”

Though Lisa admits that the shift away from their life at Frog Bottom Farm has been hard at times, she says they don’t regret their decision to leave. Beach Plum Farm offers an alternative model of food production—not only by truly walking the walk 132 July/August 2015

of farm-to-table, but prioritizing the stability of its farmers by providing a salary, health insurance, and a 401k.

In Iowa, Shanti Sellz, the owner of Iowa City’s Muddy Miss Farm, considers farming her career and does not intend to quit.

But she does question whether the small-scale direct-market model will provide her with long-term stability.

Sellz, who spent nearly a decade as an activist and farmer educator in Tucson, has been farming since she was 16 years old. In 2012, she moved back to her hometown of Iowa City, armed with a small amount of savings and a business plan for a small-scale diversified farming enterprise. Now in her fourth

The echo of a farm: empty chairs, abandoned trailers, and parched fields.

season of farming on her own, Sellz is cultivating a cooperative model with a fellow farmer. This model allows the farmers to share resources, such as labor, equipment, fuel, and marketing.

Sellz and her cooperative partner then aggregate their products in order to create volume and to cater to a more diverse market.

Like any farmer, Sellz constantly questions her farm’s specific model, but she feels strongly that sharing the risk, instead of taking it on completely as a sole proprietor, has many benefits.

Sellz reiterates that finding the right model is as much about financial sustainability as it is about human sustainability. She says, “I want to farm, and there is no reason why I shouldn’t be

able to make a living if my profession is feeding people, which is one of our society’s most basic needs.”

And this is where all of the stories, told and untold, seem to collide. Like the Moussallis, like the farmers of Walking J Farm, like the hundreds of thousands of farmers producing food across our country, Sellz is simply trying to make a living by doing what she does best: feeding her community.

“I am a good farmer,” Sellz says. “I successfully grow a lot of food for a lot of people, and in a time when most people have lost connection to where their food comes from. If I don’t grow food, who will?”

edible Baja Arizona

133

Without shade; without rest.

W

endell Berry asks, “Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: love. They must do it for love.”

I have an immense amount of respect for Wendell Berry, but I am growing tired of this answer. Certainly it would be a mistake to become a farmer if you did not enjoy being outside, if you were not fiercely independent, if you did not enjoy the physical labor involved in food production. But a farmer cannot survive simply by loving her profession. Love does not pay the mortgage, put diesel in the tractor, or make up lost revenue after a late freeze.

Love does not fix hands spent from years of milking goats or resurrect the CSA vegetables when the walk-in refrigerator goes out in the middle of a summer night.

When farmers choose to transition to alternative models of farming, or to quit altogether, they are making decisions that best support their lives, families, and careers. As Sellz says, “Farmers are inherently practical people. We have to be. If something is working, we pursue it and give it everything we have. But if it’s not working—if we are losing money, our health, or if it’s just not sustainable—we have to try something different. We get creative, find alternatives, leave enterprises that are not valuable to us. We survive.”

134 July/August 2015

Although Tina and Jim can imagine Walking J’s finances stabilizing in five to 10 years, Tina explains, “That’s a long time to sit in the hole and work to get out of the red. And we just aren’t willing to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”

Of the moment that she and Jim decided to quit, Tina says, “It was emotional, but it was a relief. We had all these questions.

How do you shut a business down? How do you do it? And Jim’s like, ‘You just do it. You just stop.’ He said, ‘We’ve got to stop the bleeding.’”

There is no disputing the fact that communities love their farmers. Walking J Farm has been heralded as one of the most successful and beloved farms in the region. And here is the disturbing reality at the crux of this entire issue: the fact is that Walking J Farm is so beloved in the southern Arizona local food community, that its farmers are so intelligent, so conscientious, so good at what they do—but they still cannot make a living from the farm. And this is not because they have failed—it is because our archaic food and agriculture system has failed them.

One thing remains certain: if, as a society, we don’t prioritize the health, well-being, and financial solvency of our farmers, we will lose them by the droves—along with all of their precious resources, talent, and skill—and along with our food. ✜

For more information, read Ken Meter’s study “Southern Arizona Local Farm & Food Economy” published by the Crossroads Resource Center. Visit USDA.gov for the Economic Research Service’s report “Farm Sector Income & Finances: Highlights From the 2015 Farm Income Forecast.”

136 July/August 2015

Visit the Farm Education Resource Network, cofounded by Debbie Weingarten and Tina Bartsch, at FernSchool.org.

Visit the National Young Farmers Coalition at YoungFarmers.org.

Debbie Weingarten is a writer, mother, and former farmer. This summer, she’s on a very serious mission to find the best horchata in Tucson.

4th Ave.

6th Ave.

le o To

Stone Ave.

6th St.

e.

Av

Br o ad w ay

o t m r a F From farmers’ markets to wholesale markets, local food producers are seeking stability in sales and access to reliable distribution channels.

140  July/August 2015

Market

By Megan Kimble Photography by Steven Meckler

“People shop with their eyes, especially for produce,” says Food Conspiracy Co-op produce manager Todd Stadtlander.

edible Baja Arizona

141

Farmers’ markets are the frontline of local food, where dollars change hands and fresh food finds eaters.

J

8 on a Sunday morning in June, white canopy tents edge the narrow band of shade below the Rillito Park pavilion. Savvy shoppers arrive early, while the produce is still perky and plentiful, before local eggs could be fried on local sidewalks.

It’s a 10-minute stroll from one end of the farmers’ market to another. There are eggs from Elfrida, cheese from Bisbee, beef from the San Rafael Valley. There are locally baked cookies and kale chips; locally roasted coffee and chiles. And there are locally grown vegetables—purple onions, shiny and piled on blue wax cloth; bright red tomatoes placed carefully in wicker baskets; grass-green fennel fronds spilling from wood crates. Customers chat with their favorite vendors. Crumpled dollars unfold from sweaty pockets and press into latch-lock cash boxes.

Farmers’ markets are the frontline of local food, where farmers and food producers build their brands and business identities—where they connect with and get feedback from customers. Farmers’ markets are where eaters come to learn about all things local—about local farmers, regional seasonality, and face-to-face commerce. And over the past 15 years, farmers’ markets have exploded across the country, increasing from 2,863 in 2000 to 8,268 in 2015, according to the USDA. But for all that farmers’ markets provide to their communities, they are still not where most people buy their food. And so, even as the number of Tucson farmers’ markets continues to increase—as evidenced by the clusters of white canopy tents sprouting up around town like dandelions—farmers’ markets are increasingly not where southern Arizona farmers are earning a living. ust befor e

142 July/August 2015

Why not? Customers are fickle, so sales are unpredictable.

There are too many markets, farmers say, which dilutes the sales potential on any one day. And farmers say that they spend an unsustainable amount of time and energy hustling their product.

“That’s the challenging part of driving everywhere to hawk your produce at different markets,” says Cie’na Schlaefli, the farm manager at the San Xavier Co-op Farm. “You don’t know if you’re going to sell it. It’s exhausting. You’re spending more time and energy and money trying to sell that food than you are growing it.”

“I realized that during the summer at the farmers’ market, we could sit there for 40 hours at five markets to sell the same amount of eggs and honey that we could give to the Co-op in about three hours,” says ReZoNation Farm’s Jaime de Zubeldia.

Even so, he estimates that he spends more than 400 hours a year on the road, delivering and selling the eggs, pork, and honey he and his wife, Kara, produce on their 10-acre farm. “That’s a lot of time to spend, which translates into money, and things not being done on the farm,” he says.

Schlaefli says that it’s important for farmers to factor in their own labor when doing their financial planning. “If you don’t figure the cost of your time into it, you wear out. And your energy should cost something.”

But seeking sales, farmers are forced to stretch their energy.

On a day that might start at 6 a.m., “I don’t usually break down until well after 12 o’clock,” says Sleeping Frog Farms’ CJ Marks.

“Every sale counts. If everyone who liked us on Facebook was part of our CSA or came to buy a $3 thing, and we sold out every time, we’d be in a much stronger position.”

edible Baja Arizona

143

Manish Shah of Heirloom Farmers’ Markets says their job is to create demand for local food by making it “fun, interesting, and accessible.”

S

of shade at the Rillito Park Pavilion, walk 15 minutes down the river path, and you’ll see another spread of white canopy tents. It’s surreal—it’s déjà vu. Didn’t I just buy eggs and tomatoes?

In the summer of 2014, Heirloom Farmers’ Markets moved their Sunday morning market to Rillito Park, and Food In Root took over management of the St. Philip’s Plaza Farmers’ Market.

At St. Philip’s Plaza, Willow Spicewood of Spice of the Desert jokes that it’s like they’re one market, just separated by a long walk.

But of course, they are not. Although some do, most customers don’t go to both markets; already labor-strapped producers are forced to choose between sticking with one market and missing out on potential sales, or splitting their time and resources to set up and stock two booths, one at each market.

“Farmers really can’t afford to send someone to all those markets—they need to be farming,” says Tina Bartsch, the former owner of Walking J Farm. “From my point of view, if farmers’ market managers really wanted to support local agriculture, they wouldn’t create more farmers’ markets. They would create one good one and have all the farmers’ come to that one. And they would be stringent about who they let in.”

Midway through the meandering St. Philip’s Market, three adjacent tables brim with colors—sunshine squash, forest tep past the line

144 July/August 2015

broccoli, crimson peppers. I duck below a banner that says, simply, PRODUCE, and ask the man behind the table where their farm is located.

“Oh, we get our stuff from all over,” he says. “Some of it is from the UA farm, down the street.”

“What about these mangos?” I ask.

“Sometimes from Peru, sometimes from Mexico.”

The apples—green and red—wear stickers with Price LookUp codes, evidence that they have already wound their way through an industrial system.

Many states have passed laws regulating who can sell at farmers’ markets—in 2014, California passed a law funding inspectors to ensure vendors at certified markets were actually growing what they sell. In Arizona, it’s up to each farmers’ market manager to decide who is allowed to sell what. At the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market, run by the Community Food Bank, vendors are required to be certified under the Arizona Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, which mandates that at least 80 percent of a vendor’s product was grown by that vendor or on one neighboring farm.

But in a town where a farmers’ market can now be found nearly every day of the week, market managers face the challenge of simply filling their markets with vendors.

edible Baja Arizona

145

The Rillito Park pavilion offers shade for shoppers and a permanent home for the Sunday farmers’ market.

“The concept of a farmers’ market, at least to a lot of people, is farmers,” says Clayton Kammerer, who co-founded Food In Root in 2012. “The reality is that we do live in the desert where the small growers are more scarce. It’s a difficult challenge of making a market something worthwhile that people can participate in; otherwise, they’ll continue to shop at Trader Joe’s.”

When the first Heirloom Farmers’ Market opened 14 years ago, Manish Shah says there were only two farms selling local vegetables. To support a viable market, the market manager allowed brokers to resell produce from places like California and Mexico. “Those brokers helped fill in the gaps,” he says.

There are fewer brokers today, he says, “And they’re not selling the same stuff as the producers. Tomatoes, maybe. But that’s it.

The brokers are selling pineapple, or out-of-season carrots.”

But local producers say that is precisely the problem—that farmers’ markets are projecting a false sense of seasonality, not to mention undercutting their prices.

“We have people coming to us in the middle of winter and asking, Do you have avocados?” says Dana Helfer, who owns Rattlebox Farm with her husband, Paul Buseck. “Some people don’t have a clue about what grows here, and if there are avocados at the market, there’s just no opportunity for them to learn.”

And, she says, allowing brokers to sell in the same space 146 July/August 2015

as farmers “really affects local producers’ ability to sell their product. You can’t compete. We’re 60 miles from a major port of entry. Our community is flooded with cheap produce. People come to the market and they only have so much money in their pocket. There goes half of that $20 to buying strawberries that got shipped in from somewhere else, that they could just buy at Safeway.”

“Customers still want to be able to buy pineapple at the farmers’ market,” says Shah—so, he says, let there be pineapple.

“I think if your interest is eating local, you’ll ask.”

The issue is that many customers don’t know they’re supposed to ask. There are so many microclimates across southern Arizona that it’s conceivable that one farm could still be growing beets while another farm has moved on to summer squash. And it’s in the name—at a farmers’ market, we come assuming that the food was grown locally.

Helfer says they’re hoping to expand within the next couple of years, from one acre of mixed vegetable production to two or three. “But as we expand, there’s only so much foot traffic that the farmers’ market can manage,” she says. “So we either expand our CSA or we diversify our market—probably both.

The infrastructure that would help us grow is not more farmers’ markets.”

edible Baja Arizona

147

148  July/August 2015

N

less than 20 percent of local food is sold in the direct-to-consumer setting—at a farmers’ market or through a Community Supported Agriculture program. According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, of the $4.8 billion earned in local food sales in 2008, only $877 million—18 percent—was generated by farmers selling directly to consumers, while selling to intermediate channels generated three times more value than selling directly to consumers.

“Small farms in particular rely heavily on direct-to-consumer sales outlets for their income, and the income from these outlets can be quite volatile—which puts farmers in a tenuous position, especially if they don’t have a more secure economic buffer of a larger or consistent buyer,” says Kara Jones, the farmers’ market manager for the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona.

And so, as farmers wear out—as they calculate the cost of their time and energy—they’re rethinking how direct-to-consumer channels like farmers’ markets fit into their sales strategy. Farmers’ markets are still an important cornerstone of local food, but what many producers in southern Arizona say they’re seeking is the economic stability offered by those alternate “intermediate channels,” including partnerships with institutions or access to wholesale markets.

A

ationally ,

on Fourth Avenue, the Food Conspiracy Co-op has seen a few transformations; today, the small storefront of the member-owned grocery store catches eyes with a coat of neon green paint and bright white bubble letters: CO-OP. To the right of the registers, in a vibrant corner of the store, produce manager Todd Stadtlander has managed to do a lot with a little space. Sloping shelves are stacked full of cold, colorful greens, fruits, and roots. Carefully stacked piles of vegetables wear laminated tags declaring their origin. Red Chard—Organic: CA. Or, Dino Kale—Local: Sleeping Frog Farms. In early June, Sleeping Frog’s curly kale is on sale, $2.39 for a bunch. “For the most part, we pay more for local produce than we pay for certified organic produce out of California,” says Stadtlander. “You can go to Sprouts or Whole Foods and they’ll have Dino kale for a buck. That’s what I pay a producer for it.”

Stadtlander works with seven to 10 local producers; to help move their product, he compromises on his profit margin, effectively subsidizing local food to make it more accessible to price-sensitive consumers. “Which is good to make sure it sells,” says Co-op general manager Kelley Kriner, “but not great as far as the education piece, because then people don’t quite understand the cost that goes into producing this food from small farms.”

But the Co-op is doing more than subsidizing local food for consumers—they’re also working with local producers to help them build more economically viable businesses. “We’ve done a few ‘super CSA’ loans,” says Stadtlander—basically, a grander version of the Community Supported Agriculture model of “investing” in a share of a farm in exchange for food that farm produces.

The consumer-driven CSA model doesn’t always provide f ter four decades

At the Food Conspiracy Co-op, produce manager Todd Stadtlander accepts deliveries of local produce “every day of the week.”

edible Baja Arizona

149

Fresh produce doesn’t sell itself. “Accessing markets is a lot of work,” says Dana Helfer of Rattlebox Farm. “I’d rather be farming.”

the cash “oomph” at the beginning of the growing season to help farmers invest in their infrastructure, seed, and labor, says Sleeping Frog Farms’ Marks. “That money actually goes to the labor and some of the seed, pumping water, drip tape. If we can buy everything in bulk at the beginning of the season, we save money, so we can produce more food at better quality, and that brings the prices down,” he says.

So the Co-op took the CSA model and supersized it, offering cash up front in exchange for produce later. In 2011 and then again in 2013, the Co-op offered Sleeping Frog Farms an interest-free loan of $25,000—which the farm has already paid back, entirely in produce. “We just did the same thing with ReZoNation,” says Kriner. “What they communicated to us was that their egg production was not sustainable in the way it was set up, so we forwarded them the cash to make the changes they needed to make—and we can continue to get their great eggs.”

Despite their dedication to supporting small producers, the Co-op is limited by the size of the store and the time of their staff. “People say, ‘Why don’t you carry more local? I go to the farmers’ market and there’s so much more there,’” says Kriner.

150 July/August 2015

“Each direct grower relationship is a cost, labor-wise, for Todd.

If he ordered everything from one organization, it’d be super easy. One invoice, and you’re done.”

And, she says, the Co-op can’t offer the price premiums that growers can earn selling their product directly to consumers at the farmers’ market. “Those folks that are at the farmers’ market need to get $3 for their head of lettuce. We can’t pay that. Grocery stores in general have a very small profit margin.”

What the Co-op offers growers is an opportunity to avoid the hustle and unpredictability of the farmers’ market—to sell their product once, in volume, and be done with it. A grower might earn less money per head of lettuce selling to the Co-op, but they also spend significantly less time.

“Where the Co-op comes in is that you want a consistent outlet for your product,” says Stadtlander. “I’m happy to work with growers who say, ‘I can grow 40 heads of red lettuce every week for the next eight weeks.’ I say, great, bring it in.”

“And if it doesn’t sell, it’s not their problem,” says Kriner.

“It’s our problem.”

THE RIALTO THEATRE SAT•7/11 SUN•7/12 SAT•7/18 SUN•7/19 THU•7/30 SAT•8/8 SUN•8/9 WED•8/12 SUN•8/16 WED•8/26 THU•9/3 TUE•9/8 THU•9/10 SUN•9/13 WED•9/16 FRI•9/18

FEATURED EVENTS

LORD HURON WITH WIDOWSPEAK MALDITA VECINDAD BILLY JOE SHAVER ¡CUBANISMO! OTTMAR LIEBERT & LUNA NEGRA ENANITOS VERDES GRACE POTTER LINDSEY STIRLING @ TUCSON MUSIC HALL ESPERANZA SPALDING ERIC HUTCHINSON WITH TESS HENLEY PRIMUS ONE MAN BREAKING BAD LOS LONELY BOYS WITH MATT ANDERSEN NILS LOFGREN O.A.R. CITIZEN COPE

318 E CONGRESS ST • 520 740 1000 • WWW.RIALTOTHEATRE.COM

edible Baja Arizona

151

Kara Jones (left) and Audra Christophel, at the consignment table at the Community Food Bank’s Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market.

O

T hursday afternoon in June, Audra Christophel, the consignment program coordinator at the Community Food Bank, sorts produce into wicker baskets for shoppers at the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market.

There are cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes from backyard gardeners. Nopales from Panchita, a gardener at Las Milpitas Farm. Apricots from Antonio’s backyard orchard. Christophel works with more than 180 micro and small-scale growers to aggregate the food they grow into a diverse display of seasonality. n a hot

152 July/August 2015

The consignment table, which began in 2005, is a microcosm of a more ambitious project in local food aggregation and distribution, catalyzed by a grant the food bank received from the USDA’s Local Food Promotion Program.

After conducting in-depth interviews with 20 local producers Christophel and Jones realized that, above all, producers were seeking more reliable sales than they were finding in the direct-to-consumer market. “But to sell to bigger buyers, like institutions, requires a fair amount of administrative

edible Baja Arizona

153

The food bank already has the infrastructure to aggregrate and distribute local produce, including refrigerator space and pallets for moving produce.

infrastructure and capacity. For a small or mid-sized farm, that’s a huge burden,” says Jones.

Enter the Community Food Bank. “We already have a lot of the infrastructure required from our charitable donation wing,” says Jones. “We already have refrigerated trucks, warehouse and cooler space, inventory tracking systems.” And after 40 years serving the community, they had the trust of local producers who’d be putting their livelihoods on the line to enter these new markets.

In April, a majority of the producers Jones and Christophel had interviewed came to the food bank for the first gathering of what they’re loosely calling a producer’s cooperative. Together, producers generated a list of crops they could grow by season, in what quantities, and at what price point.

Tucson Medical Center was the first institution to commit; they’ve now agreed to buy all the tomatoes and cucumbers that local producers say they’re capable of growing for the institutional market—300 pounds of cucumbers and 200 pounds of tomatoes every week, which ends up meeting about half of TMC’s demand, says Beth Dorsey, the director of food and nutrition at TMC. “We’re serving about 2,000 meals a day in the cafeteria and about 1,200 meals a day for our patients. It’s a lot of food.” She says she’s excited not only about supporting local producers but also for the increase in quality. “We had a 154 July/August 2015

tasting here and never before had I or anyone else in the room tasted such a great cherry tomato.”

Although it will vary seasonally, selling tomatoes and cucumbers to a place like TMC offers producers a reliable market, one that doesn’t depend on the whims of consumers or market managers. But it also requires the sort of planning and coordination that had previously been beyond the capacity of most growers.

“We talked to TMC about how we can’t get a sudden mass order and fulfill it. We need to start back when this stuff is planted,” says Jones. And to sell to an institution accustomed to receiving “three-by-three” tomatoes—named for their size, three by three inches, predictable down to the slice—growers must consider what varietals to plant. “Growing for a farmers’ market requires diversity, whereas growing for an institution requires consolidation of product,” says Jones. “We’ve talked to growers about strategically setting aside a portion of their plot—this is where we’re all growing the same varietal of cucumber, or lettuce mix.”

A few months ago, the food bank hosted a workshop led by a business consultant, Patrick Staib, who coordinated a similar effort in Albuquerque. “One of the business recommendations he had for small-scale farmers was to only anticipate that 25 percent of your income would come from the farmers’ market,” says Jones. “So 75 percent, a big chunk, should come from the wholesale market, because it’s more consistent.”

By necessity, locally grown produce is aggregated into larger quantities to supply wholesale markets.

B

S anta C ruz River Farmers’ Market, as the sun inches toward evening, the courtyard at the Mercado San Agustín fills up. Parents perch on steps while their kids play, squirm, totter. A musician resumes his strumming. Farmers are still selling food, although the supply is thinning out—frozen beef, brown-speckled eggs, thick honey. There are plant starts and seeds; crusty whole grain breads and stretchy flour tortillas.

The romance of a farmers’ market can be misleading, obscuring how many farmers burn out or go under after facing the very real struggle of growing food. But a farmers’ market is still a lovely place to wander, to talk to farmers and vendors, to slurp on a prickly pear popsicle, puppy’s leash tugging at your wrist. ack at the

156 July/August 2015

Christophel says one of her favorite parts of running the consignment table at the food bank farmers’ markets is the conversation. “People ask, why are there no bananas? Or, what can I do with this? I think that education component is one of the most important things we do—educating folks about what it means to shop at a farmers’ market, what it means to support local producers, and how that’s different than shopping at a grocery store. I love seeing a bigger conversation start on the other side of the table.”

Of course, local food needs more than education—it needs better policy. Imagine if the federal government subsidized small vegetable farms the same way it subsidized corn and soybean growers. If our city and county governments offered the same

Swiss chard sourced from many local farms becomes, simply: local Swiss chard.

incentives and tax subsidies to local grocers, meat processors, vegetable distributors, and grain millers that it offers to Walmart or Citigroup.

But that doesn’t mean consumers don’t matter—that doubling the number of regular, dedicated customers shopping at farmers’ markets or joining CSA programs wouldn’t make a huge difference for local growers. According to a study by Ken Meter at Crossroads Resource Center, if everyone in southern Arizona shifted just $5 of their weekly spending on food to a local producer, we would generate $287 million in new farm income.

“We need the support from the community to say, yes, having a local food system is important to us. Having local farms is

important to us,” says Helfer. “Not because it’s nostalgic. But because it’s important to our food security and the diversity of our American food system as a whole. We’ve got to be able to put our money and our policies where our mouth is.”

As customers climb on bikes or fold into cars, heading home with totes full of food—as farmers make their final sales, hoping to head home with empty coolers—the sun tiptoes toward the edge of “A” Mountain, finally falling west and casting the courtyard in complete shade. ✜ Megan Kimble is the managing editor of Edible Baja Arizona and the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food.

edible Baja Arizona

157

BUZZ

Tequila Rising A new wave of restaurant owners, bar managers, and mixologists is elevating the culture of tequila in the Old Pueblo.

By Swetha Sharma | Photography by Jackie Alpers

W

I dr ink tequila , I taste the earth, but I’m also transported to the sea. Earthy but sweet, spicy but floral, it’s a spirit layered with so much flavor. Every time I drink it, I wonder why I don’t drink it more often.

And I’m not alone. According to Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council—or Consejo Regulador del Tequila—the United States is the largest consumer of tequila outside of Mexico. We get 79 percent of all the tequila that’s exported from Mexico. So given that we live in a region that was once Mexico, we’ve got to have some of the best tequila watering holes in the country. Right?

I decided to find out.

Tequila is produced in only five areas of Mexico: the state of Jalisco and in parts of neighboring states: Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nayarit, and Tamaulipas. And while agave can be distilled elsewhere, the name tequila can only be used for the distillation made within these five regions. hen

158 July/August 2015

It’s a strict denomination of origin, so I wanted to start out drinking tequila in the most authentic way possible. I went to Boca Tacos y Tequila near Speedway and Euclid. Owner and chef Maria Mazon grew up in Sonora where the drink of choice is, surprise, not a margarita.

“For us, it’s the bandera,” Mazon said.

We walk over to her small bar where she gathers ingredients.

A bandera is a three-shot drink named after the Mexican flag.

The tequila is the white. The lime juice, the green. And the sangrita—usually a mix of orange juice, lime juice, and chile powder—the red.

“You just sip each one. I like to start with the tequila, then the sangrita, and then the lime,” Mazon said. The combination of smoky tequila and spicy citrus made me want to order all The many facets of agave.

edible Baja Arizona

159

the tacos on the menu. And that is partly the point; Mazon looks at tequila as another ingredient, often incorporating it into her famous salsas. “If you’re having something as simple as chips and guacamole—and you get the saltiness of chips, the creaminess of the guacamole—a good blanco is just going to hit all those notes and make it pop,” she said.

While Mazon knows her tequila, she has a realistic approach to stocking her bar. “I carry bottles of what’s considered boutique tequila, but I also have my well, the cheap stuff that isn’t 100 percent agave,” she said, referring to her stock of mixtos. Mixtos can be made with as much as 49 percent of nonagave sugars, usually sugarcane or a sugar molasses. It’s a cheaper, faster process than 100 percent agave tequila, and is also typically sold at a lower price point.

Mike Morales is a writer and consultant who has covered the tequila industry for more than a decade. He’s the CEO of Tequila Aficianado Media, a company that covers the latest news on all things tequila. Morales told me the highest consumption of mixto in the United States is in New Mexico and parts of Arizona. “The liquor companies know that, and they dump all that mixto into the four corners,” he said. Among tequila connoisseurs like Morales, the presence of mixtos is a black mark on the industry.

“Nowhere are you going to have—can I have a 51/49 [percent] Bordeaux, can I have a 51/49 cognac, can I have a 51/49 champagne,” said Morales, “Tequila is the only one that allows itself to do that.”

When I asked Mazon why she carries mixtos she said, “It makes me money. The people coming in just to get buzzed, this is what they order.”

But she admits mixtos hurt tequila’s reputation.

“You have to respect the booze; the booze doesn’t have to respect you,” she said.

160 July/August 2015

Maria Mazon of Boca Tacos mixes up a bandera: lime juice, tequila, sangrita.

Mescal holds a special place in the rotation at Penca, manned by bar manager Bryan Eichhorst.

I

Casino del Sol’s Tequila Factory to meet with Property Mixologist, Aaron DeFeo, otherwise known as “Doc,” for a lesson in Tequila 101.

“Good producers of tequila typically wait 8 to 10 years before harvesting,” DeFeo said. That’s how long it takes the agave plant to mature— which means there’s enough sugar in the plant to produce tequila.

“Generational farmers—the ones doing the harvesting – are called jimadores,” DeFeo told me. They begin by cutting the leaves off the agave to reveal the core, or piña (because it looks like a pineapple). The piña is what’s actually distilled into tequila.

“It’s first roasted, because you need to heat it to get enough fermentable sugars,” DeFeo said. “There are different roasting methods, and this is where tequila production can go so many different ways.”

How the agave is processed after it’s heated also plays a part in how it tastes. DeFeo had me try the Fortaleza blanco, a lowland tequila made using a traditional method of stone crushing the cooked agave. A lowland tequila is made from agave harvested in the valleys south of Guadalajara—closer to the actual town of Tequila, while a highland headed to

162 July/August 2015

tequila is harvested northeast of Guadalajara in more mountainous regions.

The Forteleza was bold and spicy, packing a wallop of heat. DeFeo said it reminded him of grass; he even had me pour a bit of the tequila onto my hands and rub them together. The smell of earth and grass hit me right away. “Lowland tequilas tend to be more herbaceous, whereas a highland tequila is more floral and sweet,” DeFeo said. “In the highlands you’re going to get a sweeter, more approachable tequila. If I was going to introduce someone to tequila for the first time, I would give them a highland.”

I asked DeFeo what he thought of Tucson’s tequila scene. “I think when you have outsiders come in to a place like Tucson it is surprising, still, how much mixto we see being served in large quantities at our restaurants and bars,” he said. “In Tucson even our Mexican restaurants aren’t focused on agave spirits.”

While mixto is still for the masses, DeFeo said there is a change happening among the city’s small but mighty cocktail community. “The cocktail bars that have sprung up—they have an intense love for agave and carry hand-picked selections of the best of the best.” And the mixologists and bartenders at those bars are demanding better ingredients.

New & Used Bikes Repairs & Custom Design

311 E. 7th St. 520.622.6487 OrdinaryBikeShop.com

edible Baja Arizona

163

Sidecar’s Niccy Brodhurst says tequila is the closest thing we have to an indigenous spirit.

I

N ik las M or r is , the beverage director at Tough Luck Club—the basement bar tucked below Reilly’s Craft Pizza and Drink, at Scott and Pennington—behind the bar, prepping for the day. He’s hard to miss—wide face, big smile, several tattoos, frenetic energy.

In this region, he said, “from about the 1830s through the 1860s or so, it’s all bacanora and sotol. There was a bacanora distillery on Meyer.

It was just all about what we had here, all these mescals. And then from about the 1870s on, once there was money and migration from the East, it switched to whiskey and gin.” All the native varieties, he said, “kind of disappeared.”

But Morris is part of a cocktail community that’s bringing agave back to the Southwest. “The first direct line train from Tequila, the city, to the United States came through Tucson,” Morris said. “We love tequila but we also love bacanora, we love soltol, and every other shade of mescal.”

Mescal encompasses all agave-based liquors, including tequila. Whereas tequila can be made from only one type of agave plant, the blue agave, mescal can be made with several types of agave.

And few in Tucson’s cocktail scene know mescal better than Bryan Eichhorst, beverage director at a downtown Mexican eatery, found

164 July/August 2015

Penca, near Broadway and Scott, which offers more than 50 agave spirits.

Unlike tequila, which is distilled above ground in steel autoclaves, “Mescal distillation is a different process,” Eichhorst said. It includes the cooking of the agave, and “it’s usually done in an open pit, and cooked slowly over time,” he says.

He poured me a Don Amado Rustico mescal, and right away I tasted the distinct flavors of barbecue. A sticky, sweet smokiness that made me think ribs and brisket—which makes sense, because agaves are roasted over wood, usually mesquite.

Mescals also hold a special place for Niccy Brodhurst, manager of Sidecar, located inside Broadway Village. “When I was 13 or 14, I went to Oaxca with my dad,” he says. “We were down there for two weeks for the purpose of tasting mescal—I was allowed to have a few nips here and there.”

One of Brodhurst’s goals is to build up the bar’s agave collection; when we spoke, he was getting ready for a trip to Mexico to do just that. “It’s the closest thing we have to an indigenous spirit. I think every shelf in Tucson should have some space for quality agave spirits,” Brodhurst said.

edible Baja Arizona

165

S

is not an issue at Reforma Cocina y Cantina.

Located at St. Philip’s Plaza, near River and Campbell, Reforma has one of the city’s largest tequila collections. More than 200 bottles adorn the bar. It’s a big restaurant but the bar, with its mirrored wall and assorted shelf sizes to showcase each bottle, is clearly the focal point. The tequila menus are all on iPads; the most expensive offering is a $125 per ounce DeLeón Leóna.

I sat down with Dylan Higgins, then general manager and beverage director.

“Tequila producers would love to stop making mixtos,” Higgins said. “I think they would rather sell 100 percent agave any day of the week, because everybody who does something would rather do it the way they know is best,” Higgins said. “But they make the other stuff because that is what we [the consumers] buy in bulk.”

I thought back to what DeFeo had said about mixtos hurting tequila culture, and asked Higgins if he, and those at Reforma, felt a sense of responsibility to elevate tequila. “Absolutely,” he said.

“Everybody on staff is expected to be able to answer the most basic questions, like, is that a highland or a valley tequila?”

I had Higgins pour me a few of his favorites from Reforma’s large collection. The final pour was my favorite—a Milagro Reposado Select Barrel Reserve that had been aged in French oak barrels.

I left Reforma as the early dinner crowd was trickling in. I wanted to go home, put my feet up, and drink water. Instead I sat outside Reforma for a while, and let my last 48 hours marinate. I thought a lot about Chef Maria’s “respect the booze” philosophy.

How can tequila garner respect when mixtos are duping drinkers?

While there isn’t exact data available for sales of mixto versus 100 percent agave, the Distilled Spirits Council reports sales of 100 percent agave tequilas are growing. Last year, retailers and restaurants bought 2.4 million nine-liter cases of “super-premium” 100 percent agave tequila, compared with only 513,000 cases in 2004.

But as global demand for tequila increases, mixtos are likely not going anywhere. And they’ll still be stocked in most bars in town, for those people looking for a cheap buzz. But we’ve got Mazon making banderas, DeFeo giving lessons, and Reforma stocking 100 percent agave.

It’s a good time to be drinking tequila in Tucson. ✜ helf space

Boca Tacos y Tequila. 828 E. Speedway Blvd. 520.877.8234.

BocaTacos.com.

Tequila Factory. 5655 W. Valencia Road. Casino del Sol. 520.838.6811. CasinoDelSolResort.com.

Reilly’s Craft Pizza and Drink. 101 E. Pennington St. 520.882.5550. ReillyPizza.com.

Penca. 50 E. Broadway. 520.203.7681. PencaRestaurante.com.

Sidecar. 139 S Eastbourne Ave. 520.795.1819. barsidecar.com Reforma Cocina y Cantina. 4310 N. Campbell Ave. 520.867.4134.

Swetha Sharma is a former television news producer with a love for all things food and drink. She’s usually writing with her mouth full.

No margaritas here, just quality tequila, lime, and salt. At Reforma Cocina y Catina, a mirror-backed bar shows off their vast array of tequila.

166 July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

167

All the news that’s fit to drink.

Many of our local spirits producers are trying to keep up with the demand and growing popularity for their product: Dragoon Brewing recently gave up the dream of self-distribution and began sharing trucks with Miller High Life through Finley Distributing; Hamilton Distillers moved from their alleyway distillery off of Fourth Avenue to a higher production facility near the highway; and the future of wine in Willcox looks to be trapped in courtrooms for the next decade, as judges decide what can be labeled as Arizona wine.

Not everyone has entered the bittersweet embrace of mass appeal. Iron John’s Brewing Company, the brainchild of John Adkisson and John Markley, remains the quiet contender in Southern Arizona’s craft beer scene. I recently tasted their Muse de Brussels Belgian Pale Ale at Good Oak

168 July/August 2015

Bar. The unfiltered amber opacity of the beer coupled with barely ripe apricots and lightly toasted barley on the nose immediately reminded me of my first experience with a Trappist beer. The beer diverges a bit from tradition with a slightly heavier dry hopping with Bramling Cross hops, but they lend a dry brambleberry character to the brew more than any added bitterness.

Crisp, dry, and with just the right amount of fruit, the Belgian yeast strains in this beer are singing. Buy one at Iron John’s bottle shop at 245 S. Plumer Ave. and drink it with some sausage and sauerkraut at your next barbeque. IronJohnsBrewing.com.

Wilko remains one of the few reliable places you can get high quality food, great wine, well-made cocktails, and hand selected beers near the University of Arizona campus. Luke Anabel and Sara Holcombe’s recently released summer cocktail list remains with the restaurant’s overall theme—consistent reproductions and subtle variations of classic drinks. The standout on the summer list is the Island Manhattan, a slightly lifted velveteen Manhattan with hickory-smoked Madeira, bottled in bond Bourbon, Applejack, and Gran Classico bitter.

The bonded whiskey portion of the drink brings the usual suspects of a stirred whiskey cocktail (vanilla, sawmill) while the hickory smoke and Madeira dial down the intensity with dried fruits and some sweetness. Many people connect summers in the Sonoran Desert to shaken lime juice and tequila cocktails; the true spirit animal of summer nights down here is a strong stirred whiskey cocktail. 943 E. University Blvd. 520.792.6684. BarWilko.com.

Falora / Sparkroot / BarSidecar : dot com

edible Baja Arizona

169

Nathan Ares, the accidental mastermind behind Prep & Pastry’s runaway breakfast and lunch success, is taking over the Foothills restaurant space previously filled by The Abbey for his new joint Commoner and Company. He is trying to use the same concept as Prep & Pastry but apply it to dinner fare and a full bar. Prep & Pastry has been able to take the same general dishes you could find at any breakfast place in town, make every component from scratch with consistency and quality, and provide it to diners with a heightened awareness of presentation. This winning combination is being applied to the cocktails at Commoner and Company. Their Old Fashioned variation is made with sous-vide honeycomb Dickel Tennessee whiskey, Cabernet Sauvignon soaked cherries, orange zest, and tobacco tincture. While it may not change the world, I can guarantee there will be a line of north-side residents out the door demanding their Honey Old Fashioned cocktails by the time autumn rolls around. Prep & Pastry. 3073 N. Campbell Ave. 520.326.7737. PrepandPastry.com. Commoner and Company.

6960 E. Sunrise Drive. CommonerTucson.com.

Not every night needs high-concept cocktails. For the nights that Budweiser and Jameson are in order, there is a wonderful dive bar in Drexel Heights called the Lazy V Saloon. Wood paneling covers all the walls save for a nighttime mural depicting the pastoral bliss of the arid landscape outside the bar. Three sixfoot pool tables fill half of the bar; the open area on the other half leaves enough room for you to attempt to dance to the Internet jukebox as stray dogs from the neighborhood run between your legs. Jose “Monty” Montenegro was the extremely charismatic young bartender working the room during a recent visit. While he was explaining to me that the bar was at least 50 years old, I couldn’t help notice a sign taped to the cash register warning, “The ENTIRE Canez family is 86’d from this bar. If anyone enters, please report to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.”

Monty said that the Lazy V Saloon was one of the top five dive bars in the city and probably the top 10 in the state. With a pedigree like that, it’s no wonder the place has lasted so long.

Make a visit to the Lazy V Saloon when you need a reminder of the beautiful simplicity and authenticity that is southern Arizona.

2812 W. Alvaro Road. 520.578.0202. ✜ Bryan Eichhorst is a native Tucsonan, unapologetic sommelier, dedicated evangelist of Oaxacan mescal, and the beverage director at Penca.

170 July/August 2015

edible Baja Arizona

171

WILLCOX AREA & BISBEE WINE MAP d.

From Exit #331

Fort G ra nt R

1 Hour to Tucson 1 hour to Sonoita 3 Hours to Phoenix

8

f Je fe

Rd

E.

15

Ro

zb

er

ge

bb

9

rR

sR

d.

d.

10

Be

nn

Rd

12

ck

ad ilro

a

S. R

5

.

Ave

Willcox

7 8 9 10

min

.)

186

6

18

186

( 75 las oug to D

5 miles

181

1

5 km

13

2

14

Phoenix Willcox Area

Tucson

Bisbee

Bisbee

3 From Bisbee

1 hour to Sonoita 2 Hours to Tucson

4

Subway St. 16

5

t.

S ain

M

186

n.

ve. ll A 6

ke Has

3 4

Pl.

yL

me ttle Se as ns

Ka S.

N.

1 2

E

ett

Lu

W. Rex Allen Dr.

St. art tew E.S ey St. al .

E. M rant St G W.

N

S

11

nt

N

191

W

Ar

.

Go N lden M es Rule qu ite Rd. Rd .

.

80

N

500’ 152m

Note: Many roads have been omitted for clarity.

E W S

6

SAND-RECKONER 130 S. Haskell Avenue 303.931.8472 Sand-Reckoner.com

By Appointment Only FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS: WILLCOX TASTING ROOM 100 N. Railroad Avenue 520.384.6030 FlyingLeapVineyards.com Wed-Sun: 12-6 KEELING SCHAEFER VINEYARDS: WILCOX TASTING ROOM 154 N. Railroad Avenue 520.766.0600 KeelingSchaeferVineyards.com Thurs-Sun: 11-5 CARLSON CREEK 115 Railroad Avenue 520.766.3000 CarlsonCreek.com Thu-Sun 11-5 ARIDUS TASTING ROOM 145 N Railview Avenue 520.766.9463 AridusWineCo.com Tasting Room Daily: 11-5 Crush Room Daily: 11-5 w/appt.

ARIDUS CRUSH FACILITY 1126 N. Haskell Avenue 520.766.2926 Mon-Fri: 11-5, Sat-Sun: By Appt.

11 12 13 14 15 16

.

n

62 #3

oo

ve lA ra nt Ce .

e Av

S. R

t Exi

a

ag

N

.

Ave

n rso

ad ilro

)

336

Exit #318

(3 hrs. to Las Cruces

to New Mexico

Exit #

Exit #331

Dr

191

7

Business Loop

PASSION CELLARS AT SALVATORE VINEYARDS 3052 N. Fort Grant Road 602.750.7771 PassionCellars.com CORONADO VINEYARDS 2909 E. Country Club Drive 520.384.2993 CoronadoVineyards.com Mon-Sat: 9:30-5:30, Sun: 10-4 FORT BOWIE VINEYARDS 156 N. Jefferson, Bowie AZ 520.847.2593 Daily: 8-4 BODEGA PIERCE TASTING ROOM 4511 E. Robbs Road 602.320.1722 BodegaPierce.com Thurs-Sun: 11-5, M-W by Appt.

PILLSBURY WINE COMPANY 6450 S. Bennett Place 520.384.3964 Pillsburywine.com Thurs-Sun: 11-5 Weekdays by Appointment ZARPARA VINEYARDS 6777 S. Zarpara Lane 602.885.8903 Zarpara.com Fri-Sun: 11-5, Mon-Thurs: By Appt.

KEELING SCHAEFER VINEYARD 10277 E. Rock Creek Lane 520.824.2500 Wine Club Events Only LAWRENCE DUNHAM VINEYARDS 13922 S. Kuykendall Cutoff Road 602.320.1485 LawrenceDunhamVineyards.com

By Appointment Only GOLDEN RULE VINEYARDS 3525 N. Golden Rule Road 520.507.2400 GoldenRuleVineyards.com Thurs-Sun 11-5 Mon-Weds: by Appointment FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS: BISBEE TASTING ROOM 67 Main St. Bisbee 520.384.6030 Fri-Sat: 12-7 Sun: 12-6

SONOITA/ELGIN & TOMBSTONE WINE MAP To Tuc s

on/Ph

Exit #281

oenix

To New M

exico

6.3 Mi. 1

Sonoita

83

1 km N

Lower Elgin Rd. Phoenix

m 15 nia ( o g a t to Pa

t.

t. th S

Elgin ford

To Bi sbee (25 min. )

14

St.

80

12

Note: Many roads have been omitted for clarity.

1 2 3

CHARRON VINEYARDS

18585 S. Sonoita Hwy, Vail 520-762-8585 CharronVineyards.com Fri–Sun: 10-6

DOS CABEZAS WINEWORKS 3248 Hwy 82, Sonoita 520-455-5141 DosCabezasWineworks.com Thurs–Sun: 10:30-4:30

AZ HOPS & VINES

3450 Hwy 82, Sonoita 888-569-1642 AZHopsAndVines.com Thurs: 10-4, Fri-Sun: 10-6

174 July/August 2015

4 5

HANNAH’S HILL

3989 State Hwy 82, Elgin 520-456-9000 HannahsHill.com Sat-Sun by Appointment

WILHELM FAMILY VINEYARDS

21 Mtn. Ranch Dr., Elgin 520-455-9291 WilhelmVineyards.com Nov–March: Daily 11-5 April–Oct: Fri – Sun 11-5 Mon-Thurs by Appointment

6 7 8

11

N5 Saf

St.

Elgin

d.

83

t.

N4

13

To Sierra Vista (30 min.)

th S

St.

N3

rd S

t.

N2

nd

st S

2

llen

10

/8

80

Tombstone EA

9

8

To

45 min. to Sonoita via Hwy 82 75 min. to Tucson via I-10 3 hours to Phoenix via I-10

7

Elgin Rd.

Tucson

Sonoita/Elgin

Elgin Rd.

6

Tombstone

N1

S

5

in) 5m 3 ( es gal

elo R

E

in.) ,N o

W

Las Cienegas National Conservation Area

82

3 2

4

Upper Elgin Rd.

18.4 Mi.

1 mile

to To m b

om min. fr 5 4 e( s t on

ion) junct 3 8 82/

-Can

From this exit: 2.5 Hours to Phoenix 30 minutes to Tucson 30 minutes to Sonoita

RANCHO ROSSA VINEYARDS 32 Cattle Ranch Lane, Elgin 520.455.0700 RanchoRossa.com Fri–Sun: 10:30-3:30

CALLAGHAN VINEYARDS 336 Elgin Road, Elgin 520.455.5322 CallaghanVineyards.com Thurs–Sun: 11-4

FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS 342 Elgin Road, Elgin 520.455.5499 FlyingLeapVineyards.com Daily: 11-4

9

To Ft. Huachuca (50 min.)

Sierra Vista (1 hr.)

KIEF-JOSHUA VINEYARDS

370 Elgin Road, Elgin 520.455.5582 KiefJoshuaVineyards.com Daily: 11-5

10 V471 Elgin Road,EElgin ILLAGE OF

LGIN

520.455.9309 ElginWines.com Daily: 11-5

12 L2368 Hwy 83,RElgin IGHTNING

CELLARS

IDGE

520.455.5383 LightningRidgeCellars.com Fri-Sun: 11-4

W 13 T15 N 4th Street,WTombstone OMBSTONE

INE

ORKS

520.261.1674 TombstoneWinery.com Daily: 12-6

V S S W 11 S290 Elgin Canelo Road, Elgin 14 334 E Allen Street, Tombstone ONOITA

INEYARDS

520.455.5893 SonoitaVineyards.com Daily: 10-4

ILVER

TRIKE

INERY

520.678.8200 SilverStrikeWinery.com Daily: 12-6

SABORES DE SONORA

An Honest Cheese Seeking the “soul of the soil” in Sonora’s best fresh and aged cheeses.

By Kathe Lison | Photography by Christopher Cokinos

I

of vivid saffron—perhaps 50 feet from where a man sits roasting coffee beans in a cast iron skillet, and just beyond the pot of frijoles simmering over a wood stove made of bricks and an old metal grill—we find them: Maria Elena and her helpers. With a large silver spoon, Maria Elena stirs the pot of queso cocido, or “cooked cheese,” warming over low heat.

It’s already reached the stage where she can pull it upwards as if it were taffy, and the three boys helping her—who range in age from about 7 to 15—busily pat out little circles of queso onto the surface of a cracked tablecloth scattered with a motif of girasols. The resulting rounds are slightly smaller than a small flour tortilla—perfect for layering into quesadillas.

Maria Elena pulls some of the cheese from the pan and deftly rolls it onto the table. Flipping her spoon to use the handle as a knife, she slices hunks from the end for the boys, pausing to place one into my hands. It’s hot—nearly finger-burning—and though it may look like taffy, it’s softer and less prone to tearing.

I pull pieces from the end for my traveling companions. I’ve only doled out a few before I have to stuff a glob of the warm cheese into my own mouth. Oily and slick, it goes down in a single, marvelous gulp. n a building

176 July/August 2015

A

we’d been driving south from Nogales along Highway 15 on a quest to see Sonoran cheese being made. At the dairy up the road—our ostensible destination—we were turned away by security. The boss wasn’t in and we didn’t have an appointment. No matter. We pressed on, and five minutes down the road stopped at a tiny restaurant where my friend Bill said he has been stopping for years. One time, Bill said, he and his wife arrived late at night to find the proprietress, Doña Maria, who was then very old, asleep in a chair. They woke her up. She opened one eye, gestured to the stove and where the tortillas were kept, closed it, and went back to sleep.

We were hopeful that on this visit we would find whoever was cooking awake and able to give us some insight into the local cheese. And indeed the next Doña Maria, daughter to the previous one (and mother-in-law to cheesemaker Maria Elena), greeted us readily when we poked our heads through the establishment’s doorway. At 80, she’s a diminutive woman with a halo of white-gray hair and a gloriously wrinkled face who l l m o r n i ng

Queso fresco (top left) and panela, two typical Sonoran cheeses.

Photo by William Lesch. Plates courtesy of HF Coors.

A

shuffles about her kitchen with remarkable alacrity on a pair of nd queso fresco was also essentially what Maria Elena, bowed legs. When we asked how the queso for the quesadillas was in the saffron-colored building behind the restaurant, made, Doña Maria seized a bowl filled with already-made cheese. was using to make her queso cocido—which after queso “Aquí está la leche,” she said, pantomiming her way through fresco is the second type of cheese you’re most likely to run adding the vegetable rennet—purchased from a local veteriacross in Sonora, followed by requesón, or Mexican ricotta. The narian—to the milk so that it coagulates. Once the curds have hunk of fresh curd sat in a pool of yellow whey at the bottom of formed, she explained, they’re placed in a colander to drain. a large, silver pot on the stove next to her. In addition to rennet, Next the curds are heated—she moved her fist in circles over she explained, she also adds a bit of sour milk to the mix—a her pretend pot—until they form the stretchy taffy threads. At traditional way of introducing starter bacteria. She pulled some the end of her explanation, she suspended a round of cheese of the curd from the larger pan and placed it into her pan over on her two thumbs for our inspection, holding her palms open the heat, demonstrating the process Doña Maria had mimicked toward us with the circle of cheese, ivory and nearly paper thin, earlier. suspended between them.

Dairying was unknown in Mexico until the Spaniards arrived with their cows, sheep, and goats. With the animals came recipes for making hard cheeses such as Manchego, from the windswept, sheep-studded plateau of La Mancha, and soft cheeses such as Burgos, from around the cathedral town of the same name in the northern reaches of Castile and León. Over time such recipes morphed, coming out the other side of history as quesos that may carry something of their European forebears, yet are uniquely Mexican.

There is, for example, panela, a smooth, white, moist cheese often sold in baskets the way the people around the Mediterranean have done for millennia; or cotija, a hard, dry grating cheese frequently compared to Parmesan; Oaxaca, a stretched-curd cheese pulled into ropes that are then wound into balls (think mozzarella); and, of course, Manchego, though the Mexican version is Maria Elena has continued her mother’s practice of making cheese at home. typically made with milk of cows and not sheep. Another such cheese is queso fresco, a round of pressed white curd reminiscent of queso Burgos.

Maria Elena sank her fingers into the whiteness, kneading.

Versions of queso fresco can be found throughout the country, Within a minute or two the mountains of curd begin to settle and this is quite true in Sonora, where men hawk it in highway and join, and she was pulling strands of melted cheese from the medians. As the name implies, queso fresco is typically aged for bottom of the pan to the top of the heap. On the other side of a matter of days and is meant to be consumed quickly. It’s exactly the table one of the boys paused to wipe sweat from his brow. the sort of cheese you’d expect to find in such a hot place where In the States, kids their age might have been sitting in a corner, there isn’t a need for large-format, aged rounds meant to make glued to their phones. Yet these boys laughed and ribbed one it through harsh winters. another, seeming content as they waited for Maria Elena to once What you wouldn’t expect to find here is cows—yet you’d again flip her spoon around and cut off hunks for them to form be wrong. Despite efforts to promote sheep and goats—animals into the slippery, buttery rounds. that would be better suited to the arid clime—cows remain When we ask, Maria Elena tells us they make about 650 the favored animal for cheesemaking across Mexico. The cows cheeses each day, which last a few days in the restaurant. You used themselves are mostly rangy, mongrel breeds, amalgamations of to be able to find women like her all over Europe, making batches Herefords and Holsteins and Jerseys and who knows what else. of cheese in their kitchens. It’s what some describe derisively Under the cottonwoods down along the river bottoms not far as “bathtub” cheese, and it’s disappeared virtually everywhere, from Doña Maria’s place, a motley herd of them stood placidly even in the tradition-rich countryside of France where these munching hay behind fences cobbled together from branches days even the smallest cheese operations are awash in regulation and barbed wire. The raw milk from such animals is what gives stainless steel equipment and state-of-the-art drying racks. Here many Mexican cheeses their rustic, lactic flavor, and queso fresco in Sonora, though, the old ways persist. is a good example: It’s a straightforward cheese: honest, plain, Cheeses, at their simplest and best, are an expression not and tending toward salty. only of the milk—that “soul of the soil” as one cheese monger 178 July/August 2015

so famously put it—but also of the places and people who make them. Which means that from now on, for me, queso cocido will always be the old Doña Maria snoring in her chair, Maria Elena and her boys around their queso-filled table strewn with sunf lowers, and, most especially, the stooped figure of the halo-haired Doña Maria, standing in her kitchen and holding out her circle of cheese like the tiny benediction that it is. ✜ 180 July/August 2015

(Top) A kettle of beans cooks on a makeshift outdoor stove.

(Below) Maria Elena and her cheesemaking helpers cluster on the porch.

Kathe Lison is the author of a travel narrative about French cheese, The Whole Fromage, and an as-yet unpublished memoir, Part of the World. She lives and eats in Tucson.

INK

Book Reviews by Molly Kincaid Chasing Arizona

By Ken Lamberton

University of Arizona Press 2015

A

Tucsonan Ken Lamberton’s colorful first-person travel book Chasing Arizona, it may strike the reader that she could stay in this state all her life and never run out of adventures.

Amazingly, Lamberton was able to do all of it in one calendar year. He compared it to the Big Year in the parlance of birdwatchers, and indeed, seeing all of Arizona’s “people, places and treasures” turned out to be a quest of epic proportions.

Lamberton is perfectly positioned to write such a comprehensive book on touring Arizona. A naturalist and biologist, the author has lived in Arizona most of his life, and his enthusiasm for the state is palpable, sometimes even spiritual: “Put me in the desert and I become the cholla, the spiny ocotillo, dropping leaf and bearing thorns.”

Most of the book spotlights Arizona’s desert environment, but Lamberton manages to weave in historical detail for every destination. The research that went into the book makes it much richer than a straightforward guidebook. In Madera Canyon, he gives a hearty endorsement of the cabins of Madera Kubo B&B. Then he relates the story of Ben Daniels, “a thieving, back-shooting jailbird and professional hitman-turned-lawman, Rough Rider, Yuma Territorial Prison superintendent, U.S. marshal, and Pima County sheriff” who hunted bear with Teddy Roosevelt in Madera.

True to the book’s title, Lamberton spends a good portion of his Arizona year chasing one thing or another. In Bisbee, he hunts for ghosts and craft brews. In Patagonia, he hunts for the fter reading

182 July/August 2015

A naturalist and biologist, Lamberton’s enthusiasm for the state is palpable, sometimes even spiritual: “Put me in the desert and I become the cholla, the spiny ocotillo, dropping leaf and bearing thorns.”

oldest grave. In the Chiricahua Mountains, he sights the state butterf ly, the two-tailed swallowtail, and visits Petey Mesquitey, known for his KXCI radio program, “Growing Native.” In the White Mountains, he seeks out the elusive Apache trout, a breed sacred to the White Mountain Apache Tribe. He looks for wolves in the east fork of the Black River, and upon seeing only tracks but none in the flesh, he waxes mystical: “They are as real as the sound of their voices through the trees, as vital as breath. Their way is as evident and mysterious as a trail of blood in the snow.”

The poetic Lamberton isn’t an island on his journey. His wife, Karen, accompanies him to the less-remote areas such as Bisbee, Phoenix, and Tucson, and his daughters, Jessica, Kasondra, and Melissa, often come along for the ride, giving Lamberton the opportunity to play proud Papa.

There is food, too, of course.

Along the way Lamberton decides to hunt down the best chimichanga in the state. To keep things fair and impartial, he orders the same thing, a green chile chimi, at every Mexican haunt he encounters. Spoiler alert: to Lamberton’s palate, the baked chimis at Chalo’s Casa Reynoso in Globe are the very finest.

Lamberton’s love of all things Arizona is evident in his exuberant writing, and the excitement is contagious.

Each chapter left me curious, itching to explore, taste, and experience it for myself. Lamberton set out in his first chapter to spread the gospel of Arizona’s wild and variable glories.

Thanks to his tireless research, lust for adventure, and many miles in his trusty Kia Rio, he ended the year knowing that his mission had been accomplished.

A Modern Way to Eat

The Broad Fork

Ten Speed Press 2014 ost people don’t know how to make a salad. In fact, most people don’t even know what a salad is, and that’s why they believe they don’t like salad. Even many restaurant chefs don’t have the first clue how to prepare a delicious salad. Nothing is more depressing than chilled dry lettuce leaves (even fancy organic ones) quivering beneath a wimpy smattering of sugary vinaigrette made with cheap oil. Not tossed. With maybe a cherry tomato and some shredded carrot.

I shudder when I hear people order “dressing on the side.” The first rule of salad is: a salad should be tossed.

Anna Jones knows how to make a salad, and she provides the building blocks in just two pages of her revelation of a vegetarian cookbook, A Modern Way to Eat. She says to start with salad leaves – arugula, spinach, little gem, shredded kale. Add a veggie or two, preferably one whose flavor has been previously developed, like roasted squash, roasted leeks, or seasoned tomatoes. Then you need something crunchy – Jones suggests croutons (homemade), toasted nuts, pomegranate seeds, or quick maple seeds (recipe included). She suggests adding an herb, like parsley, basil, or chopped fennel tops, and finally something hearty (if you like) such as lentils, couscous, a poached egg, or cheese.

Most important, she guides the reader into the world of making homemade dressing – the most important step in reaching salad nirvana. It’s really so simple—a 2:1 ratio of oil to acid, with flavor mix-ins like miso, mustard, or capers. It’s astonishing that there’s a market for bottled salad dressing, considering how easy and inexpensive it is to make a high quality one at home.

Putting a jam jar of dressing in the fridge on Sunday evening becomes a hallowed ritual you’ll thank yourself for later.

The cool thing about this book is that its design informs the way a home cook should approach dinner—not with a recipe but a blueprint.

You can use what you have on hand to follow her simple maps for creating endless variations of pastas, grains, hummus, pesto, and soup. Once you know the blueprint, you can go rogue, creating your own masterpieces according to the season and your senses.

This is when you truly learn how to cook.

Clarkson Potter 2015 hat the hell do I do with kohlrabi?” The question on the lips of many CSA members throughout the ages is emblazoned on the inside cover of Hugh Acheson’s new tome, The Broad Fork. His high-brow answer is Skillet Kohlrabi, Lobster, Fennel and Curry Butter.

But he also suggests a simple pickle, and putting that on a hot dog. “This is a great culinary response because darn near everything tastes good on a hot dog,” he writes.

Luckily, even Acheson’s high-brow recipes are relatively simple to make, with a short list of fresh ingredients.

Each chapter features a fruit or vegetable, and most are unconventional.

Persimmons’ sweetness is paired with grilled pork belly and a spicy soy vinaigrette. Or they are cooked into a filling for Persimmon Pop-Tarts. Sunchokes are made into crispy hash and topped with poached eggs.

Fennel is a fragrant beauty that is often discarded into the trade baskets at CSA pickups, but Acheson’s preparations are right on point. His Fennel Salad with Anchovies, Lemon, and Roasted Tomato utilizes an amazing f lavor profile and has a nice mushy/ crunchy factor. Grits with Speck and Caramelized Fennel tones down the sharp licorice flavor of the vegetable through the magical powers of pork.

(Speck is an Italian smoked ham— prosciutto would certainly work).

As a Southerner based in Athens, Georgia, Acheson can provide the last word on okra. His preparations are classics, and they are all you need to know about how to prepare this whimsical little garden gem. His instructions for simply grilling or frying are the best routes for those who eschew okra’s slimy tendencies. But Acheson’s recipes for Stewed Okra with Tomatoes, Garlic, Cumin and Peppers, and Curried Okra over Carolina Gold Rice are true Low Country classics.

For home gardeners, CSA members, and farmers’ market shoppers, this book is an admirable addition to the cookbook arsenal. Next time you find yourself asking, “What the hell do I do with _____?” Acheson has you covered. ✜

By Anna Jones

M

By Hugh Acheson

“W

Molly Kincaid is a Tucsonan who is obsessed with tinkering in the kitchen and reading cookbooks. Her favorite foods are, paradoxically, kale and pork belly.

Source guide explanation

edible Baja Arizona

185

LAST BITE

From “Survival in Southern Arizona” by Max Cannon, 1972 Foreword by Angela Orlando, Ph.D., UCLA Department of Anthropology 186 July/August 2015

drinkable BAJA ARIZONA

Fresh, organic drinks to nourish mind, body and soul.

Stay refreshed this summer with iced espresso, coffee, & tea.

savayacoffee.com