Edible Baja Arizona - March/April 2016

March/April 2016 • Issue No. 17 • Gratis

Celebrating the gastronomy of Tucson and the borderlands.

PEDACITOS DE MEXICO No. 17 March/April 2016

Pedacitos de Mexico: South Side Restaurants Protecting Working Landscapes • The World of Suzana Davila

Features

Contents

6 COYOTE TALKING

10 CITY OF GASTRONOMY What’s next for Tucson’s UNESCO World City of Gastronomy designation?

12 ONLINE What’s happening at EdibleBajaArizona.com?

14 VOICES We asked six couples: What’s the most memorable meal you’ve shared?

22 GLEANINGS Dispatches from: Xocolatl at the market; the Casa Video Bar; Veg Box Café’s downtown spot; and the new UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

34 BAJA EATS 42 THE PLATE The one thing they should never take off the menu.

10 THE WORLD 1 ACCORDING TO SUZANA In the restaurant known for little things, Suzana Davila has built a reputation on big flavors.

47 EDIBLE HOMESTEAD Gardening: A to Z of what to plant now; Ask a Master Gardener; Gardener Q&A. 64 SONORAN SKILLET With a little creativity, a simple Sunday dinner can become a week’s worth of meals.

72 FARM REPORT 76 A DAY IN BAJA ARIZONA Exploring Ambos Nogales.

82 IN THE BUSINESS Patricia Schwabe has helped shape Tucson’s downtown, from developing buildings with Peach Properties to developing a menu at Penca Restaurant.

86 PROFILE Forty years ago, long-time Tucsonan Richard Felger was promoting new water-saving food crops for arid lands. More at EdibleBajaArizona.com.

92 MEET YOUR FARMER From chickens to pigs to garlic, these three farmers show adaptation in action, acre by acre.

100 TABLE Desde tacos a tamales, toma un tour de los sabores de Mexico.

112 ENTRUSTING LAND Since the 1970s, the Arizona Land and Water Trust has protected working landscapes—and supported the farmers and ranchers who work those lands.

140 BUZZ At Savaya Coffee, Burc Maruflu has built a business around single-origin coffee served in an open-sourced café.

154 LAST BITE Corky Poster on dining out in Tucson.

edible Baja Arizona

5

T

hr ee years ago this March, we rented our small office on Convent Avenue in Barrio Viejo, and set up shop just three months before we went to press with Edible Baja Arizona’s inaugural issue. It was an auspicious location for me, since the Tucson Weekly’s first office (and my father’s former law office) was across the street. It felt like a homecoming.

Another reason for that sense of home was our landlords, the Rollings family, who leased me four of the five Tucson Weekly offices downtown from 19842000 when I was its publisher.

In addition to enabling us to have a wonderful space to create Edible, they allowed us to use a vacant building in the historic Pie Allen neighborhood as our distribution warehouse at no cost. We may be losing the warehouse space soon to a new tenant, so I wanted to give a heartfelt shout out to this special Tucson family, whose stewardship of many buildings in Barrio Viejo since 1971 has made such a wonderful contribution to our community.

Thank you Kelley, Donald, Betsy, Brad, et al.!

Every eight weeks I marvel at the process that culminates in the final days of what we call production, as hundreds of nuances and finessed details come together under the relentless drumbeat of the deadline, a calm urgency dominating each day until suddenly we’ve made a magazine. And I marvel, too, at my inestimable colleagues, whose collective passion, expertise, dedicated professionalism, and sheer brilliance combine to create such a gift.

A few notes on those colleagues: Megan Kimble becomes Editor with this issue. We are fortunate, indeed, to have her stellar talents and unwavering commitment to our mission underlying our editorial efforts. Steve McMackin just began his third year as our Art Director, providing a level of design and overall competence that never ceases to amaze. And my old friend John Hankinson, who worked with me for years at Tucson Weekly, joins us as Advertising Sales Director. John has come home from a decade away in New Mexico and we’re thrilled to have his more than 20 years of advertising expertise to help us grow the magazine.

Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and visit ediblebajaarizona.com. Digital Content Manager Kate Selby and her crew continue the conversation with daily blog posts and other content that you’ll only find online.

T

as a UNESCO World City of Gastronomy gives new poignancy to the mission of this magazine: How do we tell stories that illuminate the meanings of the word gastronomy in the context of this region’s vibrant and diverse food cultures? Of course, we’d like to think we’ve been doing that from the very beginning, but the designation provides a powerful opportunity to bring ever more people to the table as we tell the story of why this region’s food culture is so extraordinary. With that goal, we’ve changed our subtitle to read, Celebrating the gastronomy of Tucson and the borderlands. As Jonathan Mabry writes in his update: “Concepts of ‘heritage foods’ and ‘local foods’ are intertwined, and the community’s bottom-up efforts in food relocalization represent an initiative to reconnect with history and tradition as much as to reconnect local food producers and consumers.” There is much work to be done, and fortunately, that work is frequently delicious.

Growing up on the south side of Tucson, Esteban Camarena and his family were regulars at restaurants that reminded them of their home in Nogales, Sonora. He takes us on a tour of five of these childhood touchstones, with photos

by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli, to discover the stories of the people that are still creating the food that makes him feel like coming home.

“Over 30 years, three locations, and thousands of menus, Suzana Davila has written the story about what it means to eat at Café Poca Cosa,” writes Megan Kimble in her profile of the Tucson culinary icon. Most importantly, when you eat at her restaurant, Davila wants you to know that you’re coming to her home.

When is the last time you said, “thank goodness for the work of the Arizona Land and Water Trust”? After reading Debbie Weingarten’s story, you may feel a sense of gratitude for their mission to steward and protect working landscapes in Baja Arizona, enabling farmers and ranchers to preserve wildlife, waterways, and a way of life.

As always, there’s much, much more to discover in this issue. Please enjoy and we’ll see you around the table. ¡Salud! ucson ’ s r ecent designation

“The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart.”

—Samuel V. Chamberlain

6 March/April 2016

—Douglas Biggers, editor and publisher

Thank you: Rick + Philip + Sam + Wil

EATING WELL IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT.

COYOTE TALKING

Editor and Publisher Douglas Biggers Editor

Megan Kimble

Art Director

Steve McMackin

Advertising Sales Director John Hankinson Business Coordinator Kate Kretschmann Digital Content Manager Kate Selby Senior Contributing Editor Gary Paul Nabhan Designers

Lyric Peate, Sally Brooks, Bridget Shanahan, Kylie Daniels

Copy Editor

Ford Burkhart

Proofreader

Charity Whiting

Contributors

Amy Belk, Esteban Camarena, Sophia Chen, Autumn Giles, Laura Greenberg, Molly Kincaid, Shelley Littin, Jonathan Mabry, Angela Orlando, Eric Swedlund, Debbie Weingarten

Photographers & Artists

Dominic AZ Bonuccelli, Julie DeMarre, Tim Fuller, Norma Jean Gargasz, Liora K, Danny Martin, Steven Meckler, Taylor Miller, Paul Mirocha, Erica Montgomery, Isadora Lassance, Jeff Smith, Bridget Shanahan, Bill Steen, Shelby Thompson

Distribution Burning Ant, Mel Meijas, Shiloh Thread-Waist Walkosak, Steve and Anne Bell Anderson 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 8 March/April 2016

On the cover: Juan Gonzaléz digs into carne asada tacos at his

restaurant, Birrieria Guadalajara.

Photo by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli.

Above: ¡Viva la revolución del taco! At Birrieria Guadalajara.

Photo by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli.

V olume 3, I ssue 5.

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

by Salt in Pepper Shaker, LLC. Subscriptions are available for $36 annually by phone or at EdibleBajaArizona.com. Copyright © 2016.

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).

Intangible Heritage What’s next for Tucson’s UNESCO World City of Gastronomy designation?

By Jon ath an Mab r y | Ph otog raphy by Pau l Miroc h a

Y

ou probably heard the news. After a two-year application process, on Dec. 11, 2015, Tucson joined the international Creative Cities Network of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World City of Gastronomy, the first such designation in the United States.

For the last nine years, I have served as the city’s historic preservation officer and city archaeologist. I was part of the archeological team that uncovered evidence at Tucson’s birthplace below “A” Mountain of agriculture extending back more than 4,000 years, and irrigation canals going back at least 3,500 years. I’ve studied the major transitions in the food history of the U.S.-Mexico desert borderlands, including the transition from foraging to farming during prehistoric times; the introduction of Old World crops and livestock during the Spanish colonial period; the shift to industrial cuisine after the arrival of the railroad in 1880; and the current revival of traditional foods and local food production that is reconnecting people to their heritages and this place.

So why is the city’s historic preservation officer and archaeologist now the lead contact for the city on this important designation? In other countries, historic preservation is part of what is called heritage conservation, including “tangible heritage” such as historic buildings and archaeological sites and also “intangible heritage” such as folklore, music, and food.

When we emphasize the tangible and intangible heritage of our community to generate tourism, jobs, and income, we are engaged in heritage-based economic development.

That type of economic development is also based on the significant linkages between our thriving local food scene, locally owned businesses, and preservation of historic buildings.

Independently owned restaurants and other local food businesses represent one of Tucson’s largest and fastest-growing economic sectors. There are more than 1,200 restaurants and drinking establishments, which employ more than 30,000 people; when grocery stores are included, food businesses provide 14 percent of all jobs in the city. Of the total number of restaurants and bars in the city, almost two-thirds (63 percent) are locally owned, non-chain businesses. This high rate of local ownership (the 2010 census says that only 41 percent of all U.S. restaurants are locally owned) is good news for our economy: Local First Arizona calculates that 73 cents of every dollar spent at locally owned businesses stays in the community, compared with only 43 cents of every dollar spent at nonlocally owned food businesses.

In the Old Pueblo, older buildings are favored by local food and beverage businesses (and avoided by chain restaurants and bars). This pattern is most pronounced in our downtown. More than 50 new downtown restaurants have opened since 2008, and all but four nestled into spaces in buildings constructed before 1965. Again, good news for our economy: a recent grant-funded study by the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation revealed that businesses located in areas of our city with predominately

older, smaller buildings have more employees per commercial square foot than those in urban areas where newer, larger buildings predominate.

The presence of historic buildings and neighborhoods provides a visible connection between the present and the past, and they are valued because they convey the evolution and continuity of our community over generations. Conserving and reviving our intangible heritage, such as traditional foods and foodways, also helps preserve our community’s diversity. As a result of the World City of Gastronomy designation, Tucson’s heritage foods are newly perceived as patrimony, elements of identity, and economic assets all at once. Concepts of “heritage foods” and “local foods” are intertwined, and the community’s bottom-up efforts in food relocalization represent an initiative to reconnect with history and tradition as much as to reconnect local food producers and consumers. As Tucson works to develop urban agriculture, rebuild its borderlands foodshed, and increase the sustainability and resilience of the local food system, we should pursue a dialogue between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge, melding cutting-edge science and modern technology with very old lessons learned and connections to place, in the spheres of water management, agriculture, built spaces, nutrition, and the health of our desert environment.

Since the announcement of the designation, the question I hear most frequently is, “What now?” Well … a lot of things, and quickly. We are updating the official city webpage at Tucsonaz.gov/gastronomy to provide links to our application to UNESCO, information about the Creative Cities Network, and ongoing media coverage. (One of my favorite recent articles was published in the Phoenix Business Journal, titled “Arizona gets a world capital for foodies, and it’s not Phoenix.”)

We are already learning from, and connecting with, other UNESCO Creative Cities. City staff and the mayor’s new Commission on Food Security, Heritage, and Economy are studying the management structures of other Creative Cities to identify the most successful models to adapt for Tucson. Through our partners Visit Tucson and the Tucson-based U.S. chapter of the International Traditional Knowledge Institute we have made contacts with the cities of Ensenada, Mexico, and Parma, Italy—both also designated by UNESCO in 2015—to initiate relationships as sister Cities of Gastronomy. We have been contacted by other Cities of Gastronomy interested in developing international collaborations such as chefs’ networks to share innovative concepts of how to directly link farms to restaurants, and to compare ideas for food festivals and nutrition education.

We are getting the word out, planning exciting events, and most importantly, listening to you. As our main media partner, Edible Baja Arizona is soliciting comments, ideas, and a vision from readers about how to most effectively leverage this designation to make lasting change in our local food system.

So what now? The possibilities are up to us. 

Conserving and reviving our intangible heritage, such as traditional foods and foodways, helps preserve our community’s diversity.

Jonathan Mabry is the historic preservation officer for the City of Tucson.

edible Baja Arizona

11

Hungry for More eBA? Edible Baja Arizona is always serving up fresh content online! Visit EdibleBajaArizona.com.

From the Blog:

W

Lush Notes

hether you’re a cocktail hound or simply looking for something different to serve at your next party, check out our Lush Notes blog series. With bartender interviews, event profiles, and local drink previews complete with a recipe to make it at home, this multimedia blog series has you covered whether you’re heading out or staying in.

Check out Wilko’s recipe for the Novella Marathon, a drink we featured in a recent Lush Notes post: ¾ ¾ ¾ ½ ¼ 2 1

ounces Rye Whiskey ounces Sweet Vermouth ounces Apple Brandy ounces Espresso Syrup ounces Balsamic Vinegar dashes Angostura bitters dash salt tincture Salted rim, grapefruit twist, served over ice

B

ocaditos is our own bi-weekly newsletter that packs the flavor of Edible Baja Arizona’s online offerings into tasty little bites. It offers: • A roundup of upcoming local events.

• The best of the eBA blog and social media.

• Great giveaways for newsletter subscribers, like movie tickets to The Loft Cinema and gift certificates to local restaurants.

• Exclusive original recipes, and more!

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, and behind-the-scenes looks at how we make the magazine.

Feeling inspired? See more at bit.ly/LushNotes.

instagram.com/ediblebajaaz (Above) Sara Roche, photographed by Laura Horley at Wilko.

(Left) Enjoying a farm-to-table lunch at Tucson Village Farm as part of our first Edible Excursions tour. (Center) Carefully poured entries at 1912 Coffee’s cappuccino art throwdown. (Right) Discovering the delights of El Taco Rico’s scratch-made Mexican food, as part of our new Hidden Eats series.

instagram.com/EdibleBajaAZ youtube.com/EdibleBajaArizona facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona 12 March/April 2016

pinterest.com/EdibleBA twitter.com/EdibleBajaAZ

VOICES

We asked six couples: What’s the most memorable meal you’ve shared?

Photography by Julie DeMarre

O

meal was inspired by a visit to the farmers’ market in Palermo, Sicily, where, while seated at a simple card table in a tent, we were served fresh grilled fish that tasted like they had just reached into the Mediterranean that day to catch it, with roasted seasonal vegetables and greens, sautéed with olive oil, garlic, and red pepper flakes. This experience inspired us to renovate our kitchen with a ceiling-to-floor glass mosaic wall (we were in Italy investigating mosaics) and prepare farmers’-market fresh-simple suppers as a mainstay of our lifestyle. Every time we eat a similar meal, which is weekly, we are transported back to Italy and the wonderful memories we made there. ur most memor able

Aureleo Rosano & Angela Rose

14 March/April 2016

W

e went to high school together but fell out of touch pretty soon after we graduated. We later reconnected on Facebook, decided to meet, and saw each other in person for the first time in over 15 years at Don Pedro’s restaurant. We had a great time over plates of lomo saltado, ceviche mixto, and Don Pedro’s great hot sauces.

Five years later, we’ve changed—we’re now married and have a son—and so has Don Pedro’s—they’re now a food truck— and we’re happy we can continue to get their great food. Even better, we can share the lomo saltado with our little one!

Floyd Thompson & Marisa Grijalva (with Floyd Thompson IV)

O

meal included wonderful food but was even more remarkable for its rich sense of community. Noche En Blanco, held in late October in Tucson, is based on similar events held in cities around the world. You must be invited to the event by a table host.

The location is unknown until an hour or so before coming together and everything must be brought by those attending: tables, chairs, candelabra, lanterns, flowers, food, musical instruments. Everything—and everyone—must be in white.

It was exciting to see so many people streaming toward the location, with chairs, food, and flowers in tow. As darkness ur most memor able

fell, we sipped on Chardonnay made from grapes grown by our host’s father (Stu Miller Vineyard). The entree was a pan bagnat filled with chicken, Greek olives, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, provolone, and anchovies. Delicate white asparagus tucked into soft tortillas, fruit salad with fresh pineapple and blackberries, Mexican pan dulces, and macaroons completed the meal.

What we so loved about this event was not only the meal itself, but also the anticipation and mystery of surprise and how it pulled us into community. There was a strong sense of “This is Tucson and we are Tucson.”

Rocky & Wendy Brittain edible Baja Arizona

15

W

all of our meals are memorable, but a very special dinner was once had at a favorite Tucson restaurant, Taqueria Pico de Gallo. It was Randy’s 50th birthday. About three dozen close friends and family joined us, all wearing hats by request. Nacho Delgado, Pico de Gallo’s owner, put a sign on the door that said the restaurant was closed for the evening. A bar was then put up in the back, the tables were all decorated with smiley-faced helium balloons, and the music of Mozart blared over the sound system. Guests were free to order any and everything they liked from Pico de Gallo’s delicious menu. Later in the evening, the lovely Mozart abruptly changed to lively waila (chicken scratch) music, and giant-headed puppets, who’d secretly entered the restaurant from a back entrance, danced among the surprised guests. It was a thrilling, fun, and memorable evening! e lik e to think

Jim Cook & Randy Spalding

J

ames li ved in the apartments behind Sushi on Oracle for a few months before it opened in 2001; he had just returned from living in Japan for seven months. He would walk there often to enjoy the food and talk with Yoshi, the owner. When Florencia moved to Tucson a year later, it was the first place we ate after unloading the moving truck. We would frequent the place for years to come and we still believe they still have the best sushi in Tucson, especially the shrimp tempura roll, and some of the best miso soup to be found anywhere. Plus it’s a family owned place with great food and friendly service.

Florencia & James DeRoussel 16 March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

17

O

meal was one we didn’t actually eat, though we hear good things about it. Monte and I were married at The Downtown Clifton, which I recently opened with a partner. The Coronet catered. There is no kitchen at the hotel, so Sally Kane and her staff had to prep, cook, and plate in one of the hotel rooms. (Kudos to our manager, Nick DeLisle, for converting Room 2 from a hotel room to a kitchen and back again all in the span of eight hours!)

Feeding us was no easy task, as Monte is an adventurous eater, and I eat like a child, strictly no vegetables, but we knew Sally was the perfect choice. I met and fell in love with Sally shortly after I met (again) and fell in love with Monte and she’s been feeding us both, in her home and in ur most memor able

18 March/April 2016

her restaurant, ever since. We heightened the challenge by requesting 1970s-flavored appetizers. Sally came up with Swedish meatballs, cheese-stuffed Peppadew peppers, chicken wings, mini cheeseballs, roasted vegetable platters, shrimp skewers, and endive boats, but she also took the time to make a special plate of seared salmon and greens for my daughter who, weirdly, prefers that to meat balls. There were oceans of rum punch and a tower of herb-scented orange cake. Except for the punch, we had none of it. Not one bite.

So, if anyone out there reading this was at our wedding, can you let us know how the cake was?

Moniqua Lane & Monte Workman

gleanings

A brew with a view. At Casa Video, craft beers are paired with classic films.

Filming Beer

Tucson’s much-loved movie rental spot Casa Video ventures into craft beer.

By Eric Swedlund | Photography by Steve McMackin

C

asa V ideo , Tucson’s longtime staple for movie rentals, is moving into the craft beer realm with the addition of the new Casa Film Bar, which opened in December.

The Casa Film Bar is a big step up from the can, bottle, and growler sales the venerable rental store began in 2014. The 1,000-square-foot bar will offer a rotating selection of 20 taps and about 300 bottles and cans, with the selection focusing on Arizona-brewed beers, says general manager Kyle Schwab.

“I’d suggested it would be a good mix to bring beer to the store because I’ve always thought beer and movies go well together,” Schwab says.

Casa Video, located on Speedway west of Country Club, managed to build out the bar and beer coolers without losing any of its expansive movie selection, some 60,000 titles that focus on independent, foreign, and hard-to-find films. The classics, Criterion, and family sections were moved to accommodate the new bar.

Schwab will have Tucson beers on tap when possible, but he says the demand for breweries like Dragoon and Pueblo Vida already makes it difficult to regularly serve anything other than their mainstays. The Casa Film Bar also stocks as many Arizona breweries as possible.

In addition to beer, Casa Film Bar offers two wines on tap and serves Tucson’s Yellow Brick Coffee, with pour-over, French Press, and nitro cold brew options.

In keeping with the store’s tradition, 55-inch flat screen TVs in the bar will be showing films, with more regular features such as weekly film noir nights planned to draw people in, Schwab says. The bar is also working with New Belgium Brewing Company on a monthly short film and tap takeover event.

22 March/April 2016

Schwab looks forward to the Casa Film Bar sparking conversations about beer and movie pairings, for individual films or shows (Schwab’s go-to pairing is Oskar Blues Old Chub for watching Game of Thrones), genres (Ninkasi’s Dawn of the Red for zombie pictures, for example), or even directors (a bourbon barrel-aged stout for the darkly mysterious Alfred Hitchcock).

Schwab recommends the free delivery from nearby Fresco Pizzeria & Pastaria for anyone interested in having a bite to eat to go along with a pint and film. Of course, Casa Video will continue serving free popcorn, and to-go sales of cans, bottles, and growlers will continue.

Casa Video opened in 1983, moving to its current location in 1985, and has had to innovate over the years to keep up with industry changes, from VHS to DVD and Blu-ray, as well as the arrival of streaming movies, says Gala Schwab, who co-owns Casa with her brother Ray Mellenberndt.

“This industry is always changing and we’ve done a lot to change as well. A lot of video stores bigger than us, even ones like us, have closed. But Tucson is unique and has always supported us,” she says. “Craft beer is hugely popular now and we’d had success with growlers. By creating this bar, we’re making this a destination again. It just seemed like the way to go.”

Casa Video. 2905 E. Speedway Blvd.

520.326.6314. CasaFilmBar.com.

Eric Swedlund writes about music, travel, and food and drink. He lives in Tucson. Follow him on Twitter @EricSwedlund.

g

David and Yissel Salafsky started their chocolate venture after befriending cacao growers in Oaxaca.

A Taste from Chocolate Row

Xocolatl connects cacao from growers in Oaxaca to sweet tooths in Tucson.

By Shelley Littin | Photography by Taylor Miller

B

C hilean father and Mexican mother, Yissel Salafsky grew up drinking Mexican hot chocolate: smooth, spicy, and bittersweet.

“Over the years one of the most popular brands of Mexican chocolate available in grocery stores, Abuelita chocolate, was purchased by Nestlé,” she said. “They changed the ingredients a bit, adding fillers and emulsifiers because they are cheaper than cacao. It was no longer the taste I remembered from my childhood.”

Yissel was studying at the University of Arizona in 2003 when her then-boyfriend, David Salafsky, a masters’ student in public health, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico. “He wanted to see a cacao tree. Mexico is the closest place to the U.S. where they grow.”

“David doesn’t speak Spanish,” Yissel said, “but he befriended a family who showed him the cacao trees on their farm. And he brought back real chocolate, like what I had growing up, as much as he could put in his suitcases.”

Too much: Yissel and David took the extra chocolate to Tucson’s Heirloom Farmers’ Market. “It was going to be a onetime thing,” she said. But the delicacy was enormously popular, so the young couple saved the money, and traveled together back to Oaxaca.

“David took me to meet the family,” Yissel said. “I speak Spanish, so I was able to learn more about the family and their chocolate. They are third generation chocolate farmers, growing both cacao and coffee. The beans come from their small farms in Chiapas and Tabasco.

“They grow criollo cacao beans, preferred for their flavor but lower-yield than traditional forastero beans. The chocolate is darker and has a rougher texture than what we’re used to in the U.S.,” she said. or n to a

24 March/April 2016

The couple traveled throughout the region learning about chocolate lore. “The indigenous population is still very much intact in Oaxaca,” Yissel said. “They’ll show you how to make your own chocolate, add your own ingredients. The main street is called Chocolate Row.” The couple agreed to purchase cacao from their new Mexican friends every winter. “We liked getting back to more traditional food, fewer ingredients,” Yissel said, “and the idea that we could help a family in Oaxaca.”

With a seasonal license, the couple began their venture, Xocolatl. “It’s not certified organic, but the farm doesn’t use pesticides or fertilizers. The cacao grows as it would wild, as it has for centuries.”

Over the years the two families—Yissel and David are now married with three young children—refined the recipes together, tweaking the traditional Mexican ground cacao beans, almonds, cinnamon, and cane sugar ingredients to create a darker blend.

“That was before drug trafficking got really bad,” Yissel said. “At first the chocolate was a fun, feel-good thing. Now it is about continuing in spite of everything. Our friends suffer from lack of tourism. They thought we would stop coming as well.”

What began as a romantic adventure has become a mission symbolic of enduring friendship across a troubled border.

Chocolate is a simple joy, connecting disparate people in the face of social struggle. Yissel said: “It is our labor of love.”

While weather remains cool in Tucson, you can find Xocolatl at Heirloom Farmers’ Market at Rillito Park, or year-round at: casadexocolatl.com.

edible Baja Arizona

25

g

Veg Box Café co-owner Matt Price (right) proudly stands watch (and juggles beets) with his cook, Raul Tirado, in front of the brick-and-mortar café.

The Green Corner

Veg in a Box food truck brings its vegan offerings to downtown eaters at Veg Box Café.

By Shelley Littin | Photography by Taylor Miller

W

ith its bright green sign , Veg Box Café stands out

on a quiet corner of Tucson’s crisscrossed downtown streets. Monday through Saturday, the food-truckturned café dishes out vegan cuisine to the city’s veggie-lovers.

The café emerged from the Veg in a Box food truck, which Eric Korchmaros, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef turned vegan enthusiast, opened in 2014. Korchmaros began eating vegan to improve his personal health, and delved more deeply into the cuisine as he learned about where his food came from and the health perks of eating greens.

With the Box’s local following of fresh food fans, Korchmaros seized the opportunity to expand to a brick-and-mortar store. On July 1, 2015, he and co-owner Matt Price opened the Veg Box Café on Pennington Street, next door to fellow-vegan restaurant Urban Fresh.

While it’s easy to assume the two businesses are automatic competitors, Price said that Veg Box Café and Urban Fresh are quite complementary. “Urban Fresh does breakfast and lunch, and we do lunch and dinner. They do more smoothies and lighter fare. We do the burgers, veg balls, and fries.”

Korchmaros and Price have plans for their hidden corner of downtown. Price is working with Tucson City Council Member Steve Kozachik to develop and implement enhancement plans for Pennington Street. A first improvement will be more parking for bicycles in front of the café.

26 March/April 2016

“We want to revitalize this street, bring it to the level it deserves to be. We want to turn this into the ‘green corner’ of downtown,” Price said. “To do that, we need the support of the folk in this area.”

And not just the vegan crowd, he added: Veg Box Café boasts its cuisine to even the most carnivorous.

Price recommends that meat-lovers try the café’s hearty Italian veg ball sub with Pomodora tomato-almond sauce. “It will fill you up,” he said, “and wow, it’s amazing!”

Price tried a vegan diet as a personal experiment after hearing from people who found that, for them, more veggies meant more vigor. “I figured I’d do it for a month,” he said. “And I never quit.”

Now, Price eats vegan for a variety of reasons, from a love of animals and the environment to improving his own health. “It’s easy for me to be vegan,” he said. “It just feels right.”

And while the food truck took a break as the café got going, the Veg in a Box truck is back in action. You can find it parked at the southwest corner of First Avenue and Limberlost Drive Wednesday through Saturday and at the Heirloom Farmers’ Market at Rillito Park on Sundays—unless it’s called to cater for a special event.

Visit the Veg Box Café at 75 E. Pennington St., or follow the Veg Box at facebook.com/veginaboxfoodtruck.

edible Baja Arizona

27

g

Gary Paul Nabhan, a celebrated enthnobotanist, writer, and food and farming activst, is the director of the new UA Center for Regional Food Studies.

Food for Body, Mind, and Soul UA launches Center for Regional Food Studies.

By Shelley Littin | Photography by Aidan Heigl

Y

ou e at food .

You read about food (obviously). How would you like to study food? In December, the University of Arizona launched a new Center for Regional Food Studies, which will enable undergraduate and graduate students, southwestern farms and food businesses, and members of the community to coalesce around regional flavors, food traditions, and sustainability.

The program, founded by the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Southwest Center, hopes to enhance Tucson’s recent designation as a UNESCO World City of Gastronomy. The program’s goals are many, but focused largely upon improving southern Arizona’s regional food economy, heritage, and security.

“The UA’s launch of the Center for Regional Food Studies comes none too soon,” says Gary Paul Nabhan, a researcher at the UA’s Southwest Center and the director of the new center.

“Already a third of the residents of our metropolitan area suffer from some of the highest levels of poverty, food insecurity, obesity, and diabetes in our nation. Time is ripe for the university to strategically work to vanquish these societal problems in its shadows. Such work is fully aligned with why our land grant institution was created in the first place.”

The Center’s site at UA Downtown will host visiting scholars from other UNESCO Cities of Gastronomy and work with the city’s Commission on Food Security, Heritage, and Economy, among other local business leaders, to establish educational and scholastic programming in regional food heritage studies. The center will work in concert with existing UA programs, and will help place motivated undergraduate students in internships with local food- and farm-related organizations.

28 March/April 2016

Working with the UA Institute of the Environment, the Center’s founders plan to develop projects to take on a variety of challenges, such as adapting urban food production in Tucson to use more rainwater, shade bare ground, and reduce the city’s heat island effects. Another intended project involves establishing an Arizona Borderlands Food Systems Network where technical and business plans can be shared, aiming to build a resilient food system in the face of climate change and water scarcity.

Central to that endeavor, the Center for Regional Food Studies will offer short continuing-education courses to help skilled citizens in southern Arizona more capably seek jobs in food and farm sectors. During the 2016 spring semester, the Center is offering four four-day courses. Fruits of Your Labors, offered Feb. 16-19, is a hands-on field course teaching the care and maintenance of the region’s desert trees. Greenhouse and High Tunnel Management will be taught March 29-April 1, and will instruct backyard food producers and commercial greenhouse workers in the basic principles of food production in the Desert Southwest climate. Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land will focus on adapting small-scale farming to the region’s changing climate from April 26-29. The final course, Food Safety Compliance: Strategies, Permits, and Regulations, from Field to Table, will involve a comprehensive overview of food safety in fields, orchards, gardens, and livestock pens, including discussion of environmental conditions pathogen proliferation, and food preparation with an emphasis on preventing food spoilage in the desert.  For more information, visit FoodStudies.arizona.edu.

Shelley Littin is a science journalist and anthropologist. She spends her free time running unreasonable distances in beautiful places.

edible Baja Arizona

29

I

of pleasure when people from other cities highlight Tucson’s cooking traditions. In a 2010 Los Angeles Times article, the tortillas at St. Mary’s Mexican Food were singled out as “melt in your mouth.” These are the crêpe -like, hand-stretched, madefrom-scratch, large flour tortillas—15 inches in diameter—that you’ll find throughout Sonora. St. Mary’s has been making them since 1968, spinning out thousands of tortillas and Sonoran-style Mexican food in its small terra cotta building.

It’s a casual, distressed, converted bar with plenty of tables and ample parking to hold all the customers coming and going loaded with bags of tortillas and food.

I’d been here way back during my first Tucson sojourn in the 1970s.

When my mom and I decided we were tiring of our regular haunts, we ventured west, got lost, and ended up in the parking lot of St. Mary’s Mexican Food.

Sometimes it’s good to have the past stalk you.

Mom’s cranky because she wanted breakfast an hour ago, so I convince her she can get it all wrapped up in one neat package called a breakfast burrito—a new experience for her. I order one stuffed with scrambled eggs, bacon, potato, and beans, and order myself a bean, cheese, and guacamole burrito, plus a green corn tamale.

My mother likes the fact that the scrambled eggs are just right, the crispy bacon bits dispersed evenly, and the potato is not in huge t ’ s always a point

34 March/April 2016

chunks. My burrito’s beans are creamy and pitch perfect, not over-salted or split and uncooked in the middle. And the green corn tamale is moist with the right balance of savory and just a trace of sweet. And that tortilla? Oy, perfection!

Luis Salazar, who is part of the family that owns St. Mary’s, explains, “There’s a trick to those beans. It’s a simple trick: if you heat up your lard until it’s almost smoking, then add your beans and grind them, you’ll get the same flavor. We try to teach other people.” The tortillas are made with animal and vegetable shortening because “it gives the best flavor and consistency,” says Salazar. If you use straight lard, the tortillas dry out.

St. Mary’s Mexican Food is usually busy, and the help friendly. Devotees come and leave with coolers loaded with tortillas. And if they can’t carry them, they order by phone. One customer gets eight dozen delivered to the Midwest.

They freeze well. Then there was a man who moved from Tucson to San Francisco. He would pick up 25 dozen when he came to visit. After he died, his family kept up the ritual.

Medium f lour tortillas are $3.50 a dozen, and the large are $3.75 a dozen.

Beans are $4 a pint and $8 a quart.

St. Mary’s Mexican Food. 1030 W. St. Mary’s Road. 520.884.1629.

Breakfast burrito from St. Mary’s.

FALORA / BARSIDECAR : DOT COM

edible Baja Arizona

35

A

Above, from top left: Cauliflower risotto, meatballs, and roasted brussels sprouts at Reilly.

Below: Reilly’s margherita pizza.

H

undred - year - old wood floors, arched windows, exposed brick, and high ceilings all come together in urban elegance at Reilly Craft Pizza & Drink. The historic building downtown once housed a mortuary, although it’s seen a gorgeous resurrection as an Italian eatery offering starring roles for traditional dishes with a modern nod.

It’s cold and gray on this late January afternoon; when Jennifer and I push through the doors of Reilly, we have the entire restaurant to ourselves. We sit on sleek chairs, a combo of curves made from metal and wood at a black table in the middle of a large dining room. It’s a mishmash of past, present, and future visions. I’d like to move right in.

Jennifer orders a Nosenipper ($9), a drink that is just that: roasted chestnut bourbon aligned with pear brandy, and a touch of honey and lemon. It’s light, smooth, and offers a dash of sweet sour.

Our meal is a bunch of small sides: four large meatballs, surrounded by tips of toast, sitting on a cushion of fresh marinara ($9), roasted cauliflower risotto with a spray of grated cheese ($7), and deep roasted Brussels sprouts ($7). It’s a small feast of color and intense seasoning.

Now, I’ve eaten many risottos and I’ve made plenty of risottos, but this one performed so many f lavors it was like running

36 March/April 2016

up notes on an organ. The roasted cauliflower with the rich liquid base was homage to creamy mingling with melted cheese. It was just right paired with the caramelized Brussels sprouts.

The Brussels sprouts tasted as if they’d been steeped in a rich brothy marinade of sweet and savory and hot then drizzled with pecan brittle crumbs. The reason I love them is the way they’re charred on the outside; the spicy heat that follows after the first bite comes from true flavor, rather than a bunch of chiles flung in your face.

And then those meatballs. Light and tender, blended with spices and cheese.

The margherita pizza ($12) is in the Napoleon tradition, a thin crust with a bit of crunch but also chewy, baked in the pizza oven until it’s just singed on the outside rim. The sauce was a robust tomato (love!) that didn’t overwhelm the pie, and we weren’t drowning in cheese.

Reilly has a great menu that roams from a long list of pizzas to truffle fries, mussels, polenta, tagliatelle Bolognese, and goat cheese mezzaluna. They’re also known for being three places in one.

The Beer Garden offers a full pizza menu and a rotating selection of 40 tap beers and eight tap wines, with both indoor and outdoor seating. If you’re in the mood for rolling in the deep, check out the basement’s Tough Luck Club bar for craft cocktails.

Reilly Craft Pizza & Drink.

101 E. Pennington. 520.882.5550.

ReillyPizza.com. Open late.

r estaur an t floor made from pennies. Funky, tiered chandeliers crafted from wine bottles.

Truism posters by artist Jenny Holzer with hundreds of transformative sayings.

The Cup Café’s opening in 1990 was one of the defining moments in Tucson’s shifting downtown history; since then, it’s been front and center as our downtown transforms into an urban epicenter where art, music, food, and commerce converge.

I’m craving breakfast, while Jennifer’s mood is listing toward lunch. Every table is filled, so we hang out in the art deco lobby, home to a thousand memories framed by the sound and fury of Tucson’s music scene and the ghost of John Dillinger—converging in one blast of time, reminding me that dining out is as much an architectural experience as a culinary one.

When a table opens, we pass the rotating dessert display twirling in a pirouette of chiffon and sugar, icing and berries. If I stared any longer, I would’ve yanked out a piece of cake. There’s much to look at.

The copper penny floor laid bare approximately 180,000 coins and was assembled on the Congress Hotel roof by a group of friends, employees, and anyone with an itch to help.

Jennifer and I split a cup of the daily soup ($5)—roasted squash with a balsamic reduction drizzled across the top. Layers of puréed squash, creamy liquid, and sweet/ tart vinegar played together in calculated simplicity.

I got the huevos rancheros ($10), a center of black and pinto beans covering lightly fried corn tortillas, and two perfect over-medium eggs (runny yolks, dry whites) all layered with a salty jolt of asadera and cotija cheeses, plus a deep chile ranchero sauce—just part of the dance.

Jennifer ordered the vegetarian, gluten-free, lettuce wrap ($8.50) with chickpea fritters, similar to falafel, with pickled veggies (a bite of vinegar complemented with a snap of sweet), smoked cashews, and a spicy harissa sauce on the side of three large butter lettuce leaves. The crunch and well-spiced savory fritters against the tart of the veggies and the heat of the sauce was perfect.

edible Baja Arizona

37

Roasted squash soup with balsamic reduction at the Cup Café.

We scoured our plates clean and then topped it all off with a piece of coconut cream pie with a house-made crust, toasted coconut flakes scaling a mountain of sweet.

It was rich, and denser than the usual airy bits I’ve tasted before, but scented with lots of coconut.

The Cup is no stranger to national accolades and has been written up in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other outlets. In 2015, Men’s Journal magazine named it a top 10 brunch spot in the country. Its historic ambience plus the feeling that you’re surrounded by the next cool thing—be it food, art or music—is one reason eating here feels like an event.

The Cup is open 365 days a year because owners Shana and Richard Oseran want people to know they always have a place to go, even on holidays.

The Cup Café. 311 E. Congress St. 520.622.8848.

HotelCongress.com.

Blue Willow meatloaf with mushroom gravy.

38 March/April 2016

B

lue W illow R estaurant has been a part of the local independent food scene since the late 1970s.

While it still retains a bit of a hippie vibe, like the rest of us, it’s grown up.

Known for breakfast and lunch, or a hip place for unusual gifts, they’ve recently expanded their dinner menu (salmon, chicken pesto pasta, shrimp scampi) and added Bloody Marys and mimosas to brunch.

My mother and I head to Blue Willow late in the afternoon, caught between lunch and dinner. I run into a friend and feel a spark of cellular memory in the warmth of the familiar. The vintage bungalow, separated into three rooms along with their big (and covered) outdoor patio, stimulates my community DNA.

It’s cold outside—my mother’s dressed warmly enough for an Alaskan dog sledding event—so we’re both here for pure comfort pickings. We get a cup of chicken and rice soup. It’s a deep rich chicken broth showered with rice and shredded chicken, the kind simmered on the stove for a while, with just enough cayenne boost to wake our taste buds. We indulge in the meatloaf with mushroom gravy (local grass-fed beef—often Double Check Ranch) and the lasagna Bolognese (a new menu addition).

The lasagna Bolognese ($12.95) is a good portion of stacked noodles with alternating Bolognese and béchamel sauces threading the layers. The food is excellent, and the ratio of sauce to meat to cheese is just right. This is some fine lasagna.

The meatloaf comes with a side of mushroom gravy, rich in umami flavor.

The meat is excellent, local and grass-fed, and the consistency is perfect. The side of garlic toast (a talera roll sliced and slathered with butter and garlic) is true comfort (not too heavy either) while the veggies—a grouping of squash—brightens the plate.

We aren’t done. Blue Willow is known for good desserts, especially their chocolate sour cream cake ($5.95). It’s old school and classic, with a rich chocolate fudge frosting and a fine moist crumb, and we’re both dedicated to making sure it doesn’t last.

Their menu is varied, from breakfast to lunch to dinner, with many gluten-free choices. If you hate lines, be leery of weekends, but don’t forget this place. It definitely has a good Tucson feel.

BlueWillowTucson.com. 2616 N. Campbell Ave. 520.327.7577.

edible Baja Arizona

39

Smoked chicken brisket, coleslaw, mashed potatoes, and rolls from Brother John’s.

A

H o u s t o n for a year, I learned that barbecue wasn’t just another meal but an entire subculture, complete with obsession, rituals, and taste dialects. Those Texans. Picky, picky.

Essentially, barbecue is nothing more than food, mostly meat, cooked in a smoker low and slow until it’s moist, tender, and dripping from the bone.

In Tucson, there’s plenty of room for more barbecue. Which was probably what the team at Brother John’s Beer, Bourbon & BBQ figured when they opened their barbecue bar and restaurant in the former Wildcat house, once a popular college hangout.

A week after they opened in January, co-owner John Aldecoa, in a fire engine red hoodie, wove in and out of the crowds, stopping at tables, talking to new customers, asking questions. As he passed our table, I asked him what his favorite meal was. He said, “the brisket,” then added, “but I also love the pork belly.” He says their barbecue is a bit of Memphis with f ter li v ing in

40 March/April 2016

some Texas thrown in. They smoke their meats for up to 16 hours using a mix of traditional barbecue techniques.

The place was packed for dinner on a Saturday night. While we waited, we got the hot mess ($12), a mélange of housemade chips slathered in pulled pork and topped with sour cream, guacamole, burnt end pit beans, salsa verde, queso fresco, and pickled jalapeño. The name defined the food. The chips were thick with lots of crunch, an easy delivery carrier. I could’ve just stopped here and called it dinner.

But by the time our meal arrived, the smoked chicken was juicy and tender to the bone, and well smoked. The brisket was sliced in thin slabs, moist and tender, but they were sold out of the baby back ribs, so I ordered the pulled pork.

Between bites of the vinegary tanged green cabbage slaw with what tasted like bacon drippings, and the smoked meat, neither of us used even a dollop of barbecue sauce, though they delivered three squirt bottles to the table with different heat levels.

The pulled pork had good flavor, sweet and smoky, and wasn’t mushy. The side of mashed taters was creamy without being overly rich. The only slight disappointment were the rolls—they tasted like Hawaiian sweet dinner rolls when something with less sugar, like a biscuit, would pair better with smoked meat and savory side dishes.

The Brother John’s team reconfigured the old Wildcat House, creating an interior that would be at home in Anywhere, Texas, with wood tables and bright red metal chairs. Huge, rough-hewn raw wood beams intersect like Legos against one wall.

There are plenty of craft beers and a bourbon lounge with more than 150 whiskey options available.  Brother John’s Beer, Bourbon & BBQ. 1801 N Stone Ave. 520.867.6787.

BrotherJohnsBBQ.com.

Laura Greenberg is a Tucson-based writer.

For more Baja Eats coverage, visit bit.ly/BajaEats.

edible Baja Arizona

41

1

2

The Plate Plate the

4

3

The one thing they should never take off the menu.

1234 Photography by Isadora Lassance

Niman Ranch Pork Saltimbocca Primo Located at the J.W. Marriott Tucson Starr Pass Resort & Spa, this is a meal with a view. The Niman Ranch pork comes with roasted garlic mashed potatoes, spinach, prosciutto, and mushroom sage jus. $33.

3800 W. Starr Pass Blvd.

42 March/April 2016

Chicharrón Verde La Botana Fresco Grill & Cantina You’ve got a lot of options when build your own burrito at La Botana, but the chicharrón verde is not to be missed. Pork cracklings with green salsa, wrapped in a nearly translucent tortilla? Sí, por favor. $7.50 3200 N. First Ave.

Brussels Sprouts Reilly Craft Pizza and Drink Yes, Brussels sprouts—the team at Reilly transforms these humble vegetables into a side worthy of celebration.

Cooked in sherry vinegar and house hot sauce and topped with pecan brittle crumbs. $7 101 E. Pennington St.

Vegetables Travel the Silk Road Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails This Moroccan roasted cauliflower steak comes with eggplant, butternut squash, red peppers, tomatoes, chickpeas, and mint ragout, with Israeli couscous, goat cheese, pomegranates, and an herb tahini sauce. $19 135 S. Sixth Ave.

edible Baja Arizona

43

Broccoli.

Springtime Smorgasbord The A to Z of what to plant now in Baja Arizona.

By Amy Belk | Illustration by Danny Martin

B

y now many of us are antsy to get roots growing, while some gardens in Baja Arizona are already well underway. Here’s an A-to-Z of what you can plant in March and April, whether you live way up high or way down low.

Remember: Planting calendars aren’t rulebooks. Many things can be planted outside of their ideal planting dates if they’re given special protection or extra attention, or if we have extended seasons of the right weather. Patience is the name of the game this time of year, however. If planted too early, many heat-loving crops will grow more slowly than the same crops planted a bit later, when the temperatures were just right. Even if your timing is impeccable, late cold snaps are common across Baja Arizona so be prepared to protect newly planted spring or summer crops if temperatures take a sudden nosedive.

Asparagus is best planted in early spring so it has some time to get established before the heavy heat of summer.

This long-lived perennial grows best in cooler temperatures, so even though it can be planted through mid- to late April across much of Baja Arizona, it’s preferable to plant it after the last frost, when soil temperatures reach at least 50.

Basil thrives in the heat, so you can start it indoors if it’s still cold outside and move it out into the garden once soil temperatures are above 70 and all dangers of freezing are past.

Blackeye, green snap, lima, pinto, soy, and yardlong beans can all be planted throughout March and April in the lowest elevations of Baja Arizona. Wait until there’s no more danger of frost and soil temperatures are above 65, and be sure to protect them from any late cold snaps at mid to higher elevations. Blackeye and yardlong are

edible Baja Arizona

47

[E.H.] especially heat-loving, with a longer planting window than the other spring beans.

It’s already a bit too hot to plant beets at the lowest elevations, but those of you in the 1,000 to 3,000 feet elevation range should aim to get them planted by mid-March or early April. The season for this root veggie is just getting started at 3,000 to 4,500 feet, so those of you around Willcox and Benson have until around mid-May to plant.

Broccoli and cabbage like cooler temperatures, so they can only be grown at the highest elevations of Baja Arizona this time of year.

You can begin planting broccoli around mid- to early April if you live above 3,000 feet. Cabbage seed should be started by midMarch to mid-April, and transplants can be moved into the garden four to six weeks later, when temperatures are above 60.

If you live below 2,000 feet, you can continue planting cantaloupe until early to mid-April.

Tucsonans and others at 2,000 to 3,000 feet can start planting them in mid-March through early June, after the last frost. It still needs to warm up a bit more to plant them at higher elevations.

You can still plant carrots until mid-March at 2,000 to 3,000 feet, and a spring crop can be started now if you live between Carrots.

3,000 and 4,500 feet.

Cauliflower is another of the cool-season crops that has enough time to mature before the heat of summer only at the higher elevations of Baja Arizona, above 3,000 feet. Seed can be started indoors five to seven weeks before the last frost and transplanted once the danger of frost is past.

50 March/April 2016

Chard can be planted now at mid to higher elevations. Above 2,000 feet, continue planting through the beginning of April, and until mid- to late April above 3,000 feet. For the best flavor, aim for about 50 to 60 days of growth before temperatures climb above 90.

There’s a short window in which you can grow sweet corn if you live between 1,000 and 3,000 feet: now through mid-March at the lower end of that range, and from mid-March until early April at the higher.

Plant cucumber and eggplant once soil temperatures are above 65 and there’s no more danger of frost. You can continue planting them through early April below 2,000 feet, and from late March through mid-May if you’re at an elevation of 2,000 to 3,000 feet. If you live above 3,000 feet, seed can be started indoors in early to mid-April to get a jump on the season.

Make sure to protect these heat-loving plants if we get a late cold snap!

Continue planting endive and escarole above 3,000 feet until early April, and begin planting it around mid-April if you live above 4,500 feet.

Although garlic is a fall crop for many of us, bulbs can be planted until around mid- to late April above 3,000 feet.

Horseradish dislikes rapid cycles of freezing and thawing, and does its best growing in late summer to early fall. If you live above 3,000 feet, wait until the danger of freezing is past but get them in the ground before it gets too warm. It may already be too warm to plant horseradish at Tucson’s elevation unless we have a long, cool spring.

It generally stays too warm below 2,000 feet to have much success growing this perennial.

edible Baja Arizona

51

[E.H.] Kale, kohlrabi, leek, and lettuce are all cool-season veggies, so there’s still some time left to grow them at middle to higher elevations. Leaf lettuce can be planted until early April at 2,000 to 3,000 feet, and until mid-April above that elevation. Head lettuce can be planted until mid-March at 3,000 to 4,500 feet. Those above 3,000 feet can plant kale until late March or early April, kohlrabi from early April to mid-May, and short-season leek varieties until mid- to late April.

Keep planting muskmelon at the lowest elevations until early or mid-April, but wait until after the last frost if you’re in Tucson or surrounding areas at 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The season begins around the beginning of April at this elevation, but seeds can be started indoors three to four weeks earlier and transplanted into the garden after the last frost.

Though we’re done planting mustard at middle to lower elevations of Baja Arizona, the season is just getting started at higher elevations.

Continue planting through mid-July at 3,000 to 4,500 feet, and begin planting around the beginning of April through early July above 4,500 feet.

Now through mid-April is the Chard. best time to plant okra at the lowest elevations. You have until early to mid-June if you’re at 1,000 to 3,000 feet elevation, but wait until after the last frost to plant them.

Onions like cooler weather, so planting season is finished at lower elevations and harvesting is underway, or will be shortly. Above 3,000 feet, green or bunching onions can be planted until around late April. Bulbs can set out until mid-March up to 4,500 feet, and in early April above that elevation.

52 March/April 2016

Parsley can be planted through mid-April only at the highest elevations this time of year.

You can start planting parsnip around the beginning of April if you live above 4,500 feet.

Peas are spring crops that grow best when the soil temperature is around 60. You should have until around early to mid-March to plant them in the Tucson area and slightly lower elevations.

The lowest elevations of Baja Arizona are able to plant pepper starts now and into the summer, though earlier planting dates are ideal. Seeds need six to eight weeks before they’re ready to transplant, so start your seed soon or purchase plants from your local nursery and plant them after the last frost if you live above 2,000 feet.

Potato can be planted from 1,000 to 3,000 feet this time of year. You have until mid-March at the lower end of that elevation, and until the end of April at the higher end. Start planting sweet potato if you live below 2,000 feet, making sure to protect them from any late cold snaps.

Begin planting pumpkin in early March at the lower elevations, and around early April at 2,000 to 3,000 feet.

Everyone in Baja Arizona can grow radish this time of year. Continue planting it until early to mid-April at lower elevations, until late April at mid-level elevations, and begin planting it in early March and April at higher elevations.

We’re usually done planting rhubarb, rutabaga, salsify, and spinach by early March below 3,000 feet, but they can all be planted now or soon above that elevation. Begin planting rhubarb in early March and salsify around midMarch, and continue planting spinach through mid-April.

Begin planting spinach along with rutabaga and salsify in early April at the highest elevations.

edible Baja Arizona

53

[E.H.]

Parsley.

W hy is elevation so important ?

B Both summer and winter squash can be planted now through at least mid-July at the lowest elevations. Those of us at mid-Tucson’s elevation begin planting around middle to late March.

Keep planting tomato starts until mid-March in the lowest desert areas, and begin planting them around the same time in the 2,000 to 3,000 feet range. Areas that lie above that elevation can start seed indoors from early March to early April.

You may be able to get by with planting turnips around Tucson if we’ve had a mild year and you act quickly. Otherwise, they can be planted from early March to mid-April above 3,000 feet, and from early April to mid-May above 4,500 feet.

It’s warm enough to plant watermelon in the low to middle elevations of Baja Arizona. Directly sow seeds or place transplants once the soil temperature is above 70.  Information compiled from Arizona Master Gardener Manual (published online); Gardening in the Deserts of Arizona by Mary Irish; Extreme Gardening: How to Grow Organic in the Hostile Deserts by David Owens; Low Desert Planting & Harvest Calendar (published online) by Urban Farm; and personal interviews.

Amy Belk is a garden writer and photographer, a certified arborist, and a certified nursery professional who has been learning from her garden for 15 years. She and her husband homestead on a little piece of the desert in the heart of Tucson.

54 March/April 2016

aja Arizona has an extremely diverse terrain. From the very low deserts of Yuma ( just 187 feet above sea level) to the town of Bisbee (5,538 feet), the landscape, biome, and climate change quite a bit. It is often quoted that an elevation climb of 1,000 feet in Arizona is like traveling 300 miles toward the North Pole. If we started our trip in Yuma, this would put Bisbee somewhere north of Spokane, Washington. Needless to say, what’s happening in the gardens of the low desert will be quite different from what’s happening up in the sky.

City

· Elevation (feet)

Yuma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Gila Bend. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 735 Ajo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,749 Three Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,543 Tucson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,643 Green Valley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,904 Tubac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,200 Vail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,235 Benson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,565 Arivaca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,643 Patagonia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,000 Cochise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,222 Tombstone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,541 Rio Rico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,544 Sierra Vista. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,633 Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,760 Bisbee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,538

Bamboo

edible Baja Arizona

55

[E.H.]

A bee swarm in a home’s scupper.

Ask a Master Gardener

By Pima County Master Gardeners Have a question about your garden?

Submit it at EdibleBajaArizona.com or Facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona.

You can also call the Pima County Master Gardener Plant Clinic at 520.626.5161.

A

What can I do about a swarm of bees in my yard?

swarm is a large group of bees on the move to search for a new nest after their old hive becomes too crowded. As they look for a new home they make temporary stops to let the queen rest. The cluster will be visible and is often seen in a tree. They are exposed and open and there is no comb or honey visible. At this stage the bees are usually quiet and rarely defensive. Keep pets and people away from the area until the bees move on within one to four days. There is no need to call a pest removal service for a swarm.

Bees seen moving into and out of a cavity or crack in a wall, tree trunk, garbage containers, or roof may have set up a nest or hive within. These established colonies are very protective of the hive. Do not try to address the situation yourself—call a specialist. In all cases you should not disturb the swarm or nest.

56 March/April 2016

Bees are valuable pollinators and there are some bee specialists who provide live, humane bee removal and relocation instead of extermination, thus ensuring that the balance of the environment is kept intact. Search online for bee removal sources.

How can I grow better tomatoes this year?

T

omatoes do well here in Tucson, with a couple of caveats. For best success, gardeners need to be mindful of the proper timing and take care to select the correct varieties. Because of some peculiarities in the way tomato plants set fruit, small varieties or those with short maturation dates do best here. Small varieties include cherry and grape tomatoes, which are available in a variety of colors and sweetness. If you prefer a full-sized tomato, you still need to think small.

This means that large beefsteak types, the ones that are eight or 10 inches in diameter, and which can weigh

several pounds, won’t do well here. Avoid anything with “giant” or “whopper” in the species name. Instead look for varieties named Early Girl, Early Doll, Heat Wave, or Alaskan Fancy. These types of tomatoes will typically produce small fruit (4-6 inches, under 8 ounces) but they are tasty and also come in a range of colors and tastes.

Hybrids, heirlooms, open-pollinated—they all work, as long as they grow and ripen quickly.

It’s important to focus on the “days to maturity” information on the seed packets. This number indicates how many days on average you can expect between sprouted seed and mature fruit. In Tucson, tomato varieties with maturity length of 65-70 days or less do best. The variety Alaskan Fancy takes only 55 days to reach maturity.

Consider seasonal timing. Tomatoes need to be ready early; starting your own from seeds in January is best.

That is because you need to have strong plants, about 4 inches tall, ready to set out in the garden in March.

Although tomato plants will grow vigorously and bloom throughout the year, they only set fruit when the nighttime low is between 55 and 70 degrees. In Tucson this usually occurs in April. Until the nighttime temperatures are over 55 degrees, the plants will grow and flower, but not set fruit.

Tomatoes have trouble maturing when the daytime temperatures are above 90 degrees or, for a few varieties, 100 degrees. When it is too hot, the viability of pollen drops. With no pollen, there is no fruit. High heat also damages the stamen so that if pollination does occur, fruit development is poor. Choose varieties with short maturation dates and plant early in the season—aim for planting in the garden in mid-March, just after the last frost. The plants need to be large enough to be ready to set fruit a few weeks later, in April when the nights stay warm. Finally, the fruit needs to ripen before it gets too hot, which is in late May or June.

Planting deeply in very good soil helps the plant develop a bigger root system faster.

The most frequent problems we see with tomatoes are blossom end rot (caused by problems with calcium absorption or irregular watering), root-knot nematodes (best prevented by proper crop rotation practices), and cracking or sunscald. Mulching and protecting plants with 40 percent shade cloth during the hot months will help prevent the latter. 

M ark your calendar for MG’ s big spring events Master Gardener Spring Plant Sale Saturday, April 9, 8-11 a.m.

Choose from thousands of native and desert-adapted plants looking for new homes including edibles such as blackberries, grapes, fig, and pomegranate trees, as well as shrubs, wildflowers, perennials, groundcovers, vines, and a large assortment of cacti and succulents, all at very reasonable prices.

Master Gardener Home Garden Tour Saturday, April 16, 9 a.m.-3 p.m.

This self-guided tour features four gardens at the homes of Master Gardeners, with talks and demos by experts and owners at each site. You will learn how to create “grow zones” in your garden or a keyhole garden for vegetables, and how to propagate plants among other topics. Master Gardener Demonstration Gardens at 4210 N. Campbell will also be open during the tour. Buy tickets at several local nurseries, the Pima County Cooperative Extension office, online at UACals.org/3dt, and at each garden on the day of the tour. $15 in advance or $20 day of and online.

For more information, call the Master Gardener Plant Clinic at 520.626.5161 or visit 4210 N. Campbell Ave. on weekdays, 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

edible Baja Arizona

57

[E.H.]

Gardener Q&A: Raising Earthworms

By Sophia Chen | Photography by Taylor Miller

E

lizabeth Smith’s house is quietly unassuming,

tucked among rows of nearly identical houses in southeast Tucson’s Rita Ranch. But in her backyard, buried under a layer of mulch, is a gardener’s treasure—beds full of dark soil, teeming with homegrown earthworms.

Smith, a solar power consultant and avid gardener, says that her earthworms act as a miniature soil factory, gobbling up fruit peels and vegetable shavings and turning them into rich soil. Her garden is a prototype for a community garden that she is helping to plan in the neighborhood’s Purple Heart Park. Between showing me her citrus trees, her leafy winter greens, and the giant ceramic pot in which she collects rainwater, she explained to me how she borrows tricks from nature to add nutrients into her soil, use water efficiently, and keep her garden thriving.

58 March/April 2016

How long does it take your vegetable compost to turn into soil?

I’ll start by digging a hole to bury my compost around the base of a tree. It’ll take me maybe four to five weeks to make my way all the way around tree. By the time I get all the way around, it’ll be decomposed. It’ll be soil. You can’t even tell it used to be banana peels in there.

And you put the earthworms in with the compost to speed up the process?

Right. The earthworms and the microbes get in there and break it down for me. Their excrement is called vermicompost, or earthworm castings. Earthworms will break down all that carbon in compost a lot quicker and turn it into fertilizer. My fertilizer is very high in nitrogen. You can do it without earthworms, but it won’t happen as quickly, and you won’t have as much nitrogen introduced.

edible Baja Arizona

59

[E.H.] How long have you been raising earthworms?

We first did this as a project when my son was in fourth grade, about 20 years ago. I got them from a friend in Rita Ranch who’s had them for years and years.

Smith pries the lid off a bucket, one of the shelters in which she feeds and nurtures worms. She fumbles among the chunks of squash compost, clusters of dead leaves, and soil within, and unearths several fat pink earthworms. There are tens, maybe hundreds of tiny white worms, barely thicker than a human hair, wriggling alongside their adult counterparts.

Whoa! That’s super cool.

They’re real happy—they’re makin’ babies! Right here there’s never any direct sun, so this is a good place for them.

What do you feed them?

Carbon and nitrogen—you need the right ratio. Carbon-rich matter is usually brown: dry wood chips, shredded toilet-paper rolls, dry leaves. Nitrogen-rich matter is all the fresh stuff, like salad greens, apple cores, potato peelings, banana and citrus peels. If it was all fresh stuff, it would rot.

What other techniques do you use to compost to soil?

It also helps to have a layer of mulch over the top of the bed so that it stays moist.

A lot of people have these plastic drums for their compost, which just stays mummified for months because it’s so dry here.

Mulch is super, super important in the desert. It holds the moisture in—it actually self-regulates the moisture. If there’s been a lot of rain, the water just filters through it naturally. If it’s been dry, the mulch will hold onto it.

There are two things going on: the rich, dark soil absorbs the water like a sponge, and the mulch protects it like a blanket. I refill the mulch about once or twice a year.

60 March/April 2016

Mulch is protective too, right?

It protects the roots. Because I’ve got so much mulch and compost in here, the root system is huge. You have a stronger, healthier plant. It can withstand a lot more. If one of my pepper plants gets frozen, the mulch protects it from dying off completely. It’ll come back bigger in the spring.

Smith shows me her greens— verdant kale, chard, beets, and various herbs. Because of invading roots from a neighbor’s eucalyptus tree, she keeps these plants in pots that are buried in the garden bed.

So how much water does your garden need?

In the summertime, I’ll water the trees maybe once every couple weeks. In the wintertime, they can go easily over a month without watering. The mulched vegetable beds can go up to a week without watering in the summertime and much longer in the winter because of the permaculture method I use. I check the moisture level of my earthworm bin about once a week. They just need a quick sprinkle when I do add water to them.

The roots are getting what they need, so the plants are hardy and strong. I never have to shade anything. But I don’t try to plant orchids or plants that won’t survive here no matter what I do.

I learned this earthworm method from a guy in Seattle who has a YouTube video on it called “Back to Eden Organic Gardening.”

Why do you like gardening?

I just feel connected to the earth and the soil. And how one little seed could feed the entire world—I love that exponential gift.  Sophia Chen is a freelance writer based in Tucson. Her work has been featured in Wired and Physics World.

edible Baja Arizona

61

62  March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

63

Everlasting Chicken With a little creativity, a simple Sunday dinner can become a week’s worth of meals.

By Molly Kincaid | Photography by Shelby Thompson

O

things to do on a Sunday is to roast a chicken, and then see how many meals I can get out of it over the week. Using a quality, locally raised bird is pricey, but you’ll make sure not to waste a bit of it, and the taste is markedly better. Many chefs recommend using a small chicken for more flavor and tenderness. Here, I used a four-pound bird from Josh’s Foraging Fowls farm, located near Willcox and available at the Tucson CSA. You may need to adjust the cooking time depending on the size of your bird. A good meat thermometer is a must.

Since you’ll have the oven on full blast for an hour or so, take advantage of the heat and roast your veggies for the week. This is one of the many tips I cherish from Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal. I like to roast my veggies separately from the chicken, because I am particular about getting a nice brown sear on them.

But if you like, you could toss the potatoes in the chicken pan in the last 30 minutes. Roast other veggies (here, acorn squash and fennel) and cook some lentils while your chicken is roasting away.

Store all this goodness for a salad later in the week. (Cold roasted vegetables are my jam, but you could re-warm gently.) Whip up your dressing on Sunday, too. Store it away like a squirrel in the ne of m y favor i te

64 March/April 2016

fall. This dressing is tangy and thickened by tahini rather than the emulsifiers in store-bought dressings.

After I finish roasting my veggies and bird, I immediately set about making stock. It’s truly a cinch if you use a crock pot.

Once you carve the bird and pick off all usable meat, throw the bones into a large crock pot. Add a broken carrot and a couple of broken stalks of celery, a halved onion, any herb scraps you have lying around, a bay leaf, and a generous amount of salt. Set the crock pot on high for 6 hours or overnight. Taste and add more salt if needed. You can also accomplish this by simmering all the same ingredients in a pot for 1-2 hours. Strain, cool, and use in a few days for farrotto (basically, risotto made with farro), or freeze and use for soup. Homemade stock is ten times better than store-bought, and it creates no waste.

No matter what meals you’re cooking for the week, consider frittata as your Monday or Tuesday night leftover-reviver. Any little bits of veggies, greens, cured meats, or odd pieces of cheese will shine again in a frittata. Get creative and make up your own.

A favorite frittata I made recently was with leftover roast broccoli, feta, and prosciutto. I often have leftovers, so I sandwich slices of cold frittata between buttered toast for an on-the-go breakfast.

edible Baja Arizona

65

Roasted Chicken with Herb Butter

3 ½-4 pounds organic local chicken 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature 2 tablespoons chopped herbs (thyme, sage, rosemary, or whatever you have) 1 lemon, halved Fennel tops, chopped coarsely 5-6 new potatoes, cut into quarters Pat the chicken dry and place in roasting dish. Season the cavity and outside with 1½ teaspoons salt. At this point, if you can let the chicken sit in the fridge overnight to absorb the salt, that’s great. If not, just leave out for 45 minutes to 1 hour, allowing the chicken to come to room temperature. (This step is crucial to getting the bird cooked through.) Meanwhile, preheat oven to 450 degrees. In a small bowl, mix the butter, ½ teaspoon salt, and herbs—I like to mush it in my hands and then apply directly to the chicken. Make pockets under the breast skins and deposit some butter there. Rub the rest over the breasts and legs.

Stuff the cavity with halved lemon and fennel tops.

Truss the chicken with kitchen twine, tucking in the wings and tying the legs together. Cook for 50 minutes to an hour, until the thigh registers 165 degrees on a meat thermometer, and juices run clear. If the chicken browns quickly before it is done, tent with foil to prevent burning.

Meanwhile, toss potatoes with olive oil and salt. Roast on a sheet pan on a rack under chicken for 25-30 minutes, turning the potatoes every 10 minutes to achieve a golden brown all over.

Allow chicken to rest 15 minutes before carving.

Serve with roasted potatoes, maybe some greens and drizzle everything with those flavorful pan drippings.

Roasted Veggie and Lentil Salad

2 fennel bulbs, trimmed and sliced to ¼-inch thick 2 acorn squash, unpeeled and cut into half-moons 1½ cups French green lentils 4 cups water 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups arugula, torn Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Toss each vegetable with a little olive oil and salt. I like to roast all vegetables separately on sheet pans, since they have different browning rates. Place in oven and check after 10 minutes. Toss occasionally with a metal spatula. Fennel cooks quickly, in 10-15 minutes. Acorn squash will be done in 20-25 minutes. If you’re not sure, take one out, let it cool and give it a taste test. This can all be done while chicken is in the oven.

Place lentils, water, and salt in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain and cool.

Arrange arugula into four bowls. Top with ½ cup lentils, some roasted squash, and fennel. Drizzle with tahini-orange dressing.

66 March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

67

2 1 1

Tahini Orange Dressing

tablespoons tahini teaspoon honey teaspoon rice vinegar Juice of one orange (or a big juicy lemon) 1/3 cup olive oil

Combine everything but the olive oil in a food processor and blend until smooth.

While blending, pour olive oil in slowly.

(You can make the dressing with a bowl and a whisk, if you don’t have a food processor.)

Frittata with Chicken and Chard

3 tablespoons olive oil 8 eggs ¼ cup whole milk, or half and half Salt and pepper, to taste Small red onion, slivered ½ bunch chard, chopped ½-1 cup leftover chicken, chopped ½ cup chèvre goat cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Swirl olive oil all around a nonstick pan (it helps to heat slightly first). Cook onion in the olive oil over low heat for 7 or 8 minutes. Whisk eggs, milk, a generous pinch of salt, and some cracks of pepper in a bowl. Add chard to pan and a pinch of salt. Cook until just wilted, and add chicken. Pour the eggs in, coating the entire bottom of the pan. Cook for 3-4 minutes to set the bottom, tilting the pan and peeling the edges of the frittata away, allowing some uncooked egg to run underneath. Sprinkle goat cheese over the top and pop into the hot oven. This will puff up and set in 7-10 minutes. Check it vigilantly so it doesn’t get hard. You want this to be just set. Serve with greens dressed simply and toast or leftover grains.

68 March/April 2016

Farrotto with Chard and Golden Raisins

1½ 4 1 1 1 1 2/3 ½ ½

cups farro cups homemade chicken broth tablespoon butter tablespoon olive oil small yellow onion, diced tablespoon chopped thyme cup golden raisins cup pine nuts, toasted bunch chard, chopped Fresh Parmesan, to taste

Heat broth in a small saucepan. In a larger pot, melt butter and olive oil over medium heat, then add onions and a pinch of salt. Cook over low heat for 10 minutes or so. Add thyme and farro. Stir until it gives off a nutty fragrance. Begin adding broth in ½ cup ladles, stirring 3-4 minutes between each ladle, allowing the farro to absorb the broth. The pan should be almost dry each time you add another ladle.

About 20 minutes into this process, add the raisins. Continue until you have used all the broth and farro is just tender (about 30-40 minutes). Add the chard at the very end, and stir until just wilted but still bright green. Taste for seasoning—it may need a bit of salt and fresh pepper. Remove from heat and garnish with pine nuts. Top with fresh Parmesan, if you like.  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.

edible Baja Arizona

69

70  March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

71

BAJA ARIZONA

Farm Report

By Sara Jones | Photography by Liora K

I

n the spr ing ,

farmers try to get a jump-start on the intensive summer growing season. One way to do that is to use protected greenhouse space to start warm weather seedlings. “In the late winter we will start tomatoes, peppers, chiles, and other crops in the hoop house that need to be transplanted as soon as the freeze threat diminishes,” says Joe Marlow of SouthWinds Farm. The controlled temperatures and consistent watering in a greenhouse ensure a better germination rate, important for expensive organic or heirloom seeds. Later in the season, bigger seeds that germinate easily, like cucumber, squash, and okra, do well direct seeded into prepared farm beds. These crops can be protected from any lingering cold weather by floating row covers draped directly over the plants or over a series of metal hoops running over the bed.

Perennial crops—plants that establish a root system and return year after year—also need to be prepared for the summer growing season. Fruit trees and vines as well as perennial herbs like thyme and sage need pruning, thinning, and fertilizing for the growing season.

At SouthWinds Farm, Marlow says, “We will be planting new bareroot fruit trees and asparagus beds, as well as pruning existing fruit trees before it warms up.”

If you like to cook with fresh herbs, spring is an excellent time to plant your own woody, perennial herbs like thyme, oregano, and rosemary. “You can transplant perennial herbs year round in Tucson, but spring is an excellent time of year. Herbs transplanted in March and April have a chance to get established before the stress of summer heat,” says Lorien Tersey of DreamFlower Garden. At her booth at the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market, Tersey sells a wide variety of both perennial and annual herb starts, plus flowers and succulents.

72 March/April 2016

At the market this season, keep an eye out for peas and fava beans, two vegetables that make a rare appearance in our short spring season. These legumes can be fickle, requiring just the right weather to produce a good crop. They add a lovely green component to pasta or rice dishes, or light brothy soups. Both vegetables are delicious braised in olive oil with some delicate spring green garlic, green onions, or leeks. Serve with a sprinkling of fresh herbs and a hard cheese like Parmesan or Manchego for a special treat.

Other vibrant spring green vegetables available are asparagus, fennel, and herbs like dill, cilantro, and parsley. These vegetables add freshness to many recipes.

Spring vegetables, except for a few stars, are really a continuation of the winter roots and greens that have been available at market for months. Keep experimenting! There are plenty of ways to play around with root vegetables. Consider all the ways you might use a potato and imagine how it would taste with a different root vegetable. Diced, root vegetables are a perfect ingredient in fried rice or soup. Thin slices can be baked into chips, or wedges roasted like steak fries.

Turnips are excellent mashed or in a gratin covered with cream and cheese. Cooked, pureed beets make a delicious dip. Mixed with walnuts or chickpeas, you can even use them as a base for brownies.

Contrary to what you may expect, eating root vegetables raw might make them more palatable to picky eaters. Very thinly sliced, they can add color and crunch to salads.

Julienned or shredded root vegetables are a perfect base for sauerkraut and kimchi. With a hit of acidity from citrus or vinegar and some fresh spring herbs like dill or cilantro, these vegetables make surprisingly good salads. To mellow the pungency of turnips or radishes, soak raw slices in a bowl of water with a pinch of salt for 10 minutes, then drain well before using. The soaked veggies provide fantastic crunch without their normal heat and are perfect in sandwiches and salads.

edible Baja Arizona

73

Radish Salsa

Beet and Walnut Dip

This is a great dip or spread for bread or pita. Top with fresh herbs and chopped olives.

1 bunch beets, roasted, peeled, and roughly chopped 3 cloves garlic, or half head green garlic 1 cup walnuts 2 tablespoons olive oil ¼ cup plain yogurt or sour cream Salt, to taste Process garlic and walnuts in a food processor or blender until finely ground. Add beets and olive oil and process until smooth. In a medium bowl, combine beet mixture with yogurt or sour cream. Salt to taste. Store in refrigerator covered with a layer of oil for up to one week.

74 March/April 2016

Use this salsa to garnish your tacos or burritos.

It is also refreshing alongside a steak, or any other heavy, hearty dish. This is a great salsa with just the cilantro and lime juice, but add other spices to taste. Soaking the onion and radish in water for just 10 minutes takes away some of the smelly sulfur compounds and mellows the flavors considerably.

1 cup radishes, diced into ¼-inch cubes ½ red onion, diced 1 small handful cilantro, chopped Juice from one lime Salt to taste 1 pinch toasted mustard seeds 1 pinch ground cumin 1 pinch ground red pepper Put diced radish and onion into fresh, cold lightly salted water to soak for 10 minutes. Drain well and toss with lime juice, cilantro, spices, and a pinch of salt, to taste. Refrigerate until ready to serve.  Sara Jones is a longtime employee of the Tucson CSA.

A Day in

Baja Arizona

1

2

Ambos Nogales The right frame of mind for a trip to Nogales is to embrace both sides of the border.

By Eric Swedlund | Photography by Aidan Heigl

T

Ambos Nogales, which refers to “both Nogales,” captures the idea of looking past the fence and seeing one community—one city that happens to span two countries, rather than twin cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora.

An hour south of Tucson on Interstate 19, Nogales, Arizona, is a mix of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures and the seat of Santa Cruz County, with a population of 20,000 that’s dwarfed by its Sonoran sister’s 220,000 population. A day or weekend trip to Ambos he phr ase

76 March/April 2016

Nogales is enough to discover restaurants, shopping, and sites on both sides of the border.

Gariola Coffee & Deli (3131 N. Grand Ave.) makes for a great inexpensive breakfast, with freshly roasted coffee, smoothies, and a menu of breakfast burritos, and bagel or croissant sandwiches.

Exploring history on the U.S. side starts at the Pimeria Alta Historical Society and Museum (136 N. Grand Ave.). Housed in the old city hall, built in 1914, the museum offers a glimpse of the development of the area, from the Spanish arrival in the

late 1700s to the 1918 battle between U.S. and Mexican forces. A vast collection of both English- and Spanish-language newspapers keeps researchers busy, while visitors can examine the old jail and firehouse and the time capsule unearthed for the building’s centennial celebration in 2014.

Downtown shoppers can find everything from hardto-believe bargains at the Buffalo Exchange Outlet (441 N. Grande Ave., No. 10) to a dizzying collection of furniture, art, crafts, and more at the Bazar de Mexico (491 N. Grande Ave.). A must-see that helped put Nogales on the

map is the world-renowned Paul Bond Boot Company, specializing in custom, handmade cowboy boots. Bond moved to Nogales in 1957 and continued hand-making boots until his death in 2012, outfitting American icons like Gene Autry, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash, among many others.

As the lunch hour approaches, consider options on either side of the border.

In Arizona, the family-owned Cocina La Ley (226 W. Third St.) has been serving the city’s top seafood since 1993.

Whether it’s fish tacos or the incredible soups, shrimp, or

4

3

5

Upcoming Events: March 23 Nogales Bicycle Classic April 6—10 Santa Cruz Nature and Heritage Festival

April 23 Charles Mingus Hometown Music Festival

6 fish, or the weekend special mixed seafood bowl, Cocina La Ley serves an absolutely delicious and unpretentious lunch. For lunch on the Sonora side, street tacos can provide a tasty fix, but just a few blocks into the city is the popular Restaurante La Posada (116 Pierson), a welcoming and friendly spot for English speakers. The menu of soups, enchiladas, and tacos will be familiar to anyone who enjoys the great restaurants on Tucson’s South Fourth Avenue.

The downtown areas— Grand and Morley avenues in Arizona and Avenida Obregón in Sonora—are both easily

walkable and filled with shops, curio vendor stands, and, especially on the weekends, people. On Fridays from 4 to 7 p.m., the Nogales Mercado farmers’ market sets up at the corner of Court Street and Morley Avenue, featuring locally grown produce from small-scale producers.

For dinner, either side offers one-of-a-kind restaurants. In Sonora, the elegant La Roca Bar & Restaurant (Plutarco Elías Calles 91) opened in 1972 and has been a destination ever since. Tucked into a natural cliff face, the dining room’s back wall resembles a cave. In Arizona,

7 Las Vigas Steak Ranch (180 W. Loma St.) specializes in steaks and traditional Mexican dishes with house favorites including the Steak Picado (Sonoran style beef stew) and Asado las Vigas (steak and potatoes sautéed in a mild salsa).

We’re lucky in Baja Arizona to have international travel so close at hand and no matter how you approach Ambos Nogales, the blending of cultures and languages makes for a fascinating and educating trip.  NogalesAz.gov/Rediscover or NogalesInternational.com for more information.

Eric Swedlund writes about music, travel, and food and drink. He lives in Tucson. Follow him on Twitter @EricSwedlund.

1 A colorful display of goods in the open-air market in Nogales, Sonora. 2 A sideroom at La Roca Restaurant is available for special events. 3 Grab an ice cream cone and wander through the shopping center between Campillo and Benito Juárez Streets. 4 Decorative tiles to mix and match at Bazar de Mexico. 5 Breaded shrimp and lengua (beef tongue) soft tacos at Cocina La Ley. 6 Chicken quesadilla appetizer with refried beans at La Roca Restaurant. 7 Recuerdos para llevar.

edible Baja Arizona

77

IN THE BUSINESS

Creating Pockets Patricia Schwabe has helped shape Tucson’s downtown, from developing buildings with Peach Properties to developing a menu at Penca Restaurant.

Interview by Megan Kimble | Photography by Norma Jean Gargasz

How did you get involved with real estate in Tucson?

I’m from Mexico. I came to the U.S. for college. My parents sent all of us from Mexico to school in the U.S. I went to school in San Diego. My parents were living in Tucson by then. I’d come here for Christmas and I was like, not in a million years am I moving to Tucson. After I finished school in San Diego in journalism, I thought: I’m going to be a TV person. In those days, Spanish TV networks were just starting. I got a job at Univision and I thought that was going to be my life.

And then my dad died and I came here to Tucson to stay with my mother. I started working for an ad agency, doing Spanish stuff for them. I don’t know how, but I just decided to get my real estate license. Why not? I had time. I worked for Tucson Realty and then I met Ron Schwabe, randomly, who happens to be my husband. He said, why are you at Tucson Realty, why don’t you just come work for Peach Properties?

How did you get into the restaurant business?

Ron had Tooley’s, and the little restaurant was going to close.

I said, “You can’t close it, people love it.” So he said, “You can have it, it’s yours.” And I had never worked in a restaurant. Not a waitress, a server—nothing.

In his jobs, Ron has always had workers, and some workers bring food. One of his workers always had really nice food, homemade food. It always smelled nice. So I asked him, “Does your wife work?” He said, “No.” So I called her and she said, “I’ve never worked in restaurants but if you need help, I’ll go help you.” And she worked for us for almost 20 years. She became the backbone of Tooley’s. It was homecooked food and I think that’s what people loved about Tooley’s.

82 March/April 2016

How has Peach Properties supported the revitalization of downtown Tucson?

Creating pockets has been something we both love. Pockets are neighborhoods. The building has to work and it has to feel like it works all together.

I helped with the leasing of Sparkroot, with the leasing of Yoga Oasis. I chased those two guys. They signed almost the same week. Ari and Darren are complementary to each other, to the vision. Ron and I try to be very aware of renting to people that would grow with each other. That’s what I mean with my pockets.

The same with the Market Inn building. It stayed empty for a while. People called, and their vision was different than what we thought would work in that building. And now it works: we have Tap + Bottle, Exo, and the Old Market Inn Tile Shop.

That’s something that we have grown into and matured—how to have a vision and not just rent to anyone.

I think that almost every space should have food. Too many restaurants is sometimes overwhelming—people can’t eat from restaurant to restaurant. That’s why you need some retail, a museum, or a gallery, or something to break it up. But you need food. It’s true with our experience with Tooley’s. That street was doing better when there was a place to go have a lemonade and a taco. It generated more of a community feel for that whole area.

Patricia Schwabe intended to rent the restaurant space at 50 E. Broadway, but after showing the space to other restaurants and brokers, no one “got” the appeal of that corner of downtown. So she decided to do it herself.

edible Baja Arizona

83

How did Penca begin?

I started showing this space to restaurants from the foothills. At that time, six years ago, people would say, “Oh, it’s so far—nobody will walk that far.” And I was like, “Have you ever been to the Temple of Music and Art? Have you ever been to the symphony?

Have you ever been to the Fox?” I go home one night and I’m complaining—these people just don’t get it! And my husband goes, “Well then, you just do it.” And I said, “O.K.” I was blessed to have some good hires in the beginning. My bar staff from Day 1 was very ambitious and creative and strong.

I hired some good people in the kitchen who helped me create the menu. I want to maintain something that reflects the tradition of Central Mexico, and sometimes that’s harder because we’re not right there.

How did you build the menu?

It was based on my mother’s cooking. That was the food that she cooked. She grew up in a very traditional Mexico City family.

Their day-to-day food is the food that has been cooking in Mexican families for hundreds of years.

We always use chile poblano for the chile relleno. Chile nogado was a traditional dish. Short ribs.

Posole—I wanted to do the posole blanco. Turkey based, not red pork-based. A lot of black beans.

I’m striving every day to bring a Mexican meal that reflects the way people eat in Mexico.

Do you work with any local producers?

We have good companies that provide us all our chiles. It’s not a local company but they are high quality chiles. We get all our corn masa from a local tortilla place.

But do I know where the corn came from? No. You talk to Chris Bianco and he’ll tell you where the flour came from, but I’m not that.

I wish I could be more like that.

You need someone at the head of 84 March/April 2016

the restaurant really neurotic about doing it. Here our volume demands that we have consistency and the price point. That makes it harder.

What does a typical day look like?

My day-to-day is not recommended for a healthy lifestyle. We have five kids together. The two older ones are out of the house now. The little ones are 14, 12, and 9. I come check on things here [at Penca], on our projects. For example, we’re doing an amazing bar book that talks about the spirits. Everything from mescal, tequila, rum, brandy, gin. But again—super controlling human—I want to pick the paper, I want to pick the fonts.

I’ve been on the board of Tu Nidito for the past five years. I was honored this year to be asked to be on the boards of The Loft and the Tucson Symphony. The symphony to me is a super important piece of our community. It shows that we are a city that understands culture and the growth that music brings to our community.

I love that at Penca we can support the different entertainment venues on this side of the city. I love when I come some evenings and everybody is like, older. It feels like a city. They’re having fun, having a glass of wine, eating dinner. It’s like, Oh yeah, our downtown has a wider demographic. I love it. I’m proud of that.  Penca. 50 E. Broadway.

520.203.7681.

PencaRestaurante.com.

Megan Kimble is the managing editor of Edible Baja Arizona and the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food (William Morrow 2015).

(Top) The chile relleno comes as a roasted chile poblano stuffed with mushrooms, spinach, onions, walnuts, and queso.

(Bottom) The mancha manteles (“tablecloth stainers”) is a slow-cooked pork loin simmered in traditional mole.

edible Baja Arizona

85

PROFILE

The Desert Prophet of New Food Crops Forty years ago, a long-time Tucsonan named Richard Felger was promoting new water-saving food crops for arid lands. If only we’d listened.

By Gary Paul Nabhan | Photography by Bill Steen

Read the full story on EdibleBajaArizona.com.

B

R ichar d F elger has always been a little ahead of his time. As a teenager in southern California, he cultivated rare cacti and orchids at home. Before he graduated from college at the University of Arizona, he shadowed some of the world’s greatest desert ecologists. And on his first trip down to Alamos, Sonora, he had a realization that would drive his career: the Sonoran Desert was full of wonders—and many of those wonders were edible.

Within a few years, Felger had suggested that we design farms to mimic desert ecosystems. In several papers published in the late 1970s, he and his colleagues pioneered a methodology for identifying “new crops for arid lands.” He proposed that the most yield-stable native wild food plants of the desert be domesticated into crops that could be cultivated with minimum irrigation and tillage.

The Sonoran Desert natives that Felger initially proposed be cultivated included mesquite, agaves, fruit from organ pipe and prickly pear cactus, tepary beans, chiltepins, grain from saltgrass called “nipa,” amaranth, and oil from buffalo gourd seeds. Felger predicted that agriculture in the Sonoran and other deserts would soon need to be restructured from the bottom up.

His vision was to “fit the crop to the prevailing environmental conditions rather than trying to remake desert environments to fit temperate, water-hungry crops.” otanist

86 March/April 2016

He and his colleagues proposed that farmers plant native, drought-hardy crops in mixtures of species, mostly perennials.

They could efficiently use harvested rainwater, rather than the pumped groundwater required by conventionally recommended crops—cotton, alfalfa, pecans, citrus, lettuce. Felger recognized the Sonoran Desert’s apparent barrenness as “deceptive,” and showed how its residents could enjoy a level of local food security unknown for decades.

And yet, his message was largely ignored, if not outright dismissed, by most of the crop scientists working in the same arid region. Most field crop scientists in the Southwest’s land grant agricultural colleges dismissed Felger’s suggestions and the possibility that future water scarcity might drive into obsolescence the furrow irrigation of food crops adapted to temperate climates.

“The usual complaint about new crops you hear when you talk with well-funded institutions or government programs is that most native desert crops are not well-suited for industrial scale harvesting and processing,” he said.

As early as the 1970s, botanist Richard Felger was proposing the cultivation of “new crops for arid lands”—many of which are now in cultivation today.

edible Baja Arizona

87

Now, with groundwater levels plummeting across the desert Southwest and the Colorado River’s reservoirs reaching the lowest levels since it was first dammed, both water rationing and steep price increases for irrigation are kicking in.

Desert-adapted crops are needed more than ever.

It may be hard for contemporary Southwest foodies to recall, but in the mid-1970s, foods like mesquite flour, prickly pear fruits and syrups, dried tepary beans, chia seeds, popped amaranth grains, and agave nectar were virtually unknown in the American marketplace. Amaranth seeds and greens, prickly pear pads (nopalitos) and fresh fruits (tunas) were still widely available in Mexico, but they were often looked down upon as “poor people” survival foods.

While not directly involved in their commercialization, Felger was among the vanguard of those who elevated the status of such foods.

Through dozens of lectures and popular magazine articles, Felger helped Mexican scientists, chefs, and innovators begin to take more pride in the cultural heritage, nutritional quality, and flavors of their ancient foodstuffs. In ways, they were far ahead of their counterparts in the United States in their efforts to build upon Felger’s vision.

Now in his 80s, Felger is in the field again, partnering with his Silver City, New Mexico, neighbor Gregg Dugan, a tree crop specialist who is helping to advance the no-till production of perennial food crops in permaculture systems.

If there is any take-home message from Felger’s work over the past four decades, it is that innovations in our food systems most often emerge from creative people on the margins, not from the biggest, wealthiest research institutions or agribusinesses. It was Felger’s deep familiarity with these wild and native plants that enabled him to envision an alternate future for food crops in the desert.

But the question in Felger’s story is not how visionaries like Felger secure funding and recognition for their innovations that may benefit society. Rather it is: Are we desert dwellers ready to eat a diet that features delicious water-conserving crops suited to our arid environment, or will we continue to see the desert depleted by the furrow irrigation of water-guzzling and largely unsustainable food crops? This choice is ours to make.  Read the full story on EdibleBajaArizona.com.

Gary Paul Nabhan is senior contributing editor for Edible Baja Arizona and director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona.

He began his own work on desert foods as Richard Felger’s intern and research assistant 40 years ago.

88 March/April 2016

(Above) Richard Felger is working with Gregg Dugan, a tree crop specialist in Silver City, New Mexico, to build partnerships with local farmers to get crops like mesquite and Apache redgrass (below) cultivated on a large scale.

edible Baja Arizona

89

90  March/April 2016

MEET YOUR FARMER

Tasting Climate From chickens to pigs to garlic, these three farmers show adaptation in action, acre by acre.

By Angela Orlando | Photography by Tim Fuller

B

aja A r i zona ’ s diverse microclimates create extremely specific growing conditions not only for wild flora and fauna but also for domesticated crops and livestock.

Distinct soil compositions, seasonally shifting winds, fluctuating rainfall patterns, and dramatically vacillating night and daytime temperatures carve niches that vary even acre-by-acre. Environmental conditions select for particularly well-adapted species of plants and animals, and adamantly against everything unfit.

Just as with wine, when we taste a plant or animal that is perfectly adapted to a specific place, we can sense its native soil’s minerality, the herbaceous vegetation it foraged on or grew around, and even, some would say, the aridity of the climate it grew in.

92 March/April 2016

It takes a patient farmer to figure out an ideal variety of livestock or crop that will thrive in his or her slice of Baja Arizona. Kyle Young in Arivaca bred his Gila chickens to adapt to an ecosystem very different from where Thad Koehn raises his free-range pigs near Willcox. That is a terrain very different from where Chris Stross grows up to 20 kinds of garlic, right on the Tanque Verde Wash in eastern Tucson.

Each of them also raises other foods, but these varietals represent their landscapes and adaptability.

A taste of place. From left: Free-range pigs near Willcox; a Gila chicken in Arivaca; and garlic from Tucson's Tanque Verde Wash.

edible Baja Arizona

93

Kyle Young

K

Erda Kroft Farm, Arivaca

yle Y oung of Erda Kroft Farm crossed four hardy and rare chicken breeds over and over again, selecting for resilience and intelligence, until his own Gila chicken breed was perfected.

He sought a medium-large chicken that was ideally adapted to the summer heat and winter chill of the desert Southwest—a dual-purpose egg-layer that yielded flavorful meat. Instead of eating genetically modified soy and corn while constrained in coops, the chickens consume native grassland leaves, legumes, beetles, and grubs.

“A healthy animal is going to taste much better than a nonhealthy animal,” said Young, “and an animal’s taste reflects the terroir much more than it reflects the breed. The Gila chicken tastes how a chicken raised on my farm should taste.”

Gila chickens are also particularly flavorful birds because they’re some of the savviest fowl around. Their mothers teach them survival skills necessary to roam free: They must learn to hunt for the best available grubs and grasshoppers, or they won’t be able to compete for food. Plus, the abundant grasshoppers

on Young’s land are full of beta carotene, which makes the birds delicious and healthy, and their egg yolks extra orange.

The texture of their carcasses isn’t soft and buttery like commercially farmed chicken, Young said. Instead, they’re firm, representing the smell, taste, and chew of real food uncommon in our industrial food system. “The Gila chicken meat is much darker in color because the bird ate higher quality protein,” Young added. “If people want vegetarian chicken or eggs, they’re missing out on nutrition. Bigger chickens like the Gila even eat rodents, which add omega-3 fatty acids.”

As Young said, to evoke the flavor of a Gila chicken, “take a chicken from the grocery store, subtract the bland, and add richness.”

Young sells chickens of all ages as well as eggs in Arivaca by word of mouth, and it doesn’t take him long to run out. On the rare occasion that he has too many eggs, he sells them at Health is Wealth Vitamins in Green Valley and occasionally in the store at Three Points Restaurant on Sasabe Highway closer to Tucson proper.

To cook a Gila chicken: Young prepares birds according to type and age.

Roosters need to be eaten, and one of his preferred ways to cook them is to stuff the bird with mirepoix, mushrooms, and Southwest flavors like partially cooked amaranth grains and whole chiles from his garden. Then he places the bird in a deep, unglazed oval lidded pot. He slow roasts it at 200-250 degrees in his Celtic-style chimneyless outdoor oven “until it’s finished” (about 3½ hours, but check its doneness starting at 2). A little reddish fluid in the bottom of the pot is normal and can be the base for gravy.

He likes to fry younger birds “like mom did,” he said. She cut them into pieces and shook them in a paper bag with flour 94 March/April 2016

(gluten-free substitutes are O.K., he noted) with salt, pepper, garlic and onion powders, and sage. Then she fried the bird pieces in lard. A gravy can consist of bone stock thickened with coconut flour, arrowroot powder, and chia seeds, and seasoned with turmeric, red chile powder or paprika, and salt.

Old hens, on the other hand, are stew birds that mostly become stock. He cooks them in water until tender—about 8-12 hours—skimming off the collagen, which he spreads on bread like butter. He uses their tougher meat for chicken salad.

Erda Kroft Farm. ErdaKroft.com.

Thad Koehn

S

Chiricahua Pasture-Raised Meats

K oehn moved his family from the state of Kansas to the high desert of Kansas Settlement near Willcox about 25 years ago. There, he began farming cereal grains, hay, and cotton as he did in his native Midwest.

Ten years later, his son Josh started raising sustainably pastured beef and chickens in the adjacent fields. In 2014, his brother Thad joined him. Today, the brothers maintain the fields’ natural ecological diversity and provide ample pastureland and ethically raised sheep, turkeys, and pigs.

Most pigs raised to be eaten in the United States suffer terribly, seldom leaving their pens, rutting in their own waste; some never see the light of day before they are slaughtered. Many farms in Baja Arizona do raise meat ethically, but few raise pigs, especially pigs that can spend 100 percent of their time outdoors.

At any given time of year, the brothers have about 30 pigs of varying ages, and they aim to produce a total of 200 per year. cot t

The brothers let their animals take their time maturing, never giving them antibiotics or growth hormones. It has been a while since Koehn has eaten commercial meat, he said, but he remembers the difference between his and the pork typically available.

“A big difference is the texture of the meat. It has largely to do with the forage, not so much the climate. The rain usually goes around us in the Valley anyway,” Koehn said. But unlike industrial pigs, he says “they aren’t living in their muck. The texture is firmer. Commercial pork is mushier and lacks texture but ours isn’t tough.” The farm’s microclimate is stable compared to the rest of Baja Arizona, which gives consistency to the taste of the meat.

Another flavor difference is that commercial pork is bred to be very lean, whereas the brothers’ maintains some fat. “The fat is one thing that makes it very good. We don’t want to raise the lean hog. Some of the flavor comes from the fat,” Koehn said.

To cook a Chiricahua Pasture-Raised Meats pig: Koehn said he prefers pork belly over all other cuts. He suggests slicing it like bacon, marinating it overnight with equal amounts of salt and brown sugar, and frying it like bacon for breakfast. (In fact, pork belly, bacon, and pancetta are the same cut: bacon is cured, pork belly is smoked, and pancetta is cured with herbs.)

He also likes a pork chop now and again. One way to cook a free-range pork chop is to preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

While the oven is heating, make aluminum foil squares large enough to wrap each piece of meat, and rub each chop with 1 tablespoon olive oil, ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, and lemon pepper to taste. Do not add salt because it toughens the 96 March/April 2016

meat. Carefully wrap the foil around the chops and evenly space them on a cookie sheet. Put the sheet on the middle rack in the oven. After 35 minutes, unwrap the foil to check for an internal temperature of 145 degrees; if the chop is not hot enough, check again after five minutes.

Chiricahua Pasture-Raised Meats delivers butchered pork to members of Tucson Community Supported Agriculture at 300 E. University Blvd. some Tuesdays and Wednesdays. They also deliver individual pick-ups to three Tucson parks to customers who preorder up to three days beforehand.

Chiricahua Pasture Raised Meats. CPRMeats.com.

Chris Stross

Mariposa Market Gardens

U

2013, Chris Stross and his wife, Elizabeth, grew a variety of crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, garlic, herbs, and squash on the banks of the Tanque Verde Wash near Speedway and Houghton roads. But since Elizabeth died, all 77-year-old Chris has the energy to tend is their organically grown garlic.

The 20 varieties of garlic he collected from all over the world, that is.

The wash’s microclimate conditions swing back and forth so dramatically that Stross said he cannot grow typical Tucson plants like bougainvillea or bird of paradise. However, he has had success with garlic varietals originating in cold, wet climates as distant as Russia, the Republic of Georgia, San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Washington State’s border with Canada. Stross ntil

said he is not sure why so many varieties thrive in his beds while others simply refuse, even though the protesters are so genetically similar to their productive cousins.

A variety particularly adapted to his land is the Valdour softneck from the Dordogne region of France. Yet unlike the pendulum-like microclimate where Stross lives, the Dordogne has predictable, calm weather patterns, and the garlic tastes mild - almost as if it doesn’t have to struggle to survive. As such, it lends itself to a range of cuisines.

Stross’ garlic is ready to lift from the soil in June when the shoots have five or six green leaves. After a laborious drying process, he sells it at the Heirloom Farmers’ Market at Rillito Park beginning in August. He charges $12 per pound (about one-third of what mail order catalogs charge for smaller bulbs).

To cook a batch of skordalia with Mariposa Market Gardens garlic: Mix mashed potatoes, crushed Valdour garlic, salt, olive oil, and vinegar. (Ask Stross how much of each ingredient to add, and he’ll respond: “Enough.”) His actual recipe asks for 1 potato, 3 cloves of crushed garlic, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ cup of olive oil, and about 2 teaspoons vinegar. Blend using a handheld blender. The garlic won’t overpower the dish. Rather, it occurs as a pleasant hint of heat in what can be used as a spread or a dip.  98 March/April 2016

Mariposa Market Gardens. 520.906.9293.

Angela Orlando is a cultural anthropologist who is passionate about the Sonoran Desert, indigenous foodways, and talking with people about cooking and eating.

TABLE

Litt le Pieces of Mexico Desde tacos a tamales, toma un tour de los sabores de Mexico.

By Esteban Camarena | Photography by Dominic AZ Bonuccelli

I

gr ew up on the south side of Tucson and my family always knew where to go to get certain foods that reminded them of their days back in Nogales, Sonora. They were reminded not only of the taste of Mexico’s food but also of the feeling of home. I continue to visit these places with friends, family, or by myself. Whenever I walk in, I’m filled with memories of my childhood. The food also now leaves me with a taste of curiosity. Who made this food? How was this food made? Why was it made?

Get to know the people behind the restaurants I consider little pieces of Mexico scattered throughout Tucson.

C

r ecí en el sur de T ucson y mi familia siempre sabía donde ir para saborear ciertas comidas que les recordaran sus días en Nogales, Sonora. No solo se acordaban de los sabores de México, sino también del sentimiento de estar en casa. Yo continúo visitando estos lugares con amigos, familia o solo. Naturalmente, cada vez que entro a alguno de estos lugares se reviven las memorias de mi niñez. La comida también me deja con un sabor mezclado con curiosidad. ¿Quién preparó esta comida? ¿Cómo la prepararon? ¿Por qué la prepararon? Los invito a conocer a las personas detrás de los restaurantes que considero pedacitos de México en Tucson.

Tacos Apson 3501 S. 12th Ave. · 520.670.1248

Francisco Durazo, owner of Tacos Apson, named the restaurant after the Mexican rock ‘n’ roll band Los Apson—his father played drums in the band.

T

you notice when you walk into this small taquería is that the walls are completely covered in old photographs of the Mexican rock ‘n’ roll band Los Apson, which swept through Mexico during the ’60s and ’70s with their mellow music. The name of the band comes from the abbreviated name of the city of Agua Prieta, Sonora, the band’s hometown. Francisco Durazo, whose father played the drums in the band, opened the doors to his business 14 years ago, eager to offer his version of Sonoran food.

The second thing you notice is the huge, sizzling grill. The menu is emblematic of a typical Sonoran barbeque, offering grilled tripe, baby back ribs, and other staples such as caramelos (melted cheese and choice of meat between two corn or flour tortillas), and Sonoran hot dogs.

And everything is prepared on that grill, only feet from where you order. A fully stocked salsa bar complements whatever grilled goods you chose.

The restaurant is normally full, especially during the weekend when it closes late. But it hasn’t always been this way. “When you start, it is very difficult,” says Durazo. “You go from one day to another, you have to let yourself be known and wait for the people to approve of you and afterwards maintain a rhythm.” Without a doubt, the community of Tucson has approved of this small taquería, as the restaurant will celebrate its 15th anniversary next year. “It’s really exhausting but when you work hard, do things well and treat people face-to-face, everything will be good,” says Durazo. he first t h ing

L

que notas al entrar a está pequeña taquería son las paredes totalmente adornadas con viejas fotografías de la banda de rock ‘n’ roll mexicano Los Apson, que recorrió México durante los años 60 y 70 con su música melosa. El nombre de la banda se deriva de la ciudad de Agua Prieta, Sonora, de donde son originarios los integrantes de la banda. Francisco Durazo, cuyo padre tocaba la batería en la banda, abrió las puertas de su negocio hace catorce años con el afán de ofrecer su versión de la comida sonorense.

La segunda cosa que llama la atención es una enorme parrilla. El menú es característico de una carne asada sonorense que ofrece tripitas asadas, costillas y otras cosas típicas como los caramelos y los hotdogs estilo Sonora.

Todo se prepara en esa parrilla a solo unos metros de ti. Un bar de salsas bien surtido complementa cualquier cosa asada que hayas elegido.

Normalmente el restaurante está lleno, especialmente durante los fines de semana cuando cierran tarde, pero no siempre ha sido así. “Cuando empiezas es bien difícil”, dice Durazo. “Empiezas de un día para otro, te tienes que dar a conocer y esperar a que la gente te apruebe y después mantener un ritmo”.

No cabe duda que la comunidad de Tucson ya aprobó esta taquería ya que este año celebrarán 15 años de su apertura. “Es muy desgastante pero cuando trabajas duro, haces las cosas bien y tratas cara a cara a las personas, todo te irá bien”, dice Durazo. a primera cosa

edible Baja Arizona

101

I

the beautiful city of Guadalajara, the closest taste of the regional cuisine is at the small restaurant Birrieria Guadalajara. For more than 34 years, the González Family has offered traditional cuisine from Guadalajara; one of their most famous dishes is the delicious birria, prepared from scratch daily in their open kitchen. This dish comes from the Mexican state of Jalisco and is typically made with beef or lamb, seasoned in a variety of spices and chiles, then slow cooked in its own broth.

Mónica González’s daily routine includes preparing birria, as well as other dishes, such as posole and menudo.

In the morning, she and other cooks start by dicing onions, cilantro, and chiles; they check on the meat, often finishing what they started the day before, as many dishes require marinating for at least 24 hours. Everything except for the tortillas, which are bought locally, is made in-house, using fresh and natural ingredients, strictly following her grandmother’s original recipes.

“It began slow,” says Mónica. “When we first opened no one accepted us because we sold tacos with soft shells instead of hard shells. After people tasted our food, they approved happily.” After 34 years in business, they’re supported by old and new customers alike. The open kitchen allows guests to see exactly how their food is prepared and the welcoming space makes you feel as if you’re sitting down at a taquería in Guadalajara enjoying a delicious birria taco. f you haven ’ t v isited

Birrieria Guadalajara 304 E. 22nd St. · 520.624.8020

102 March/April 2016

For more than 34 years, the González Family has offered traditional cuisine from Guadalajara at Birriería Guadalajara. From right: Mónica González, Carmen Sanchez, Juan Sanchez.

S

la oportunidad de visitar la bella ciudad de Guadalajara, la oportunidad más cercana para probar su cocina regional se encuentra en el pequeño restaurante, Birriería Guadalajara. Por más de 34 años la familia González ha ofrecido platillos típicos de Guadalajara. El más famoso es la deliciosa birria que se prepara diariamente en la cocina abierta del restaurante.

Este platillo proviene del estado mexicano de Jalisco y está hecho de carne de res o borrego adobado en una variedad de especies y chiles, y lentamente cocinada en su propio jugo.

La rutina diaria de Mónica González incluye la preparación de la birria y todos los platillos que se ofrecen como el pozole y el menudo. Desde temprano, Mónica y las demás cocineras comienzan a cortar cebollas, cilantro, chiles, revisan las carnes, muchas de las cuales se comenzaron a preparar el día anterior, ya que bastante de lo que se ofrece necesita marinarse por más de 24 horas. Todo se prepara en casa, menos las tortillas que se compran localmente, usando ingredientes frescos y naturales, estrictamente de acuerdo con las recetas originales de la abuela.

“Comenzó lento”, dice Mónica, “Cuando abrimos nadie nos aceptó porque vendíamos tacos con tortilla blandita en vez de ‘hard shell’ pero después de probar nuestra comida, la gente nos aprobó felizmente”. Después de 34 años de estar abiertos, viejos y nuevos clientes siguen apoyando el negocio. La cocina abierta le ofrece la oportunidad al cliente de ver exactamente como se prepara su comida y lo acogedor del lugar te hace sentir como si estuvieras sentado en una taquería de Guadalajara disfrutando un buen taco de birria. i no h a s t enido

edible Baja Arizona

103

E

begins with a dream and the will to fulfill it. That’s how Ramón Becerra, owner of Maico Mexican Restaurant, began his journey. He says, “I wanted the American Dream, so we packed the few things that we had and we came.” He arrived in the United States with his family and a few bags in 1974 from Teocuitatlán, a small village in the state of Jalisco. Although they arrived in California, Becerra says the friendly people and climate brought them to Tucson more than 20 years ago. Before opening the restaurant, Becerra had his own music store named Ana’s Records on Tucson’s south side, but he always had a dream of owning his own restaurant.

Eight years ago, he opened Maico, named for the nickname of one of his five children. All the dishes are made from family recipes typical of the state of Jalisco. The complete menu offers everything from ceviche tostadas, tortas, sopes, and chile rellenos. “Everything that we serve are our favorite dishes, and everything is prepared with heart,” says Becerra. “We enter the building with the will to work, we wash our hands, we turn on the stoves, we bless ourselves, and let’s go!”

The first day that they opened the restaurant, they “cried and cried” because no one came. Without paying for any promotion, they have slowly built a reputation for serving delicious Mexican food at reasonable prices—a visit from Andrew Zimmern for the Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods” helped, too. Becerra concludes with a piece of wisdom: “Life teaches you everything. If you want to do something, do it.” He gets up in a hurry to attend the quickly forming line of customers. v ery jour ney

Maico �exican Restaurant 835 E. 22nd St. · 520.294.2836

104 March/April 2016

Ramón Becerra, owner of Maico Mexican Restaurant, came to the U.S. because, he says, he wanted the American Dream.

T

con un sueño y las ganas de cumplirlo. Así comenzó don Ramón Becerra, propietario del pequeño restaurante mexicano Maico. Nos dice, “quería cumplir el sueño americano, así que empacamos las pocas cosas que teníamos y nos venimos”. Llegó a los Estados Unidos con su familia y unas pocas maletas en el año 1974 desde Teocuitatlán, un pequeño pueblo en el estado de Jalisco.

A pesar de haber comenzado en California, la gente amable y el clima los trajo a Tucson hace más de 20 años. Antes de abrir el restaurante, se dedicaba a vender discos en su propia disquera (Ana’s Records) en el sur de Tucson, pero siempre abrigaba el deseo de abrir su propio restaurante.

Ocho años atrás, abrió el restaurante Maico, cuyo nombre proviene del apodo de uno de sus cinco hijos. Las recetas que se ofrecen son todas de familia, provenientes del estado de Jalisco.

El menú completo incluye desde tostadas de ceviche, tortas, sopes y chiles rellenos. “Todo lo que servimos son nuestros platillos favoritos y todo se prepara con corazón. Entramos con las ganas de trabajar, nos lavamos las manos, prendemos las estufas, nos persignamos y ¡vámonos!”

El primer día que abrieron el restaurante “lloraron y lloraron”, pues casi no tuvieron clientes. Sin promoción alguna, poco a poco han generado una reputación de ofrecer deliciosa comida mexicana a precios económicos. También les ayudo una visita del presentador del programa “Bizarre Foods”, Andrew Zimmern del canal Travel Channel. Ramón concluye diciendo, “todo enseña la vida, el que quiere hacer algo, lo hace”. Se levanta apurado para atender una línea de clientes que se juntaron repentinamente. odo tr ayecto comienza

L

holds a special place in the hearts of many Tucsonans.

For more than 35 years, owner Frances Erunez and her family have been serving up Sonoran-style Mexican food to the community.

The walls of the restaurant are covered with awards and photographs of Frances with politicians and celebrities. Throughout the years she has gained fame for being a supporter of causes ranging from child literacy to voter registration as well as involving herself in different community events (she recently spoke at a small-business forum hosted by the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management).

The name of the restaurant comes from where Frances was born—a house-turned-restaurant on Obregón Street in the city of Nogales, Sonora.

The name also represents a typical tool used in the Mexican kitchen, a little jar where you can store salsas, juice, or any other condiment. Frances created all the dishes on the menu, including the steak ranchero, chicharrones with red chile (pork rinds in a red chile sauce), tamale plates, and the red and white menudos. “When my children arrived from school, I had dinner prepared for them that was usually very colorful with tomatoes, chiles, and cheese. Everything that we serve originally came from my own kitchen,” she says. Since 1980, she says she has been proud to serve dishes that are prepared from scratch daily, including their famous menudo.

Frances is now retired, but she frequently stops by to make sure everything tastes right and, more importantly, to say hello to her clients, many of whom she considers family. According to Frances, there is a good flow at the restaurant because of how they treat people: “I like to make people happy and bring out the best in them and let them know that yes you can.” os J arritos

Frances Erunez, the owner of Los Jarritos, is known in the community for the many causes she supports, from child literacy to voter registration.

L

ocupa un lugar importante en el corazón de muchos Tucsonenses. Por más de 35 años, la propietaria, Frances Erunez y su familia, han servido una variedad de comida mexicana estilo sonorense a la comunidad de Tucson. Las paredes de Los Jarritos están cubiertas de premios y fotografías de Frances con políticos y celebridades. A lo largo de los años ha ganado fama por apoyar buenas causas como la alfabetización infantil y el registro de votantes. También participan en eventos dentro de la comunidad (recientemente participó en un foro de pequeñas empresas organizado por la Universidad de Arizona).

El nombre del restaurante proviene del lugar de nacimiento de Frances, lo que era antes una casa y después un restaurante por la Calle Obregón en la ciudad de Nogales, Sonora. El nombre también representa una herramienta típica en la cocina mexicana, el jarro o jarrito donde se guardan las salsas, jugos o cualquier otro líquido. Los platillos que se sirven son creaciones de Frances como el steak ranchero, chicharrones en chile rojo, tamales y el menudo blanco y rojo. “Cuando llegaban mis hijos de la escuela, les tenía la cena preparada con muchos colores como el tomate, chile y queso. Entonces todo lo que servimos es como salía originalmente de mi propia cocina”, dice Frances. Desde el año 1980 se enorgullece de preparar comida casera cocinada diariamente, incluyendo su platillo más popular, el menudo.

Frances ya se jubiló pero visita el restaurante frecuentemente para asegurarse que todo conserve el sabor original, pero principalmente para saludar a sus clientes, a los que ella considera miembros de su propia familia. El restaurante mantiene una buena concurrencia, y según ella, se debe a la manera de tratar a las personas: “a mi me gusta mucho animar a la gente. A todos les digo que hay que sacarle lo positivo a la vida y que sí, sí se puede”. os J arritos

Los Jarritos 4832 S. 12th Ave. · 520.746.0364

P

means many things. It literally refers to the beak of a rooster, but it can also refer to a salsa made with chopped tomato, onion, and cilantro, or a fruit salad with lime and chile powder. Taquería Pico de Gallo is named for the fruit salad that brims from red plastic cups lined up in a refrigerator behind the cashier. Ignacio Delgado, who is from Nayarit, Mexico, began selling pico de gallo, corn on a cob, and horchata from a cart in front of Pueblo High School along 12th Avenue with his wife and kids. He recalls being asked to leave by the police only to be asked to return by the school administration and sell inside the high school.

They decided to expand their business and opened the restaurant on South Sixth Avenue in 1990, in what used to be a cowboy boot store. (In fact, a room that has a wall covered by mirrors used to be the store’s show room.) Ignacio’s daughter, Diana Delgado, remembers they only sold $8 worth of food on the first day they opened, even though “we prepared 10 dozen corn tortillas waiting for people to arrive, but not even the flies came.”

Today, people come like flies. The business has flourished and they have plans of expanding. “The secret has been to maintain the recipes how they originally began,” says Diana. “Every day we start from scratch, fresh.” You can taste it. The corn tortillas are always made to order, the pickled veggies are flavorful, the meats are perfectly seasoned, and the pico de gallo is freshly cut.  ico de gallo

Esteban Camarena is a native Tucsonan and avid traveler. He has worked at several local restaurants including Agustín Kitchen. Follow him on Instagram @estbncam.

Taqueria Pico de Gallo 2618 S. Sixth Ave. · 520.623.8775

106 March/April 2016

At Pico de Gallo, Ignacio Delgado and his daughter, Diana Delgado, remember the day they opened, when “not even the flies came.”

E

tiene varias definiciones. Literalmente es el pico de un gallo. También puede ser una salsa hecha con tomate, cebolla y cilantro o una ensalada de fruta con limón y chile. La Taquería Pico de Gallo se nombro así por la ensalada de fruta que rebosa en vasos rojos en el refrigerador detrás del cajero.

El señor Ignacio Delgado, originario de Nayarit, junto con su esposa y sus hijos comenzaron vendiendo pico de gallo, coctel de elote y horchata por medio de una carreta en frente de la escuela Pueblo High School en la 12 Avenida. Don Ignacio se acuerda que la policía le pidió que se fueran de ese sitio y después los administradores del distrito lo invitaron a vender dentro de la escuela.

Decidieron expandir su negocio y abrieron el restaurante ubicado por la Sexta Avenida en 1990, donde antes era una tienda de botas vaqueras. (De hecho, el cuarto que esta cubierto de espejos era el mostrador de la tienda.) Diana Delgado, hija de Don Ignacio, se acuerda de que el primer día solamente hicieron 8 dólares, “a pesar de haber preparado 10 docenas de tortillas de maíz esperando que la gente viniera, ni las moscas aparecieron”.

Hoy en día, las personas llegan como las moscas. El negocio ha florecido y tienen planes de expandir. “El secreto ha sido mantener las recetas como originalmente comenzaron y todo los días empezar de nuevo, fresco”, nos dice Diana. Lo puedes probar. Las tortillas de maíz siempre están recién hechas, el escabeche siempre fresco, las carnes perfectamente sazonadas y el pico de gallo recién picado.  l pico de gallo

Esteban Camarena es nativo de Tucson y viajero ávido. Ha trabajado en varios restaurantes locales, incluyendo Agustín Kitchen. Síguelo en Instagram @estbncam.

edible Baja Arizona

107

108  March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

109

d l r o W e h T gs, n i h t e l t t i l r wn fo o n k t n a r u on a In the rest ila has built a reputati v Suzana Da big flavors. on P hot

le n K imb a ler g e M By n Meck e v e t S y by o gr a p h

T

he lor e of Suzana Davila is long and varied. Businessmen crossing the country stop planes in Tucson just to eat her food. Travelers come in clasping folded newspaper clippings four or five years old, gushing about how long they’ve been waiting to taste her mole negro. Some Tucsonans eat at Café Poca Cosa twice a week because, they say, they can’t get what she’s serving anywhere else.

Davila builds churches, funds orphanages, and feeds the hungry. After learning that a priest in her native San Carlos, Sonora, had to give sermons from under an umbrella when it rained, she built the community a new church. She buys textbooks for schoolkids in Guaymas and food for their families. Once, she drove south in a moving van full of medical supplies only to be turned back at the U.S.-Mexico border. “Now I bring a little at a time,” Davila says.

A little at a time is an approach that’s served her well. “That’s how the whole concept started—that you get to try a little bit,” says Davila. “That’s why it’s called Café Poca Cosa. Try a bunch of little things.”

g n i d r o c c A zana u o t S

Davila started small—six tables in a restaurant “the size of a parking spot”—and became big—featured in Gourmet and The New York Times, praised as serving the best Mexican food in Tucson. After nearly 30 years in business, her menu has barely changed. Except, of course, that it changes daily, each new menu recorded in curly, momentary white cursive on the restaurant’s signature chalkboard easels.

Over 30 years, three locations, and thousands of menus, Suzana Davila has written the story about what it means to eat at Café Poca Cosa. To eat at Café Poca Cosa is to be served well, to be surprised, to be celebrated. Above all, to eat at Café Poca Cosa is to be submersed in the world according to Suzana Davila.

Order the restaurant’s most popular dish, El Plato Poca Cosa, and the chef will serve you a sampling of three dishes on the menu. The chef takes no requests, makes no substitutions, handles no hints or nudges. “The fun part of the plato is that you sort of close your eyes and let me handle it,” says Davila. “And it will be so fun for you to try something that perhaps you never would have tried,” she says.

“I think people need to recognize—you’re coming into my home. You know about my cuisine. You have read about it before. You want to open your eyes and say, ‘I’ll try it?’ I don’t care that you have something to say. I want to make sure that’s clear.”

Suzana Davila says that people who come to eat at Café Poca Cosa are coming into her home.

edible Baja Arizona

111

Shanali Davila makes all the pastries at Poca Cosa; she recently added vegan cupcakes to the menu with three to five rotating daily flavors.

D

in San Carlos, a beach town near the port of Guaymas. When, at 15, her family moved to Tucson, she didn’t speak a word of English; she enrolled in high school at Immaculate Heart, but started volunteering with a kindergarten class at St. Joseph Catholic School to help her language skills. “I helped the teacher and worked with the students,” she says. “It was perfect. You pick up the block. You sweep with the broom.”

She worked as a model and interior designer before she went to look at a little storefront on Scott Avenue. “My father and I decided, why don’t I get it started and see what happens and it’ll be a lot of fun and I love cooking and my father had taught me most of the cooking and my mother is very good in the kitchen,” she av ila gr ew up

112 March/April 2016

says. Davila speaks musically—one phrase rolls into the next and the next, attention cornered by cadence rather than punctuation.

“I said, this is perfect. My father was retired and I said, ‘Get out of retirement because you’re going to help me out.’ It was so much fun because everyone remembers Daddy dancing and cooking in the kitchen with me.”

Within a few weeks of opening, the city started a construction project on Scott Avenue. “I thought, I’m doomed,” she says. “And then I said, no I’m not.” She started making coffee and fresh juice for the workers. “And then I’d say, ‘What do you guys want to have for lunch?’ And one would say, ‘I want caldo de queso.’ Or carne asada. And I’d say, O.K., cool, I’m going to put that on the menu.”

Davila calls Gloria Payan her right-hand woman. She’s worked in the kitchen for 16 years.

She soon had a line out the door.

Eventually, she expanded into the Santa Rita Hotel and her sisters, Sandra and Marcela, took over the little restaurant.

The Little One, now at Stone and Alameda, still serves breakfast and lunch.

When the Santa Rita Hotel was demolished in 2005, Davila moved the restaurant to 110 E. Pennington St. and settled in. “Besides changing location and décor, I don’t think we’ve changed much in terms of who we are from Day 1,” says Shanali Davila, Suzana’s daughter. Both Shanali and her brother, Christopher Stockstill-Davila, work full time at the restaurant. Christopher manages the bar while Shanali does desserts and helps with scheduling and orders.

“The restaurant is my life,” says Christopher. “It’s what I know. It’s coming from my home to my other home. It’s not a job.

I’m here helping out my mom.”

114 March/April 2016

“She has a certain amount of swag and charm. I sometimes think people come in here just because they want to see Suzana.”

“She has a very generous heart,” says Shanali. “Always has. She was a single mom to the two of us. She always tried to figure out how to help others. It definitely rubbed off.”

In addition to her work in Mexico, Davila donates gift certificates to dozens of charities around town. She donates money to the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona and Casa Maria. When jobs at the restaurant open up, she reaches out to the Gospel Rescue Mission, which offers shelter and relief to those struggling with homelessness or addiction. “She believes that people should be able to get a second chance,” says Suzy Crockwell, who runs the restaurant’s business office. “And sometimes a third chance and fourth chance.”

As downtown has transformed around them, “We stick out like a sore thumb,” says Shanali. “Who tries to change their menu twice a day, five days a week? You don’t come here because you want your normal Mexican food.”

edible Baja Arizona

115

T

h e fo o d at Café Poca Cosa is sauced. It is always modified by “in.” Pollo en mole negro. Asada en salsa brave de chiles. Cochinito en tomatillo y habanero. Chicken, steak, and pork dishes tend to be slow-cooked, falling-apart tender, and drenched in mole. Ask Davila about her moles—there are more than 20 varieties—and her whole face opens up.

“The pipian verde is to die for! There are so many ingredients—lettuce, spinach, peanuts, sesame seeds, onions, pistachios, pepitas. It’s so good.” She slurps in air.

Her whole body is involved in conveying just how good this mole is. “Mole negro is the big chocolate mole, with the richness of the Mexican chocolate, the different combinations of chiles, almonds, pecans, sesame seeds,” says Davila. “But there’s also mole de chipotle or mole amarillo. I’ve also invented and created my own moles.

And that’s the fun thing—having the tradition but also having my own little twist.”

It’s late on a Wednesday morning, half an hour before the restaurant opens for lunch. Davila stands suddenly, distracted by a man at the front door. She catcalls, “You’re here! I need you so baaaaaad.”

The man who just walked in the front door calls back: “Yeah, yeah.” “It’s my coffee guy,” she says, sitting again. “The coffee maker started acting up this morning. I said, ‘I cannot!’”

But the coffee man has come. The coffee man knows what to do. Like nearly everyone else in Davila’s world, he’s been around for a while.

That her employees stick around— sometimes for decades—is a point of pride for Davila. “Everyone who works for me, we all work together as a team,” she says. “I don’t have any managers. If I have to hire a bunch of managers to manage you then I don’t need you. I want you to grow with me. I want you to have that confidence in yourself to be able to handle it.”

“Working here has changed me,” says Laura Mabry, a server since 2015. “It’s made me a stronger, more empowered woman. She is illuminating. Because everywhere she goes, she’s full of energy.

She’s just shining.”

Server Laura Mabry holds Café Poca Cosa’s chalkboard menu, which changes daily.

116 March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

117

Above: Server Antonio Cisneros carries a colorful tray of Poca Cosa’s signature cocktails. The best selling drink at Poca Cosa? “The classic margarita,” says Suzana’s son Christopher. Right: Lisette Martinez has been on the line, creating Poca Cosa’s colorful salads, for more than 10 years.

“I feel like when I started here, she’s very much able to get out your inner strength,” says Crockwell, who’s worked with Davila for 17 years. “I think as a woman, I’ve matured working for her for so long.”

By the time the coffee man leaves, customers have begun to trickle in. Back in the kitchen, Lisette Martinez, a cook since 2006, is busy assembling salads. “They all have to be very fresh, very different,” she says. Her birthday is coming up and she reminds Davila about the cake.

“It’s a small thing,” says Crockwell. “All employees get a cake on their birthday. It works like a family. We come together, we sing.”

More significantly, all eligible employees also get health insurance. After four years, every employee is given a retirement plan that’s 100 percent vested, which means that employees own and control their own accounts, even if they leave the café.

Without managers on the floor, servers are responsible for managing their own sections and dealing with any disputes that 118 March/April 2016

arise. Jeff Willer has worked as a server for 10 years and says, “She allows us our own voice. When you’ve been here as long as I have, that’s important.”

Casey Golden started as a busser in 2013 and eventually worked his way up to being a server. “It’s different from any other service job I’ve had,” says Golden. “You can’t work here unless you think about the food in a different way, because it’s always changing. You really have to be on her level—she spills her soul into this place.”

Again and again, employees comment that Davila is there.

She’s there, shift after shift, plate after plate. Crockwell says she’s worked alongside Davila scrubbing toilets, washing dishes, or busing tables. “She doesn’t expect anything from anyone that she wouldn’t do herself,” she says. “I think some of it”—it being the magic of Suzana—“is seeing her strength.

Whatever you do, be the best at it. And be proud of what you do.”

edible Baja Arizona

119

At CafĂŠ Poca Cosa, the food is defined by the sauce; specifically, by the 20 varieties of mole that rotate on the menu.

O

T h u r s day n i g h t in January, the restaurant sparkles and chatters. Plates emerge from the kitchen, each one a spectacle. Salads are jumbles of color, flamboyantly displayed—sliced apples arrayed in pineapple tops punctuated by bright shredded beets or dark marbled grapes. Patrons awaiting their Plato Poca Cosa sit up straighter in their seats as their servers approach, craning to see if they’ve received what they hoped for.

Davila stirs about, wearing tight leather pants, pointed toe flats, and an impeccably pressed, impossibly white, Oxford shirt. A middle-aged man sits in the foyer awaiting his wife. “Should I get you a margarita while you wait?” Davila asks. “What kind of party are we going to have tonight?” The man laughs and shakes his head. Davila moves onto the next cluster of customers—she’s throwing a party every night, no matter who decides to attend.

“She has a certain amount of swag and charm,” says Willer. “I sometimes think people come in here just because they want to see Suzana.”

The interior is dim; the décor, modern. The restaurant is full of older couples, families. There are a few younger couples, groups of businesspeople. Davila skirts behind the bar and needles at Christopher.

“You should see him when we’re really busy. He’s kick-ing-it.” She teases him, asking when he’s going to step it up and take over the restaurant. It’s an old joke, worn into an easy shtick. Christopher shakes his head.

“We can’t even get her to take a vacation,” he says.

Davila does take a vacation every year—she closes the restaurant every summer for a month. She used to invite her employees to join her at her home in San Carlos, but as her grandchildren are getting older, she’s started taking the opportunity to travel the world with her family.

Over the years, she’s gradually relinquished her grip on the pots and pans in the kitchen, turning over the day-to-day kitchen operations to her cooks.

“These girls have been with me so long, they read my mind,” she says. “I still have that passion. I still love tasting. I still love running the show. I keep telling my children, it’s time you guys! Time for you to pick it up. And they just say”—rolling her eyes—“like that would happen. I still have a great deal of energy. I don’t need a lot of hours to sleep.

“It’s seeing all those faces that have supported you forever,” she says. “That have been with you. That have seen the changes from the tiny one to here. It’s really sweet. That’s what keeps me going.”  n a

Café Poca Cosa. 110 E. Pennington St. 520.622.6400. CafePocaCosaTucson.com.

Megan Kimble is the managing editor of Edible Baja Arizona and the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food (William Morrow 2015).

122 March/April 2016

Christopher Stockstill-Davila has managed the bar at Café Poca Cosa for nearly two decades. “When we moved to this space, my mom said: okay, I can build what I want.

I can make it how I want it to look,” he says. “It’s very modern, Mexico City inspired.”

edible Baja Arizona

123

Entrus�ing �a�d

By Debbie Weingarten | Photography by Jeff Smith

124 March/April 2016

Sinc� ��� 1970s, th� A�izona Land and Wa�er Trus� has pr�� �cted wo�king �an�scapes— and sup�ort ed th� farme�s and ranche�s who w�rk �ho�e lan�s. edible Baja Arizona

125

Buck � � ew Farm p�ovided va � uable habi�at fo r �ar� a nd en � angered sp�cie� Since it was established in 1954, Buckelew Farm has morphed signficantly.

Nick Buckelew and his wife, Laurie, have had to be just as adaptive in responding to those changes.

A

photo taken in the early 1960s shows four Buckelew siblings with their father, Bob Buckelew.

Bob is perched on a John Deere tractor, holding baby Clara in his lap. He’s smiling against the sun, a pipe dangling from his lips. Barbara and Nick are riding in a Radio Flyer wagon attached to the tractor. Behind them, Dorothy sits on a cruiser bicycle, her hair swept up in pigtails. In the background is a white fence, an open field, and the gentle rise of the Roskruge Mountains.

In 1954, at the age of 19, Bob began farming in Avra Valley.

Together, he and his wife, Clara, raised four children and farmed cotton and wheat. In 1964, the family moved to Tucson so the kids could attend school.

Nick says he was always pulled back to the farm. After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1976, he moved back to Avra Valley and began growing conventional wheat and cotton on 320 acres. “I’d always come back and work on the farm in the summer, even when we lived in town. My dad was a successful farmer, and I guess I was following in his footprints,” he says.

Buckelew Farm has changed significantly since 1954. Nick and his wife, Laurie, have raised cattle, corn, wheat, and cotton. In 1984, they grew their first pumpkin crop, which catapulted them into the business of pumpkin festivals. Twenty years ago, Nick attended a direct-market farm conference and met a farmer who swore that his corn maze helped stabilize the farm’s finances. Now, each fall, Buckelew Farm crawls with thousands of visitors for the annual Pumpkin Festival & Corn Maze. black and w hite

126 March/April 2016

The land that is Buckelew Farm has also spent years morphing into different shapes. At one point, Bob and Clara were forced to sell the southern part of the farm. Then Nick and Laurie purchased additional acreage in the 1980s. In 2002, the family sold the water rights for portions of the original property to the City of Tucson. In 2006, a housing developer approached the Buckelews with a high-dollar offer to buy the farm. Of the four Buckelew siblings, Nick was the one who felt most attached to it. His sisters had long since moved away, but their parents had deeded the farm equally to all four children. And his sisters wanted to sell.

The property was already in escrow when Nick, disturbed by the idea of his family farm turned into a housing development, went to the Arizona Open Land Trust for help. Approximately 160 acres of the farm was virtually undisturbed, including a riparian area that supported native and migratory wildlife. After a survey, it was determined that Buckelew Farm provided valuable habitat for rare and endangered species, including the pygmy owl, Swainson’s hawk, Bell’s vireo, western yellow-billed cuckoo, western yellow bat, western burrowing owl, Tucson shovel-nosed snake, and Pima pineapple cactus.

In October 2006, the land trust facilitated Pima County’s acquisition of Buckelew Farm as a permanent protected open space (505 acres of irrigated and undeveloped land, along with federal and state grazing rights totaling more than 2,000 acres).

The Buckelews kept a 10-acre homestead with three houses and a workshop. The land trust negotiated a contract wherein the Buckelews would manage the property for the county, continuing their operation as they have for decades.

“Wor king l�nds are a�� � c�ns�rvation v�lu�.”

The staff of Arizona Land and Water Trust, at their Tucson office.

From left: Scott Wilbor, Sharma Torrens, Liz Petterson, Diana Freshwater, Cameron Becker, and Jill Medlow.

O

n a war m fall mor ning at the office of Arizona Land and Water Trust, or ALWT, sunlight streams through the windows, catching the framed photographs of ranches and grasslands on the wall. Liz Petterson, executive director, and Diana Freshwater, president, tell me stories about their work with the land trust. The stories are funny, sad, heartening—habitats saved, ranchers in dire financial straits, curmudgeon landowners softened over time.

To tell the story of the land trust is to also tell the stories of the wildlife and waterways that make up our Baja Arizona landscapes—and the people who have stewarded and fought tirelessly for them. In 1997, when the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl was listed as an endangered species, it was the policy work of Chuck Huckelberry and the persistence of Maeveen Behan that resulted in the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan—regarded by many scientists and land planners as the first land management plan to truly balance nature and growth. (“As a land planner, I look at it and say this transformed Pima County,” says Freshwater). It was Priscilla Robinson of Southwest Environmental Service (“A force of nature,” remembers Freshwater), who worked to shut down the copper smelter in Douglas, after range grass began to suffer and leukemia clusters emerged. After the smelter closed in the early 1980s, Robinson worked with others to develop the state’s first conservation easement legislation.

The work of a land trust is to acquire and manage sensitive lands. Think of their work according to the “stick” analogy: When you purchase a property, you essentially purchase an invisible bundle of sticks. These sticks are your property rights and are attached to the deed itself—the right to subdivide, the right to build, the right to pump groundwater from a well. But if you aren’t going to use all of your sticks—say, the stick that allows you to develop—you can sell one to a trust for a portion of the land value. This effectively extinguishes the right forever, but without disturbing the entire bundle. Trusts offer various

128 March/April 2016

options for landowners, including facilitated acquisition of land (in which another entity purchases the land as protected space), water fallow leases (in which the trust compensates a farmer for fallowing a portion of a property, in order to replenish the water table and restore river flow), or holding a property’s development rights in perpetuity through a conservation easement.

With roots that stretch back to 1978, Arizona Open Land Trust is the oldest and first local land trust in Arizona. In 2008, Southeast Arizona Land Trust merged with AOLT to become the ALWT. The merger brought together “two kinds of minds,” says Dennis Moroney, a rancher and board member at the time of the merger. “And we were all focused on one objective—to save open country and land.” Moroney remembers passionate discussions between ranchers, environmentalists, lawyers, and accountants, which ultimately helped the organization evolve.

As the ALWT has grown, it has gained national recognition, serving in a leadership role for the National Alliance of Land Trusts. In 2013, it received national accreditation, “a rigorous process that looks at every deal, every document,” says Petterson.

Only 317 out of approximately 1,700 land trusts nationwide are accredited.

In 2007, the organization embraced a programmatic emphasis on water conservation, becoming the state’s only water trust.

“Water was always the sticking point,” says Petterson, referring to years of talks with landowners and agencies. So the land trust launched a Desert Rivers Initiative, designed to develop conservation strategies to secure water for riparian habitat and rural livelihoods. With its partners, the University of Arizona Department of Hydrology and Water Resources and the environmental company Ecosystem Economics, ALWT “negotiates water lease agreements that benefit the agriculture operation and help to restore the riparian flows,” says Petterson. There are five agreements (one in the lower San Pedro and four on the upper Gila River), in which the landowners agree to fallow certain sections of land for a season or up to a year.

edible Baja Arizona

129

Wh�t’s �oing to hap�en �o our l�nd wh�n we’r� g�ne?

A

c r o s s t h e c o u n t ry ,

a movement is growing among land trusts to protect working landscapes and help beginning farmers access land. Holly Rippon-Butler, land access program director for the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), says that access to land is a significant hurdle for new farmers. The increase in cost of farmland is due to factors that include competition from developers, as well as nonfarmers purchasing second homes. Both scenarios translate to working lands being taken out of production, and the cost of farmland spiking beyond what is affordable for farmers.

With 30 percent of American farmers over the age of 65, it is a critical time to protect working lands. According to the NYFC, more than two-thirds of the farmland in the United States will change hands over the next two decades. The USDA predicts that 500,000 farmers (one-quarter of farmers nationwide) will retire in the next 20 years. That this shift will impact our food security is an understatement.

Rippon-Butler notes that land trusts might not be the answer for every farmer. Conservation easements are legally binding documents that restrict specific activities on a piece of land in perpetuity. “Choosing to place an easement on a property is a big decision and one that should be considered carefully,” she says.

But for many farmers, land trusts are important allies. Money made from selling development rights can be used to pay off debt, purchase new equipment, or lower the purchase price of land to make it more affordable for beginning farmers. The crux of the relationship potential between farmers and land trusts rests in the fact that they have a mutual interest in keeping working lands from being developed.

“Innovative land trusts understand that farm viability is a key component of farmland conservation and are exploring ways in which they can be strong supporters of the agricultural community in their area,” Rippon-Butler says.

ALWT is one of those innovative land trusts, working to ensure that farmers and ranchers are able to stay in business and remain on their land.

“Working lands are a conservation value,” says Petterson. In 2007, ALWT began co-hosting a series of Ranching into the Future workshops focusing on many of these issues. The workshop series draws hundreds of participants, and invariably the question surfaces: What’s going to happen to our land when we’re gone?

Mountain View Ranch's Grace Wystrach says, "I love my land ... I love the open spaces, and the wildlife."

E

2015, Fort Huachuca was designated a “sentinel landscape,” one of only three in the country. This designation was developed as a partnership between the departments of Defense, Interior, and Agriculture to support “efforts to promote working lands, protect wildlife habitat, and ensure military readiness at military bases.”

Fort Huachuca, in partnership with ALWT, was awarded a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense to protect working lands and wildlife habitat around Fort Huachuca.

Though the partnership may seem unlikely, it has had real benefits for open spaces near Fort Huachuca. The money funded two conservation easements—a total of more than 1,600 acres—on Rain Valley Ranch, which sits between the Whetstone and Mustang mountains in Sonoita. Grace Wystrach, whose family owned Rain Valley Ranch from 1949 to 1987, was also able to fund a conservation easement on Mountain View Ranch, the ranch she now owns with her husband, Michael.

Through a mix of military readiness funds, the Wystrachs sold their development rights to 396 acres of their 411-acre property.

“We were in a situation where we were needing to get some money out of our property,” says Grace of the decision to place a conservation easement on their property. And even though they received less money than if they had divided it up, she says, “I didn’t want to see it chopped up.”

When Grace was growing up on Rain Valley Ranch, Sonoita was still open country. Gradually, as families passed on and younger generations couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes, the land began to be sold and developed. And while the Wystrachs don’t completely dismiss the value of development (they are also the owners of Sonoita’s Steak Out Restaurant & Saloon), they acknowledge that it comes with very real consequences, including a drop in the water table.

When I ask Grace what her land means to her on an emotional level, her voice swells. “It means a lot,” she says. “I love my land. I inherit that from my mother ... I love the open spaces and the land, and the wildlife, and the freedom of being able to look out and not see a house next door.”

Grace and Michael raised six children, who are now mostly scattered across the country. One daughter still lives in the area and is attached to the Hereford operation and the land. Grace says she isn’t sure that her kids will choose to keep the ranch after they inherit it, but even if they sell, the property will never be able to be subdivided or developed.

“Even though I might be long gone, it’s important to me that my beautiful property will not be covered in houses,” she says. arly in

edible Baja Arizona

131

T

o date , ALWT has protected more than 45,000

acres in southern Arizona, including grasslands, riparian habitat, urban reserves and parks, and working landscapes. As an organization, they have proudly stood in the intersection between environmentalism and agriculture, ardent defenders of ranchers and migratory birds. They have been persistent and patient witnesses, listeners, and bridge builders. Freshwater speaks of the years of “spadework and trust-building” with landowners, agencies, funders, and fellow conservation groups— some with vastly differing political views. A 501(c) (3) organization, ALWT works only with willing landowners who approach them for help.

“We ask, ‘What can we do to help you protect this property? What is your vision for this property?’ We would never say ‘We think you should do this, or do that.’ We have a high respect for private property rights,” says Petterson.

�cro�s the coun��y

� moveme�t is growin� Instead, they simply present their toolbox: conservation easements, facilitated acquisitions, water lease agreements. For many of the landowners they have represented, the ALWT staff has stuck around long enough to become family.

They have sat at the same dinner table for years— learning a property’s history, the dynamics of a family, answering questions over and over about complicated purchase agreements and easement restrictions.

Grace and Michael Wystrach placed a conservation easement on Mountain View Ranch, which helped them keep the ranch running and the land protected. Their daughter, Amie Allen, helps manage the Hereford cattle operation. (Bottom) Dennis and Deb Moroney also raise Navajo-Churro sheep on their ranch.

132 March/April 2016

t o pr � t e c � working l��dscapes

edible Baja Arizona

133

“We �sk, ‘�hat can we do to h�lp y�u pro�ect this �ropert�?’

(Above) Rancher Dennis Moroney speaks to a gathering of agrarians and landowners hosted by the Arizona Land and Water Trust.

(Below) Dennis and his wife, Deb, learned the hard way about how traditional financing can turn desperate.

“It’s such an honor to work with these families,” Petterson says, “You’re a psychologist sometimes—you play all these roles.”

Over the years, Petterson and Freshwater have witnessed death, divorce, and bankruptcy. They have respected that the relationship between land and land steward is deeply personal—often, the land is the other family member.

I

1980 s , Dennis and Deb Moroney purchased a ranch and cattle company near Prescott. They settled for a minimal down payment and a 10-year period of low mortgage payments, after which a giant balloon payment would be due. Eventually, their initial $1 million investment turned into $2.8 million in debt.

“I just felt like I was sort of duct-taped and tied to the railroad n the

edible Baja Arizona

135

The w�rk of a land trus� i� t� acqu��e & man�ge s�n��tiv� lands.

Arizona Land and Water Trust protects many sensitive landscapes, including nesting grounds for migrating birds like Willcox's famous sandhill cranes.

tracks. And the train was coming down the tracks …” Dennis says, trailing off. “It was an absolutely desperate situation.”

As the 10-year mark approached, he and Deb put the ranch on the market just to get out from under the upcoming payment.

Offers came in and fell through, so Dennis went to real estate school to learn how to manage the sale himself. He contacted “any entity on the planet that had made noise about helping struggling ranchers or saving land,” but none of them could help. He joined the Board of the Central Arizona Land Trust and became convinced that land trusts were untapped opportunities for farmers and ranchers trying to unbury themselves from debt. They finally sold the property one week before the payment was due.

They used the money from the sale for the down payment on another ranch—47 Ranch—just north of Bisbee. By that time, Dennis says, “I was a very knowledgeable person about desperate ways of financing and how to save [yourself] from total destruction.” He joined the board of the Southeast Arizona Land Trust, and started working to find an easement partner. Because the Moroneys had purchased the property to produce food, they had no intention of subdividing or developing the land. A conservation easement, forever forfeiting the development rights, seemed a no-brainer—and one that could recoup their initial investment on the property.

Dennis invited Arizona Game and Fish out to his property to talk about easement potential. They went out to Abbott Spring to eat their lunch, Dennis says. “And a bobcat comes walking down the hill, and then different weird birds are coming in. These people are going, ‘Wow! This is amazing!’”

What followed was the recording of rare species of dirt finks, leopard frogs, rattlesnakes, and more. Based on the habitat value, the Moroneys received funding for their conservation easement.

The Moroneys had to donate 25 percent of the value of the land, but were paid 75 percent of the property value for the development rights—enough to pay off their mortgage. “After being 2.8 million 136 March/April 2016

dollars in debt to having no mortgage on a ranch,” says Dennis, “it was beyond a dream come true.”

In 2013, the Moroneys negotiated a second conservation easement on a different piece of the ranch, which paid off their operating loan. Since then, the Moroneys have been operating debt-free and intend to stay that way.

In an interview published in the 2014 ALWT Annual Report, Dennis Moroney says, “I think that the biggest unmet need at this time is the issue of the transition of agriculture from one generation to the next. We need to match eager, willing, enthusiastic, passionate young people with old worn-out crusty farmers and ranchers who really need to get the heck out of the way.”

And the Moroneys intend to do just that. They are transitioning to an employee-owned business model. Once Dennis and Deb are no longer able to work, or don’t want to, the ranch business will transfer to the employees, who by that time will have earned thousands of hours of sweat equity. And as part of the transition plan, the Moroneys will be able to stay in their home until they die.

“It’s gratifying for someone like myself who’s spent my lifetime just trying to get a ranch,” says Dennis. “And to actually be in a situation where it’s paid for—I don’t think it would have happened without the tools of a conservation easement.”

Dennis Moroney remains optimistic about the future, in large part because of his experience with land trusts providing a tangible option for recouping property costs and protecting agricultural land. His optimism is contagious.  Arizona Land and Water Trust. 3127 N. Cherry Ave. 520.577.8564. Alwt.org.

Debbie Weingarten is a freelance writer. She serves on the City of Tucson’s Commission for Food Heritage, Security, and Economy, and the Pima County Food Alliance Leadership Council. She is the co-founder of the Farm Education and Resource Network (FERN).

edible Baja Arizona

137

138  March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

139

BUZZ

The Coffee You Like At Savaya Coffee, Burc Maruflu has built a business around single-origin coffee served in an open-sourced café.

By Autumn Giles | Photography by Erica Montgomery

“A

I had to do really was call somebody,” says John Matzek matter-of-factly, as if it makes perfect sense for a customer at a coffee shop to get its phone and Internet service hooked up a couple months after it has opened.

Matzek lives near the original location of Savaya Coffee Market in the Williams Centre and has been “religiously going there” since it opened in 2009. He’s one of a big group of folks that Savaya owner Burc Maruflu calls the “original Savayans,” a tight-knit, rag-tag bunch—among others there’s a firefighter, a musician, a technical sergeant in the Air Force, and even a rabbi—who Maruflu credits with making Savaya possible. “It was kind of open-source. Everybody came and contributed in their own way,” he says.

Since then, Savaya has expanded to employ about 30 people, serving organic, single-origin coffee from around the world at four locations in Tucson. Savaya works with a handful of local wholesale accounts and offers monthly classes on topics like brewing methods and tasting. Matzek says that one of the things that keeps him coming back to Savaya, besides the coffee, is that they’ve “grown while still keeping their philosophy and all their values.” ll

140 March/April 2016

Maruflu—who came to Tucson from his native Turkey more than 10 years ago for his wife’s work—admits that Savaya’s origins were unusual. At first, “there was not a cup of coffee sold in the store,” he says. “There was no seating in the store ... You could only talk to me, but you had to stand up.” There were no set hours: sometimes the doors would stay locked for months at a time or for a few minutes when Maruflu had to go pick up his kids from school. The space was lined with burlap bags and barrels of coffee. There was no register, just a disheveled cash drawer.

Savaya’s Williams Centre location started as a place for Maruflu to put his roaster. He didn’t want to put it in his garage, he explains.

“I designed the store like a classroom and it was a place where I could roast the coffee and teach people about coffee and share cups of coffee with people so that I could make friends. It was a shop that only sold coffee beans ... but coffee beans from different places around the world.” Before opening Savaya and continuing through the early days of the business, he taught entrepreneurship classes in Turkey, traveling back and forth from Istanbul to Tucson.

Burc Maruflu opened the first Savaya Coffee Market location as a place to roast coffee. Eventually, he started actually serving coffee.

edible Baja Arizona

141

At the original Williams Centre store, located on Broadway at Craycroft, Mario Latona (left) and Nate Kaufmann ring up one of Savaya's many regular customers.

Starting Savaya feels like both a practical and inevitable move for Maruflu. “Coffee is very important to me,” he says, “and what kind of coffee I drink is very important to me. I couldn’t find the coffee that I am comfortable with drinking in Tucson. So ... I had to get a roaster.” He wanted coffee done right, so he did it himself. However, his connection to coffee goes far beyond being a connoisseur. Maruflu traces the history of coffee preparation in his family back for centuries. He credits his grandmother Neriman with teaching him to roast and prepare coffee with precision and care.

“She was roasting the coffee over wood in a chamber. At the top level, she had a layer of sand and she was brewing the coffee over sand, so it was getting the heat from roasting below,” says Maruflu.

“She was very different than anybody else because she really 142 March/April 2016

brewed the coffee to taste, whereas everybody was just turning the sage-colored coffee beans to brown, sometimes burning them.”

Neriman’s expert hand garnered significant attention. As Maruflu tells it, “She was a famous person for her coffee serving skills.”

Neriman died in 2006 at the age of 92 and her tombstone reads: “The girl who served Atatürk’s favorite coffee.” Maruflu compares Atatürk to George Washington; because of Neriman’s reputation, she was asked to serve coffee as part of a welcoming ceremony when “the father of the modern Turkish republic” visited her hometown of Izmir. He proclaimed it the best coffee that he’d ever had. “Years later, when he was visiting Izmir again, ... he specifically asked for my grandmother,” says Maruflu. At that time Atatürk gave her the title of “the girl who served Atatürk’s favorite coffee.”

addition to being organic, Maruflu learned roastall of Savaya’s coffees are ing, brewing, and tasting also single origin, meanfrom his grandmother ing the beans come from a and although he’s clearly specific geographic region serious about quality cofto preserve their terroir. fee, Savaya doesn’t take According to Maruf lu, coffee too seriously. John Savaya was “one of the Sims, a fire department pioneers of single origin captain who moonlighted coffees.” as a volunteer roaster and He travels to and stays teacher in the early days at the farms during their of Savaya, says, “It was a harvest seasons, tasting playground. We were gothe coffees at their origins. ing to get a deep fryer and “I buy coffee according to deep fry coffee beans.” its taste,” says Maruflu. “I Sims describes an envihave to find that unique ronment of collaboration taste. Unique means the and play. “You couldn’t coffee has to be representell who was an employee tative of its region, but or customer because we also coffee that will really were all coming up with have an impact on my palideas ... teaching back ate.” Because Maruflu has and forth,” he says. They connections to every one were constantly experiof the 50 or so organic menting—“hot and cold, coffee growing countries slow and fast, every single in the world, coffees from thing that you can think all over the globe rotate about coffee”—a process through Savaya’s menu Maruflu calls “a rich exbased on seasonality and perience.” availability.

As Savaya has grown, When asked to pick a talking and teaching favorite, he responds, “The about coffee has remained best coffee is the one that central. “It wasn’t like he you like.” It only makes had a good product and sense, he says. “We all like was going to keep it a sedifferent vegetables and cret,” says David Ortiz, an fruits, and coffees are just Air Force technical serlike that.” When pressed, geant with a passion for he says, “I like Brazilian a coffee. Ortiz helped out lot because of its caramely, Maruflu and early baristas honey, chewy taste. I taste Jeremy Cooper and Leah some marzipan type of flaCento free of charge. vors in this coffee. So, that’s Ortiz recalls customers my favorite.” He favors coming in to waste time different coffees for difwhile they were waiting Maruflu credits his grandmother Neriman with teaching him ferent brewing methods— at the cell phone store to roast and prepare coffee with precision and care.

Mexican and Peruvian for next door. They would cold brew, Ethiopian for end up leaving with two Turkish or Greek-style coffee, and Brazilian for espresso. pounds of coffee and a French press, remembers Ortiz, “and the “We are changing all the time and pretty fast too,” says knowledge of how to make a great cup of coffee.” Maruflu says, Maruflu on Savaya’s rapid growth in the past year or so. He has “I constantly teach about coffee.” plans to add a fifth and sixth location in 2016 to the roster of Although Maruflu’s influence is clear in all aspects of Savaya, stores at the Williams Centre, La Encantada, Dove Mountain, particularly the focus on education, he’s quick to step out of the and Oro Valley. Although now customers can buy a cup of coffee limelight. “If you ask me who I am or what I do at Savaya, I am in Savaya stores in addition to the beans, there’s still just one the coffee buyer,” he says. However, with the high standards for size of cup and a roaster in every store, as there has been since sourcing that he maintains, being Savaya’s coffee buyer is no small the beginning. feat. “Organic coffee is the only way for me,” says Maruflu. In 144 March/April 2016

edible Baja Arizona

145

Maruflu (center) with roaster Nate Kaufmann (left) and barista Mario Latona.

When asked to pick a favorite coffee, Maruflu says, “The best coffee is the one that you like." (Below) Freshly roasted coffee.

Jason Morris has been a customer at the Williams Centre location since it opened. “It’s more than coffee. It has sort of become a lot of people’s living room,” says Morris, who is the first to admit he didn’t even like coffee before he set foot in Savaya. Savaya was one of the first places he and his wife took their infant daughter outside of their home after she was born.

“I keep my own cup there,” says Morris. “A lot of us keep our own cups there.” 

Savaya Coffee Williams Center. 5350 E. Broadway Blvd.

520.747.3200. SavayaCoffee.com Autumn Giles is a freelance writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in Modern Farmer and Punch. She’s the author of Beyond Canning: New Techniques, Ingredients, and Flavors to Preserve, Pickle, and Ferment Like Never Before.

edible Baja Arizona

147

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. )

15

Elgin

St.

80

13

Note: Many roads have been omitted for clarity.

1 2 3

CHARRON VINEYARDS

18585 S. Sonoita Hwy, Vail 520.762.8585 CharronVineyards.com Thu–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

148 March/April 2016

4 5 6

RUNE WINES

3969 State Highway 82, Elgin 520.338.8823 RuneWines.com Fri-Sun: 11-5

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

7 8 9

12

N5 Saf

St.

d.

83

t.

N4

rd S

N3 14

To Sierra Vista (30 min.)

th S

St.

t.

N2

nd

st S

2

llen

11

/8

80

Tombstone EA

10

9

To

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

8

Elgin Rd.

Tucson

Sonoita/Elgin

Elgin Rd.

7

Tombstone

N1

S

6

in) 5m 3 ( es gal

elo R

E

in.) ,N o

W

Las Cienegas National Conservation Area

82

3 2

5

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

10

To Ft. Huachuca (50 min.)

Sierra Vista (1 hr.)

KIEF-JOSHUA VINEYARDS

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

11 V471 Elgin Road,EElgin ILLAGE OF

LGIN

520.455.9309 ElginWines.com Daily: 11-5

V 12 S290 Elgin Canelo Road, Elgin ONOITA

INEYARDS

520.455.5893 SonoitaVineyards.com Daily: 10-4

13 L2368 Hwy 83,RElgin IGHTNING

CELLARS

IDGE

520.455.5383 LightningRidgeCellars.com Fri-Sun: 11-4

14 WT

OMBSTONE ORKS

WINE

15 N 4th Street, Tombstone 520.261.1674 TombstoneWinery.com Daily: 12-6

15 S334 E AllenS Street,WTombstone ILVER

TRIKE

INERY

520.678.8200 SilverStrikeWinery.com Daily: 12-6

edible Baja Arizona

149

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

zb

er

Ro

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: WILLCOX 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

on rs

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

edible Baja Arizona

151

LAST BITE

Dining Downtown

By Corky Poster

I

a lot. I mean a lot. I wish I were one of those admirable people who cooks from interesting recipes and prepares exciting meals. But I am not. Instead I go to restaurants. It is expensive, but I have a comfortable income and live modestly. My wife and I bought our house for $15,000 42 years ago. I drive a 15-year-old car. I walk a lot and bike occasionally. I have no expensive hobbies and I don’t buy much stuff. So eating out is my vice. I enjoy it and it makes my life richer in unexpected ways.

I eat out in restaurants downtown. I live near downtown and have worked there every day since 1973. As an architect and planner, I am a big supporter of downtown’s growing economy. By choosing to bring my personal business and disposable income downtown, that support becomes literal. But eating downtown is more than just about the excellent quality and variety of food to enjoy. I have been doing it for so long and so consistently that my experience has moved from commercial to social. I eat at the restaurants of my friends; my food is brought to me by my friends; the regulars sitting near me are my friends.

The Shaars at El Minuto feel like family to me. When my children, Ben and Lucia, visit home from Brooklyn, we go directly from the airport to El Minuto for an emergency dose of caldo de queso. At Penca, the costillas and the mancha manteles mole (literally “tablecloth stainer”) are my favorites, unless Christa’s tone and expression tell me that the special is better. Jo Schneider at La Cocina treats me like a big brother and won’t bring me diet soda or artificial sweeteners because she says they are bad for me. Jasper and Brian at 5 Points Market, bringing an Eggleston sandwich, remind me of the friends of my children. The Oserans sit with me at Maynards or The Cup and catch me up on the latest downtown development gossip. My firm designed the rehabilitation of the historic Train Depot, so I love eating a Cubano sandwich knowing that the Maynard’s floor hovers over the historic ramp to the subway under the tracks.

Carlotta, Ray, and Marcos Flores at El Charro are my friends and neighbors—my architectural office is right next door on Court Avenue. I am allowed to eat their carne seca now. In 1973, e at o u t

154 March/April 2016

when I worked in the same historic adobe, my late friend/mentor/employer, the architect Judith Chafee, was having a neighbor feud with the Flores family and forbade her employees from eating there. Before she passed away in 1998, Poster Frost Mirto purchased the building from her, but luckily the food prohibition was not in the deed.

Travis at 47 Scott asks me questions about downtown; Vicente and Marita chat with me at the bar at Casa Vicente while I indulge in the hot papas bravas; I’ve known the Rollings family since 1974 and the Cushing Street Bar hasn’t changed one bit since then, although I wish Betsy would bring back the Quesadilla No. 2. Suzana Davila treats me like the old friend I am whenever I walk into Café Poca Cosa to see what magic mole might be on the blackboard menu that day.

If I crave a peanut butter and fig sandwich, I wander into Sparkroot to say “Hi” to Ari and Kerry. When I eat a house BLT at Time Market, with Peter and Bree Wilke bustling nearby, I feel like I’m eating with relatives. I was friends with Sally and Gregor before they opened the wonderful Coronet. I feel most at home there when my wife, Mary, and I order Evren’s Walnut-Feta Pâté with our friend Evren (after whom the dish is named) sitting right at our table and her husband, Paul, playing harp or accordion with Kyklo on the patio.

So eating out in downtown Tucson has immeasurably enriched my life with great food and people. I am thankful that many of my closest and most interesting friends are people whom I know because of where I eat. Because my eating out exposes me to a much broader social network of people than my narrow work world, I get to know a very diverse, eclectic, and amazing set of people of various ages, backgrounds, and interests. I truly value that.  Corky Poster is an architect and planner with Poster Frost Mirto and has 42 years of practice in Tucson. His work specializes in urban design, historic preservation, affordable housing, and community architecture. He is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.