® edible NEW MEXICO
THE STORY OF LOCAL FOOD, SEASON BY SEASON
Loose Leaf Farm, Clark Case, Ojo Conejo, Erica Tai, and Keegan Tranquillo
PARADOX Flow Down by Susanna Space FACES OF FOOD
Tending the Seeds of Land-Based Leadership in Northern New Mexico by Victoriano Cárdenas
Capulin Canyon by Ungelbah Dávila
Paletas by Stephanie Cameron
EDIBLE DISPATCH
Forty-Eight Hours in Puebla by Stephanie Cameron LAST CALL Boozy Paletas
A Tour from River to Tap by Erin Elder
THE ONCE AND FUTURE RIVER
From Buckets and Barrels to Tanks, the Work of Preserving Traditional Indigenous Farms and Recovering Sacred Rivers in a Drier New Mexico by Sarah Mock
THE ART OF MAKING WATER by Shahid Mustafa
Paletas, photo by Stephanie Cameron.
Watershed
There is precious little riverside dining in New Mexico, but it’s not for our rivers’ lack of majesty nor for our failure to recognize that rivers, whether wild or tamed, are precious. Their value is especially felt as we transition from spring to summer, when flows slow and farmers and stewards rely heavily on centuries-old acequia systems. Early summer is the season of crisp mornings and crisp harvests, of sunsets witnessed from restaurant patios and backyard gatherings. It is also a season of tremendous thirst, when anyone who lives here can understand the logic of dancing for rain.
In this issue of edible New Mexico, we take an expansive view of the watershed, featuring stories that tell of the many sources that sustain life in our arid land. Reporting from Gallup to the banks of the Zuni River, Sarah Mock shares modern approaches to the ancient art of water collection in communities contending with the repercussions of federal acts. In considering recent efforts at legislation to protect local waters from “forever chemicals,” Las Cruces–area grower Shahid Mustafa’s eye is on the water underground. We hear, too, about an Indigenous-led project to restore watersheds in the long aftermath of wildfire.
Dropping down from the mountains, we trace the ephemeral Santa Fe River to the mill where blue corn is ground for whiskey poured on Agua Fria. Poet and Taos native Victoriano Cárdenas talks acequias, farming, and genízaro identity with a Dixon grower and mayordomo, and we get the story behind the local food hub that just might have delivered the week’s produce to the restaurant where you picked up this magazine. Speaking of the foodshed: Among the Local Heroes highlighted here and in the latest episodes of 5-Minute Fridays are the winners of our Spotlight Awards for Farmworker and Food System.
To quench our thirst (and curiosity), Erin Elder takes us on an illustrated tour of the plant that treats river water for drinking in Bernalillo County. If it’s aqua vitae you seek, turn to the guide to Cocktail Week. For those occasions when you thirst for the boldest and coldest flavors of summer, we offer recipes and tips for homemade paletas. We recommend that you pair one with an afternoon connecting with your river. Stand in the sun and soak in the sticky, cool flavors. This, all of it, is the fruit of our watershed.
Briana
Olson, Editor
Robin Babb, Associate Editor
Stephanie and Walt Cameron, Publishers
PUBLISHERS
Bite Size Media, LLC
Stephanie and Walt Cameron
EDITOR
Briana Olson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Robin Babb
COPY EDITORS
Marie Landau and Margaret Marti
DESIGN AND LAYOUT
Stephanie Cameron
PHOTO EDITOR
Stephanie Cameron
EVENT COORDINATOR
Natalie Donnelly
PUBLISHING ASSISTANT
Cristina Grumblatt
CONTACT US info@ediblenm.com
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Bite Size Media, LLC publishes edible New Mexico six times a year. We distribute throughout New Mexico and nationally by subscription. Subscriptions are $40 annually. Subscribe online at ediblenm.com/subscribe
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Nourish your body & soul with fresh, globally-inspired, plant-forward foods scratch-made locally, with love
ANGEL FIRE Lowe’s Market ALBUQUERQUE
La Montanita Co-op Nob Hill & Rio Grande
GRAB & GO
Conveniently available at select fine markets
CATERING
For elevated events across New Mexico, call 505.266.6374
PATIO KITCHEN
Visit Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, 116 Amherst Dr SE Monday–Saturday, 10am–6pm
• ABQ Airport - W H Smiths ( 2 locations) • Lowe’s Market on Lomas • Moses Kountry
Natural Foods • Silver Street Market •
Triangle Market in Sandia Crest • Sandia
National Labs • UPC at UNM • UNM
Hospital in Cafe Ristra • Skarsgard Farms • Presbyterian Rust Hospital • Intel Rio Rancho
• Nusenda Corporate Office • Presbyterian Cooper Center ESPA Ñ OLA Center Market • Presbyterian Hospital GALLUP La Montanita
Co-op LOS ALAMOS Los Alamos
Cooperative Market • Los Alamos National Laboratory PLACITAS The Merc SANTA FE
Eldorado Supermart at the Agora • Kaune’s Market • La Montanita Co-op • Pojoaque
SuperMarket • Skarsgard Farms • Ohori’s Coffee TAOS Cid’s Market
CONTRIBUTORS
ROBIN BABB is the associate editor of edible New Mexico and The Bite. She is an MFA student in creative writing at the University of New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque with a cat named Chicken and a dog named Birdie.
STEPHANIE CAMERON was raised in Albuquerque and earned a degree in fine arts at the University of New Mexico. She is the art director, head photographer, recipe tester, marketing guru, publisher, and owner of edible New Mexico and The Bite VICTORIANO CÁRDENAS is a trans poet and writer from El Prado, and his ancestral home is El Torreón Hacienda. He grew up irrigating fruit orchards and fields of alfalfa with his grandfather, drawing water from the Acequia del Medio del Prado and the Acequia Madre del Prado. His debut book of poetry, Portraits as Animal, was published by Bloomsday in 2023.
UNGELBAH DÁVILA lives in Valencia County with her daughter, animals, and flowers. She is a writer, photographer, and digital Indigenous storyteller.
ERIN ELDER is an artist and writer using creative research methods to understand how people and landscapes shape one another. More of Erin’s place-based illustrated writing can be found on her Substack, site & scene. She lives on the banks of the Rio Grande, just outside Albuquerque.
SARAH MOCK is an agriculture and food writer, researcher, and podcaster, focusing on topics from farm production to ag history and economics. She’s written two books, Farm (and Other F Words)
LOCAL HEROES
An edible Local Hero is an exceptional individual, business, or organization making a positive impact on New Mexico’s food systems. Edible New Mexico readers nominate and vote for their favorite local chefs, growers, artisans, advocates, and other food professionals in two dozen categories. Winners of the Olla and Spotlight Awards are nominated by readers and selected by the edible team.
Over the course of the year, we invite these Local Heroes to share their stories and visions for the local foodshed on our podcast, 5-Minute Fridays.
and Big Team Farms. Her current project, The Only Thing That Lasts, is a podcast for Ambrook Research about the past, present, and future of American farmland. She lives in Albuquerque.
SHAHID MUSTAFA owns and runs Taylor Hood Farms, practicing regenerative organic agriculture on two acres in La Union and offering a CSA with home delivery. Through his nonprofit DYGUP/Sustain (DYGUP stands for Developing Youth from the Ground Up), he has worked with staff at Las Cruces High School to implement an environmental literacy curriculum and establish a one-acre plot where students receive credit for helping with all stages of vegetable production.
BRIANA OLSON is a writer and the editor of edible New Mexico and The Bite. A graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Houston, she lives in Albuquerque and can often be found walking along the Rio Grande.
SOPHIE PUTKA is a full-time journalist and part-time food writer and photographer. She has been a barista, outdoor educator, and mushroom farmer at local New Mexico businesses, and lives in Albuquerque with her dog Iggy.
SUSANNA SPACE, a writer and consultant long based in Santa Fe, is a former associate editor with edible New Mexico and The Bite. Her articles have covered Indigenous cuisine, culinary road tripping, and numerous local restaurants and bars. Her other journalism and essays have appeared in Guernica magazine, Longreads, and Searchlight New Mexico
5-Minute FRIDAYS
Every Friday, we share food stories served up with a side of levity—and no, no episode is actually five minutes. We have a blast while discovering new ways to think about and understand the food and drink that lands on our tables and getting to know the people who put it there.
Listen at ediblenm.com/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
FARM / RANCH, BERNALILLO
COUNTY
Loose Leaf Farm
What the Hail Kale: A Conversation with Co-Owners Mark and Sarah Robertson
Loose Leaf Farm is a small half-acre operation in the Village of Los Ranchos. In this episode, we are talking about community, CSAs, tools, leasing land, dwarf goats, limited-edition tomatoes, and all the things that make this little farm go.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
LISTEN
'Chimayó Tradition Green Chile Cornbread': A Taste of New Mexico Heritage
Imagine transforming a simple cornbread mix into a masterpiece of New Mexican flavors that brings generations together. That’s what you’ll experience with Chimayó Tradition Green Chile Cornbread. When that golden, chile-studded crust emerges from your oven, you’re not just baking cornbread – you’re creating moments to remember.
"The first time I made this cornbread," says Elena Martinez, a third-generation Chimayó home baker, "the aroma took me right back to my grandmother’s kitchen. The way the flame-roasted green chile weaves through every bite—it’s pure New Mexico magic."
Our mix isn’t just another cornbread recipe; it’s a celebration of regional flavors where sweet meets heat, where
tradition meets innovation. Each batch carries the soul of New Mexico’s cherished chile fields.
Find us at your local grocery store and transform your family table into a celebration of New Mexican flavor.
SPOTLIGHT: FOOD SYSTEM
Clark Case
Meet Me at the Co-op: A Conversation with the Manager of the Dixon Cooperative Market
Clark Case was pivotal in conceptualizing and establishing a local market in 2003 and became an employee in 2020. In this episode, we are talking about how the Dixon Co-op puts $400,000 back into the community annually by creating jobs, buying from local producers, and paying rent to the library.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
LISTEN
www.pigandfigcafe.com
pigandfigcafe@gmail.com
www.beefandleafcafe.com
FARM / RANCH, GREATER NEW MEXICO
Ojo conejo
Everyone Benefits from the Cow: A Conversation with Co-Owners Jen Antill and Heathar Shepard
Ojo Conejo has big dreams for the future in Ojo Sarco. In this episode, we are talking about homesteading, manure, Rose the dairy cow, fresh milk, and feeding the community.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
LISTEN
photo: Kitty Leaken
CHEF, SANTA FE Erica Tai
A Drive to Do the Impossible: A Conversation with the Executive Chef at Alkemē
From creating nutritional labels to helping open a restaurant with Hue-Chan Karels, Erica Tai has learned by leading in the kitchen. In this episode, we are talking about Alkemē’s culture-totable concept, taking inspiration from Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Hawaiian Pacific Rim cuisine, and having fun while creating whatever they can dream up.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
SPOTLIGHT: FARMWORKER
Keegan Tranquillo
Early Bird Catches the Worm: A Conversation with a Farmer in the Española Valley
Keegan Tranquillo knows he wants to be outside for a living, and from birding to farming, he has found a path to fulfilling that dream. In this episode, we are talking about the seasons, the extremes of farming in the Southwest, adventurous eating, supporting farmworkers, and the birds .
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
Photo by Eric O'Connell
Flow Down
TUMBLEROOT FARMHOUSE WHISKY
By Susanna Space
If you follow the Santa Fe River from its headwaters high in the Sangre de Cristos down into the foothills, through McClure Reservoir, past the adobe houses that line Upper Canyon Road, all the way along Patrick Smith Park and under Palace Avenue, you’ll find yourself traversing, as the land flattens, what was once fertile farmland irrigated by abundant acequias, their silver branches flowing north and south from the central trunk of the river.
Continue past the skate park, under the roaring traffic of Saint Francis Drive, and you’ll find the water rushing or trickling or absent altogether, depending on the season and the year. Past the tennis courts of Alto Park, just up the riverbank along the street named for the waters, among the gas stations and houses and dirt side roads, you’ll find the Agua Fria location of Tumbleroot Brewery and Distillery.
The mill at El Rancho de Las Golondrinas, a living history museum, photo by Jason Kirkman.
Sitting on the taproom’s spacious patio, you could be forgiven for not taking in the riparian landscape in favor of enjoying the sunshine warming your back. And if you did connect the fact that you were patronizing a watering hole just steps from the flow of snowmelt for which Native people named the land O’Gah Po’Geh as you sipped a drink made with Tumbleroot’s Farmhouse Whisky, you could risk underestimating the strength of that connection.
But let’s back up. That whiskey’s raison d’être begins, as many things do, with beer. Among Tumbleroot’s staple brews is its Farmhouse Ale, a beer whose roots reach far from the Santa Fe River and the US Southwest and back a couple of centuries. Tumbleroot co-owner Jason Kirkman crafted the beer with inspiration from the saisons of French-speaking Belgium, lightly fruity, hoppy ales developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and brewed in winter to refresh farmworkers—les saisonniers—during the busy summer months. Of particular interest to Kirkman was what many brewers consider the saison de saisons, the one produced by Brasserie Dupont since 1844, well known to be a classic example of the type.
From the Farmhouse Ale, a whiskey companion was kind of a no-brainer. “We loved the idea of a malt whiskey based on one of our favorite beers,” Kirkman says. With the tools already in hand at their brewery and distillery, creating a malt whiskey was relatively easy. It didn’t hurt either that Kirkman has a thing for Irish and Japanese whiskies, which are malt based.
But Kirkman, a bona fide craftsperson, isn’t one to take the easy way. Like the river, the process meandered. “We wanted [the whiskey] to be local and we wanted it to have a variety of grains. And we wanted to use some zippy farmhouse ale yeast”—the kind used to make those Belgian saisons. For additional complexity in the grain bill and a dash of New Mexican terroir, he sought a source for local blue corn. And the waterway that threads past Tumbleroot’s back door followed.
“Brewers will normally use flaked corn or something that’s been precooked,” Kirkman says, rather than raw kernels. But the New Mexican blue corn he bought from Sunny State, outside of San Jon, was distinct and hearty—and not easily tamed. “Those huge corn kernels will jam our barley malt mill,” Kirkman remembers thinking.
“I thought, we could take it to this distillery or that,” Kirkman says, reflecting on the decision on how and where to have the grain processed. He’d been visiting El Rancho de Las Golondrinas for years and offering Tumbleroot’s beers at events there.
“They grow grapes and they make wine,” Kirkman thought as he made the connection. “They’ve been growing hops. They have their own wheat and they mill it and they make tortillas. So it really is a working farm.” After a conversation with Las Golondrinas’ director of operations Sean Paloheimo, a history-loving brew nerd’s dream plot surfaced—one that circles back to the Santa Fe River’s journey west across the city and into La Cienega.
Left: Las Golondrinas director of operations Sean Paloheimo watching the mill's gears, photo by Jason Kirkman. Right: Former lead brewer Andy Lane and Jason Kirkman grinding the blue corn for the Tumbleroot Farmhouse Whisky, photo by Michael Chavez.
You could say the idea took Kirkman and his production team across the parking lot behind Tumbleroot’s Agua Fria location, tracing the water as it trickled away from its namesake street, under NM 599, and alongside the geometric patchwork of the Santa Fe Airport’s runways. There, those waters meet La Cienega Creek, which has long been a source of irrigation of Las Golondrinas’ property, and, traditionally, the power behind the historic mills that sit there among the fields.
Each fall since then, when the tide of visitors has receded and as the museum is packing up for winter, Kirkman and his production team take a field trip. Sacks of blue corn in their arms, they enter the largest and most prominent of the mills, a structure so picturesque it could have been lifted from the page of a storybook. “It’s a huge wheel,” Kirkman says of the towering wooden waterwheel that powers the mill, and when the stone that grinds the corn gets moving, “it’s definitely loud in there, but it’s pretty cool.” Paloheimo gets a bottle of whiskey from Tumbleroot’s newest batch for his trouble.
Back at the production space, Kirkman cooks the milled corn in batches, adding it to the stainless steel tank, the mash tun, where it’s
mixed with the grain mash to create the Farmhouse Whisky’s distinctive flavor profile. Finally, the whiskey is left to age in oak barrels. Two years later, the result is a springy and pleasantly sharp spirit with an effervescent warmth.
Served alone inside an aqua-blue, earth-shaped tumbler at the downtown Tumbleroot Pottery Pub—the location closest to the river’s source near Deception Peak—the spirit’s clarity and potency seemed to this writer to embody the river. And in a cocktail made with agave spirits, lime, and chipotle, the cool wash of flavor brought to mind mountain snow against a hiker’s warm palm. There at the bar, I thought of a walk I’d taken along the river when January’s cold snap hit and the young cottonwoods and willow branches were bare. The waters, unusually high for that time of year, had partially frozen over. I was struck by the play of light at sunset, and for a moment I stood still breathing the fresh air, watching my dog squint into the breeze, her paws balanced on the ice.
Multiple locations in Santa Fe, tumblerootbreweryanddistillery.com
Tumbleroot's head of production Michael Chavez and co-owner Jason Kirkman, photo by Stephanie Cameron.
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Tending the Seeds of Land-Based Leadership in Northern New Mexico
A CONVERSATION WITH JOSELUIS “AGUA Y TIERRA” ORTIZ Y MUÑIZ
by Victoriano Cárdenas
Acequia del Llano in Dixon, photo courtesy of Joseluis “Agua y Tierra” Ortiz y Muñiz.
An acequia runs with pure, cold water from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, soaking a field of corn under the watchful eye of a parciante. Farmland is lush in the high desert of northern New Mexico because of these unique systems of irrigation and the tender care of their traditional stewards.
I’m native to Taos and while I now live in Albuquerque, I grew up learning how to irrigate from my grandfather, drawing water from the Acequia del Medio del Prado and the Acequia Madre del Prado to water our fruit orchards and alfalfa fields. I followed him all around our fields, learning when to plant, where to release the water, how to steer it where we needed it to go. A lot of kids went to the pool at the youth center to play in the water, but I had acequias in my backyard and that’s where I played—finding fossils and digging for worms, and making adobe bricks in empty SPAM cans. It was the perfect place to grow up, to learn about the ecosystem through a balance of work and play.
“Acequia technology is perfect technology; they are perfect systems. And it’s a social determinant of health: acequias flowing and corn growing,” says Joseluis “Agua y Tierra” Ortiz y Muñiz. “Not only to produce food, but people demonstrating traditional farming is in itself a healing practice. It’s healing, even just to see it.”
Ortiz y Muñiz is an Indigenous, land-based native New Mexican from his maternal village of San Antonio del Rio
Embudo (Dixon) and the Llano de La Yegua in the Santa Barbara Land Grant (Northern Tiwa territory). Together with his family, he tends crops and livestock and stewards his ancestral lands within the Embudo River Basin. His roots in traditional agriculture were passed on intergenerationally and he maintains a traditional land- and acequia-based way of life. Today, he is the mayordomo for the Acequia del Llano and the community liaison and project director of the ¡Sostenga! Center for Sustainable Food, Agriculture, and Environment at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC). I talked with Ortiz y Muñiz, who now goes by Agua y Tierra, about his work revitalizing these ancestral forms of knowledge, and the challenges he’s faced along the way.
Homecoming
Generation after generation, from colonization onward, so many of us have been uprooted from our lands. Still, some journeys back to the land begin with departure. Agua y Tierra left his homelands to move to the South Valley of Albuquerque, where he worked at La Plazita Institute, providing traditional healing to previously incarcerated and addicted youth and families, before returning to Dixon in 2019.
“Originally, I came up here with all this energy. I’d been in a bad car accident and broke my back. I had to relearn how to walk. After that, I moved back home, motivated and wanting to do some big work, only to face hurdle after hurdle. I came back hoping for welcome, trying to
Agua y Tierra with his daughter, Corina, on their family farm in the Embudo River Basin, photo courtesy of Joseluis “Agua y Tierra” Ortiz y Muñiz.
reestablish a sense of home, only to find myself homeless in my own homelands. I spiraled into a heavy depression when I realized those big changes wouldn’t occur overnight. Change has to be grassroots, from the ground up, and being able to appreciate that process helped me to root into this new person, focusing all of my intention around land and water.
“So I went on this inner search of identity and development of my genízaro consciousness, but my family has always bought into . . . that violent Spanish settler culture that was superimposed on us. And I thought, Who am I really? Do I want to be connected to that anymore? Don Bustos [of Santa Cruz Farm] mentored me through this process, and Richard Moore and Sofia Martinez through Los Jardines Institute mentored me in my recovery, which led to me entering this realm of leadership in my community, walking the same steps of my grandfather along the acequia and being a mayordomo, and defending the water and the land as an activist. I had this revival of self-identity as I began to understand my purpose . . . so I renamed myself Agua y Tierra, the Water and the Land.”
On Being Genízaro
Genízaro is the term used for Native Americans detribalized between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in New Mexico and the surrounding Southwest. Under Spanish settler rule, genízaros were forced to work as slaves or indentured servants, and
were sometimes forcibly married or adopted into Spanish families. Gentrification and institutional violence continue to uproot us in the present day, not only from our land but from our food as well.
Like many New Mexicans, I didn’t understand my own family’s roots for a long time; we had only ever claimed Spanish identity. But I learned that several of my ancestors were detribalized from their original Indigenous communities—through displacement, conflict, and slavery—and forced to assimilate into a Spanish household, taking on new names, a new language, and a new religion. That erasure and many other violences still have effects on my family and, as Agua y Tierra says, in our wider communities today.
“I’m an heir to these land grant areas and to genízaro identity and history, and part of that history was settlers taking our land and resources by violence, and a mass erasure of our identity,” says Agua y Tierra. “Our ancestors’ systems were so dismantled that there was no capacity for the community to retain its leadership. They went defunct and weren’t able to self-determine by the systems governed by natural law. Part of the reason we’re so impoverished materially and in crisis is directly because of displacement and colonization. The descendants of the land and its stewards still exist but don’t know their history, identity, traditions. A big focus in my work is to bring out of obscurity the genízaro consciousness in the Indigenous peoples.”
Community limpia in Dixon, photo courtesy of Joseluis Agua y Tierra Ortiz y Muñiz.
Learning and Leadership
But how to develop leadership in a vacuum of understanding? In 2019, together with Don Bustos, founder and executive director of the Greenroots Institute, and Camilla Bustamante, former dean of community, workforce, and career and technical education at NNMC, Agua y Tierra helped to revitalize the ¡Sostenga! pilot program and turn it into a full-scale demonstration farm at the college, a crucial step in the growth of an agriculture program, unique to northern New Mexico, that aims to offer a support system to engage students in their own communities, farmlands, and businesses, and to use the classroom for teaching traditional practices.
“On my mom’s and dad’s sides, they weren’t the first generation [of] college graduates but instead stayed poor on the land as farmers, leaving behind a beautiful legacy of work with the land. I didn’t inherit anything when my grandparents died, but I inherited their stories and practices, and that is a great deal of wealth. That saved my life. If every descendant of northern New Mexico could hear these stories, they would feel such a strong sense of pride and an urge to go home, to return, and farm their grandparents’ land. Without that deep querencia for this place, as a recovering drug addict, and as a single father to an Indigenous baby girl, I didn’t know where I would land.”
Farming Is the Way Forward
Although there’s still plenty of work to be done, it’s easy to see that querencia for the land is alive at the ¡Sostenga! Center. After being a grassroots organizer for so long, Agua y Tierra is now stepping back to see how the seeds he’s planted have grown, focusing on being a father, and looking for the next generation of leaders to step up and lead the way.
“[Right now,] very few farms are producing food and most aren’t producing it commercially. We are not utilizing our traditional water-based/land-based networks, and so the water and land are not connecting to support mycelial networks in soil and other processes that can help to restore it. A return to the land would be a remedy for climate change and a lot of other issues our communities face. . . . Farming is our strength. Especially in a world where climate change is having such an impact, it is going to be our traditional wisdoms that pull us through, especially when it relates to food, to water. The land is forgiving, and there is still so much left of our culture. Our ancestors gave us tools to collaborate with nature and our connection to land and water. Engaging in land-based practices feels so familiar, it makes sense. We can feel the land calling us back home.”
Left: Agua y Tierra with one of his horses. Right: Greenhouse at ¡Sostenga! Center for Sustainable Food, Agriculture, and Environment. Photos courtesy of Joseluis Agua y Tierra Ortiz y Muñiz.
IN THE WILD
CAPULIN CANYON
REVITALIZING A WATERSHED WITH THE INDIGENOUS LANDS PROGRAM
By Ungelbah Dávila
Photos of Capulin Canyon from 1980, when Congress designated the surrounding 5,000 acres as a wilderness area, are a shocking contrast to the current view of the canyon. Today, a blackened, burnt swath of earth cuts through what was once a verdant ecosystem. Located in the Jemez Mountains, Capulin, once home to Ancestral Puebloans, natural builders and artists, belongs to a landscape altered by fire. In 1996, the human-caused Dome Fire ripped through 16,500 acres, destroying most of the Dome Wilderness. Fifteen years later, just as the grasslands and forests were coming back to life, the Las Conchas Fire, one of the largest in New Mexico’s history, burned 156,000 acres—scorching the same area, as well as nearby Bandelier. Then, in 2022, the Cerro Pelado Fire devastated 45,600 acres, mostly within the bounds of the Las Conchas burn scar. Capulin Canyon, cradling its namesake tributary, cuts through burn scar within burn scar on its way down to the Rio Grande. Now a field of charred sticks occupies what thirty years ago was a lush haven for plants and wildlife.
Without the presence of plant life that would naturally regulate how rainwater or snowmelt is collected and passed along to the Rio Grande, tribal and agricultural communities in the Middle Rio Grande Basin, which stretches from Cochiti Pueblo to Socorro, have one more card stacked against them in their struggle to access healthy water. Native Americans, often acknowledged as our region’s first farmers, were also this land’s first scientists, hydrologists, architects, engineers, botanists, astronomers, and ecologists. This could be one reason that Indigenous-led organizations around the state have long recognized not only the impact fire damage has on the watershed but the connections between all land uses, lifeways, and communities.
Capulin Canyon watershed, photo courtesy of Trees, Water & People.
“I come from a farming family in Santo Domingo Pueblo. We are a rich, vibrant community that still does farming as a way to preserve our lifeways,” says James Calabaza, program director for the Santa Fe– and Fort Collins–based Indigenous Lands Program (ILP), which was created in 2005 under the nonprofit Trees, Water & People to support Indigenous communities in preserving their lands. “For some families, it’s a major form of economical revenue for them when they sell their harvest and their crops in the fall time.”
Calabaza says that every year communities along the Rio Grande that depend on irrigation for their fields are having to ration water more and more, and that this has started causing tension among communities. “A lot of the communities downstream of Cochiti Dam are senior water right holders, and they have the first right to irrigate their fields. But communities in between, like Peña Blanca and Algodones, who are also big ag-producing communities, are facing a lot of those shortages and challenges because they have junior water rights.”
But Calabaza is optimistic that the work ILP is doing will eventually help resolve some of these issues. “If we can invest a lot of our knowledge and our science and man-power resources back into rehealing these watersheds, our water systems will improve,” he says.
Revitalizing the hydrological function of the watershed around ancestral locations and Pueblo communities post-fire is the ILP’s primary focus. This spring, they cohosted the 2025 New Mexico Tribal
Forest & Fire Summit in Mescalero, and in partnership with the Pueblos of Santo Domingo, Cochiti, and Jemez, they are about to launch an ongoing project to rehabilitate the Capulin Canyon watershed.
Another key project partner is High Water Mark, a company launched by hydrologist and engineer Phoebe Suina, of the Pueblos of San Felipe and Cochiti, in response to flooding in the Rio Grande Valley after the Las Conchas Fire. Since 2013, Suina has worked to support tribal governments and communities in post-fire and postflood watershed management and rehabilitation. ILP will also be collaborating with Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, whose projects include habitat restoration programs for adults and youth.
This year, ILP and their partners will begin work on the canyon’s 2,200-acre headwaters, and they plan to use the project as a template for all of the adjacent canyons in the Jemez Mountains.
“What we’re trying to do is bring together that traditional ecological knowledge that exists and has survived years of colonialism and oppression, to combine it with the cutting-edge Western science that is coming out of academic institutions and research facilities,” says Calabaza. “We’re hoping that this project is also reconnecting people back to the land. The water, it’s a living thing, and we treat it as a living thing moving forward. There’s just so many intersectionalities between the conservation of water, language, community, resistance, farming, education, youth engagement and outreach, and the idea of
James Calabaza and Michael Martinez of Trees, Water & People, photo courtesy of Trees, Water & People.
August 1 - September 30, 2025
America’s Farmers Market Celebration™ (AFMC) is the only annual ranking of the top farmers markets in the United States as voted on by the public. Since 2008, the AFMC has highlighted the important role farmers markets play in communities across the nation while celebrating the farmers, staff, and volunteers who make markets happen.
intergenerational transfer of knowledge between elders and youth. Those are all factors that are going to be webbed into our project. But the very center of it is water. Water is life, and water brings people together.”
Watershed restoration work starts with planting trees, and Calabaza says they have planted more than 125,000 trees in the last five years, with about 85,000 of them in New Mexico. This fall, with the help of the Forest Service, Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, Santa Fe Indian School, and others, ILP will begin planting 10,000 Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and white fir trees in and around Capulin Canyon.
Having trees on the landscape is critical for watershed function, he says, because trees help protect the soil from erosion and control the underground movement of water to prevent fast runoffs. Farmers using the water downstream are impacted by the loss of trees in higher elevations because trees are instrumental in creating a canopy for snowfall that allows it to melt more slowly and better absorb into the earth and the watershed, something that becomes vital during the hot summer months.
“The trees are eleven months old that we’re planting back in this landscape, and it’s going to take a few years for them to acclimate,” says Calabaza. “We’re going to start also working on installing and building structures [in the canyon] that can help control some of the [runoff], especially after a really heavy rainstorm, because right now that water is just flowing very fast back into the Rio Grande. But if we’re able to stop and retain it, it’s going to just recharge that landscape. It’s going to seep in and infiltrate into the ground, and then hopefully, over time, naturally release through springs.”
ILP project manager Michael Martinez is from the Pueblos of Ohkay Owingeh and Jemez, and he says that the devastation from these human-caused wildfires is so bad that a new word needs to be invented to describe it. He says the area encompassing Capulin Canyon has been neglected, and now people’s livelihoods downstream are in jeopardy. He wishes someone had started revitalization work much sooner because of how long it takes for trees to grow and for nature to find its balance again.
“Now we’re probably fifteen years past everything, and now we’re getting into it, but it will take some time,” Martinez says. “But Mother Nature, she knows what she’s doing, and we just need that little push. That’s what we’re hoping, that once we get these structures implemented, that she can handle the rest on her own.”
Calabaza says they want to also create job opportunities for Indigenous communities and expose young people to conservation work as a possible career path. This underpins their partnerships with both the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps and the Santa Fe Indian School, which offers a field-based agriscience class that gives students hands-on exposure to chemistry, biology, botany and ethnobotany, horticulture, and ecology.
“Natural resources–related work is seeing a decline in young adults or students coming into this field, so we’re trying to build activities and real-world opportunities for young Native Americans to participate in,” Calabaza says. “We have a partnership with Santa Fe Indian School where we’re going to provide volunteer days for middle school and high school students to come out to do some basic project activities like tree planting. . . . [E]ven though they might not want to do natural resource–related work today, they’re still going to have to take on responsibility in the future as the next stewards of our landscape, and carry on that generational knowledge that we’ve learned or has been passed through time.”
Phoebe Suina of High Water Mark LLC in a gully in the Capulin watershed, photo courtesy of Trees, Water & People.
IT TAKES A FOODSHED
BEHIND THE WHEEL WITH NEW MEXICO HARVEST
By Sophie Putka . Photos by Stephanie Cameron
It’s tricky to pin down just what New Mexico Harvest does— because when it comes to getting locally grown food onto New Mexican plates, they do it all. I get a taste of this over the course of a late morning at their small kitchen and processing facility in Albuquerque’s North Valley, where owner Thomas Swendson greets a local grower who’s dropping off crates of jewel-like tomatoes, demonstrates the sealing power of a machine that packages meals for schoolkids, and gifts me a selection of their prepared foods, wrapped in neat brown paper. It’s fitting that Swendson’s title on New Mexico Harvest’s website reads “El Presidente/Wearer of many hats.”
Yes, New Mexico Harvest runs a CSA (community supported agriculture) program, aggregating produce and meat from family-run growers and farmers, then distributing some 130 shares to members in their distinctive blue tote bags every week. But they also run an online farmers market with à la carte items; deliver local produce
wholesale to restaurants, grocery stores, schools, and senior centers; prepare ready-to-eat items in their commissary kitchen; and by 8 am each morning, make 450 meals for kids at thirteen nearby schools.
For Swendson, it’s all part of a family legacy. His stepfather, Steve Warshawer, started the company as Beneficial Farms CSA in 1994, delivering eggs and cheese out of his car from a loading dock in Santa Fe. Warshawer handed the business off to Swendson about a decade ago, and Swendson renamed it in 2020 to reflect the network’s expanding reach. At times, Swendson has worked as a commercial truck driver, pouring what he made into keeping the operation afloat. All five of his siblings have worked for New Mexico Harvest at one time or another, he said, and three still pitch in, along with his partner, Electra Kennedy-Hall, who has worked in most areas of the business and continues to write their weekly newsletter. Swendson’s mother, Colleen Warshawer, runs Ewe Matter Farm & Dairy, which provides lamb for the food hub.
Jon Agard off to deliver shares to New Mexico Harvest members.
“I’ve dedicated my life to try and highlight the work that these farmers are doing,” Swendson said, speaking of the more than eightyfive farmers that New Mexico Harvest works with over the course of the year. “It’s incredible. Our local food movement is unique.” Part of what makes New Mexico’s food system so robust, in his view, is how supportive local farmers markets are—both of generational growers and newcomers entering into agriculture.
Over the years, New Mexico Harvest has expanded their CSA program to include a customizable membership option and an online marketplace, where anyone can order locally grown or made items for home delivery in an area that spans from the Albuquerque metro area to Santa Fe. (CSA members get a 10 percent discount on à la carte purchases.) Offerings include classics like heirloom tomatoes, Swiss chard, red onions, and mung bean sprouts, but also newer, prepared items like their addictive pumpkin spice candied pecans, chewy apple pie fruit leather, green chile corn bread, and, most recently, delistyle meals like sandwiches and salads made with local fare including M’tucci’s focaccia and Tucumcari Mountain Cheese Factory feta. These prepared items are not only convenient but pivotal to the local food economy. “Our new commissary kitchen and food hub are equipped to process surplus crops, extend the life of seasonal harvests,
and reduce food waste,” a recent newsletter reads. “These efforts not only sustain our farmers but also build resilience in our food system.”
The marketplace option, on top of traditional CSA offerings and wholesale relationships with dozens of local businesses and institutions, can make for a dizzying weekly delivery system—meticulously planned and executed. Swendson reeled off daily pickup and distribution routes that reach as far as Dixon in the north and, in coordination with other regional food hubs, Las Cruces and Silver City in the south. Including volunteers and part-timers, just nine people make it all happen each week. As if this weren’t enough, the team adjusts their routines seasonally. “There’s a lot of complexity to it,” Swendson acknowledged.
Their participation in New Mexico Grown, a federally funded food-purchasing program whose aim is to provide fresh, locally grown food to children and older adults, takes New Mexico Harvest another step beyond the realm of a traditional CSA. It lets them act as a distributor for a broad network of midsize local growers, creating a values-based food supply chain and allowing schools and other institutions to rely less on food giants such as Sysco and Shamrock.
Meals being prepped for kids' after-school program.
Chef Bila Conchas
COVID-19 may have pushed New Mexico Harvest to focus more on delivery, but the ability to distribute local food more widely was ushered in, Swendson said, partially by the Food Safety Modernization Act, which put in place sweeping new food safety regulations, including for smaller food facilities. While it meant more stringent rules that could pose a challenge for small food producers (for example, food handling had to be moved indoors), Swendson said it also represented “a ‘between’ step for the very commoditized USDA regulations and these natural, local, organic movements of, not just the organic specifically, but trying to bring small-scale farmers to the bargaining table with the larger-scale [ones].” Swendson said their involvement with New Mexico Grown is a prime example of the lasting impacts of this transition: “Through going through those steps as farmers and our steps as a food hub, we can now sell directly to the institutions, whereas prior to the Food Safety [Modernization] Act, it was just—you had to be a big farmer.”
With the addition of the commissary kitchen two years ago, they also inherited a kids’ meal program—the one Swendson demonstrated
packaging for on my recent visit. The meals serve kids enrolled in afterschool programs run by Community for Learning, which provides support to low-income and at-risk children outside of school hours. It’s funded by grants from the state departments of health and education as well as the federal Department of Education. Recent threats to this department and cuts to the USDA have endangered New Mexico Grown and programs like it, Swendson said, but he’s hopeful. “The state is hugely behind it, and they’re going to find a way, I know they will.” Also uncertain are upgrades to their infrastructure—a flash freezer and dehydrator for prolonging the life of more food—that Swendson was hoping would be funded by a federal grant.
Still, there’s more in the works: Swendson wants to get New Mexico Harvest certified for jamming and pickling. Plans are underway to add more charcuterie boards, cookies, and other baked goods to the online marketplace. And, Swendson said, maybe soon he and his partner will add an even more personal contribution to the operation: pineapple and citrus fruits from a greenhouse in their own backyard farm.
505-585-5127, newmexicoharvest.com
Top left: CSA bags being loaded for weekly delivery. Bottom left: A large variety of local products available to New Mexico Harvest members. Right: El Presidente/Wearer of many hats, Thomas Swendson.
out and about WITH The Bite
FIELD NOTES ON A FEW PLACES TO EAT AND DRINK
Santa Fe’s Sassella, closed late last year in response to some plumbing issues, is never to reopen. Some voiced hope that Chef Cristian Pontiggia would follow the restaurant’s closure by at last opening his very own restaurant, but that is not to be. The good news is that, with his taking the role of executive chef at the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, you won’t have to wait for months of fundraising and planning in order to eat his food again.
Rustica Fresh Italian Kitchen closed not long after Sassella, but, incredibly, has already reopened as Piazza Caffè Leonardo Razatos, generational owner of the Plaza Cafè, and his husband, Giuliano Marcheschi, bought the venue in south Santa Fe in February, put up a circus mural and made a few other changes, then reopened with much of the same kitchen staff. Pasta is handmade and prices verge on bargain—just don’t call the grissini breadsticks.
George R. R. Martin continues to expand his influence in the “real world”: Next door to Jean Cocteau Cinema and
Beastly Books, you can now find Milk of the Poppy, an apothecary-style cocktail bar with slipstreamy, plum-colored seating from which you can sip grassy-hued cocktails, lychee fruit concoctions, and all manner of other artful libations, along with dishes featuring bone marrow, pea shoots, and flowers. Sokhang Pan, who charmed The Bite contributor Raven Del Rio when she interviewed him at Radish & Rye, is the head alchemist; Adam Garcia is leading the culinary team.
Hello Sweet Cream, the ice cream shop in La Tienda at Eldorado where you can find such flavors as Raspberry Rose (rose as in petals, although they remove those from the cream before churning it) alongside kid pleasers like peanut butter cookie dough, has opened a second location at CHOMP in Santa Fe.
After spending millions of dollars restoring the Plaza Hotel and the Castañeda Hotel, Allan Affeldt has decided to put both Las Vegas hotels up for sale. Affeldt has said that the hotels will operate as normal throughout the sale and that none of the staff will be impacted—although, after replacing Bar Castañeda when Chef Sean Sinclair resettled full time in Albuquerque, the Trackside dining room closed for the season last fall,
never to reopen, so you’ll have to dine elsewhere in town. The Skillet, perhaps?
On that note: Prairie Hill Café and Byron T’s Saloon, the restaurant and bar at the illustrious Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, have closed their doors for good. Run by native Las Vegans Sara Jo Mathews and Ryan Snyder, Prairie Hill will be missed by tourists and local patrons alike, and will be remembered for—among other things—providing hot meals to evacuees and first responders during the Hermit’s Peak / Calf Canyon Fire. Mathews and Snyder have already teased their next Las Vegas project, though, which is actually a return to an earlier project: Borrachos Craft Booze & Brews. No further details yet, but we’ll keep you updated.
DWTNR Cocktail Bar & Lounge, the swanky cocktail bar and restaurant in the newly remade ARRIVE Albuquerque, held its grand opening in late February. (The hotel itself, formerly Hotel Blue, opened a week or so prior.) Our crew enjoyed a Big Bad John, a glass of Gruet, and some surprisingly satisfying shaved ice on a first visit; next time we’ll take a Mama Tried with some Mom-style tacos. They also do small plates and green chile smash burgers, and devote a corner of the menu to variations on the Boilermaker, sometimes known as the Indie Sleaze.
DWTNR Cocktail Bar & Lounge.
Sokhang Pan, photo by Raven del Rio.
The Skillet, photo by Douglas Merriam.
In March, Afghan Kebab House opened in the spot that used to be Knead Dough Bar (and, before that, Gold Street Caffe) in downtown Albuquerque. While we’re sorry we can no longer stop by to grab one of Chef Herrera’s doughnuts, kebab and qabuli palow are a welcome addition to the local lunch scene, as is the spirit of this new place.
Obviously that means Knead Dough Bar & Eatery is closed closed, but Knead Bakery is still taking orders. If you’re longing for one of those Potato Cake Doughnuts or like the idea of a Dubai Chocolate Croissant, follow them online to find out when orders go live.
For those who’ve been waiting for straight-up Ethiopian to come to New Mexico: Clay Pot Ethiopian Cuisine hosted the grand opening of their food trailer in February, and have since been popping up at breweries from Corrales to Nob Hill to downtown Albuquerque. Ethiopian vegetarian is among the best, but they offer meat dishes too, all served with tangy injera. May 3 they’re hosting a spring brunch in Placitas, and we hope it won’t be the last. As with all food trucks, check their social channels for current schedules. (ICYMI, Clay Pot has been running occasional classes and doing catering around town for a while, to much joy and acclaim.)
What was MÁS is now Char, opened March 20 in the revamped restaurant space at Hotel Andaluz in downtown Albuquerque. They’re talking live-fire cooking and spins on New Mexican, with the upstairs bar styled for the Prohibition era.
New downtown Albuquerque brunch spot Smothered is now fully opened, and our sources report that we must get there soon, and to order the chicken and waffles.
The 377 Brewery in Albuquerque is also shutting its doors. Co-owners Cliff Sandoval and Fred Atencio opened the place in 2016 on the corner of Gibson and Yale, meaning it was the first stop for New Mexico beer for folks flying into the Sunport.
One of Albuquerque’s most beloved Chinese restaurants has shuttered: Budai Gourmet Chinese served its last meal in late February. Returning there to eat duck had been on our to-do list all winter, and their closure has offered incentive to get to the rest of the places we love, be they Chinese or Italian, while they are still here.
Down in Mimbres, where dining-out options have long been limited to the Living Harvest Bakery, a.k.a. Three Questions Coffee House, and the Log Cabin Restaurant, there’s a new spot:
Oluv. Located in the old Mimbres Cafe on NM 35, their menu is American, meaning it’s all over the map. Per the Silver City Daily Press, one of the chefs (also a co-owner) grew up in Louisiana, which explains the Southern leanings of their Sunday brunch menu.
On March 27, the Street Food Institute cut the ribbon on its newest project: the Barelas Community Kitchen, at Fourth Street and Barelas. The community kitchen will provide job training, a food business incubator program, and affordable commercial kitchen rentals for small food businesses.
Sadly, edible New Mexico’s Burrito Smackdown has been postponed to 2026, due to predictions of record heat this June. However, tickets for the Green Chile Cheeseburger Smackdown go on sale July 1—an event that always sells out, usually over a month before it actually goes down. (VIP tickets sell out even faster, so you might want to set that calendar reminder now.)
Stephanie Herrera of Knead Bakery, photo by Ungelbah Dávila.
Char in Hotel Andaluz.
Green Chile Cheeseburger Smackdown.
Stay Local, Discover New Mexico
SIP / SAVOR / SPA / SWIM SUMMER STAYCATION
As we celebrate 20 years of effortless escapes, we invite you to indulge in the ultimate summer staycation. Relax by our tranquil pools, savor local dining, and enjoy the unique charm of each of the destinations we call home—Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces. Your ideal getaway is closer than you think. New Mexico residents enjoy exclusive savings with a valid state ID. Enjoy up to 20% off with Code: SUMMER25 when you visit HeritageHotels.com.
EDIBLE INGREDIENT
Tomatoes
Let’s face it: At some point in the near future, our kitchen counters will hit a crescendo with tomatoes spilling out of bowls, from cherries to zebras, and Romas to beefsteak. Whether they are coming from the garden, the farmers market, or the co-op, we can’t help but hoard tomatoes like we will never see them again. In preparation, we are arming you with a handful of super-quick recipes inspired by New York Times Cooking to help you make good use of them before you begin canning and freezing them to savor year-round.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
TOMATO YOGURT DIP
Sliced crusty bread
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled
2 cups Greek yogurt, full-fat
1 large ripe tomato, halved horizontally (any variety)
Salt and black pepper
Brush bread with olive oil and toast under the broiler or on the grill. While bread is still warm, rub slices with garlic clove. Add yogurt to a shallow bowl and spread into an even layer. Using a box grater, grate cut sides of the tomato on top of the yogurt and discard skins. Season with salt and pepper and serve with the toasted bread for dipping.
TOMATO TOAST WITH CHEDDAR MAYO
2 medium tomatoes, thinly sliced
Flaky salt (or smoked sea salt)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup (packed) white cheddar, finely grated
4 slices rustic bread
Arrange tomatoes on a plate and sprinkle with salt. Stir together mayonnaise, cheddar, and a pinch of salt. Toast
bread using whatever method you like. When the bread is hot and ready, slather on the cheddar mayo. Top with tomatoes and serve.
BAKED EGG WITH TOMATO
Butter, as needed (or oil of choice)
1 slice tomato (any large variety)
1 small slice prosciutto or other cured meat (optional)
1 egg
Flaky salt and freshly ground black pepper
Shredded basil and/or parmesan, for garnish (optional)
Heat oven to 375°F and position rack in the middle. With a paper towel, wipe a bit of butter into a ramekin or other small oven-proof dish that holds 4–6 ounces. Place a tomato slice in the bottom and then a slice of prosciutto. Break one egg into ramekin and place on a baking sheet. Bake for 10–14 minutes, or until egg is set and white has solidified. The egg will continue to cook after you remove it from the oven, so it is best to undercook it slightly. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, basil, and parmesan.
*Sourcing note: La Montañita Food Co-op carries local tomatoes at all their locations when in season.
Paletas
ICE POPS TO BEAT THE SUMMER HEAT
Words and Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Popsicles evoke carefree childhood days. I remember bright, neon colors dripping down my fingers as I stood beside the ice cream van blaring its weird pied piper music during hot summer vacations. Unfortunately, as an adult who’s just a little more attuned to the subtleties of flavor than my childhood self, I find that most store-bought Popsicles disappoint—they’re loaded with excessive sugars and artificial ingredients and often priced beyond their worth. You don’t have to settle for these subpar sweets when you make ice pops or paletas at home. Paletas, made with natural ingredients, are slightly more sophisticated than those Popsicles of yore; with flavorful chunks of fruit, nuts, or herbs dispersed throughout the treat, textures emerge to chew through as the ice pop melts in your mouth. The paleta recipes in this edition of Cooking Fresh are meant to spark your creativity—whether you opt for water and fruit juice–based (paletas de aguas), cream-based (paletas de crema), or some boozy versions (see page 72), the possibilities are unlimited.
Here are some general guidelines for creating your own paletas.
• No Popsicle mold? Substitute Dixie cups, individual yogurt containers, muffin tins, or ice cube trays. To get the sticks to stand upright in these unconventional molds, tightly wrap the top of the mold with aluminum foil and poke your Popsicle sticks through the foil.
• To alleviate spills when freezing and because pops will expand when they freeze, don’t fill molds to the very top—leave a 1/8-to-1/4-inch gap at the top of each cup. This gap will also leave room for topping when desired.
• Ingredients lose flavor when they freeze, so the puree should have an intense, sweet flavor—even more so than you might expect.
• Add cornstarch to cream-based pops to make them creamy and not icy.
• Honey is an excellent sweetener for homemade Popsicles because it has a delicate flavor and prevents ice crystals, making for a creamier texture. Agave syrup can yield similar results.
• Amplify the flavors of ingredients by roasting them.
• Create layers of texture by including whole pieces of fruit, or add a nutrient boost with bee pollen, chia, hemp, and/or flax seeds.
• Freeze paletas for 6–7 hours, preferably overnight, and until they are completely frozen through.
• To remove the paletas, run the mold under warm water for a few seconds to loosen them.
Agua de Jamaica Paletas
These pops are a refreshing burst of tartness with a subtle hint of floral goodness. The jamaica (hibiscus) petals imbue their bright, ruby-red hue with a punch of tanginess that puckers your lips and keeps you longing for more. If desired, add another splash of color with fresh mint leaves.
Makes 8–12 ice pops
4 cups water
1/2 cup dried jamaica flowers
1/2 cup honey or sweetener of choice
Juice of 1 lime
1/2 cup mint leaves, plus more for garnish (optional)
Rinse and drain dried jamaica flowers in a large colander. Bring water to a boil in a large pot. Add flowers and mint (if using), and cover with a lid. Remove from heat and steep for 20 minutes.
Strain jamaica water into a pitcher and discard flowers. Add honey and stir. Taste tea, and add more honey or dilute with water to your liking; just keep in mind that some flavor will be lost as the paletas freeze. Refrigerate until cold. Push 4–5 mint leaves (if using) to the bottom of Popsicle molds and fill with jamaica tea. Snap on lids, insert Popsicle sticks, and freeze until solid, for 6 hours or overnight.
Balsamic Roasted Cherry Pops
Adapted from Rachael Bryant, Meatified
My ultimate sweet treat is vanilla ice cream with strawberries and balsamic, so when I stumbled across this recipe, I knew it would be magic with Monticello’s balsamic condiment. You can make this recipe vegan by swapping agave for honey.
Makes 8–12 ice pops
1 1/4 pounds dark sweet cherries, pitted and divided
3 tablespoons high-quality balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 2/3 cups unsweetened coconut milk, full-fat
2 teaspoons cornstarch
Unsweetened shredded coconut
Preheat oven to 400°F. Place 1 pound of cherries in a baking dish and drizzle them with the balsamic vinegar and honey, then sprinkle sea salt over the top. Roast for 35 minutes, stirring halfway through the cooking time, until cherries have released their juices and just begun to wrinkle a little.
Allow cherries to cool slightly, then transfer to a blender, making sure to scrape up all the pan juice too. Add the coconut milk and cornstarch and blend together. Taste and add additional honey or salt, if needed.
Cut remaining 1/4 pound of cherries in half; add to the Popsicle molds, and fill with cherry mixture. Use a skewer or chopstick to break up any air bubbles in the mixture, leaving a gap at the top of each mold for adding shredded coconut. Pop the molds into the freezer for 30 minutes.
Remove from the freezer and sprinkle the top of each mold with the shredded coconut, then snap on the lid and slide Popsicle sticks into each carefully. Return to the freezer and freeze until solid, for 6 hours or overnight.
Chocolate-Coco Paletas
These paletas can be made with Oaxacan chocolate or high-quality local chocolate such as Eldora in Albuquerque or Chokolá in Taos. Experiment with single-origin bars and flavored bars like Eldora’s Chili Blast. This recipe makes use of avocados on the edge. When too soft for slicing and too brown for guacamole, they can be an excellent substitute for butter and add creaminess to vegan recipes.
Makes 8–12 ice pops
3–4 ounces chocolate, broken into pieces
2 cups unsweetened coconut milk
1/2 avocado, ripe or overripe
2 tablespoons agave syrup
2 teaspoons cornstarch
Bring coconut milk to a very gentle simmer over low heat. Add chocolate and agave, and stir with a whisk or molinillo until chocolate has dissolved. Pour into a container and let it cool completely in the refrigerator or freezer. Put chocolate mixture, avocado, and cornstarch in the blender, and puree until smooth. Pour into Popsicle molds, snap on lids, insert Popsicle sticks, and freeze until solid, for 6 hours or overnight.
Thai Tea and Cheese Foam Paletas
Cheese foam originated in Taiwan and quickly gained popularity in East Asia before reaching the United States. Adding cheese foam topping to iced coffee or tea drinks takes your beverage experience to the next level, and the same goes for these paletas.
Makes 8–12 ice pops
Cheese Foam
4 ounces cream cheese
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
Thai Tea
4 black tea bags
2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 star anise pods
3–4 black cardamom pods, cracked open
1 cinnamon stick
1/4 piece vanilla bean pod
2 teaspoons turmeric, ground
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
2 tablespoons evaporated milk or whole milk
Cheese Foam
Set up a stand mixer or large mixing bowl and hand mixer. Add cream cheese and beat on high until smooth and creamy. Add heavy whipping cream and condensed milk and beat until the texture starts to foam up into soft peaks. Add sea salt a pinch at a time and adjust to desired taste. Continue mixing until you reach a light and airy mousse-like consistency. Be careful not to overmix; stop before you have the firm peaks characteristic of whipped cream. Pour into a piping bag. Set aside in the refrigerator.
Thai Tea
Place tea bags, water, vanilla extract, star anise, cardamom, cinnamon stick, vanilla bean, and turmeric into a medium-sized pot and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and continue to simmer for 3–5 minutes. Strain tea mixture and place in refrigerator to cool.
In a large bowl, whisk sugar, sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, and cooled tea until thoroughly combined.
Assembly
Pour Thai tea 1/3 of the way up the Popsicle molds. Then pipe in cheese foam, creating a layer about 1/4-inch thick. Continue layering until the mold is nearly full. Snap on lids, insert Popsicle sticks, and freeze overnight.
Forty-Eight Hours in Puebla
Words and Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Arriving in the city known for mole poblano, chiles en nogada, and Talavera pottery, I was surprised by the dichotomy of modern and colonial-era architecture. Despite the many department stores in Puebla today, the zócalo, the main square, remains the city’s cultural, political, and religious center and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. Many downtown buildings incorporate glazed, decorative Talavera tiles, introduced by early residents from Spain. The cuisine, as I discovered, is also not limited to the stuff of colonial legend: Puebla’s chalupas, tacos dorados, tacos árabes, cemitas poblanas, and molotes are all must-trys.
Sabor a Puebla: CHALUPAS
In the heart of Puebla’s historical district stands an old fountain, which serves as the centerpiece of the lively zócalo. This vibrant gathering place, surrounded by notable buildings such as City Hall, the Casa de los Muñecos, and the Basilica Cathedral of Puebla, is ideal for people watching. You can relax and enjoy the view from the patio of one of the many adjacent bars and cafés that look over the zócalo. At Sabor a Puebla, chalupas served in sets with salsa verde,
salsa roja, and mole poblano were perfect for sharing while drinking cerveza and watching the barrenderos (street sweepers).
Clementina Cocina Poblana: CHALUPAS and TACOS DORADOS
Eating chalupas only once on my trip wasn’t an option. This quintessential Pueblan street food, closer to a light tostada than what often passes for a chalupa in the United States, is essentially a corn tortilla fried in lard, bathed in salsa, and topped with shredded pork or chicken, onions, and sometimes a sprinkling of fresh cheese. At Clementina, I paired my chalupas with tacos dorados: crispy, golden corn tortillas filled with chicken and potatoes, served with sour cream and cheese (and, of course, table salsas). Clementina is situated on the Street of Sweets, known for its forty dulcerías, so be sure to save room for dessert. I went with the strawberry tres leches cake at Dulceria Dos Hermanos.
Mezcalería Míel de Agave: ESQUITES and MEZCAL
“Mezcaleros somos, y en el camino andamos” is the phrase scrawled in neon on the wall of Míel de Agave which reflects the passion
and spirit of this space. The proprietors may not produce mezcal, but they’re all about honoring the culture and diversity of mezcal. My dinner companions and I ordered four flights (twelve tastes) of mezcal and several dishes to share. The esquites, a creamy corn dish prepared with mayonnaise, chopped chile poblano, epazote, cheese, and salsa macha, was a highlight for me, as well as the Candinga Papalometl mezcal. From the food to the cocktails to the service, Míel de Agave delivered an exquisite taste of Puebla.
Dahlias
Petunias
Chile Basil
Cape Daisy
Heirloom tomatoes
Finished Water, 2025, gouache on paper.
DRINKING WATER IN ALBUQUERQUE
A TOUR FROM RIVER TO TAP
Words and Illustrations by Erin
Elder
Chances are you’re reading this article with a glass of water nearby. Chances are you have sipped from this water in the last few minutes and may sip some more while reading. Chances are, if you use municipal utilities, drinking water is not something you think much about, despite the fact that you do it many times every day of your entire life.
If you live in the United States, chances are that, thanks in part to the Safe Drinking Water Act, the water coming from your tap is safe to drink. Whether you filter your water or drink it straight from the faucet, you can, in most parts of this country, trust that tap water will not kill you. Thanks to the governance of American water since 1974, you are not likely to get cholera or dysentery or any number of diseases that could be contracted by drinking water in many other parts of the world; nor, with rare exceptions, are you likely to be poisoned by lead. You may know and appreciate this. But how does drinking water get to the tap? Where does it come from and how does it work?
Curious about such things, I recently toured the San Juan–Chama Drinking Water Treatment Plant, which is responsible for cleaning the majority of the water we drink in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. The tour was led by Cassia Sanchez, the plant’s chief engineer, who met me and a few others in the visitors’ lobby. We gathered around a roomsized 3D model of the city’s water system; after donning hard hats and protective glasses, we walked out into the warm afternoon sun.
Opened in 2008, the plant is a sprawling complex of pools and piles, trucks and storage tanks, whirring buildings, winding staircases, metallic smells, and color-coded pipes. Encircled by chain link and razor wire, the plant is run twenty-four hours a day by thirty-three full-time operators who control every aspect of the system through a closed network of cameras, screens, sensors, mechanisms, and monitors. Solar panels adorn employee parking structures to provide 20 to 30 percent of the plant’s electric power. Currently serving 680,000 people, the plant produces 50 to 60 million gallons of clean drinking
water each day of winter and, the river permitting, twice as much during summer months. It took four years and $160 million to build this facility. Considering the long history of humans drinking water in Albuquerque, the plant is expensive, high tech, and new.
People have lived along the banks of the Rio Grande for twelve thousand years and while its water has long been used for crops, the river, which has always been brown with silty sediments, has never been good to drink. Ancient people collected drinking water from intermittent springs and rain, storing it in clay vessels. Spanish colonists built acequias to channel river water for irrigation, but dug wells for drinking. The city’s twentieth-century water system was entirely supported by wells drilled into the underlying aquifer. For decades, it was believed that these groundwater deposits were massive, that they held as much water as Lake Superior and would never run out. But by the 1990s, it became clear that the Albuquerque aquifer—a fraction of its imagined size—was being depleted at an unsustainable rate.
Meanwhile, New Mexico had been bolstering its water supply for irrigation and, through the 1948 Upper Colorado River Basin Compact, the state received rights to water from the San Juan River’s smaller tributaries: the Navajo, Little Navajo, and Blanco rivers. Because these rivers flow on the other side of the Continental Divide, a system of diversion dams and tunnels was built in the 1970s to move the water under the mountains and into the Rio Grande watershed. This imported water travels underground for twenty-six miles before joining up with the Chama River near its headwaters. Moving through a number of dammed reservoirs, the water eventually mixes with the Rio Grande and flows into New Mexico’s largest city.
The earth naturally filters groundwater; there is no need to purify it for drinking. But, with Albuquerque’s population growing and the aquifer shrinking, and with the San Juan River waters successfully delivered into its watershed, drinking river water became a twenty-first century imperative. It just needed to be cleaned.
Pipe Room, 2025, gouache on paper.
If you have visited the Bachechi Open Space or walked the river just south of Alameda, you have likely seen the site where much of Albuquerque’s drinking water is drawn. There, a small inflatable dam stretches across the Rio Grande, diverting water into two mechanized structures on the east bank. That water flows into a large pump house designed in the style of a Spanish mission, then travels seven miles underground to the surface water plant where it is treated by Sanchez and her team.
“We treat every bit of water, and then we re-treat it,” Sanchez commented as she led us in and out of the plant’s many buildings. But what does that mean?
Water treatment is a technical process that begins with the removal of sticks, rocks, trash, and other debris that settles to the bottom of two huge storage ponds. Then the water begins its dizzying journey through columns and pipes and refinements, including the addition of ferric chloride, which bonds with tiny particles and settles out from the clarified water. Liquid ozone is pumped through the water to kill
viruses and bacteria, and lyme is used to control its pH; a foot of sand and five feet of granulated carbon filter out any remaining toxins. Tiny bits of chlorine and fluoride are added to the water and once it is finished, the water is divided into reservoirs destined for the east and west sides of the city. Massive pumps move water uphill to large holding tanks, where it is then gravity-fed into individual homes and businesses through three thousand miles of underground pipes. Six hundred employees are responsible for the distribution of drinking water, working around the clock to ensure that whenever you turn on the tap—whether it’s to drink or to water your lawn—clean water comes out.
As we moved through the plant, climbing metal stairwells and peering into stories-tall pools, Sanchez shared ways that the plant is continually evolving as the team responds to new realities. One building held pallets piled high with LED lights that would soon replace less sustainable halogen bulbs. Outside, several large tankers were ready to transport stopgap emergency water to neighboring communities such as Las Vegas or the Navajo Nation, places that need clean
drinking water when their wells become contaminated or run dry. Other forms of responsiveness were less visible, like the discussions and proposed plans about how to deal with PFAs and microplastics, which are increasingly present in water everywhere.
Standing in the shadow of a large storage tank, Sanchez told us how the surface water plant, designed to protect the depleting aquifer, has shut down every summer since 2020 because the river has not delivered enough water to serve the city as well as people and places downstream. This means that if you drink a glass of tap water at a Nob Hill restaurant in July, you’re probably drinking groundwater. Now the city’s water comes from a combination of both systems— which, when needed, can switch back and forth in the course of mere hours or days.
Meanwhile, the Colorado River Compact will expire in 2026 and is currently being renegotiated by elected officials from seven western states and thirty tribes. This extremely difficult compromise, already swollen with the uncertainties of climate change and population booms, is being overseen by the newly reduced Bureau of
Reclamation. Forty million people depend on Colorado River water and these careful agreements about how it is used, moved, measured, valued, and cleaned.
I know that our bodies are 60 to 70 percent water and that water comes from specific places, but now, having toured the surface water plant, I recognize that we are ambulatory reservoirs, each made up of different water collections. Sipping from my glass, I imagine the journey this particular drink has taken. Can I taste the spring snowmelt in those San Juan River tributaries? Is the influence of Rio Grande water palpable? Or has this water come partly from the aquifer? Does it bear traces of the local storage reservoir from which it traveled to my home? Does the cumulative distance traveled somehow flavor these waters? Do the machines and chemicals and pipes and pumps? Do the laws and compacts and evolutions in technology? The countless hours of human care?
Feeling the confluence of my body’s waters meeting everything contained in each new gulp, I sip and sip again. Once emptied, I walk to the kitchen, turn on the faucet, and refill my glass.
Plant Pool, 2025, gouache on paper.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE RIVER
FROM BUCKETS AND BARRELS TO TANKS, THE WORK OF PRESERVING TRADITIONAL INDIGENOUS FARMS AND RECOVERING SACRED RIVERS IN A
By Sarah Mock
DRIER NEW MEXICO
Traditional Zuni olla water jars, painted by Eileen Yatsayte and Noreen Simplicio, serve as rain catchment vessels at Ho’n A:wan Park in Zuni and supply water for the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project community garden, photo courtesy of Zuni Youth Enrichment Project.
For James and Joyce Skeet, farmers at Spirit Farm near Vanderwagen, when water doesn’t come from the sky, it comes from a truck.
“We’ve collected seven or eight thousand gallons of water since last year,” James explains, “from the Little Sisters of the Poor.” This organization, which runs a Gallup-based assisted living facility, is not supplying water from the tap but from their roof. A three-thousand-gallon tank (about twelve feet high, six or eight feet across) set up outside the Little Sisters’ Villa Guadalupe collects water from the roof and gutters when it rains, and stores it until the Skeets can haul the water from Gallup to their farm miles away.
Eight thousand gallons may sound like a lot, but on Spirit Farm, where chickens, pigs, cattle, Navajo-Churro sheep, and many gardens grow year-round, it will last about a month, and more water is always needed. Surface water from rivers is not an option, given that in a good year, only four small rivers flow in the entirety of the nearly six-thousand-square-mile county where the farm is located. A well isn’t an option either, because the Skeets’ farm is on Chichiltah Chapter lands of the Navajo Nation and securing permission from the multiple bodies required to drill a water well on tribal lands involves a long, bureaucratic, and very costly process that can take years to complete.
Spirit Farm is not alone in this challenge. Across the Navajo Nation, a third of all households and families don’t have access to
running water, due to lack of municipal infrastructure and difficulties with drilling wells. Families without running water to their homes or farms must haul water for drinking, cleaning, and all other uses, usually from nearby municipalities.
“Hauling water is incredibly expensive,” reported Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, in his 2024 congressional testimony. “Families that haul water on the Navajo reservation spend the equivalent of $43,000 per acre-foot, compared to about $600 per acre-foot for a typical suburban water user.” This cost is both direct and indirect, including everything from the gas spent to haul thousands of pounds of water to the time spent in what can be hours-long lines at municipal distribution points. When that water is used for farming and gardening, the need, and the cost, multiply exponentially. In the face of these barriers, the Skeets had to get creative, which is what brought them to raise money and install a rain catchment tank in Gallup in the spring of 2024.
Right now, one of the main limitations on the rain harvesting project is the irregularity of precipitation. While the tank filled up in a single day once in 2024 during a particularly intense rain event, it can otherwise take weeks, even months, for the tank to get near capacity. And conditions are only getting more difficult, given that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System has identified Gallup and surrounding McKinley County as current areas of “severe drought,” and forecasts for the 2025 summer indicate the trend will continue.
Spirit Farm hoop house by day and night, photos courtesy of Spirit Farm.
A few dozen miles south of Spirit Farm, the people of Zuni Pueblo are also farming through the drought. Despite millenia of living and farming along the banks of the Zuni River, current conditions and alterations to the river have transformed Zuni farming practices in ways that make adaptation to the new normal difficult.
“Our storied irrigation techniques and careful stewardship of our water and lands allowed us to irrigate over 15,000 acres,” said Arden Kucate, governor of Zuni Pueblo, reflecting on the historical relationship between the Zuni people and their river in his 2024 congressional testimony. Extensive Zuni farms were planted along the banks of tributaries and the Zuni itself to ease irrigation and take advantage of river-borne nutrients, but today the Zuni River is barely a trickle for much of the year. Just as with the stream itself, the flow of Zuni life has been interrupted by diversions, overgrazing, and historic clear-cutting by farming settlers upstream, as well as by the enduring impacts of the largely ineffective Black Rock dam, constructed by the federal government in 1908.
But much like the Skeets, farmers in Zuni are finding creative ways to continue traditional farming practices. One group, the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP), makes both community gardening and supporting at-home gardens a central part of their youth nutrition and education work, especially since the start of the pandemic.
“We got [the youth program participants] tools, soil, non-GMO seeds, and all this information, packed into this little bucket,” says Zachary James, a food sovereignty and water conservation specialist for the program. “The bucket was for conserving water.” ZYEP’s water-saving programs have only grown since that earliest iteration. Over the last five years, they’ve distributed more than a hundred 50-gallon rain barrels to families to harvest and store rain from rooftops to water their backyard gardens. Today, Zachary reports, you can see the barrels all over the village, and families have been able to grow and expand home gardens as well as gardens in public spaces.
“Gardening ties into our culture,” says Kenzi Bowekaty, ZYEP’s food sovereignty leader. “We used to have the Zuni River running through here, which was our main resource for agriculture. Now with backyard gardens, we are still able to do those practices, but we have to be resilient and conserve water as best as we can.”
One much-celebrated Zuni strategy for resilient agriculture in a dry landscape is waffle gardening, which many families still practice today. Historically built alongside the river, waffle gardens involve the shaping of sunken beds in clay soil, surrounded by short earthen walls. These adobe-like structures trap water for slow release, protect plants from driving wind, and moderate temperature, keeping plants warm on cold nights and cooler on hot days. Although they can no longer
Left: Historic waffle gardens along the Zuni River, photo courtesy of Zuni Pueblo Governor Arden Kucate. Right: ZYEP integrates waffle gardening into their youth education, photo courtesy of Zuni Youth Enrichment Project.
rely on river water, the ZYEP team is integrating waffle gardening into their youth education and food sovereignty work, exploring its broader effectiveness in a drying climate and renewing their cultural connections to the land.
While ZYEP and the kids and families they empower continue to advance the goals of Zuni food sovereignty, growing everything from corn and chiles to cilantro and other sacred plants, the wider Zuni community continues caring for and protecting the Zuni River, both on and off the Pueblo.
On the national stage, Zuni leaders and New Mexican legislators are fighting to pass the Zuni Indian Tribe Water Rights Settlement Act, which would, in addition to providing funds to improve drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, provide funding to improve the Zuni River and one of its tributaries, the Rio Nutria. Improvements would include work like channel restoration, which will benefit riparian ecosystems, and setting aside tens of thousands of acres in the basin as a wildlife sanctuary. The settlement would also protect the tribe’s rights to water for irrigation and livestock, funding upgrades that honor traditional irrigation practices.
“If the water rights settlement goes through, it could be a reimagining of how we can bring [the river] back to life,” says Curtis Quam,
a Zuni community leader and museum technician and cultural educator at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni. “Is it traditional? It’s debatable, but I think it’s important to have these conversations about what’s really important.”
Back on Navajo lands, the Skeets are continuing to advance their rain catchment work as well. Though they’re planning to partner with more farmers and add more tanks throughout the town of Gallup, they’re growing the program slowly in order to iron out the kinks.
When catchment water runs out at Spirit Farm, which it usually does in midsummer, the Skeets head to Gallup to fetch city water like so many of their neighbors. But they’ve had additional problems with the fact that this water is treated with chlorine, which means it must be amended before it can be used on crops. On top of that, as the Gallup city wells become depleted, they’re also becoming increasingly mineralized, which is hard on plants. In the Skeets’ experience, using this water contributes to declining soil health. One solution James
ZYEP has distributed more than a hundred 50-gallon rain barrels to families, photo courtesy of Zuni Youth Enrichment Project.
and Joyce have found is dosing treated water with a compost extract, which they’ve found helps neutralize the salts.
Looking to the future, heat and drought conditions are not expected to improve. According to a 2022 study, average temperatures across the state are likely to increase between five and seven degrees in the next twenty-five years, and average precipitation is expected to decrease. When James considers this trend toward increased heat and dryness in the region, he sees good reason for the people of northwestern New Mexico to stop looking to deeper wells or imported water, and to start looking back at the ways Indigenous people have historically survived and thrived on this landscape.
“It floods here every year,” James explains, “but we’re not managing the water. It just runs off. We need to capture it, slow it down, spread it out, and let it soak in.” The Skeets are pursuing a number of strategies to do this work on their farm, everything from planting cover crops and amending soil with organic biochar to increase its water-holding capacity to supporting native plant species and utilizing locally adapted landraces of plants and animals, like the
Navajo-Churro sheep, rather than more common but less resilient European types.
But James and Joyce are doing more than just adapting to the current (and likely future) conditions in the region. They’re also actively working to change the narrative around water. “We like to hold water celebrations,” Joyce explains of their local events, which they’re calling Bringing Back the Rain. Like much of the work on their farm, these events are part educational, part conversational, and part traditional.
“How do we get back to considering water as sacred?” is one of the critical questions of these water celebrations, Joyce reports. “We have to reattach ourselves to how precious water is.”
Curtis Quam sees a similar path to revitalization through the maintenance of deep, cultural connections to the river itself, whether the water is visible there or not. “Even though the river is physically dry most of the year,” Curtis says, “it is still very much part of our spiritual lifeline and our connection to our ancestry, and it is visited every day by people within the community.” The memory of the river, and its vital importance to the Zuni people, lives on.
Left: Hauling water from Gallup to Spirit Farm. Right: Navajo-Churro at Spirit Farm. Photos courtesy of Spirit Farm.
THE ART OF MAKING WATER
By Shahid Mustafa
Lettuce and leafy greens are among the vegetables known to absorb contaminants from the soil, photo by Nikita Photography.
Phytoremediation refers, theoretically, to a form of repair. But inherent to the term is something much more fundamental: the process by which plants absorb toxins from water and potentially take in contaminants through their roots and store them in their tissues. The vegetables that are most effective at taking up contaminants and storing them are leafy greens, lettuces, and root vegetables—pretty much the top three out of five items I usually provide in my weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) share. According to recent National Institutes of Health research on the risks of growing vegetables in old mining areas, “The bioaccumulation of toxic elements in edible parts of vegetables cultivated on contaminated soils results in their entry into the food chain and negatively affects consumers’ health.”
Needless to say, I don’t grow vegetables in order to treat polluted soil or groundwater. (For the record, I grow using organic practices on land that has never been mined.) But recent developments in local policy have me concerned about the future health of the waters flowing beneath the land I farm. What troubles me is not the presence of heavy metals but the proliferation of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as PFAS. The Environmental Protection Agency has found that PFAS are long-lasting chemicals, parts of which break down very slowly over time, and due to their widespread use, many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals, as well as in water, air, and soil. There are thousands of PFAS present in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products, which makes it challenging to assess the potential human health and environmental risks.
Produced water is defined as the water in subsurface formations that is brought to the surface during oil and gas production. Based on findings from previous spills in states including Texas, produced water resulting from oil and gas extraction is suspected by some environmentalists to be riddled with PFAS. In New Mexico, the majority of produced water is the wastewater product of the oil and gas sectors. According to the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), “For every barrel (42 gallons) of oil produced, four to seven barrels of produced water may be generated. In 2018, New Mexico became the third largest oil-producing state, generating over one billion barrels of produced water (~60,500 Olympic size swimming pools).” Currently, most of this water is stored in deep wells
through underground injection. This storage problem, combined with the impacts of rising temperatures and a vanishing snowpack, has led to a push to turn this produced water into—well, into what is one of the ongoing questions and points of tension. Another, more immediate concern is the handling of produced water itself.
A press release published on March 11, 2025, by the environmental nonprofit WildEarth Guardians states, “PFAS, often called ‘forever chemicals,’ encompass more than 14,000 man-made substances used for their oil and water repellency, temperature resistance, and friction reduction. These chemicals are highly toxic at minuscule amounts, persist indefinitely in the environment, and are linked to testicular and kidney cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and other severe health risks. Without full chemical disclosure, oil and gas companies can easily hide continued PFAS use behind trade secrets.”
The New Mexico–based nonprofit issued this press release in direct response to the state Oil Conservation Commission’s decision, earlier that day, to ban PFAS’ use in fracking—but not to require full disclosure of all chemicals used in the drilling and production process. The commission’s decision appears to have been made based on concerns of overstepping its own authority and potentially violating the New Mexico Uniform Trade Secret Act. According to that act, a “trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process that determines independent economic value. In its ruling, the commission effectively allows that an entity or “person” (as the act defines them) has the right to withhold disclosure of potentially harmful PFAS used in its operations if disclosure would expose to the public a unique proprietary formula—except in the case of reporting an accident or spill.
The lone supporter of full disclosure in a 2–1 vote was Commissioner Greg Bloom of the State Land Office. Explaining his vote, Bloom stated, “There are a lot of PFAS chemicals, potentially hundreds of thousands, that have not been safety tested,” that could be hidden in the attempt to protect trade secrets. In his testimony he also shared, “1.5 ounces [of these chemicals] would contaminate 100,000 acre-feet of water, an acre-foot is enough water for two or three houses for a year, it’s hundreds of thousands of gallons. So the toxicity of this is almost the level of where it’s unfathomable and they haven’t been safety tested, they’re being spilled on the ground; we heard testimony they could be evaporated into the air. We don’t know what happens with that.”
“In In New Mexico, we are experiencing the real-time, tangible effects of climate change. The strategies of denial and procrastination have led us to the point of crisis management, which, to me, is reflected in the reactionary language of legislation that attempts to balance the need to protect both public health and industrial privacy.
Without being required to disclose the chemicals used, Bloom observed, companies working in the state cannot feasibly be held accountable. He said, “Simply, if a company wants to bring chemicals into New Mexico, transport them, potentially spill them, may or may not report them, may or may not have them cleaned up. . . . We should know what chemicals are being used out there.” In defense of his position, Commissioner Bloom also offered, “I think our charge is to protect public health and the environment; it’s not necessarily to ensure trade secret status for chemicals which we now know are incredibly toxic.”
Responding to the commission’s decision in the March 11 press release, Melissa Troutman, climate and health advocate at WildEarth Guardians, said, “This decision gives the illusion of progress, but without enforceability through disclosure, it’s nothing more than posturing. Industry’s stranglehold on New Mexico politics is suffocating, and today’s ruling proves it.”
In support of the commission’s decision not to demand full disclosure is the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association (NMOGA), which describes itself as “a coalition of oil and natural gas companies, individuals, and stakeholders dedicated to promoting the safe and environmentally responsible development of oil and natural gas resources in New Mexico.” According to NMOGA’s website, “Advanced technologies have allowed the industry and regulators to better understand produced water and how it can be treated and reused in both the oil and gas industry and other agricultural or industrial processes. Reusing produced water turns a waste product into a valuable resource, promoting conservation of our freshwater supplies for essential uses such as drinking, agriculture, and ecosystem support.”
March 22, 2025, was World Water Day, observed specifically to advocate for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. The date also marked the end of the first session of the 57th Legislature of New Mexico, where a House Bill (HB 222) proposed “requiring
disclosures of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations and downhole operations” and prohibiting the use of fracking and drilling fluids containing PFAS. The bill did not pass, so the Oil Conservation Commission’s ban remains the legal safeguard for protecting New Mexico’s waterways from PFAS contamination. In light of the bill not passing, Troutman responded via press release, “Farmers, first responders, water well owners, and medical professionals need access to chemical pollution data to protect health and safety. But in New Mexico, oil and gas is allowed to keep chemicals secret, prioritizing profits over public health and our right to know what chemicals are being dispersed into our communities.”
In New Mexico, approximately 81 percent of the public water supply comes from groundwater sources, and over 76 percent of the state’s surface water goes toward agriculture. Groundwater is water that infiltrates the ground and fills the spaces between soil particles and cracks in rock formations known as aquifers. Aquifers are replenished by rain and snowmelt, and the naturally arid conditions of the Southwest, compounded by population growth and severe drought, have had a dramatic impact on the state’s groundwater reserves.
In the same legislative session, another bill was successful. According to the Office of the Governor’s website, HB 137 “is a key component of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s 50-Year Water Action Plan, designed to protect the state’s limited freshwater resources. By treating and incentivizing the use of salty underground water, the Strategic Water Strategy supports manufacturing and clean energy needs while preserving community drinking water supplies.” An earlier version of the bill included projects involving the reuse of treated produced water, or wastewater from oil and gas production. While those terms were cut from the final version of HB 137, Governor Lujan Grisham remains committed to continuing research on produced water treatment, which she sees as “a critical tool for New Mexico’s long-term water security.”
Aerial view of oil pads in New Mexico, photo by Purplexsu Photography.
On March 12, in announcing a promise to “modernize outdated regulations on wastewater discharges for oil and gas extraction facilities” and deliver on President Trump’s energy agenda, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lee Zeldin said, “EPA will revise wastewater regulations from the 1970s that do not reflect modern capability to treat and reuse water for good. As a result, we will lower production costs for oil and gas extraction to boost American energy while increasing water supplies and protecting water quality.”
Leading the charge in researching produced water treatment in New Mexico is the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium (NMPWRC), which was established in 2019 in response to the Produced Water Act of the same year. In order to establish regulations and policies for the reuse of produced water outside the oil and gas sector, the NMED entered into a memorandum of understanding with New Mexico State University in September 2019 to create the NMPWRC. In addition to filling “scientific and technical knowledge gaps” needed to establish such regulations, the consortium’s stated goals include accelerating technology and processing “research, development, and implementation for environmentally sound, safe, and cost-effective reuse of produced water for industrial, construction, agricultural, rangeland, livestock, municipal, aquifer storage, surface water, and/or other applications.”
When asked about the research on produced water, and specifically their findings on using produced water in agricultural applications, NMPWRC’s program director Mike Hightower said, “What we’re in the process of right now is treating it for agriculture. We’re looking very closely at treating water that can be used. Even though we’re looking for it, we don’t see a lot of PFAS in produced water from oil and gas wastewater. Our focus has been on organics, and we’re finding that we can remove the organics well. Some of the constituents that people are worried about are not in produced water. We can make this water very high quality. All of our current data is suggesting that we can make that water appropriate for agricultural food production.” As to when the consortium might determine the safety of applying produced water in agricultural production, Hightower said, “We’ll have
enough data within the next two years. The EPA is really interested in this, and trying to protect all of the potential applications.”
In New Mexico, we are experiencing the real-time, tangible effects of climate change. The strategies of denial and procrastination have led us to the point of crisis management, which, to me, is reflected in the reactionary language of legislation that attempts to balance the need to protect both public health and industrial privacy. How we arrived here matters less now than how we move forward. As the debates about these recent votes show, there still seems to be a wide gap between the narratives of the opposing viewpoints. Speaking of the chemical disclosure bill that failed to pass, Troutman added, “Though HB 222 didn’t get to the governor’s desk this year, we will continue to push for chemical disclosure until we get it, and we need the public’s support to make that happen.” The need to act fast has always been voiced by environmentalists, and the legislation that was approved by the state sets the stage for introducing produced water into the public water supply, a strategy that presents a reasonable cause for concern due precisely to what may be perceived as the lack of time available to invest in evaluating the long-term ramifications.
In journalist Steven Solomon’s book Water, published in 2010, he wrote, “The age of water scarcity consequently heralds the potential start of a momentous transition in the trajectory of water and world history: from the traditional paradigm based on centralized, massscale infrastructure that extracted, treated, and delivered ever greater, absolute supplies from nature to a new efficiency paradigm built upon more decentralized, scaled-to-task, and environmentally harmonious solutions that make more productive use of existing supplies.”
Perhaps we are now at a point where we have no choice but to accept our current (no pun intended) reality, and brace ourselves for a paradigm shift that demands a greater public responsibility in understanding the real and potential threats to our water alongside a willingness to embrace and support the developing technologies that we will be dependent upon to preserve our most basic common need. The moment upon us demands diligence and steadiness as we navigate these chaotic rapids.
Food Safety Laboratory and greenhouses at the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at NMSU, host to the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, photos by Shahid Mustafa.
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Boozy Paletas
Words and Photos by Stephanie Cameron
CANTALOUPE MARGARITA POPS
The only thing more refreshing than a margarita poolside on a hot summer day is a frozen margarita in Popsicle form. These buzzworthy pops garnished with chamoy and chile salt are perfect for summer soirees.
4 cups cantaloupe, seeded and cubed
1/2 cup tequila (high-quality reposado or silver)
3 teaspoons lime juice, freshly squeezed
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons triple sec or other orange liqueur
1/4 cup Tajín or chile salt for garnish (optional)
1/4 cup chamoy for garnish (optional)
Place melon, tequila, lime juice, honey, and orange liqueur in a blender and process until smooth. Pour melon mixture into molds, snap on lids, insert Popsicle sticks, and freeze for 6 hours or overnight.
To garnish: Remove paletas from mold, dip in chamoy, sprinkle on Tajín or other chile salt, and serve immediately.
CUCUMBER GIN POPS
Adapted from Molly Yeh
Cucumbers and gin go together like ramma-lammalamma-ka-dinga-da-dinga-dong, and a sprinkle of za’atar and bee pollen add the shoo-bop-shawhadda-whadda-yippidy-boom-da-boom that make these pops sing.
1 pound cucumbers, coarsely chopped (I use Persian cucumbers)
1/4 cup gin (I use Los Poblanos Western Dry Gin)
1/4 cup honey
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon bee pollen (I use Moses Bee Pollen)
1 teaspoon za’atar, plus more for topping
Combine cucumbers, gin, honey, lemon, bee pollen, and za’atar in a high-speed blender and blend until very smooth. Pour into Popsicle molds and sprinkle each with a small pinch of za’atar. Snap on lids, insert Popsicle sticks, and freeze for 6 hours or overnight.
Note: See ice pop tips on page 49.
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
ESPRESSO MARTINI
CHEF & SHAKER BRUNCH
WITH CARAVEDO PISCO | JUNE 1, 12 – 2 PM
Enjoy a cocktail pairing brunch from Chef Eric Stumpf and Caravedo Pisco Ambassador Jared Sasso. Learn a little, enjoy a lot!
HAPPY HOUR WITH TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA
JUNE 3, 3–6 PM
Enjoy complimentary drinks while you learn the process from Tito’s brand ambassadors.
THE ORIGINAL SANTA FE WHISKEY COCKTAIL & FOOD PAIRING WITH SANTA FE SPIRITS
JUNE 4, 6 PM, TICKETED
Enjoy a featured cocktail, a four-whiskey flight, and hors d’oeuvres crafted by executive chef Eric Stumpf.
BOXCAR PRESENTS TITO’S DANCE PARTY!
JUNE 6, 7–9 PM
Join us for live music, games, prizes, and samples of our featured Tito’s Handmade Vodka Cocktail. Performing artist Jabob Acosta playing 6–8 PM followed by Gemini Night with DJ Dynamite Sol 9 PM–2 AM.
COCKTAIL PAIRING
MAY 31–JUNE 8
We will be serving Tuna “Poke” filled Wonton Crisp with our Garden to Glass Martini all week.
Cocktails & Culture Festival
Friday, May 30, 5–8 pm: TACO WARS
Saturday, May 31, 11 am–12 pm: Mind Body Spirit(s) Yoga
Saturday, May 31, 12–2:30 pm: Special Spirits Tasting
Sunday, June 1, 12–2 pm: Chef & Shaker Brunch with Caravedo Pisco
Sunday, June 1, 5–7 pm: Cat Gods Goddesses Deities & Demons
Book Party and Kitty Cocktails
FEATURED CHEFS
Edmundo Mendoza, Mas Chile Food Truck (2nd place winner in 2024)
Fernando Ruiz, Escondido
Jeffery Kaplan, Rowley’s Farmhouse Ales
Michael Dooley, Sunday at Grams Private Chef
Craig Moya, NM Hard Cider
Nate Clements, Time Travelers Pub
Jerry Dakan, Santa Fe Community College Culinary
Jackson Ault, Santa Fe Chef
Beverly Crespin, Dragonfly Tea House
Angel Franco, Palace
Raymond Naranjo, Manko
Eric Stumpf, Boxcar
Victoria Bruneni, Capitol Cafe / What the Truck
Christus Emergency Room Nurses, Taco Emergency (community team)
Ginger Sour
An herbal zero-proof refresher that captures the bright and tangy flavors of lemon and sumac with the warmth of ginger and honey, and the herbal notes from juniper berry and coriander. Topped with an aquafaba foam and sprinkle of sumac dust.
WINE COCKTAILS, MOCKTAILS & GOOD VIBES
JUNE 3, 4, AND 5, at 6:30, 7, 7:30, and 8 pm
Farm Bar Cocktail Event: Gather your friends and make plans to join us for a casual cocktail event on the farm. The all-inclusive price includes two artisan wine cocktails or mocktails, two appetizers, and gratuity. Get your tickets at farmandtablenm.com.
FARM & TABLE 8917 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque 505-503-7124, farmandtablenm.com Giggle Water tapatio tequila | genepy | calvados | lime cucumber | madagascar vanilla | prosecco side car PALACE 142 W Palace, Santa Fe 505-919-9935, palaceprimesf.com
Hello Cocktail Lovers!
We are excited to present the third year of New Mexico Cocktail Week, which highlights participating bars and restaurants around the Land of Enchantment and the spirits brands that are the foundation for our cocktail programming. We proudly promote and support our incredible cocktail and culinary community in New Mexico, and our success is due to the collaboration between all of us in the industry–participating venues and spirits producers as well as everyone who loves great food and drinks.
We can’t wait to see you out and about and raise a glass together!
Cheers,
Natalie Bovis, The Liquid Muse Events
Stephanie Cameron, edible New Mexico Co-founders
FEATURED COCKTAILS
Choose your own adventure and enjoy these featured cocktails all week long at venues around the state.
Featured Cocktail: BACK IN THE SADDLE
4803 Rio Grande NW, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque 505-985-5000, lospoblanos.com
Featured Cocktail: DESPERADO 717 Central NW, Albuquerque 505-472-7233, dwtnrbar.com
LOS CONEJOS
Featured Cocktail: EL CARMEN
1504 Central SE, Albuquerque 505-242-7490 copperloungeabq.com/conejos-home
Featured Cocktail: AGUA BENDITA A.K.A. HOLY WATER
125 Second Street NW, Albuquerque 505-923-9080 hotelandaluz.com/sip-and-savor/char
Featured Cocktail: GINGER SOUR
8917 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque 505-503-7124, farmandtablenm.com
Featured Cocktail: PISTACHIO MARTINI
2402 Central SW, Albuquerque 505-389-7870, themontereymotel.com
Featured Cocktail: ELEVATED DAIQUIRI
3123 Central SE, Ste D, Lower Level Albuquerque daydreamrumbar.com
Featured Cocktail: MOUNTAIN LION
2000 Bellamah NW, Albuquerque, 505-318-3998 hotelchaco.com/eat-drink/level-5
Featured Cocktail: SECRET GARDEN
Multiple locations in Albuquerque mtuccis.com FIND ALL EVENT DETAILS AT
Tamarind-and-serrano-pepper-infused reposado tequila, Tajín-infused Bacardi, agua de melon (cantaloupe fresh water), vanilla and orange bitters, and lime juice.
AT HOTEL ANDALUZ 125 Second Street NW, Albuquerque, 505-923-9080, hotelandaluz.com/sip-and-savor/char
Rum Forrest Rum
VARA Noche Negra Rum, fresh lime, mint leaves, muddled blackberry, simple syrup, club soda finish.
JUNE 4, 6 PM COCKTAIL CLASS
Join us for a cocktail-making class in Santa Fe with our distiller, Ayisha, and learn and drink simultaneously. Tickets available at varawines.com.
VARA WINERY & DISTILLERY
329 W San Francisco, Santa Fe, 505-898-6280 201 Hermosa NE, Albuquerque, varawines.com
FEATURED COCKTAILS
Choose your own adventure and enjoy these featured cocktails all week long at venues around the state.
Featured Cocktail: JASMINE SAZERAC
600 Central SW, Albuquerque 505-503-6722, oniabq.com
Featured Cocktail: PONDEROSA SUNSET WHISKEY REFRESHER 1761 Bellamah NW, Albuquerque 505-639-5941, ponderosabrewing.com
Featured Cocktail: ABSINTHE - MINDED
2031 Mountain NW, Albuquerque 505-766-5100, seasonsabq.com
Featured Cocktail: MOJO MARTINI 701 Central NE, Albuquerque 505-460-1950, theimperialabq.com
Featured Cocktail: TRACTOR MARGARITA
1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque 505-243-6752, getplowed.com
Featured Cocktail: SHADES OF RED 120 Marble NW, Albuquerque 505-203-6626, @stillspirits
Featured Cocktail: VERDE ES VIDA 3201 Central NE, Albuquerque 505-508-1177, thesmokynote.com
Featured Cocktail: RUM FORREST RUM
201 Hermosa NE and 315 Alameda NE, Albuquerque 505-988-7222, varawines.com
Featured Cocktail: SPRING SPRITZER 10601 Montgomery NE, Albuquerque 505-294-9463, savoyabq.com
Featured Cocktail: KENTUCKY NINJA 1504 Central SE, Albuquerque 505-242-7490, copperloungeabq.com
Featured Cocktail: BACK IN THE SADDLE 1318 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque 505-808-1715, lospoblanos.com
Featured Cocktail: THE SON OF MAN 623 Twelfth Street, Las Vegas 505-563-0477, giant-skillet.com
Barrel Aged Negroni
Gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, aged in our El Nido cask for three months.
HAPPY HOUR AT THE ZOZOBRA BAR
JUNE 5, 4:30–5:30 PM
Come join us for happy hour and enjoy our Barrel Aged Negroni and fried chickpeas. We will also be offering some of our wood-fired pizzas at a special price.
EL NIDO & SU SUSHI
1577 Bishops Lodge, Santa Fe 505-954-1272, elnidosantafe.com
The Son of Man
Soonhari, Apple Mango Soju, lime, green apple, simple syrup, and egg white.
“SURREAL SUMMER SIESTA”
JUNE 7, 4–9 PM, TICKETED
A four-course food and cocktail experience—each inspired by iconic surrealist art. Indulge in creative dishes and drinks while enjoying live music, all in a vibrant, art-infused atmosphere. A night of flavor, music, and imagination awaits! Music by Mineral Hill. After-party 9 pm–12 am.
$150 tickets available at giant-skillet.com
THE SKILLET 623 Twelfth Street, Las Vegas 505-563-0477, giant-skillet.com
FEATURED COCKTAILS
Choose your own adventure and enjoy these featured cocktails all week long at venues around the state.
Featured Cocktail: BLUE HAWAIIAN MIXED-UP CANNED COCKTAIL
200 N Bullard St, Silver City 119 N Main St, Las Cruces littletoadcreeek.com
Featured Cocktail: GARDEN TO GLASS MARTINI
133 W Water, Santa Fe 505-808-1715, boxcar-restaurants.com
Featured Cocktail: GIGGLE WATER 142 W Palace, Santa Fe 917-822-6940, palacesf.com
Featured Cocktail: SPRING: GARDEN RHUBARB GIMLET
2791 Agua Fria, Santa Fe 505-303-3808 tumblerootbreweryanddistillery.com
Featured Cocktail: SPELLBOUND
545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe 505-916-8596, aasbdistillery.com
Featured Cocktail: BARREL AGED NEGRONI 1577 Bishops Lodge, Santa Fe 505-954-1272, elnidosantafe.com
Featured Cocktail: PALAASH 551 W Cordova, Santa Fe 505-930-5521, paper-dosa.com
Featured Cocktail: RUM FORREST RUM
329 W San Francisco, Santa Fe 505-910-0494, varawines.com
Featured Cocktail: BACK IN THE SADDLE 201 Washington, Santa Fe 505-808-1713, lospoblanos.com
Featured Cocktail: MILK PUNCH 418 Montezuma, Unit C, Santa Fe 505-946-8172, milkofthepoppybar.com
Featured Cocktail: THE SANTA FE GOLD RUSH 7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe 505-467-8892, santafespirits.com
Do you want to be part of New Mexico Cocktail Week in 2026? Email us at Cheers@NMCocktailWeek.com
DAILY SPECIAL: MAY 31–JUNE 8
Taste our new whiskey for $8.
Ponderosa Bourbon Bomb
Ponderosa Spirits’ Single Barrel Straight Whiskey, muddled cherries, and orange slices, topped with Goslings ginger beer.
Pistachio Martini
Local vodka, cold-pressed lime juice, pistachio syrup, gold edible glitter, crushed pistacio rim, and lime wheel.
MOJITO MONDAY AT MOMO
JUNE 2, 5 PM
Momo Lounge is a local watering hole with the coolest Route 66 vibes, located at the Monterey Motel.
PONDEROSA BREWING COMPANY 1761 Bellamah NW, Albuquerque 505-639-5941, ponderosabrewing.com
MOMO LOUNGE AT THE MONTERY MOTEL 2402 Central SW, Albuquerque 505-389-7870, themontereymotel.com
PARTIES |
TASTINGS / CLASSES |
COCKTAIL PAIRING DINNERS |
COCKTAIL & FOOD PAIRINGS
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL | FIND ALL EVENT DETAILS AT NMCOCKTAILWEEK.COM
May 30
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL: TACO WARS
MAY 30, 5–8 PM, TICKETED
The official opening party of the Cocktails & Culture Festival and New Mexico Cocktail Week!
Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Pavilion, 1607 Paseo De Peralta
May 31
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL: MIND BODY SPIRIT(S) YOGA
MAY 31, 11 AM–12 PM, TICKETED
Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave, Santa Fe
Tickets at theliquidmuse.com.
SANTA FE SPIRITS
SANTA FE SPIRITS DISTILLERY TOUR & TASTING
MAY 31, 11 AM–4 PM
7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL:
SPECIAL SPIRITS TASTING
SATURDAY, MAY 31, 12–2:30 PM
Milk of the Poppy, 418 Montezuma, Unit C, Santa Fe Presented by Cocktails & Culture Festival Brands Tickets at theliquidmuse.com.
TOWN & RANCH | SURF ROCK TIKI NIGHT
MAY 31, 12–9 PM, TICKETED
1318 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, lospoblanos.com
TUMBLEROOT BREWERY & DISTILLERY
GUIDED SPIRIT TASTING AT TUMBLEROOT POTTERY PUB
MAY 31, 2 PM, TICKETED
135 W Palace, Santa Fe, tumblerootbreweryanddistillery.com
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW DISTILLERY
NEW SPIRITS RELEASE PARTY!
MAY 31, 3–9 PM
545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe, aasbdistillery.com
June 1
M’TUCCI’S BAR ROMA
TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA SECRET
GARDEN BRUNCH PATIO PARTY
JUNE 1, 10 AM, MAKE RESERVATIONS
3222 Central SE, Albuquerque, 505-401-7647 mtuccis.com
SANTA FE SPIRITS
SANTA FE SPIRITS DISTILLERY TOUR & TASTING
JUNE 1, 11 AM–4 PM
7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL:
CHEF & SHAKER BRUNCH WITH CARAVEDO PISCO
JUNE 1, 12–2 PM, TICKETED
Enjoy a cocktail pairing brunch from Chef Eric Stumpf and Caravedo Pisco ambassador Jared Sasso. Learn a little, enjoy a lot!
Boxcar, 133 W Water, Santa Fe Tickets at theliquidmuse.com.
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING AT TRACTOR WELLS PARK THE ULTIMATE LOCAL BLOODY MARY SUNDAY
JUNE 1, 1–7 PM 1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, getplowed.com
SANTA FE SPIRITS
SMOKE & SPIRITS: A SUMMER BBQ COOKING CLASS WITH SANTA FE SPIRITS
JUNE 1, 2–5 PM, TICKETED
Learn to craft backyard favorites with a New Mexico twist while sipping cocktails made with our award-winning local spirits at Santa Fe School of Cooking. 125 N Guadalupe, Santa Fe, santafeschoolofcooking.com
COCKTAILS & CULTURE FESTIVAL: CAT GODS GODDESSES DEITIES & DEMONS
BOOK PARTY AND KITTY COCKTAILS
JUNE 1, 5–7 PM
As Above, So Below, 545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe
Santa Fe Gold Rush
The Original Santa Fe Whiskey - Original Mesquite, fresh lemon juice, and mesquite honey syrup.
JOIN US FOR ALL OUR EVENTS DURING NM COCKTAIL WEEK
Check out our full calendar of events and follow us @SantaFeSpirits to stay in the loop. From a cozy barrel room dinner, a hands-on cooking class, and the one-day-only return of Read St.—you won’t want to miss a sip!
SANTA FE SPIRITS
7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe 505-467-8892, santafespirits.com
MOJO Martini
An espresso martini featuring local vodka, espresso from our own coffeeshop MOJO Rising, Tumbleroot Luna Negra liquor, and sweetened with maple syrup.
EDIBLE NEW MEXICOs
POOL PARTY AT THE IMPERIAL JUNE 8, 1–4 PM, TICKETED
Grab your beach attire and sample cocktails from the New Mexico Distiller’s Guild and bites from The Imperial’s food vendors.
THE IMPERIAL DIVE
701 Central NE, Albuquerque 505-389-7870, theimperialabq.com
EVENTS
June 2
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW DISTILLERY
PRE-SHIFT: INDUSTRY APPRECIATION
JUNE 2, 4–10 PM
545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe, aasbdistillery.com
MOMO LOUNGE | MOJITO MONDAY AT MOMO
JUNE 2, 5 PM
2402 Central SW, Albuquerque, themontereymotel.com
SEASONS ROTISSERIE & GRILL
COCKTAIL MAKING CLASS: BEGINNER
JUNE 2, 6:30 PM, TICKETED
First class of our three-course cocktail making series with Josh Morey. Includes a set of bartending tools to keep. 2031 Mountain NW, Albuquerque, seasonsabq.com
June 3
TOWN & RANCH | DISTILLERY TOURS
JUNE 3–7, 3–6 PM
Go behind the scenes with our head distiller, Jamie Lord, and see how Los Poblanos Botanical Spirits are made. Drop in between 3 and 6 pm for a 20-minute tour, a guided tasting of our two gins, and a casual Q&A session. 1318 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, 505-808-1715 lospoblanos.com
BOXCAR | HAPPY HOUR WITH TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA
JUNE 3, 3–6 PM
Join Tito’s brand ambassadors as they explain the craft of making America’s favorite vodka. Enjoy complimentary drinks while you learn the process. 133 W Water, Santa Fe, boxcar-restaurants.com
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING
AT TRACTOR WELLS PARK
MINI MARGARITA FLIGHT ON TACO TUESDAY
JUNE 3, 5–8 PM
1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, getplowed.com
FARM & TABLE
WINE COCKTAILS, MOCKTAILS & GOOD VIBES
JUNE 3, 4, AND 5, RESERVATIONS at 6:30, 7, 7:30, and 8 pm. Farm Bar Cocktail Event: Gather your friends and make plans to join us for a casual cocktail event on the farm. 8917 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, farmandtablenm.com
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW DISTILLERY
COCKTAIL HISTORY TRIVIA: Hosted by Quiz Lizard
JUNE 3, 6:30 PM
545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe, aasbdistillery.com
June 4
TOWN & RANCH | DISTILLERY TOURS
JUNE 3–7, 3–6 PM
See June 3 listing for details.
DWTNR | TROPICAL SIPS & JUKEBOX HITS
JUNE 4, 6 PM
717 Central NW, Albuquerque, dwtnrbar.com
VARA WINERY & DISTILLERY
COCKTAIL MAKING CLASS
JUNE 4, 6 PM, TICKETED
Join our distiller, Ayisha, and learn and drink simultaneously. 329 W San Francisco, Santa Fe, varawines.com
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING
AT TRACTOR WELLS PARK
Tricks of the Trade Cocktail Making Class with Filly.
JUNE 4, 6–8 PM, TICKETED 1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, getplowed.com
BOXCAR AND SANTA FE SPIRITS
THE ORIGINAL SANTA FE WHISKEY COCKTAIL & FOOD PAIRING
JUNE 4, 6 PM, TICKETED
A food pairing event hosted by Santa Fe Spirits’ master distiller in Boxcar’s Speakeasy Room. Enjoy a featured cocktail, a four-whiskey flight, hors d’oeuvres crafted by executive chef Eric Stumpf, and stories from the team. 133 W Water, Santa Fe, boxcar-restaurants.com and santafespirits.com
EVENTS
• PARTIES | • TASTINGS / CLASSES | • COCKTAIL PAIRING DINNERS | • COCKTAIL & FOOD PAIRINGS FIND ALL EVENT DETAILS AT NMCOCKTAILWEEK.COM
FARM & TABLE
WINE COCKTAILS, MOCKTAILS & GOOD VIBES
JUNE 3, 4, AND 5, RESERVATIONS at 6:30, 7, 7:30, and 8 pm. See June 3 listing for details.
June 5
SANTA FE SPIRITS
SANTA FE SPIRITS DISTILLERY TOUR & TASTING
JUNE 5, 11 AM–4 PM
7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
TOWN & RANCH | DISTILLERY TOURS
JUNE 3–7, 3–6 PM
See June 3 listing for details.
EL NIDO & SU SUSHI
HAPPY HOUR AT THE ZOZOBRA BAR
JUNE 5, 4:30–5:30 PM
Join us for our Barrel Aged Negroni and fried chickpeas; we will also offer some of our wood-fired pizzas at a special price.
1577 Bishops Lodge, Santa Fe, elnidosantafe.com
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING AT TRACTOR
WELLS PARK | SLIDER & COCKTAIL PAIRING
JUNE 5, 5–7 PM
2 handcrafted cocktails paired with 2 Heavy Burgers sliders. 1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, getplowed.com
SANTA FE SPIRITS
CASK THIEF EXPERIENCE
JUNE 5, 4–7 PM, TICKETED
Roam through our stills and rackhouse, tasting straight from six rare barrels hand-selected for this exclusive Cask Thief Experience. Love what you taste? Bottles available for one night only.
7505 Mallard Way, Ste I, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
FARM & TABLE
WINE COCKTAILS, MOCKTAILS & GOOD VIBES
JUNE 3, 4, AND 5, RESERVATIONS at 6:30, 7, 7:30, and 8 pm. See June 3 listing for details.
June 6
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING AT ALL TRACTOR
LOCATIONS | SUMMER COCKTAIL MENU RELEASE
JUNE 6, 2 PM
Multiple locations, getplowed.com
TOWN & RANCH | DISTILLERY TOURS
JUNE 3–7, 3–6 PM
See June 3 listing for details.
SANTA FE SPIRITS | BARREL ROOM DINNER
JUNE 6, 6 PM, TICKETED
A thoughtfully paired multicourse meal, each dish complemented by a bespoke Original Santa Fe Whiskey cocktail. 7505 Mallard Way STE I, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
BOXCAR | BOXCAR PRESENTS TITO’S DANCE PARTY!
JUNE 6, 7–9 PM
Join us for live music, games, prizes, and samples of our featured Tito’s Handmade Vodka Cocktail. 133 W Water, Santa Fe, boxcar-restaurants.com
June 7
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW DISTILLERY
ODE TO THE MARTINI
JUNE 7, ALL DAY
Special martini menu and martini flights available. 545 Camino De La Familia, Santa Fe, aasbdistillery.com
TROUBLED MINDS DISTILLING AT TRACTOR WELLS PARK
SATURDAY COCKTAIL HAPPY HOUR
JUNE 7, 3–6 PM
Celebrate the release of our new summer cocktail menu with $3 off ALL cocktails!
1800 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, getplowed.com
TOWN & RANCH | DISTILLERY TOURS
JUNE 3–7, 3–6 PM
See June 3 listing for details.
Pool Party edible’s at The Imperial
TICKETS AVAILABLE AT EDIBLENM.COM
June 8, 1–4 pm
Grab your beach attire and sample cocktails from the New Mexico Distiller’s Guild and bites from The Imperial’s food vendors.
THE SKILLET | SURREAL SUMMER SIESTA
JUNE 7, 4–9 PM, TICKETED
A four-course food and cocktail experience, each inspired by iconic surrealist art. Music by Mineral Hill. After party 9 pm–12 am. 623 Twelfth Street, Las Vegas, giant-skillet.com
SANTA FE SPIRITS | READ ST. POP UP
JUNE 7, 4–9 PM
Come hang with us for the long-awaited return—featuring Backyard BBQ, music, and plenty of Santa Fe Spirits. 308 Read, Santa Fe, santafespirits.com
DAYDREAM RUM BAR
DAYDREAM CHRISTENING CELEBRATION
JUNE 7, 6–10 PM
All great voyages deserve a proper christening. Join us as we toast to Daydream’s embarkation with sparkling wine, tropical cocktails, and exquisite rum tastings. 3123 Central NE, Albuquerque, daydreamrumbar.com
June 8
SEASONS ROTISSERIE & GRILL
COCKTAIL PAIRING BRUNCH
JUNE 8, 11 AM & 12:30 PM, MAKE RESERVATIONS
Four-course brunch paired with cocktails. There is a mocktail version for those who wish to skip the booze. 2031 Mountain NW, Albuquerque, seasonsabq.com
TUMBLEROOT BREWERY & DISTILLERY
SECOND ANNUAL TUMBLEROOT GARDEN PARTY
JUNE 8, 2–8 PM
Get inspired to grow botanicals to infuse your own gin. Stock your garden with shoots and seedlings from local vendors while you enjoy live music and sip our craft beers, spirits, and cocktails.
2791 Agua Fria, Santa Fe, tumblerootbreweryanddistillery.com
THE IMPERIAL DIVE | EDIBLE NEW MEXICO’s POOL PARTY AT THE IMPERIAL
JUNE 8, 1–4 PM, TICKETED
The official closing party to New Mexico Cocktail Week. Throw on your best beachwear and join us for cocktails and bites by the pool. Tickets available at ediblenm.com. 701 Central NE, Albuquerque
All Week
BOXCAR | COCKTAIL PAIRING
MAY 31–JUNE 8
We will be serving Tuna “Poke” filled Wonton Crisp with our Garden to Glass Martini all week.
133 W Water, Santa Fe, boxcar-restaurants.com
PONDEROSA BREWING CO. | DAILY SPECIAL
MAY 31–JUNE 8
Taste our new whiskey for $8.
1761 Bellamah NW, Albuquerque, ponderosabrewing.com
