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MEMBER OF EDIBLE COMMUNITIES
NEW MEXICO THE STORY OF LOCAL FOOD, SEASON BY SEASON IN NEW MEXICO
New and Next ISSUE 67 · SPRING • APRIL / MAY 2020
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radishandrye.com 505.930.5325
SPRING: APRIL / MAY DEPARTMENTS 2 4
A LETTER TO OUR COMMUNITY GRIST FOR THE MILL By Willy Carleton and Candolin Cook
56 WORTH THE TRIP Gallivanting in Gallup by Cyndi Wood
74 THE PLATE
Legal Tender Saloon and Eating House by Douglas Merriam
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CONTRIBUTORS
80 #EDIBLENM
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LOCAL HEROES
81 SOURCE GUIDE / EAT LOCAL GUIDE
24 28 32
Oni, Little Bear Coffee Co., The Food Depot, and 505 Food Fights
EDIBLE INNOVATOR Farm-to-Market by Katie Goetz
FERMENTI'S PARADOX Accelerating Tradition by Joshua Johnson
AT THE CHEF'S TABLE Curiouser and Curiouser by Joanna Manganaro Toto
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FACES OF FOOD
40
COOKING FRESH
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EIGHT AROUND THE STATE
Apogee Spirulina by Robin Babb Brick Toast: Digging into Dessert
ON THE COVER
edible
MEMBER OF EDIBLE COMMUNITIES
NEW MEXICO
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THE STORY OF LOCAL FOOD, SEASON BY SEASON IN NEW MEXICO
88 LAST BITE
Cherry Flip Mocktail by Natalie Bovis
FEATURES 62 HALL OF A GOOD TIME
Will the Modern Food Hall Take Off in New Mexico? by Nora Hickey
New and Next ISSUE 67 · SPRING • APRIL / MAY 2020
New and Next. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
66 THE NOT-SO-SECRET LIFE OF PLASTIC Local Waste, From Farm to Table by Briana Olson
72 THE HEART OF MEAT
The Conversation on Cell-based Meats and the Future of Local Ranching Comes to New Mexico by Willy Carleton
Breakfast WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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#SUPPORTLOCAL WE RELY ON SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT in order for us to tell the story of local food. Without them, we would not be able to share the stories of the good food movement! Make it a priority, when everything has gone back to normal, to support these businesses! WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW—Support your local businesses by buying gift cards, merchandise, mail order, ANYTHING to get a little money in their coffers now, when they need it most. This goes for restaurants, bakeries and cafes, but also farms, farmstands, breweries, spirits shops, housewares, and more. Sign up NOW for a CSA. COMMIT TO THE FUTURE—When it has been deemed safe by officials and health safety experts, go out and patronize local small businesses and farmers with renewed commitment and urgency. Make it a local food BONANZA. Put your local farmers market’s schedule in your calendar so you can visit it every week.
If every reader of edible New Mexico committed to spending $25 on local today, they would put $1,925,000 back into our economy. What if you did that just once a week for the next year? #supportlocal and buy a gift card, order take out, pick up veggies from a farmer, order a csa, fill a growler . . .
You can find a list of resources on our website at ediblenm.com. 2
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OUR PARTNERS
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What is the one thing local you will do today? WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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GRIST FOR THE MILL PUBLISHERS Bite Size Media, LLC
“In these uncertain times” is a phrase we hear a lot of these days. While the future has always been—and will always be—uncertain, contemporary concerns about the health of our bodies, economy, political system, and planet have left many of us feeling especially anxious and, at times, helpless. The pages in this issue of edible, however, are all about action and vision. From transforming the meat industry to remembering to bring our reusable bags, we showcase how groups and individuals in our food community are working toward a more promising future. We look at the visionaries fusing food with art and science at the Electric Playhouse; delve into the possibility of spirulina becoming a more ubiquitous super food; and discover new techniques for accelerating the aging process of whiskey—many of us could use a stiff drink right about now. Our feature on food halls shows how the business model may inject much-needed capital and growth into our state’s largest city. And our pieces on the future of meat production and plastic consumption, respectively, challenge us to think openly and critically about our complicity in the climate crisis and the steps we’re willing to take to combat it. As we go to print, the news on COVID-19 has been developing at a dizzying pace. As we face the uncertainties ahead, we pause to remember what is most important. We encourage all in our community to remain safe and follow the guidelines issued by public health experts, and support local how and when you can. We offer these pages with the hope that they can provide some inspiration for the future as we all now work together toward maintaining the health and well-being of our community.
Stephanie and Walt Cameron
EDITORS Willy Carleton and Candolin Cook
COPY EDITORS Margaret Marti and Briana Olson
DESIGN AND LAYOUT Stephanie Cameron
PHOTO EDITOR Stephanie Cameron
EVENT COORDINATOR Natalie Donnelly
DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER Joshua Hinte
VIDEO PRODUCER Walt Cameron
SALES AND MARKETING Kate Collins, Melinda Esquibel, Gina Riccobono, and Cyndi Wood
CONTACT US Mailing Address: 3301-R Coors Boulevard NW #152 Albuquerque, NM 87120 info@ediblenm.com www.ediblenm.com
Willy Carleton and Candolin Cook, Editors
SUBSCRIBE ∙ BUY AN AD ∙ LETTERS 505-375-1329 WWW.EDIBLENM.COM We welcome your letters. Write to us at the
Stephanie and Walt Cameron, Publishers
address above, or email us at INFO@EDIBLENM.COM Bite Size Media, LLC publishes edible New Mexico six times a year. We distribute throughout New Mexico and nationally by subscription. Subscriptions are $32 annually. Printed at Courier Graphics Corporation Phoenix, Arizona No part of this publication may be used without the written permission of the publisher. © 2020 All rights reserved.
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B AR C ASTAÑED A
D AYD REAM RUM B AR
L ITTL E B EAR C O FFEE C O.
CONTRIBUTORS ROBIN BABB Robin Babb is a writer and the owner of Harvest Moon Books. She lives in Albuquerque. @harvestmoonbooks STEPHANIE CAMERON Stephanie Cameron was raised in Albuquerque and earned a degree in fine arts at the University of New Mexico. After photographing, testing, and designing a cookbook in 2011, she and her husband Walt began pursuing Edible Communities and they found edible in their backyard. Today Cameron is the art director, head photographer, marketing guru, publisher, and owner of edible New Mexico. WILLY CARLETON Willy Carleton is co-editor of edible New Mexico. He recently completed his PhD in history at the University of New Mexico, with a dissertation examining the cultural history of twentieth-century agriculture in the Southwest. CANDOLIN COOK Candolin Cook is co-editor of edible New Mexico; an associate editor for the New Mexico Historical Review; and a PhD candidate in history at the University of New Mexico, specializing in culture and myth in the American West. She loves all local farms, but especially Vida Verde Farm in Albuquerque. KATIE GOETZ Katie Goetz grew up working alongside her parents, brother, and sisters on their beef cattle ranch in Sierra County. Now a policy analyst at the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, Katie is happily a Jill of all trades. She previously worked as a reporter, spokeswoman, and sixthgrade English teacher. She lives in Las Cruces. NORA HICKEY Nora Hickey is a writer and teacher living in Albuquerque. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Guernica, DIAGRAM, and other journals. She podcasts with City on the Edge and teaches at the University of New Mexico.
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JOSHUA JOHNSON Joshua Johnson practices landscape design and installation, specializing in environmental specificity and appropriateness. His love for gardens has inspired four years as a nurseryman at Albuquerque’s Plants of the Southwest, a lot of landscape maintenance, and various design-build projects in environments as different as New Mexico and the Netherlands. JOANNA MANGANARO TOTO Joanna Manganaro Toto is a freelance writer, new mother, and designer of Sonámbulo Jewelry. A recent Santa Fe transplant, she enjoys scouring estate sales for southwestern treasures and sampling the excellent restaurants in her new city. Check out her designs and vintage finds on Instagram at @sonambulojewelry. DOUGLAS MERRIAM Douglas Merriam is a travel and lifestyle photographer with a passion for anything food-related. He published Farm Fresh Journey: The Santa Fe Farmers Market Cookbook (farmfreshjourney.com), now in its second printing. Merriam gives the Farmers Market a percentage of every book sold. BRIANA OLSON Briana Olson is a freelance writer and editor, and lead editor for the New Farmer’s Almanac, a miscellany of writings and art by farmers, ecologists, and other land-loving types. She enjoys long mountain walks, taking risks in the kitchen, and seeking out new and interesting things to eat, from Bangkok to Albuquerque. CYNDI WOOD Cyndi Wood is a writer, designer, and project manager for a variety of endeavors, from creating annual reports for the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University to producing museum interactive exhibits. But most of all, she enjoys all things food-related, especially when combined with a really good road trip.
Rug with automatic rifles and tanks, unidentified artist. Acquired in Peshawar, Pakistan, 1998.
Explore the ways these unique handwoven rugs update traditional imagery and themes to reflect current events, changing technologies, and the long history of foreign involvement in Afghanistan.
on exhibit through august 30
On Museum Hill in Santa Fe InternationalFolkArt.org ¡ (505) 476-1200
LOCAL HEROES An edible Local Hero is an exceptional individual, business, or organization making a positive impact on New Mexico's food systems. These honorees nurture our communities through food, service, and socially and environmentally sustainable business practices. Edible New Mexico readers nominate and vote for their favorite local chefs, growers, artisans, advocates, and other food professionals in two dozen categories. In each issue of edible, we feature interviews with a handful of the winners, allowing us to get better acquainted with them and the important work they do. Please join us in thanking these Local Heroes for being at the forefront of New Mexico's local food movement.
Oni
AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID GASPAR DE ALBA, CHEF/PARTNER BEST FOOD TRUCK
Co-owners David Gaspar de Alba and Daniel Linver breaking ground on Oni's new brick-and-mortar. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
There’s good news and bad news about Oni Food Truck. The bad is opening a restaurant in Downtown Albuquerque! They will serve
signature dish. Co-owners Daniel Linver and David Gaspar de Alba take pride in designing their menu around seasonal ingredients sourced almost entirely from New Mexico producers.
a variety of Japanese-inspired food and drink, with ramen as their
How did you first develop a passion for cooking?
news is the food truck no longer exists. The great news is that Oni
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8301 Lomas Blvd NE | Albuquerque, NM (505) 260-5000 | garciahonda.com
DISCOVER THE COMPACT SUV FOR YOU
WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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LOCAL HEROES knowing where your food comes from. Oni is not the first establishment where you’ve made Japanese-inspired cuisine. What do you love about Japanese food, as a chef and as an eater? The purity of ingredients. You can’t hide poor-quality product behind layers of fat, cream, and cheese. What is a Japanese ingredient every home cook should keep around? Soy sauce. Real soy sauce. Not water infused with hydrolyzed soy protein and artificial color junk. There is an entire world of beautiful, umami-rich soy sauce out there for us to discover. True fermented soy sauce will add depth to any dish. How do your El Paso roots and living in New Mexico influence your cooking? The fiestas and family get-togethers associated with eating delicious food are my fondest memories growing up in the Southwest. I cook so people can gather and enjoy good company. Pecan Dashi Ramen. Photo courtesy of Oni.
Spending summers working on family farms gave me a true appreciation and respect for food at a young age. Born and raised in El Paso, I relocated to Portland, Oregon, just out of high school. This is where I cultivated a true love for food culture and the industry. I was in the right place at the right time. There were no shortcuts when it came to quality. The best, freshest product you could imagine was from local sources. Since moving back to the Southwest, the majority of my friends here are food producers. I couldn’t be happier. How did the Oni food truck come about? Oni debuted at Marble Brewery downtown New Year’s Day 2017. The winning combination of delicious Marble beer, great ambiance, Oni’s hot ramen, and chilly January weather put our noodles on Albuquerque’s food truck map. Our great friend Wade McCullough provided his kitchen trailer, and we were just a few friends who wanted to share our deep passion for food. More importantly, we wouldn’t be successful without our stellar staff! We all love working together, but I believe their real motive is eating the ramen. As co-owner/chef at Oni, and previously as executive chef at Artichoke Cafe, you have been very committed to sourcing local. Why is this important to you, and how do you make it work? I can talk about this for hours but I’ll keep it short. Sourcing locally is a priority and a responsibility to me as a restaurant owner. As a chef, I want to lessen my environmental impact and carbon footprint as well as support our local food economy and community. There is no other option for me, so we make it work. There are endless benefits to 10
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Oni is in the process of transitioning from a food truck to a brick-and-mortar in Downtown, Albuquerque. What can we expect with the new location? The brick-and-mortar wouldn’t be possible without my partnership with co-owner Daniel Linver. We are currently building out a beautiful space on 6th and Central. I have a profound love for sake and we will be offering a diverse selection, as well as beer and wine. You can expect a festive ambiance, great music, expanded menu, and knowledgeable staff. So far, what has been the most difficult part of opening your own restaurant? What has been the most fun? We are still in the early stages of opening the restaurant, so as expected there are numerous hurdles, but we keep pushing forward. Continuous planning and endless amounts of heart are going into the new restaurant. If you ignore the speed bumps, everything about this is fun. Every day is a new lesson and experience. Tell us something surprising. Oni will be giving away a pair of tickets to any New Mexico United soccer game that I can’t make it to this season. I’m opening a restaurant so I’ll probably have plenty of giveaways. Is there anything else you’d like to share with edible readers? Edible New Mexico is such an outstanding and imperative publication for us here in New Mexico. They discover, recognize, and introduce the soul of our great state to readers. Once again, please take the time, ask questions, and learn where your food comes from. oniabq.com
1301 Cerrillos Rd ■ Santa Fe, NM 87505 ■ (505) 557-6654 ■ www.galleryethnica.com
LOCAL HEROES
Little Bear Coffee Co. AN INTERVIEW WITH JACOB FOX AND ISAAC FOX, OWNERS BEST BEVERAGE ARTISAN, NON-ALCOHOLIC Photos by Stacey M. Adams
Proprietors Jacob Fox and Isaac Fox of Little Bear Coffee Co.
Little Bear Coffee Co. is owned by brothers Jacob and Isaac Fox, along with their colleagues at New Mexico Capital Partners, Tim Fox and Tyler Gerard. The brothers grew up in the East Mountains, where they spent most of their childhood running around in the woods. After graduating from UNM, they began successful careers in real estate and in the food and beverage industry. Little Bear’s first café opened in Uptown in late 2017, and a new location debuted in Nob Hill last November. The coffee shop isn’t their only new endeavor in Nob Hill, however, as they recently partnered with Nob Hill Bar and Grill to open the Daydream Rum Bar, directly across from Little Bear on Central Avenue. Why did you want to enter the coffee business? What do you love about it? I don’t know that we had a super specific reason for entering the coffee business, [except that] we just love coffee and we love people! Coffee is 12
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a connector, and part of what we love so much about coffee culture is how it inherently reflects the community of whatever location it is in. During our years of traveling together, we realized that our opinion of whether or not we liked a place was largely influenced by a handful of small experiences. The coffee shops or bars we got to visit seem to reflect the nature of a community in a way that far exceeds the space’s [physical] footprint. We wanted to build a place in Albuquerque that we felt really reflected what was special about our home, and we continue to do that as we change and grow. What is Little Bear’s philosophy? Little Bear’s mission statement is to “love people, use coffee.” In everything we do, we want to put people first. We still absolutely strive to make the best coffee our customers have ever had on a daily basis, but we always want to make sure that people are prioritized over our product. We strive to be a leader in the world of craft beverage, and be
experience the essence of true santa fe dining EASTER BRUNCH Sunday, April 12 11:00am to 2:30pm 3-Course Prix Fixe Menu $80 per person / $35 under 12 yrs. Reservations Recommended CINCO DE MAYO CLEEBRATION Tuesday, May 5 11:00am to 7:00pm Tasting Menu $65 per person 4:00pm to 6:00pm Enjoy Live Mariachis 11:30am to Close Featuring a Trio of Margaritas $30 MOTHER’S DAY BRUNCH Sunday, May 10 11:00am to 2:30pm 3-Course Prix Fixe Menu $80 per person / $35 under 12 yrs. Reservations Recommended MEMORIAL DAY CELEBRATION Saturday, May 23 to Monday, May 25 11:30am to 5:30pm Ceviche Special $35 per person
ROSEWOOD INN OF THE ANASAZI 113 WASHINGTON AVENUE | SANTA FE, NM 87501 | (505)988-3030 Contemporary Southwestern Cuisine inspired by locally sourced seasonal ingredients. Dining Room · Bar · Patio · Live Entertainment · Private Dining For reservations please call (505) 988-3236
A NA SAZ I RESTAURANT BAR & LOUNGE
Left: Latte art. Right: Little Bear Coffee Co. at the Nob Hill location.
a leader in how companies should play a part in building community. We also want to have a lot of fun, so that’s a priority too! Last year, Little Bear opened a second location in Nob Hill, which includes the retail collective And Stuff. Why did you select that location and collective business model? What has been the community reaction? Nob Hill has always been one of our favorite parts of Albuquerque. We always hoped we could find a cool spot for another café in that neighborhood, and we were really excited when we finally did! Nob Hill has been a destination for local food, beverage, and shopping for a long time. We definitely wanted to contribute to what makes that area of town so great. Lease rates in Nob Hill can be prohibitive, so we decided to have everyone pitch in together to make the whole development more successful and cost effective. From Organ Mountain Outfitters to Prisma Hair Co. to all the awesome businesses collaborating at And Stuff, we made it a priority to find other local businesses who all have an abundance mindset and want each other to be successful. So far, Nob Hill has been nothing but supportive of our efforts in their neighborhood. We were adamant that we wanted New Mexico companies, and that we wanted to preserve as much existing character of the property as possible. Those are both things that Nob Hill really values as a community, and that we value as well. Can you tell us about Little Bear’s design and what inspired it? Our work-life has been mostly centered around real estate with our pops, which led to a love for place-making and wanting to help make spaces that people wanted to be in. We want our Little Bear locations to always feel unique and purposeful to the style of the building and area. Our current cafés are very different from each other aesthetically, and we are really proud that they both feel like their own place. In regard to our branding, we really want our designs to be fun, approachable, and once again rooted in a sense of place. We love our state, and we love Albuquerque, so all of our branding and interior design has undertones of New Mexico, without being too on the nose. 14
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We also focus on making sure there are spaces that are naturally inviting for customer and barista interaction. Through seating and standing space where the baristas work, customers can organically talk with our staff and learn about coffee in a more relational way. What can we look forward to at Little Bear locations in the future? This year, we really want to focus on our wholesale business, so our coffee can be accessible to whoever wants it! We realize we can only reach a certain number of people with our two cafés at the moment, so taking our coffee to other establishments seems like a good way to meet other customers where they are. We are looking forward to partnering with other businesses in our community through the growth of our wholesale program, and we are also offering coffee training to whoever carries our products. We definitely have aspirations of opening more cafés in the future, but those opportunities are probably still a little way out. Is there anything else you’d like to share with edible readers? We hope that everyone’s day is a little brighter because they spent some of their time at Little Bear, and we hope that we continue to create an environment and community where people feel like they matter. We couldn’t have dreamed this project to be as successful as it has been without the help of our first staff and café managers. They made Little Bear special since day one, because they all believed in the type of space and community we wanted to build. Everyone added their own unique voice and talents to collaborate on something bigger than themselves, and we are still striving to continue that effort as we grow. Our love for building physical spaces led to us wanting to activate those spaces in a way that makes our city better. We are continuing to learn how to do that better and better, and collaborate with other people along the way. Working alongside family and friends to help create the home we all want to live in is what drives everything we do. We are looking forward to investing in our community for a long time to come! 3123 Central Ave NE and 2632 Pennsylvania NE, Albuquerque, littlebearcoffeeco.com
Travel Local
TAOS El Monte Sagrado Resort & Spa ElMonteSagrado.com Palacio de Marquesa MarquesaTaos.com
Pictured is Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe.
SANTA FE
Hotel Chaco HotelChaco.com Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town HotelAbq.com
Eldorado Hotel & Spa EldoradoHotel.com Inn and Spa at Loretto HotelLoretto.com Hotel St. Francis HotelStFrancis.com Hotel Chimayo de Santa Fe HotelChimayo.com
ALBUQUERQUE
LAS CRUCES Hotel Encanto de Las Cruces HotelEncanto.com
LOCAL HEROES
The Food Depot
AN INTERVIEW WITH SHERRY F. HOOPER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OUTSTANDING NONPROFIT Photos by Stacey M. Adams
Left: Sherry Hooper, executive director of The Food Depot. Right: Volunteers at work in the warehouse.
As the food bank for nine counties in northern New Mexico, The Food Depot provides food to more than fifty-five thousand people experiencing hunger each quarter. The majority of The Food Depot’s hunger relief services involves food distribution to more than 145 nonprofit programs, including food pantries, hot meal programs, homeless and domestic violence shelters, youth programs, and senior sites. Each month, The Food Depot provides more than 430,000 meals to the most vulnerable of our community: children, seniors, working families, and those in ill health. How did the Food Depot get started? In the early 1990s, it was evident that northern New Mexico needed a food bank. One did not exist and nonprofit agencies were soliciting 16
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food donations independently. To streamline those efforts and allow the agencies to focus on their missions and core competencies, The Food Brigade, Kitchen Angels, and Food for Santa Fe joined forces to create a food bank; planning and start-up operations for The Food Depot were underway in 1993 and 1994. With the dedicated inspiration and support of those three founding organizations, members of The Food Depot’s board of directors, and several community leaders, the food bank program took shape. By November 1995, The Food Depot was serving thirty-five agencies and had distributed approximately 130,000 pounds of food. In 2019, the food bank served 145 nonprofit food programs and provided 6.3 million pounds of food, enough for 5.3 million meals, for hungry New Mexicans.
Open for Dinner Tuesday Sunday
Chef's Prix Fixe Menu offered Sunday - Thursday 210 Don Gaspar Ave., Santa Fe NM 87501, Inside Hotel St. Francis
505-992-6354 www.marketsteersteakhouse.com
Susan’s Fine Wine and Spirits One of the largest selections of wine, craft beer, and spirits in town!
FOR INFORMATION ON NEW PRODUCTS, UPCOMING EVENTS, WINE CLUB SELECTIONS AND MORE, VISIT SFWINEANDSPIRITS.COM.
1005 S. St. Francis, Suite 101 | 505-984-1582 sfwineandspirits.com | Mon–Sat 10am–7pm
Same great food, same great service, new hound. 730 St Michaels Dr, Santa Fe, 505.471.0440, loyalhoundpub.com
Volunteers prepping vegetables at The Food Depot.
What are the biggest challenges we face in this state as we try to eliminate hunger? The rural aspect of our state creates a challenge in providing food assistance. Much of New Mexico is composed of isolated rural communities with few resources, but great need. The Food Depot is consistently exploring opportunities to meet their need for food. Another challenge The Food Depot faces is the lack of food resources in New Mexico. While we utilize food from local sources, we must look outside our state to bring in the vast quantities of food needed to feed the growing number of hungry New Mexicans. What are some misconceptions you’ve heard about hunger in New Mexico? Hunger is a hidden crisis in New Mexico. The faces of hunger in our state look very different from those images you might see of terrible famine in Africa. Hunger in New Mexico means children going to bed hungry and eating only at school each day; parents going without food so their children may eat; and seniors choosing between buying the medicine they need or paying for food. Another misconception we find is that people requesting help are unwilling to work. In fact, more than 50 percent of the households seeking help have at least one working adult. Of households with no one able to work, 57 percent are disabled, in poor health, or acting as a caretaker, and 30 percent are retired. About 30 percent of people helped are children. 18
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How involved have local farms been in reducing hunger here in New Mexico, and how might more local food become available to those who need it most? The Food Depot has a goal of providing at least 50 percent of our food distribution in fruits and vegetables. The food bank is extremely fortunate to have the kind help of New Mexico farmers. We work through the Santa Fe Farmers Market to access fresh produce when farmers haven’t sold their product. The market also gives us booth space to encourage customers to buy extra produce to donate at our booth for hungry New Mexicans. This opportunity helps both our local farmers and people in need. What changes would you like to see at the policy level to address hunger in our state? The Food Depot encourages our elected officials to make policy changes that address poverty. Hunger is a symptom of poverty. How can readers help with the mission of the Food Depot? People who want to help end hunger can volunteer their time at The Food Depot or a local food pantry, conduct food drives through their business, school or religious organization, and make a financial contribution. thefooddepot.org
OFFERIN DELIVER G Y AND TAKEOU T. ORDE R ONLINE AT MATA-G .COM
VEGETARIAN KITCHEN • INTERNATIONAL CUISINE 116 Amherst Drive SE, Albuquerque • mata-g.com
*Holidays & special events excluded
Offered during dinner in MÁS Tapas y Vino In-Restaurant Dining Only 125 2nd St NW, Albuquerque, NM Phone: 505.923.9080
LOCAL HEROES
505 Food Fights
AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE W. WHITE, CHEF/OWNER HIGH POINT GRILL AND DIRECTOR OF 505 FOOD FIGHTS BEST EVENT Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Competitors at the Fiery Foods Show 505 Food Fights: Jessie Rae Arbogast of The Zia Chef, Carmen Rodriguez of Sweetwater Harvest Kitchen, and Sara Tori Green of Sunrise Springs Spa Resort.
505 Food Fights is a bracket-style culinary competition pitting New Mexico chefs head-to-head in a secret ingredients challenge. Chefs have one hour to produce two unique dishes, featuring three mystery ingredients. Spectators are charged ten dollars at the door to cheer on their favorite chefs. All proceeds go to a designated local charity.
in. 505 Food Fights is the perfect venue to both raise money for New Mexico charities and bring awareness to the deep talent we have in our New Mexico culinary scene.
How and when did 505 Food Fights start?
In the last two years alone we have donated to over twenty local New Mexico causes, totaling over $20,000. Causes have included The Kitchen Kids, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, New Mexico Autism Society, New Mexico Chapter of the American Heart Association, Rebels with a Cause, Pediatric Congenital Heart Association, and many, many more!
505 Food Fights was created several years ago by a couple friends of mine, at which time I was merely an enthusiastic competitor. Since that time, I have taken over directorship and grown the brand, making High Point Grill the event’s regular home. I believe chefs, along with public figures, have a duty to enrich the communities they live 20
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How much have you raised over the years? To how many causes have you donated?
Amazing coffee, incredible food.
Order Coffee Beans Online at iconikcoffee.com
New Drive In! Lena and Lupe Park outside, text 505-629-0764 We’ll take your order at your car and deliver your order right to you.
1600 Lena St. 314 S Guadalupe St 202 Gaisteo St in beautiful Santa Fe
Fiery Foods Show edition of the 505 Food Fights.
Above and left: Fiery Foods Show edition of the 505 Food Fights. Bottom right: Sponsor Daniel Gilpatrick of Shamrock Foods, competitor Carmen Rodriguez, and Director of 505 Food Fights Mike White.
How do you choose which ingredients for each food fight? What’s your favorite ingredient combination you’ve thrown at the competing chefs? Ingredients are often categorized by giving competitors a protein, a produce or dairy item, and a culinary curveball. I often source inspiration from others by asking them to randomly name items within the categories and I combine them in unexpected ways. The curveball is usually the category people most fear, having been any number of things from canned fruit cocktail to a child’s birthday cake to flaming hot Cheetos. Other times the protein is most feared when it’s something extreme, such as whole beef heart, chicken livers, or belt fish. Who will be competing in the next competition? The Regular Season of 505 Food Fights will resume in mid-2020, featuring several new and returning chefs from Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, and Santa Fe. Two-time champion Dominic Valenzuela will lead the pack with the biggest target on his back. What charities will you be donating to in 2020? 22
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We again will be donating exclusively to local New Mexico charities: The Kitchen Kids, Rebels with a Cause, New Mexico Chapter of American Suicide Prevention, Hands Across Time New Mexico, NM Dental Care in your Home, New Mexico Autism Society, Roadrunner Food Bank, Watermelon Mountain Ranch, Street Food Institute, St. Felix Food Pantry, Storehouse New Mexico, New Mexico Hospitality Industry Education Foundation, the SANE collaborative, New Mexico Make-a-Wish Foundation, SAFE house NM and many more. Is there anything else you’d like to share with edible readers? Please support New Mexico chefs! We have some of the most talented chefs in the entire country right here. They have been putting their talents out there and donating their time in order to raise money for New Mexico charities. It’s my personal passion to raise as much money and give as much time and resources back to New Mexico communities as we possibly can. Find more information about upcoming 505 Food Fights at highpointgrill.com.
EsCaPe To WiNtEr WeLlNeSs JaNuArY 17-19, 2020
TiMe To CoMe ClEaN After over a year of development, Los Poblanos Lavender Hand Sanitizer is on schedule to arrive early April, and the timing couldn’t be more serendipitous. Our production team at Los Poblanos has crafted a sanitizer that not only refreshes hands, but blends our own home-grown, home-distilled lavender and a touch of rose water to offer an aromatherapeutic boost. Lavender has been used for thousands of years for its natural healing and antiseptic properties, and effortlessly lends itself for use in a sanitizer. This new addition pairs perfectly with our signature Lavender Hand Soap and Lotion for the ultimate hand cleansing experience. We are honored to be able to donate one thousand bottles of Lavender Hand Sanitizer to several local organizations, including community hospitals in desperate need of supplies and Southwest Creations, a local manufacturing company who has admirably shifted all production to making face masks and gowns for Bernalillo County.
Check farmshop.lospoblanos.com for availability.
EDIBLE INNOVATORS
Farm-to-Market IN ITS SECOND YEAR, FARMESILLA EYES CHANGES BIG AND SMALL By Katie Goetz · Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Shawna Runyan, owner of FARMesilla in Las Cruces.
Shawna Runyan is light on her feet around FARMesilla, the farmto-market store she and her husband TJ opened on the edge of Mesilla in 2018. Today, she’s updating her point-of-sale software to incorporate new items made to order in the onsite kitchen. FARMesilla just hired a new chef. Becky Windels moved to New Mexico last summer after twenty years in the restaurant and catering business in and around Phoenix. On her first visit to FARMesilla last fall, she bought local pumpkins, pinto beans, and green chile sau24
edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
sage, then brought the resulting dishes in to share with Shawna. The pair started talking about how they might partner, which culminated in Chef Windels’s hiring right around Valentine’s Day—a day made more memorable at FARMesilla this year when a customer proposed to his girlfriend on the patio. She said yes. Today, Windels brings out what she calls Little Casa Ensalada: a bed of greens topped with pickled red onions grown by Shiloh Produce in Hatch; feta crumbles from Tucumcari Mountain Cheese;
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EDIBLE INNOVATORS
Left: Chocolate Bread Pudding French Toast. Right: Little Casa Ensalada with Mesilla Sunrise Vinaigrette.
pepitas candied with bourbon from nearby Dry Point Distillers; and a vinaigrette featuring FARMesilla’s own Mesilla Sunrise cold-pressed juice of carrot, apple, lime, and ginger.
“The produce itself is just a work of art,” Shawna says. “That [and the product] is what I want the focal point to be.”
“It’s a playground in here,” Windels says, pointing around the market. “I like cooking with big flavor [and] I love the food culture here.”
The Runyans have two sons, 15 and 11, who help out at the market. If the boys get hungry on the job, whatever they grab from the shelves gets put on their respective tabs.
Hiring Windels complements FARMesilla’s core: hundreds of local items, including produce, meat, eggs (chicken and quail), cheese, raw milk, beer, wine, salsas, spices, biscochos, coffees, jellies, skin products, candles, and more. There’s a grab-and-go case for hungry folks on the run. FARMesilla began serving and stocking its shelves with New Mexico beer and wine last year. This year, they’ve added taps for Small Batch Booch, kombucha made locally from FARMesilla’s own cold-pressed juices.
Shawna grew up in Belen and studied accounting at New Mexico State University, where she met TJ, who studied agribusiness and marketing. He grew up on a ranch near Artesia and spent summers selling his family’s apples at a roadside stand. After college, he worked as a produce broker, then started his own company called Mesilla Valley Produce. Shawna was content keeping the books for MVP until TJ suggested she start a truck farm. She says retail has brought her out of her comfort zone.
“I’m always looking for unique items that set FARMesilla apart from all the other shops in town,” Shawna says. “[The search is] very time-consuming, but it always pays off.”
“Now that I have the infrastructure set up and all the little mechanical parts are turning the way they’re supposed to, I can hop out and go do things like meet with the vendors and taste their products.”
FARMesilla’s customer base includes tourists to Mesilla, RV-dwelling snowbirds, and day-trippers from El Paso. Highway 28 bicyclists gather here every Thursday and retired teachers every Friday. There’s ample covered seating outside and a sunlit nook inside. “When I was in here yesterday, I didn’t know what chile to buy for my son: mild or hot,” Jerry Ellis says while on vacation from Muskegon, Michigan. A moment later, he’s out the door with a bag of dried New Mexico red chile. His son requested hot. FARMesilla employs ten people. Shawna is full-time, as is Israel Jiménez, the jack-of-all-trades who fabricated much of the market’s décor: lighting, shelving, and barstools. Shawna designed the market to be clean and simple—an aesthetic reflected across FARMesilla’s social media channels. 26
edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
The Runyans are still deciding what to do with the three acres they own behind FARMesilla. They’ve cover-cropped it before, and they’re considering planting a garden there. Shawna says she’d like to do a test garden at home before investing in any irrigation infrastructure behind the market. TJ half-jokes they should set it up for glamping. Shawna responds with questions that suggest she’s willing to at least entertain the idea. FARMesilla has been her baby since 2015, when she showed up every day to oversee its construction. FARMesilla will celebrate its second anniversary on August 1. “Standing back and looking at it now,” Shawna says of the market, “there’s the realization that it really came together how I envisioned.” 1840 Avenida de Mesilla, Las Cruces, 575-652-4626 instagram.com/farmesilla
Photo by Eric O'Connell
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Accelerating Tradition SCOTT FEUILLE OF TAYLOR GARRETT SPIRITS BRINGS NEW TECHNIQUES AND LOCAL GRAINS TO ALBUQUERQUE'S GROWING CRAFT DISTILLERY COMMUNITY By Joshua Johnson · Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Left: Fried zucchini served with Taylor Garrett whiskey. Center: Copper stills at VARA Winery & Distillery. Right: First Class Old Fashioned, Mile High Molly, and Final Approach cocktails.
One of Albuquerque’s newest distillers, Scott Feuille of Taylor Garrett Spirits, has a bourbon mash-bill whiskey, and a unique method of making it, that has created a buzz among New Mexico’s whiskey lovers. Counting myself as one, I stopped by the tasting room at VARA Winery & Distillery, where Taylor Garrett Spirits has partnered and fired up its still. Sharply dressed and clean-cut, Feuille, a career pilot and retired naval aviator, greeted me at a dining table where he and his VARA colleagues had laid out an impressive sampling of their food and drink offerings. Three screen-printed whiskey bottles sat in flight formation atop a nearby table. He handed me a glass. With a rich mahogany color and a nose of toasted oak, vanilla, maple syrup, and corn, I was transported twentyfive years back in time to a scent memory of ripsawing oak boards in my grandfather’s basement. I was shocked to learn that this whiskey 28
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was only six days in the making—less than one one-hundredth of the time required to age the youngest traditional Straight Bourbons. Accelerated spirits, as they are often called, are just starting to make an imprint on the craft distilled spirits industry. Craft distillers such as Brian Davis of Lost Spirits Distillery in Los Angeles are using alternative processes to develop their flavor profiles by subjecting spirits and wood to heat and light to achieve the same chemical transformations that would otherwise take years in a rickhouse. Terresentia Corporation in North Charleston, South Carolina, uses ultrasonic waves to enhance the profile of their spirits; and though their spirits do spend some of the time in traditional barrels, they aren’t doing any of their own distilling. Unlike Terresentia, Feuille finds the true art of his craft in that distilling process. “The skill isn’t letting it sit in a rickhouse for four or eight years,” he says; “if I put the wrong stuff in that ager, it isn’t going to fix it.” As he describes himself: “I’m a process guy. I’m a
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FERMENTI'S PARADOX pilot. I live and die by checklists.” And, through his meticulous attention to detail, he has come to achieve a consistent product batch after batch, from grain to bottle, right here in New Mexico. At the soul of Taylor Garrett’s bourbon mash, Feuille cooks up corn, rye, and malted barley, all grown with water from the Rio Grande basin by Proximity Malt Company in the San Luis Valley. These ingredients are brewed and then distilled onsite at VARA’s current location. To achieve his flavor profile, Feuille says, “We use American white oak, it’s sourced out of Indiana, kiln-dried and then seasoned. I mill it and I toast it. We age it at an equivalent exposure rate of a standard barrel, so it’s around fifty-three square inches per gallon, maybe as much as sixty. . . . I try to get a nice vanilla profile and then char it, and by charring it you’re getting that temperature gradient that goes a little bit into the wood—a lot of the color.” In traditional cooperage, quarter-sawn oak is a necessity both for barrel integrity and for pore structure so only a small portion of the lumber milled from any given tree can be utilized to construct a barrel. Feuille claims that his whiskey-making process, which toasts and chars staves of any grain orientation, uses only 25 percent of the wood needed for traditional barrel-aged whiskeys. Attempting to pry further into Feuille’s maturation process, I didn’t get the “If I told you, I’d have to kill you” sense, but his smile lines deepened a little as he said, “It’s all physical. There’s movement, there’s temperature, there’s other little magical processes that happen, let’s just say light is very important for oxidation. . . . What’s cool about the process is that it opens us up to doing a whole portfolio of experimentals, so we can play around with flavor profiles.” There was nothing cagey about Feuille’s nature. He attributes much of his inspiration to become a distiller to the Albuquerque craft brewing scene’s collaborative attitude, and expressed hope that the local spirits culture will grow into a similar community. So how does it taste? In accord with the nose, a toasted oak and vanilla profile dominates. Though there is a bit of corn present on the nose, it doesn’t come through as much on the palate. My favorite characteristic is the rye spice that finishes, which stands very nicely alongside the strong flavors at the heart of New Mexico’s cuisine. There are currently three noteworthy signature TG whiskey cocktails developed by VARA’s mixologist: the First Class Old Fashioned made with bitters, orange bitters, simple syrup, and a cherry; the Mile High Molly made with apple syrup, lemon, and bitters; and the Final Approach, with TG whiskey, lemon, lime, and rosemary simple syrup. If you decide to take yours at the source, VARA also offers a fantastic array of tapas, including ceviche, papas bravas garnished with red chile threads, and an assortment of Spanish cured meats and cheeses. With more new spirits planned for release, including ones with experimental woods and aging processes, the future looks promising for Taylor Garrett Spirits. There aren’t currently any dates set for the release of those products, but with Feuille’s proprietary accelerated process, it’ll probably be sooner than you think! Find at VARA Winery & Distillery, located at 315 Alameda NE in Albuquerque. taylorgarrettspirits.com 30
edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
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AT THE CHEF'S TABLE
Curiouser and Curiouser ELECTRIC PLAYHOUSE’S IMMERSIVE DINING EXPERIENCE ENCOURAGES ATTENDEES TO EXPLORE THE WONDER OF REGIONAL FORAGED INGREDIENTS By Joanna Manganaro Toto
Diners engaged at Electric Playhouse's Curiosities dining series. Photo courtesy of Electric Playhouse.
To spend time in Electric Playhouse, a new all-ages recreation space on Albuquerque’s Westside, is to feel a bit like the Alice character in Lewis Carroll’s celebrated books. Instead of a rabbit hole or a looking glass, guests enter this high-tech wonderland through a neonlit tunnel and are deposited into a giant-scale board game, in which they have become the game pieces. Projectors shoot colorful graphics across the floors and walls of the cavernous space, and motion-detection devices allow guests to interact with what they see. The surreal experience continues as guests move through the other rooms. Swirling graphics are manipulated with the contortions of their bodies. In a semi-enclosed space, they lob balls at images that appear via projections on a massive wall. An infinity mirror in a small room borrows from the whimsical installations of artist Yayoi Kusama, with brightly-colored geometric projections that reflect back on themselves, creating the illusion of a much larger space. Even for the selfie-averse, the urge to take a photo is irresistible. Electric Playhouse may be the only place where this writer has seen people from toddlers to adults genuinely having the same amount of fun. That alone makes one feel as if they’ve stepped through the looking glass. 32
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The venue is the brainchild of CEO and former tech executive John-Mark Collins, who with his four business partners celebrated Electric Playhouse’s grand opening on February 1. However, the company’s origins date back to March 2017, when Collins began planning the first “immersive dining experience” that he would hold at Savoy, the fine-dining restaurant in the Heights where he once worked as general manager. Collins used his expertise in immersive design to create interactive visuals meant to enhance the theme of the meal: new takes on classic dishes. The dining series was a success, inspiring Collins to seek out new venues for his immersive dinners. After several more dinners with great responses, Collins decided to seek out partners to expand his concept. Instead of focusing solely on the dinners, his partners pushed him to take the idea to the next level. Collins explains, “The dinners were actually the catalyst to build the Playhouse because we wanted to have our own space to do them in. My business partner, Luke Balaoro, who’s our lead software developer, said, ‘Well, why should we stop at the dinners? We should build a bunch of other stuff! We should make it a whole family experience.’ And it just kind of spiraled from there.”
AT THE CHEF'S TABLE
Top left: Chef Julian Griego plating for Curiosities dining series, photo courtesy of Electric Playhouse. Bottom left: Bison Albondigas with chile verde seca and corn dumplings, photo by Stephanie Cameron. Right: Prickly Pear Mocktail, photo by Stephanie Cameron.
While the bulk of the big-box space that Electric Playhouse occupies is devoted to immersive gaming, Collins and his partners have made an effort to keep the dining aspect of the business prominent. A fast-casual restaurant, which does not require patrons to buy a ticket to the gaming portion, greets guests as they enter. And a block of three rooms to the left of the entrance is designated for digitally-enhanced dining experiences. On an unseasonably warm February night, twenty-four guests, most strangers to one another, gathered around one long table in one of those three rooms. An amuse-bouche that was a take on the classic Spanish dish, tortilla española, awaited them on plates perfectly illuminated from above. Trippy graphics swayed and swirled across the walls and over the rest of the tabletop. Some observant diners quickly discovered that the graphics could be manipulated by waving a hand or dining utensil just above the surface of the table. Others (this writer included) weren’t delighted by this revelation until halfway through the meal. As each course arrived, a new set of whimsical visuals appeared to accompany it. Called “Curiosities,” this meal was part of a dining series that was originally slated to run through April 18. Chef Julian Griego, fellow Savoy veteran and former instructor and chef de cuisine of CNM’s Street 34
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Food Institute program, has focused on regionally foraged ingredients to create its imaginative menu. Griego notes, “What's really exciting about this dinner—not only is it super interesting in general—but this is the first time that I’ve worked with the tech team at Electric Playhouse to come up with ideas and take them all the way to fruition.” The standout dish in Griego’s five-course dinner, which can be purchased with or without wine pairings, is the sous vide smoked trout tamale. The rich flavor of the trout is brightened with herby chimichurri and a hollandaise sauce featuring the chiltepin pepper, the only wild chile native to the United States. In subsequent dishes, Griego features other regional favorites, including bison, sage, and piñon. Of his intentions for guests at the immersive dinners, Collins says, “We hope that they get the opportunity to try something they wouldn’t normally try or learn something about food that they wouldn’t already know, whether it’s a local ingredient or an interesting backstory. . . . There’s a little education piece that we put out there in all of it.” Griego agrees, adding, “We want to create a community space and get people to interact with each other. And the immersive dinner, being at one table with a group of strangers trying new things—it’s a really cool way to bring people together.” 5201 Ouray Rd NW, Albuquerque, electricplayhouse.com
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FACES OF FOOD
Apogee Spirulina IN SANTA FE, NICOLAS PETROVIC IS GROWING THE HUMBLE GREEN SLIME THAT COULD FEED THE FUTURE By Robin Babb
Nicolas Petrovic at Apogee Spirulina farm. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Petrovic.
It’s winter when I visit Nicolas Petrovic at his small farm on the Santa Fe Community College campus, and there’s not much happening in his two hoop houses. But the long, oval-shaped ponds inside give off an unmistakably briny smell, hinting at the unique crop that grows here in the warmer months. Petrovic is an algae farmer—or, more specifically, a spirulina farmer. As the company Apogee Spirulina, he sells his products online and at the Santa Fe Farmers Market. There, he gets plenty of questions about his growing practices, the nutritional content of spirulina, what it tastes like, and what, exactly, this green stuff is. By now, he’s accustomed to education being a big component of his job. The spirulina product that Petrovic sells is different from many on the market in that it takes the form of crunchy flakes rather than a fine powder. This, he explains, makes it more food friendly: in addition to the obvious smoothie application, his suggestions are, “Mix it in with your hummus. And, it goes really deliciously well on avocado.” After a little experimentation of my own, I’d add that it’s great with toasted sesame seeds on top of fried rice. 36
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Spirulina has a lot to recommend it—both in terms of nutritional value and environmental footprint. The microalgae is super dense in protein and omega-3s, generates huge amounts of oxygen from nitrogen and CO2, and, unlike most crops, doesn’t require freshwater to grow—in fact, the brackish water used to grow algae can be recycled many times for subsequent algae crops. In a future where freshwater will be at even more of a premium than it is now, the ability of spirulina to thrive in hot, dry climates and in brackish water will be a huge advantage. Water isn’t the only resource scarcity algae can potentially alleviate. Elsewhere in Santa Fe, Eldorado Biofuels is growing algae to make biofuel with industrial wastewater from fracking and dairy farming—water that can be full of oil, grease, and industrial chemicals. It’s not exactly creating something from nothing, but it’s pretty close. “People have no idea how rich the history of algae cultivation in New Mexico is,” Petrovic says. He is, however, a wealth of knowledge on the topic. He went through the Biofuels Program at SFCC, which focuses largely on algae cultivation for fuel. After finishing that program, he traveled to the south of France in 2012, where he learned about spirulina cultivation for food from small-batch master growers. After spending most
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Top: Spirulina ponds and greenhouses. Bottom: Spirulina flakes on avocado and blended in popsicles. Photos courtesy of Nicolas Petrovic.
of the last decade of his life learning about and growing algae, Petrovic has become something of an evangelist for the green stuff. As an example of spirulina’s incredible potential, he tells me the story of moving his algae production from his home into the greenhouses on the SFCC campus. After the initial move, he had a scare when the water in his ponds suddenly leveled out at a pH of 9.6—too low for algae to thrive. The algae turned grey, Petrovic says, and “fell flat—the ponds had gone totally weird.” He called one of his mentors in France to ask what was happening, who assured him that this was normal—just wait, he said, spirulina never dies. After panicking for a couple of weeks and thinking that he’d have to start all over, sure enough, the algae started greening again. After going through a few generations of evolution— spirulina reproduces every twenty-four hours—“it had come back and morphed into a new strain specific for Santa Fe conditions, specific to right here,” he says. He’s never had problems with his ponds since. As great a source of nutrients as algae is, and as easy as it is to grow, one would think that it would have taken off as a meat substitute/protein source in its own right by now. The thing is, Americans are a little squeamish about eating algae—at the end of the day, it’s green slime that smells 38
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like the ocean. But algae has been a component of some coastal cultures’ diets for centuries: Japan consumes many different species of algae, some of which are more recognizable to us as seaweed (“seaweed” refers to a few species of algae categorized as macroalgae), like nori and kombu. Though spirulina has some history in the US, it’s as a nutritional supplement. It’s been sold in dried form as an omega-3 supplement and a component of vegan protein powders, and the Food and Drug Administration has approved it for use as a food coloring agent, mostly used for candy. But they have yet to sign off on algae as a food in its own right. Nevertheless, Petrovic has well-founded hopes that algae, and spirulina in particular, has a big future in the US. Since it first started being cultivated at scale here in the 1970s, it’s always been vegetarians, vegans, and the health-conscious who have gravitated towards spirulina supplements as a source of protein and micronutrients—and now there’s the massively growing health and wellness market to sell to. “They’re saying by 2025, it’s going to be almost a $24 billion per year industry. This,” he says, pointing to his currently-dormant ponds, “is part of it.” apogeespirulina.com
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COOKING FRESH
Brick Toast DIGGING INTO DESSERT Photos by Stephanie Cameron
As intermittent fasting and going plant-based becomes a 2020 food trend, we are finding joy in this year’s sweeter hits. For this issue’s Cooking Fresh, we are digging into brick toast—no, this is not related to avocado toast; it’s not even a distant cousin. Brick toast is showing up in Asian tea shops on the coasts, but we haven’t seen it much here in our state yet, so the edible test kitchen is sharing our take on this dessert with some New Mexican flair. 40
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The foundation of brick toast is a loaf of milk bread hollowed out and filled with toasted bread, ice cream or custard, syrup or honey, and fruit. We will dive into each component of this sweet course and give you the ability to create each item from scratch. This is not a dessert for one, so grab some spoons and enjoy!
The Bread To ensure that all our readers can enjoy brick toast, we offer standard, gluten-free, and vegan versions for the base of the dessert. Alternatively, source a good white bread from a local bakery and shorten the time in the kitchen.
WHITE MILK BREAD
Makes 1 9-inch loaf
Adapted from Kat Craddock
In the bowl of a stand mixer, gently stir together the yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar. Slowly add the warm water (so it doesn't splash the yeast up the bowl). Let sit for at least 15–20 minutes, until the mixture is completely foamy.
1 large egg, beaten 2/3 cup whole milk at room temperature, plus more for brushing 3 tablespoons slightly warmed water, about 85°F 2 1/3 cups plus 1 tablespoon bread flour 1/4 cup plus 1 teaspoon sugar 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast 2 teaspoons kosher salt 1/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature Nonstick baking spray, or a neutral-flavored oil, for greasing
When yeast is ready, add the egg, milk, water, flour, remaining sugar, and salt; beat on lowest speed until a dough begins to form, about 3 minutes. Raise mixer to the second speed and beat 4 minutes more. The dough should be smooth and quite sticky. Lower the speed, add the butter, and mix 12 minutes more, using a rubber spatula to scrape down the hook and bowl as necessary. Lightly grease a medium bowl with nonstick spray, then add dough. Cover bowl loosely with a dish towel and let rest at room temperature until significantly increased in volume, about 90 minutes. Lightly grease a 9-inch loaf pan with nonstick baking spray, then line with parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom and sides of the parchment paper with more spray. Preheat the oven to 375°F. On a lightly floured work surface, punch down dough and shape into a loaf by rolling into a jelly roll or pulling on all sides. Place in the parchment-lined loaf pan. Lightly cover the loaf with a clean dish towel and let rise at room temperature until the dough is just peeking over the rim of the pan, 60–75 minutes. When ready to bake, remove the dish towel and brush with milk. Bake until evenly dark golden brown, 35–40 minutes. Remove and let cool for 15 minutes before using the parchment paper to lift the milk bread out of the pan. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, at least 1 hour, before slicing.
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COOKING FRESH GLUTEN-FREE WHITE BREAD
Makes 1 9-inch loaf
Adapted from Sharon Lachendro
In the bowl of a stand mixer, gently stir together the yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar. Slowly add the warm water (so it doesn't splash the yeast up the bowl). Let sit for at least 15–20 minutes, until the mixture is completely foamy.
2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast 2 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon sugar 1/4 cup warm water, 110°F 1 1/4 cups milk, warmed to 110°F 2 tablespoons canola oil 2 tablespoons butter, softened 3 large eggs, room temperature and beaten 1 tablespoon white vinegar 3 cups gluten-free all-purpose flour 1/3 cup cornstarch 1 tablespoon xanthan gum 1 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder Nonstick baking spray, or a neutral-flavored oil, for greasing
While the yeast is proofing, sift together the gluten-free flour, cornstarch, xanthan gum, salt, and baking powder in a separate bowl. Lightly grease a 9-inch loaf pan with nonstick baking spray, then line with parchment paper. Lightly grease bottom and sides of the parchment paper with more spray. When yeast is ready, add warm milk, canola oil, 2 tablespoons butter, eggs, white vinegar, and remaining sugar to the bowl. Mix on low with a dough hook until ingredients are combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low until completely combined. Set the mixer to medium speed and mix for 5 minutes. Scrape the bowl as necessary. Transfer dough (it will be the consistency of a quick bread) to the prepared loaf pan. Smooth out the top with wet hands. Lightly cover with dish towel and set the bread in a warm place to rise for 60–75 minutes. Leave a tiny air vent on one corner of the pan. The dough will rise to the top of the pan. When bread is done rising, preheat the oven to 375°F. Very gently move the bread to the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Then reduce the oven temperature to 350°F and loosely cover the bread with aluminum foil so it doesn't get overly brown. Bake for an additional 20 minutes. Remove and let cool for 15 minutes before using the parchment paper to lift the bread out of the pan. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, at least 1 hour, before slicing.
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COOKING FRESH VEGAN WHITE BREAD
Makes 1 9-inch loaf
Adapted from Richa Hingle
In the bowl of a stand mixer, gently stir together the yeast and sugar. Slowly add the warm water (so it doesn't splash the yeast up the bowl). Let sit for at least 15–20 minutes, until the mixture is completely foamy.
1/2 cup warm water, 110°F 1 tablespoon raw sugar 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast 1/2 cup warm almond milk or other nondairy milk, 110°F 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for brushing 3 cups organic bread flour or all-purpose flour or unbleached white flour 1 1/4 teaspoons salt Nonstick baking spray, or a neutral-flavored oil, for greasing
In another bowl, add the dry ingredients and mix well. When yeast is ready, add oil and warm almond milk to the bowl. Mix on lowest speed with a dough hook until ingredients are combined, about 1 minute. Add the dry ingredients and continue to mix on low until completely combined, about 8 minutes. Spray water on top and cover the bowl with a clean dish towel and let rise for 90 minutes or until doubled. Lightly grease a 9-inch loaf pan with nonstick baking spray, then line with parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom and sides of the parchment paper with more spray. Preheat oven to 370ºF. On a lightly floured work surface, punch down dough and shape into a loaf by rolling into a jelly roll or pulling on all sides. Place in the parchment-lined loaf pan. Lightly cover the loaf with a dish towel and let rise at room temperature until the dough is just peeking over the rim of the pan, 60– 75 minutes. When ready to bake, remove the dish towel and brush with oil. Bake until evenly dark golden brown, 35–40 minutes. Remove and let cool for 15 minutes before using the parchment paper to lift the bread out of the pan. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, at least 1 hour, before slicing.
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COOKING FRESH SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK Adapted from Robyn Stone of Add a Pinch Sweetened condensed milk is made with just four ingredients. It’s easy to go vegan with this recipe.
Makes 1 1/4 cups Whisk together milk and sweetener in a medium saucepan over mediumlow heat. Whisking often, bring to a low simmer and continue to simmer, still whisking, until milk has reduced by half, about 30 minutes. Once reduced, remove from heat and stir in butter and vanilla. Allow to cool completely and store in a Mason jar in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.
2 cups whole milk (dairy, almond, cashew, oat, etc.) 3/4 cup sweetener (granulated or cane sugar, honey, or maple syrup) 4 tablespoons salted butter, plant-based butter, or margarine 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
ROASTED RHUBARB AND STRAWBERRIES Adapted from Michelle Stiles 1 cup hulled strawberries, cut in half 1 1/2 cups rhubarb, roughly chopped 1/8 cup maple syrup 1/8 cup sweet vermouth 1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar 1 teaspoon grandulated or raw sugar 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
Makes 2 cups Preheat oven to 350°F with a rack positioned in the middle of the oven. Line a rimmed baking sheet or large cooking dish with parchment paper. In a large bowl, mix the strawberries and rhubarb. In a small bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, sweet vermouth, balsamic vinegar, sugar, and salt. Pour over rhubarb and strawberries, gently tossing until coated. Spread the fruit out on the baking dish in a single layer, drizzling the juices over the fruit, and slide into the oven. Roast for about 40 minutes. The juices should be thick and the rhubarb tender to touch. Transfer to a bowl while still warm. Use immediately or refrigerate for up to 1 week. Serve with brick toast or spooned onto ice cream or a slice of sweet bread.
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COOKING FRESH GOLDEN MILK ICE CREAM Adapted from Minimalist Baker 2 14-ounce cans full-fat coconut milk 4 quarter-size slices fresh ginger 1/4 cup maple syrup 1/4 cup sugar (refined or raw) 1 pinch sea salt 2 teaspoons ground turmeric 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon black pepper 1/8 teaspoon cardamom 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 2 tablespoons olive oil (optional) 1/4 cup candied ginger, chopped (optional)
Makes 2 cups The day or night before, add coconut milk, fresh ginger, maple syrup, sugar, sea salt, turmeric, cinnamon, pepper, and cardamom to a large saucepan and heat over medium heat. Bring to a simmer (not a boil), whisking to thoroughly combine ingredients. Then remove from heat and add vanilla extract. Whisk once more to combine. Taste and adjust flavor as needed, adding more turmeric for intense turmeric flavor, cinnamon for warmth, maple syrup for sweetness, or salt to balance the flavors. Transfer mixture (including the ginger slices) to a non-reactive bowl and let cool to room temperature. Then cover and chill in refrigerator overnight or for at least 4–6 hours. The next day, use a spoon (or strainer) to remove the ginger. At this time, you can add olive oil for extra creaminess by whisking in thoroughly to combine (optional). Add mixture to ice cream maker and churn according to manufacturer’s instructions—about 20–30 minutes. It should look like soft serve. While it's churning, chop the candied ginger (optional). Add the ginger in the last few minutes of churning. Once churned, transfer the ice cream to a large freezer-safe container (such as a parchment-lined loaf pan) and use a spoon to smooth the top. Cover securely and freeze for at least 4–6 hours, or until firm. The ice cream will keep in the freezer for up to 10 days or more, though it is best when used within 7 days.
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COOKING FRESH
Building the Brick Toast There is one rule when building brick toast: Don’t skimp on the ingredients and garnishes. The more height, texture, and color, the better.
SHE'S A BRICK . . . TOAST 4 1/2-inch slab milk bread, cut from the end of the loaf (there should be a crust on 5 sides) 1 cup roasted rhubarb and strawberries (see recipe on page 44) 1 tablespoon granulated sugar 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 2 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk (see recipe on page 44) 3 tablespoons honey, divided 2 scoops of Golden Milk Ice Cream (see recipe on page 46) or other ginger ice cream 1/2 cup whipped cream 1/2 teaspoon espresso powder 1/2 teaspoon red chile powder 1/8 cup crushed pecans Pocky sticks or cinnamon sticks for garnish
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Makes 1 9-inch loaf Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Using a serrated knife, and starting from the crustless side of the bread, cut a square out of the center of the loaf (do not cut all the way through), leaving a 1/2-inch border on all 4 sides and at the bottom crust. Remove the cube and cut it into 1-inch pieces. Leave the box intact. Spread pieces and toast box on the prepared baking sheet and brush them on all sides with melted butter. Bake, turning the pieces occasionally so they brown evenly, until the small cubes are crisp and golden, about 15 minutes. Remove and cool cubes in a bowl. Continue baking toast box until crisp, about 10 minutes more. Brush the inside of the toasted bread box with the sweetened condensed milk. Gently toss bread cubes with prepared fruit. Transfer mixture into toast box and drizzle with 2 tablespoons of honey. Top toast with ice cream and whipped cream and garnish with pecans, espresso powder, and red chile powder, as desired. Add a couple of pocky or cinnamon sticks and drizzle with the remaining tablespoon of honey. Serve immediately with spoons and steak knives.
A Wonderful Mix of Friendship and Philanthropy
Become a Member of The Circles The Circles is the premier membership of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. Join us and enjoy an exclusive calendar of events that is especially designed to enhance your appreciation of the art, history and culture of New Mexico and folk art traditions worldwide. You’ll discover unparalleled camaraderie with an intimate group of fellow members. For more information contact Cara O’Brien at 505.982.6366, ext. 118 or email cara@museumfoundation.org or visit museumfoundation.org/circles.
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EIGHT AROUND THE STATE
Breakfast By Stephanie and Walt Cameron Publishers Stephanie and Walt Cameron are sharing some of their favorite finds around New Mexico in edible’s Eight Around the State. For this issue, they searched for breakfasts to fuel their travels. Whether looking for a sweet or savory start to the day, here are a few of edible’s favorite from-scratch kitchens. We would love to hear our readers’ favorites. Drop us an email at info@ediblenm.com with your best finds from anywhere in the Land of Enchantment.
Carrizozo ZZQ BBQ DRIVE-IN What we are eating: Egg & Cheez Burrito with brisket. Worth noting: Although it may not be your traditional New Mexican burrito, the smoked meats in this handheld delight make it exceptional. ZZQ BBQ is the perfect in-between, middle-of-nowhere stop to fuel up for the next couple hundred miles. Open Monday– Friday, 8:30am–6pm. Find: 6539 US-380, Carrizozo, parked next to the Four Winds Motel
Los Lunas EUROPA COFFEE. TEA. BAKERY What we are eating: Belgian waffles with pecans and organic whipped cream, served with bacon. Worth noting: Europa serves espresso drinks, charcuterie plates, sandwiches, quiches, and soups made with seasonal ingredients, most of which come from the adjacent farm. You can also pick up the farm’s grassfed beef from the freezer located in the cafe. Open 7am–7pm daily. Find: 2105 NM-314, Los Lunas
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EIGHT AROUND THE STATE
Taos MICHAEL'S KITCHEN What we are eating: Poor Man’s Eggs Benedict—two eggs any style, nestled between shaved ham, doused in red chile, and crowned with melted cheese on a toasted English muffin. Worth noting: Michael’s Kitchen Coffee Shop and Bakery, established in 1974, has had some time to hone their craft. After dining, take home some of their homemade pastries, cream puffs, English muffins, doughnuts, or cinnamon rolls, along with a loaf of their raisin, rye, or wheat bread. Open 7am–2pm daily. Find: 304-C North Pueblo Road, Taos
Las Cruces INDULGENCE BAKERY & CAFE What we are eating: Country Fried Chicken Bowl served with roasted potatoes, sautéed onions, crispy fried chicken, two eggs any style, and country gravy. Worth noting: Owned by a mother-daughter duo, Marybeth and Meagan Higgins, Indulgence is creating the ultimate comfort food. We also highly recommend splitting Meg’s Butternut French Toast with your dining companions. Open Tuesday–Sunday for breakfast and lunch. Find: 2265 South Main Street, Las Cruces
Gallup GLENN'S BAKERY What we are eating: Cherry fritter and strawberry turnover. Worth noting: Glenn’s was founded in 1972, and since 1980 it has been owned and managed by the Chavez family, who turned a popular bakery into a favorite local eatery. Drivethrough window and sit-down café open at 6am, Monday– Saturday. Find: 901 Route 66, Gallup
Open for Lunch Tuesday-Sunday. Open for Dinner Everyday. Happy Hour Tuesday-Sunday 2-5 PM. 30 craft beers on tap. 614 Trinity Drive, Los Alamos • 505-662-8877 pajaritobrewpubandgrill.com
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EIGHT AROUND THE STATE
Albuquerque THE GROVE CAFE & MARKET What we are eating: Sweet Potato Hash with roasted sweet potatoes, feta, cauliflower rice, avocado, roasted mushrooms, tomatillo salsa, sunflower sprouts, and a sunny side up egg. Worth noting: Owners Jason and Lauren Greene are deeply committed to the community. The Grove has been buying from a wide variety of local farmers since 2006 and today employs more than thirty culinary-minded individuals. Open Tuesday–Sunday for breakfast and lunch. Find: 600 Central SE, Albuquerque
Truth or Consequences PASSION PIE CAFE What we are eating: Corn, Feta, and Green Chile Quiche and Carrot Cake Muffin. Worth noting: Passion Pie’s walls are covered in eclectic local art that’s available for purchase. The café’s funky, one-of-a-kind tabletops commissioned by local artists are for sale, too. Open for breakfast and lunch every day but Wednesday. Find: 406 Main Avenue, Truth or Consequences
Santa Fe MADAME MATISSE What we are eating: Croque Madame served with ham, Swiss cheese, and topped with a sunny side up egg. Worth noting: French chef Eric De Margerie prepares freshbaked croissants, pain au chocolat, crepes, croque madame, French onion soup, and other classics. Dine on huevos rancheros and a few other non-French specialties, too. Breakfast is served all day. Open 8am–3pm daily. Find: 1291 San Felipe Avenue, Santa Fe Call first or check restaurant websites to find out if they're operating at standard business hours—or offering carryout or delivery.
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True-Lee New Mexico balloon at Red Rock Park in Gallup.
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WORTH THE TRIP
CULTURE, ADVENTURE, AND FRESH, CREATIVE CUISINE By Cyndi Wood · Photos by Stephanie Cameron
GETTING ACQUAINTED Gallup lies at the confluence of a number of notable intersections: a cultural nexus of Native peoples, descendants of settlers, and more recent arrivals from around the world; the Mother Road—Route 66—with its glowing neon and echoes of Jack Kerouac, ambling alongside the rush of I-40; and trading posts displaying vintage pieces of traditional Native crafts next to those of a fresh new generation of stellar artists and craftspeople. Established in 1881, this crossroads town was inadvertently christened for David L. Gallup, the local paymaster for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, when workers “had to go to Gallup” for their pay. In the late 1920s, Route 66 became the first continuous road between Chicago and Los Angeles, passing
through Gallup and further opening up the West and Southwest. Now vintage and new neon signage accents Historic Route 66 in Gallup, while a dizzying array of modernday trading posts provide a connection between Native American artisans, their collectors, and art lovers. Festivals and gatherings, along with options for outdoor adventures, attract visitors throughout the year.
BREAKFAST Founded in 1972, Glenn’s Bakery features house-made treats like Mexican pastries, donuts, cream puffs, turnovers, and apple and cherry fritters to accompany coffee and espresso. Open early, they serve breakfast burritos wrapped in their own tortillas, made fresh daily, plus lunch and dinner.
Above: Gallup sign welcomes visitors to town. Middle top: Baked goods at Glenn's Bakery. Middle bottom: Apple fritters at West End Donut & Deli. Right top: True-Lee New Mexico balloon inflating. Right bottom: 24-hour West End Donut & Deli.
West End Donut & Deli has been an institution in Gallup for thirty-nine years. Open 24-7, they offer a fresh alternative to fast food for locals and those passing through on I-40. They make daily batches of donuts, apple fritters, fruit-filled empanadas, cookies, and muffins. If it’s closer to lunchtime, you may want one of their sandwiches or subs, made with their own bread, to eat there or take out exploring. The Route 66 Railway Cafe is known for its down-home comfort food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Serving breakfast all day, hungry folks can select from breakfast burritos, omelets, and huevos rancheros. One local waxed poetic about their cheese enchiladas and eggs, smothered with red or green chile.
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WORTH THE TRIP SHOP
LUNCH
With more than one hundred trading companies, you could spend all your time in Gallup perusing Native American handcrafts such as fine local jewelry, from old pawn pieces to modern designs, plus pottery, woven rugs and textiles, Zuni fetishes, carved Kachinas, and other artworks. Some of the trading companies have been run by multiple generations, like Tanner’s Indian Arts and Winfield Trading Company, providing materials such as silver and turquoise to the artisans and then purchasing the final products. Established in 1872, Tanner’s Indian Arts specializes in all-natural gemgrade turquoise. In display cases grouped by type of turquoise, you will find museumquality pieces such as vintage squashblossom necklaces as well as modern jewelry and other artworks by up-and-coming
young artists. While there, you may find one of their artists has dropped by to consider some stones over a cup of coffee. A bit out of town on the road to Zuni, Winfield Trading Company is one of the largest wholesale suppliers of Native American arts and crafts in the world and home to the largest selection of Lone Mountain turquoise stone and jewelry. They also have a selection of Navajo rugs, Zuni fetishes, pottery, carved Kachinas, and more.
Flavour Savour packs big taste in a small footprint, featuring hot and cold sandwiches with meats smoked and cured in-house and their own fresh sauces, soups, and salads. Taking a cue from their moniker, the names of their sandwiches are moustache-themed, like the Fu Manchu with roasted pork and pickled carrots on a baguette, and some feature locally made brioche from Blackbird Bakery. The menu also offers daily specials plus vegetarian and vegan options.
Another local craft can be found at City Electric Shoe Shop. Specializing in moccasins, shoppers can find a plethora of sizes, styles, and colors—or you can place a custom order to accommodate your own fashion. They also manufacture belts made by hand and offer a wide variety of cowboy boots.
Angela’s Café, located in the former railroad station that is now the Gallup Cultural Center, is a cozy place with lots of seating. A daily soup special complements an assortment of freshly made salads, quiche, and classic sandwiches like the BLT, chicken salad, and pastrami. While you’re there, visit the exhibits upstairs at the museum.
Left top: Moccasins at City Electric Shoe Shop. Left bottom: Turquoise room at Winfield Trading Company. Middle top: Pastrami sandwich at Angela's Café. Middle bottom: Fu Manchu sandwich at Flavour Savour. Above: Tanner's Indian Arts trading company. 58
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WORTH THE TRIP SEE & DO Eight miles out of town, Red Rock Park has several hikes to explore the red cliffs that were formed more than two hundred million years ago. Or, check an item off your bucket list and view the landscape from a hot-air balloon. The extremely recognizable sugar skull design of the True-Lee New Mexico flies from Red Rock Park, taking visitors into the canyons and so close to the cliff faces that you can see hand- and footholds made by Ancestral Pueblo people around 300 AD. The views of Church Rock and Pyramid Rock from the balloon are unforgettable. There are a number of biking trails in the area, including the High Desert Trail System (also for hiking), Gallup North Hogback Trail, Twin Springs Area, and the Zuni Mountains (also for hiking). These trail systems offer a variety of terrain for different levels of expertise.
While in Gallup, you will be close enough to Zuni Pueblo for a day trip. It is the largest of the nineteen New Mexico Pueblos, with more than seven hundred square miles and a population of over ten thousand. Around 80 percent of the people in Zuni are involved in making art, and some of their studios are open to visitors.
lattes, and frappés. Bagels, muffins, scones,
SNACK
leaf ), and the bright purple Taro Royale,
For a pick-me-up, stop by the Gallup Coffee Company for one of their custom roasts. They offer an assortment of hot libations, including regular and flavored lattes, cappuccinos, drip coffee, Red Eye, and Americano. Chilled coffee drinks include iced coffee, cold brew, and iced lattes. An assortment of hot and cold teas is also available, including loose-leaf,
cookies, and breads are provided by their very own Blackbird Bakehouse. For the bubble tea aficionado, be sure to visit Cha’ahh! Milk Tea Café and Filipino Market. Their milk teas come in a variety of flavors, like Hokkaido (hint of caramel), Buko Pandan (hint of coconut and pandan all with add-ons like boba, coffee jelly, chia seed, and cheese foam. They offer fruit teas along with smoothies in unusual flavors like chai, avocado, red bean, and piña colada. The market has an assortment of staples and treats from the Philippines.
Above: Red Rock Park from the air. Middle top: Blackbird Bakehouse goodies available at Gallup Coffee Company. Middle bottom: Street front of Gallup Coffee Company. Right top: Cha’ahh! Milk Tea Café and Filipino Market. Right bottom: Milk tea from Cha’ahh! WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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WORTH THE TRIP DINNER When thoughts turn to dinner, Badlands Grill can satisfy your surf-and-turf cravings. Locally owned, Badland’s Grill offers tender filet mignon, sirloin, T-bone, and rib eye steaks—wet-aged for a minimum of twentyeight days, cut in house, and cooked to order—plus a New York Strip that is dry-aged for thirty-five to forty days, with roasted green chile among the usual steak toppers. Diners can also enjoy pork chops smoked in house, lamb chops, house-made pasta and bread, burgers, seafood, and wine and beer. Middle Eastern and Mediterranean specialties such as shawarma, shish kebab, and kufta—seasoned ground beef with parsley and onions—abound at Oasis Mediterranean Restaurant. The vegetarian plate, with falafel, grape leaves, baba ghanouj, and hummus, is one of a number of plant-based and vegan options. House-made desserts include vegan baklawa (baklava) and kunafa, shredded filo dough topped with sweet cheese and pistachios in a hot sugar syrup.
Potent Turkish coffee is served in delicate, gold-rimmed glass cups. Fratelli’s Pizza Bistro & Ice Creamery offers the only freshly made, from-scratch gelato in town, in a host of playful and seasonal flavors like lavender, Almond Joy, and lemon blueberry. Sauces for the pizza, calzones, pasta, and Italian specialties are made from scratch daily, and pizza can be ordered with a cauliflower crust. Try the popular Alfredo Fries—crispy potato fries with Alfredo sauce, mozzarella, bacon, and pepperoncini.
STAY To really immerse yourself in the Gallup experience, stay at the iconic El Rancho Hotel. With its Western ranch house décor and rustic handmade furniture in the lobby, it was considered one of the grand hotels of the Southwest when it opened in 1937. Built to house actors filming the more than one hundred Westerns shot in the area during the 1940s and 1950s, the El Rancho’s seventyfour rooms have been occupied by Holly-
wood luminaries such as John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Mae West. Be sure to explore the stars’ portraits in the lobby’s second floor gallery, either solo or accompanied by the El Rancho’s resident historian. The hotel’s restaurant serves dishes with Southwest and Mexican favors with a nod to their notable guests, such as the Ronald Reagan Burger with a side of jellybeans. The newly remodeled 49er Lounge—where Errol Flynn is said to have ridden his horse in for a cocktail—has signature margaritas and focuses on New Mexico craft beer, spirits, and wine.
FESTIVALS & GATHERINGS Immerse yourself in Native American culture during the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in August. Held in Gallup for one hundred years, it draws members of tribes from across the US and features traditional dances and music, parades, a juried arts exhibition, and rodeos. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, visitors can experience authentic traditional music and dances in downtown Gallup, along with explanations of cultural traditions, during the free Summer Nightly Native American Dances. For stunning color in the skies, visit Gallup during the Red Rock Balloon Festival on the first weekend of December. In one of the world’s largest balloon rallies, more than one hundred balloons rise into clear blue skies to soar over striking scenery in the heart of Native American ancestral homelands.
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Left top: Badlands Grill. Left bottom: Turkish coffee and other delights at Oasis Mediterranean Restaurant. Middle top: Pizza at Fratelli's Pizza Bistro & Ice Creamery. Middle bottom: Entrance of the El Rancho Hotel. Above: Gelato case at Fratelli's.
FIND Angela’s Café 201 E Historic Highway 66, 505-722-7526, on Facebook @angelascafe2 Badlands Grill 2201 W Historic Highway 66, 505-722-5157, badlandsgrill.com Cha’ahh! Milk Tea Café and Filipino Market 221 W Historic Highway 66, 505-297-3938, on Facebook @officialcha.ahh City Electric Shoe Shop 230 W Coal Avenue, 505-863-5252, on Facebook @CityElectricShoeShop El Rancho Hotel 1000 E Historic Highway 66, 505-863-9311, elranchohotelgallup.com Flavour Savour 204 S Third Street, 505-409-1927, on Facebook @FlavourSavourSandwiches Fratelli’s Pizza Bistro & Ice Creamery 1209 N Highway 491, 505-863-9201, fratellisbistro.com Gallup Coffee Company 203 W Coal Avenue, 505-410-2505, on Facebook @GallupCoffeeCompany Glenn’s Bakery 901 W Historic Highway 66, 505-722-4104, glennsbakery.com Oasis Mediterranean Restaurant 1301 W Historic Highway 66, 505-863-8899, on Facebook @Oasis-Mediterranean-restaurant Red Rock Park gallupnm.gov/207/Red-Rock-Park-and-Museum Route 66 Railway Cafe 2150 E Historic Highway 66, 505-863-2535, on Facebook @Route-66-Railway-Cafe Tanner’s Indian Arts 237 W Coal Avenue, 505-863-6017, tannersindianarts.com West End Donut & Deli 3030 W Historic Highway 66, 505-722-3233, on Facebook @West-End-Deli Winfield Trading Company 1830 State Highway 602, 505-778-5544, winfieldtradingco.com X-Treme-Lee Fun Balloon Adventures 505-979-2012, scenicballoonrides.com For more information, visit Gallup Tourism galluprealtrue.com
Hall of a Good Time WILL THE MODERN FOOD HALL TAKE OFF IN NEW MEXICO? By Nora Hickey
Sawmill Market on opening night in March. Photo courtesy of Sawmill Market.
“T
The desire for the resurrection of a neighborhood that was once central to the affairs of industrial Albuquerque is one also shared by many of the tenants in Sawmill Market. In the 34,000-square-foot space, merchants sell, serve, and pour a wide variety of delectable options. 62
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W
hen what’s now known as the Sawmill District in Albuquerque was first settled by the Tiwa people, likely around 1300 CE, it was carried out with a vision of community. Growing crops such as beans and squash, the Tiwa established systems of commerce and permanence, making the area a place to live and work. Today, the Sawmill area is once again teeming with a spirit of sharing and industry, thanks to the newest form of culinary cooperation—the food hall. In some ways it is easier to examine the past than consider the future. There’s something comforting about nostalgia and intimidating about invention, but thank goodness for those who dare to change. Exploration and ambition from New Mexican locals are exactly what propelled the freshly opened Sawmill Market, as well as a boom of other new and upcoming food halls, including the Highlands Central Market in Albuquerque and Chomp in Santa Fe. First, to understand where we’re going, let’s look back briefly. The food hall derives from its ancestors, the cafeteria, food court, and food market, but has a distinctly new focus on local food vendors that provides a wide variety of cuisine in a setting of camaraderie and community. Recent iterations of the food hall nationwide are often easily accessible, both physically and price-wise, and located in urban areas with lots of pedestrian and car traffic. Often, the food hall is created in the spirit of renewal, whether this be in repurposing a historic building (such as the San Francisco Ferry Marketplace) or bringing new attention to an overlooked part of town (such as the Pizitz Food Hall in downtown Birmingham, Alabama). While the specifics of the food hall aren’t strict, what is irrefutable is their sudden ascension in American dining culture. Cushman and Wakefield, a real estate firm early to study food halls and their growing presence in the States, found that the number of food halls has nearly quadrupled from 2016 to today. Their research found one hundred twenty halls across the country four years ago and projected four hundred fifty food halls to open by the end of 2020. New Mexico will be a part of that propitious number. Our state hopes to follow the example of our neighbor to the north, Colorado, which has seen huge success with food halls since the early boom. One of these first halls, the community-orientated Stanley Marketplace in the Denver area, was envisioned by Mark Shaker after he worked as a social worker in West Africa and enjoyed the region’s many communal markets. “We took a social work approach to development—getting to know people and making them a part of the process, giving tours, getting input on design. The vendors and neighbors had input in the project, this is a purpose driven project,” Shaker says. Stanley is housed in a former airplane hangar. “We got the historical landmark on the building for adaptive reuse and used the whole structure. When you walk in the building you can see the tracks where they used to have cranes and motors hanging,” Shaker says. After the success of Stanley, Shaker opened up a new food hall in downtown Denver in 2019, Broadway Market, which similarly offers a range of food for an affordable price point. So, what could the huge success of a food hall in a place like Colorado mean for New Mexico’s own future? Like Stanley, Sawmill
Market is repurposing a historic building, the former Frank Paxton’s Lumber Co., in an area of town that, while seeing new development like Chaco Hotel, has until recent years been overlooked. Highlands Central Market will rise from ground that the city deemed “blighted”—a stretch of land that sits on Central Avenue across from Presbeyterian Hospital. Chomp is using an existing courtyard on Cerrillos Avenue to draw people into all its businesses. Sawmill Market, the creation of Heritage Hotels & Resorts CEO Jim Long, opened its glass doors in March 2020. Long asked Jason and Lauren Greene of Grove Cafe and Market to step on as concept developers, and the community-minded couple quickly agreed. “We really wanted to create a lifestyle amenity like Sawmill Market for the community to call their own. Jason and I are very passionate about urban revitalization in underused neighborhoods, breathing new life and excitement into these important Albuquerque neighborhoods,” Lauren says. “Albuquerque is so ready to have more places to congregate with friends and family, spend an afternoon, a date night, a family night out. We are a city that has a lot of pride in its place and in who we are as a community.” This desire for the resurrection of a neighborhood that was once central to the affairs of industrial Albuquerque is one also shared by many of the tenants in Sawmill Market. In the 34,000-square-foot space, merchants sell, serve, and pour a wide variety of delectable options. Whether a diner comes in search of wood-fired pizza, authentic barbeque, fresh Mexican food, or a meal-capping sweet, Sawmill can sate any appetite. Three businesses that will soon operate in Sawmill recently spoke of their hopes for the space. Alanna Casale owns Tulipani Pasta, a “tiny pasta shop that offers a changing line of artisanal, fresh pastas that are made in small batches using the best organic flour, eggs, and seasonal ingredients available.” Casale uses these seasonal, local ingredients to make unique pasta like spinach bucatini and purple carrot and beet tulipani, a tulip shaped pasta. At Sawmill, she will sell fresh pasta to cook at home, as well as serve dishes using her unique product. Casale sees Sawmill as particularly attractive to small business owners like herself. “Opening at Sawmill is a wonderful way to test my concept and reach a broader audience without the daunting investment of a full-scale restaurant,” she says. “Because of the way that all the businesses will split shared costs, Tulipani’s customers will have the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful community seating areas and an outdoor entertainment space that I wouldn’t be able to provide them in a stand-alone storefront.” Sharing that welcoming, light-filled space will be Botanic Bar, owned by Brandon Palmer. The bar will specialize in herbal and floral inspired cocktails as well as nonalcoholic drinks. “Our focus is on lower alcohol cocktails, kombuchas, and shrubs. Nearly all drinks will be offered both with or without alcohol,” Palmer explains. Patrons can sip on their drinks in the oasis-like greenhouse aesthetic of Botanic Bar. Palmer is excited to join the lineup of local businesses exposing Albuquerque to unique and tasty goods. “Being in Sawmill is special because it can put a business in front of a lot of people who WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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Top left: Eldora Chocolate. Bottom left: Bar at Flora. Photos courtesy of Sawmill Market. Right: Overhead of Mercantile Cafe & Wine Bar and Flora restaurant. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
might not otherwise travel to a stand-alone property offering a single concept or cuisine,” he says.
attention to this beautiful area of Albuquerque that has been too long dormant,” he says.
And after your plate of pumpkin ravioli, and a lively and refreshing drink, where better to end than an espresso? Plata Coffee, owned and operated by Rose Kerkmans and Aaron Ketner, highlights coffee by New Mexico roasters. “New Mexico is filled to the brim with talented coffee roasters, and we created Plata as a place to showcase them,” Kerkmans says. Roasters include the Albuquerque-based Cutbow Coffee and Santa Fe’s Iconik Coffee.
Casale echoes this wish for revitalization, saying, “I already adore the Old Town and Sawmill neighborhoods; there’s a lot of history and character in the area. I hope this market will introduce even more vitality, both energetically and economically.”
The owners of Tulipani, Botanic, and Plata are excited about bringing this innovative food hall to Albuquerque at large, and the Sawmill neighborhood more specifically. Kerkmans notes, “Albuquerque is a city steeped in history, and to be welcomed into the Sawmill/Old Town neighborhood is especially important to us.” She goes on to note the importance of both tourists and locals in the state’s economy, and is excited “to create a hub where New Mexicans and visitors alike can come to experience some of the best the state has to offer!”
A few miles to the east, Highlands Central Market stands to make its mark on the city. This food-hall mixed-use hybrid is the brainchild of the Maestas Development Group and Titan Development and will offer living, dining, work, and recreation. On a twelve-acre parcel across from Presbyterian hospital on Central Avenue, the development will transform unused land into a hub of activity. “Albuquerque is a city that is in dire need of a true urban, mixed-use development,” says Ian Robertson, director of communications for Titan Development. “Not only will [Highlands] be a fantastic development, but improvements will bring increased tax revenue, reduce crime, and invigorate positive change in the neighborhood.”
Palmer also sees great potential in the historic district. “I think for the Sawmill District specifically, [the market] adds a long-needed activation of an underserved area. It brings jobs and excitement and
Highlands will also feature a one-of-a-kind space—one floor of the attached Springhill Suites hotel will be dedicated to the Ronald McDonald House, which houses and supports families whose children
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Top left: Sawmill Market sign. Bottom left: Botanic Bar. Photos courtesy of Sawmill Market. Right: Overhead of Naruto and food hall. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
receive extended hospital care. “This new RMHC facility takes up an entire floor of the new hotel and includes guest rooms, library, conference room, industrial kitchen, laundry, common area, and bathrooms,” says Robertson. Construction has begun on the project, which will span five city blocks, and everything is set for completion within the next three years. Santa Fe, too, will soon enjoy the offerings of local food hall Chomp. It was conceived by Ken Joseph, whose visits to some of the original food halls left indelible impressions. “Boston’s Quincy Market and the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia appealed to me,” Joseph explains. “They are accessibly priced, high quality food, drink, and community in a fun atmosphere.” Through Chomp, Joseph wants to bring the delicious fare of Santa Fe in reach of everyone. “The project I developed is designed entirely around the concept of community, so the building itself is designed around a central courtyard.” Businesses that will circle this communal space include Radish and Rye and the New Mexico Hard Cider Taproom. “We are all going to cooperate and feed off each other,” Joseph says. “I’m also working with Jamie Lenfestey of AMP concerts, talking about what kind of music and events will be a good fit at Chomp.
We are just now learning how important community and fun are, and we don’t have many venues where wine and food are accessible and reasonably priced.” Along with these major undertakings, a number of smaller projects are popping up to provide even more food hall options. The 505 Central food hall in downtown Albuquerque will have nine tenants upon completion. Tin Can Alley in northeast Albuquerque will be built from shipping containers. And the old Disco building in Nob Hill now houses a retail collective anchored by Little Bear Coffee. New Mexico is a place so often associated with the past, from ancient ruins to the stunning profile of time-worn mountains. Some may say the future is harder to detect in a state steeped in such history, but it is pulsing all around us. These food halls show promise to pull people together in spaces where the latest innovations in cuisine and community meet. “Food halls have the power to become community landmarks, your third place after home and work,” Lauren Greene says. Turn the future into tradition and enjoy something that never goes out of style: exceptional food and company. sawmillmarket.com, facebook.com/TheHighlandsABQ, stanleymarketplace.com, lunasantafe.com WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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The Not-so-secret Life of Plastic LOCAL WASTE, FROM FARM TO TABLE By Briana Olson
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Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.
“Buying local can really help,” Brad Weikel of Little Green Bucket says, not only because a lot of plastics are introduced via industrial packaging, but because there are huge amounts of plastic waste that are pre-consumer. He refers to stacks of plastic-wrapped pallets at big box stores—packaging on top of packaging. 66
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t was a hot, breezy afternoon@TravelNewMexico early in 2019 when I cycled into Nui Chua National Park, a rugged, largely undeveloped peninsula on Vietnam’s south central coastline. The sea sparkled like something out of a travel photographer’s dream; wild jungle, not rubber trees, populated the inland hills. Cresting one promontory, curving east, something shiny drew my eye to the pristine white sands of an empty beach. Shells, I thought, or sea glass. But as I coasted down into the cove, I saw that the pretty blue line was drawn with finely shredded plastic. Plastic wasn’t news. I’d seen plastic debris along roadways in the mountains of North Vietnam; I’d swum in waters where the occasional plastic bottle knocked against my legs. Proof of plastic’s abundance was everywhere, from plastic nets at the fish farms that line Vietnam’s coast to plastic stretched over row crops in farms in the country’s north to the empty water bottles I handed back to café owners every time I stopped to rehydrate during a long ride in the tropical sun. This finely shredded tide of plastic might have come from any of those places. It might have come from plastic bales shipped from the US to Southeast Asia after China said no more. Whatever its source, here it was—visible, tactile evidence of plastic degrading into material small enough to be unconsciously ingested by living things. The next morning, with dining options limited, we ate squid. Back in Albuquerque, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch seemed more remote, more like someone else’s problem—as if the plastic on Vietnam’s beaches were unrelated to the plastic bags caught in the red agave and the rosemary, the styrofoam containers spilling uneaten leftovers in downtown gutters, the plastic bottles in the Rio Grande. Still, I started to form a plan to go plastic-free—to “break free from plastic,” as in the title of Senator Tom Udall’s newly introduced bill. I already had the habit of reusing plastic bags for beets and radishes, tossing loose garlic into my cart, bringing my own shopping bags to the grocery store. I’d start with one month. Thirty days, plastic-free— how hard could it be? Here’s a clue I didn’t have at the time: Of the 7.8 billion metric tons of plastic produced between 1950 and 2015, about half was produced in just the last thirteen years. This is according to a study led by industrial ecologist Roland Geyer, which found that 79 percent of the plastic waste generated by 2015 (that's nearly 5 billion metric tons, roughly equivalent in weight to 29 million blue whales) had accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. Nearly half—42 percent—of all nonfiber plastics, Geyer says, have been used for packaging. My attempt to quit quickly turned into a catalogue of all the ways I’d been using plastic without realizing it. It wasn’t just the plastic salsa cups or the straws I kept forgetting to tell servers not to bring; it was the shampoo bottles, the yogurt containers, the plastic wrapped around almost every available block of cheese. I kept finding reasons to delay the start date of my plastic-free month. I was moving; I needed garbage bags. It started to feel like my early attempts to quit smoking cigarettes. Tomorrow, I’d tell myself when I lit up within seconds of deciding never to smoke again. Tomorrow, I’d tell myself as I dropped a plastic bag of chips into my basket. And, as with tobacco, apologists for plastic—enablers—were easy to find.
You’ll die anyway, the smokers would say. You’ll get hit by a truck. None of this will make a difference, the apologists for plastic said. But according to Project Drawdown, a research organization focused on stopping global warming, households account for up to half of global waste production. They don’t try to project the impact of households giving up plastic altogether, but they do project that if bioplastics capture 49 percent of the market by 2050, 4.3 gigatons of emissions could be avoided. They also project that if the average worldwide recycling rate of metals, plastic, glass, and e-waste increases to 65 percent, as the city of Seattle has come very close to achieving, household recycling could help avoid 2.8 gigatons of carbon emissions by 2050. That’s in theory. But recycling is relatively new to New Mexico; Albuquerque’s residential recycling rate is currently at 18 percent, the state’s is a couple points lower than that, and with a crash in the market for recyclable plastics, some cities—Silver City being one—have ended curbside programs altogether. Is 65 percent within reach? And is the material we toss into our blue bins even being recycled? The answer, at least for Albuquerque, seems to be yes—mostly. “The annual contamination rate is right around 29–30 percent,” says Matthew Whelan, director of Albuquerque Solid Waste. That means nearly a third of what we try to recycle is sent to the landfill, either because it’s dirty or because it wasn’t recyclable in the first place. Plastic bags— the number one contaminant—aren’t accepted in curbside recycling because they jam up the conveyors at the recycling station. Still, over the past five years, about 70 million pounds of waste has been diverted annually through the city’s residential recycling program. As for where it goes, David Friedman of Friedman Recycling tells me that almost all HDPE plastics (also known as #2, mostly milk jugs and detergent bottles) are going to the Southeast, to the Carolinas, where they’re being turned into buckets, pipes, conduits. PET plastics (#1) sometimes go to southern California, he says, and sometimes to Texas. “It used to be turned into yarn, insulating fibers, that kind of thing; nowadays, they’ve optimized tech to put it back into foodgrade PET.” Friedman anticipates that this will lead to an increase in recycled plastics being turned back into bottles and clamshells, rather than being recycled only for secondary uses. He admits that the mixed plastics (#3 through 7) are still “spotty;” “that’s the little bit that we sometimes export,” he says, and “sometimes it accumulates, but we haven’t thrown any away.” Friedman Recycling has “adjusted up,” in Friedman’s words, to improve the quality of their plastics for the market; they’ve slowed the speed of the conveyors and increased the labor for sorting, cleaning, and baling the plastics. This means a higher cost for the city, which is why Whelan and team are trying to educate residents on the importance of “recycling right.” That means knowing what’s accepted locally (Albuquerque Solid Waste has produced an app, the Recycle Coach, as part of their education efforts) and giving up what’s known as aspirational recycling—tossing a garden hose in the recycle bin because you want to believe it has someplace to go besides a landfill. WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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The plastics industry has long tapped into that very wishfulness, encouraging consumers to believe that anything put into a bin with a recycling symbol on front would be magically transformed into a new product. Flexible packaging—almost always mixed plastics of the sort that Friedman Recycling, along with every other facility in the country, has had the most trouble finding a market for—is one of the latest things to be represented as “recyclable” by producers, despite its low value and the dearth of facilities who can handle it.
bags to the store, and feel like they’re doing something. That’s important,” he says.
The industry argues that flexible pouches are more sustainable than rigid plastics because they require fewer inputs and less energy to produce. Critics of plastic bag bans, like the one that Albuquerque’s city council passed around the time I was trying to get off plastic, often cite life cycle assessments, arguing that the carbon footprint of every available alternative to single-use plastic, from reusable cotton to paper to compostable plastic, is higher than that of the LDPE plastic used in thin plastic bags. Forests are precious, and it’s important to remember that paper comes from pulp comes from trees. But incentives—like the fee Santa Fe stores have to charge for paper bags—can help prevent a wholesale shift from plastic to paper, and it’s also worth keeping in mind that the plastics industry has been fighting plastic bag bans since the 1980s. Every defense of plastic bags is a defense introduced, first, by the industry itself. That includes the claim that banning plastic bags will damage local business, which was successfully used to force an exemption for Albuquerque restaurants. The final version of the Clean and Green ordinance, like the ban passed in Santa Fe in 2014, allows plastic and styrofoam to maintain their hold on the city’s carryout business.
Albuquerque’s ban has only been in effect for a couple months when I talk with Dods, too soon to tell how, or if, it will affect the city’s litter problem. I called him with a different question: Are compostable bags just as problematic as conventional plastics? I knew there’d been disagreement over an eco-campaign launched at the Downtown Growers’ Market, trying to get vendors to use compostable produce bags, and I’d read that an industrial composter in Oregon recently stopped accepting them.
“Sometimes it can feel a little bit like emptying out the ocean with a pail,” says Walter Dods, operations manager at Soilutions, which collects thousands of tons of food waste from participating restaurants and stores and turns it into compost, when I ask what he thinks about Albuquerque’s plastic bag ban, but “you’ve got to take those small steps.” Dods is neither the first nor the last to tell me that it’s about awareness. “People start taking their reusable 68
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I consider my own cotton grocery bags, bags I’ve used for upwards of five years (yes, they get washed), and calculate that I’ve easily used them three hundred times each. No one knows exactly how many plastic bags Americans use every year, but one of the more conservative estimates puts it at 103 billion nationally—about three hundred fifteen per person. Based on that number, I’ve saved 1,500 plastic bags in the past five years.
“There was a committee,” says Danielle Schlobohm, co-manager of the market; “some vendors were really excited about it . . . but we got a lot of pushback,” with other vendors concerned about the increased cost (which, depending on who you talk to, was a few cents per bag or forty-four cents per bag or two thousand dollars for the season) and the sourcing. “People had a lot to say about the bio-bags,” one farmer says. Another tells me that the bags are made from corn grown with chemicals, and caused moisture to cling to the product, making it slimy. Casey Holland, of Chispas Farm, acknowledges the imperfection of the bags, but says, “more alternatives won’t be developed if we don’t use what’s there.” She talks about educating customers and adapting the presentation of her products. When her crew challenged her attachment to displaying herbs in plastic ziplocs, she says, “I really started questioning my own complacency.” Yes, Dods tells me, Soilutions’s customers might confuse compostable and conventional plastics, but, “compostable plastics are not the issue.” He adds, “I’ve got ten chef ’s knives at home that are perfectly good.” Then he sends me a slideshow of contaminants they’ve found in food waste—almost all conventional plastics.
Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.
Brad Weikel of Little Green Bucket, which offers curbside compost pick-ups to Albuquerque residents (diverting two thousand pounds of food waste every week) and manages the waste bins at the Downtown Growers’ Market, sees more of a problem with products marketed as “biodegradable.” There’s a well-established certification system for compostable bags, but “biodegradable” is to plastic as “natural” is to meat—meaningless. “The term biodegradable needs to be regulated,” Weikel says. “The actual compostable products—there are a lot of sourcing concerns, life-cycle analysis concerns, but I generally feel that it’s a great bridge away from conventional plastics.” “Buying local can really help,” Weikel says, not only because a lot of plastics are introduced via industrial packaging, but because there are huge amounts of plastic waste that are pre-consumer. He refers to stacks of plastic-wrapped pallets at big box stores—packaging on top of packaging. Another source of pre-consumer plastic waste is farming itself. “Strawberries, lettuce, leafies from California—almost all of that is raised using plasticulture,” says Matt Stong of Preferred Produce near Deming. As Stong explains, conventional strawberry farms in California are covered with sheets of plastic film, also known as plastic mulch, while the fields are “fumigated” with methyl bromide. Plastic is again used to cover the ground during the growing season. Plasticulture is also widely used in industrial hemp cultivation. But the use of plastic is not limited to industrial farms; many small-scale farmers rely on plastic materials, from watersaving drip irrigation to greenhouse covers to the seed trays and pots used for indoor plants. “Plastic mulch is the industry standard in the organic world; it saves water, allows us not to spray herbicides, plus it keeps weeds down,” one local produce farmer tells me. “They’re working on biodegradable cellulose plastics, but they’re not as good.” Stong agrees that “herbicides are far worse than plasticulture. The diesel used for a mechanical harvester for weeding also has a bigger footprint—but the plastic mulch can break down if it’s not pulled soon enough, and then aldehydes and ketones will seep into the soil and the water supply.
And the plastic doesn’t last more than a year and has to be disposed of.” Another thing both farmers agree on: farming is hard, and competition, whether from cheap labor in Mexico or industrial production in California, makes it harder. Still, Stong thinks farmers should just spend the money on biodegradable cellulose mulches; he says the added cost is less than twenty bucks a roll. Numbers on agricultural plastics are difficult to come by. One research team, in 2006, estimated that every year, farmers use one million tons of plastic for greenhouses and high tunnels and 700,000 tons of plastic mulch. That would put agricultural plastics at less than 1 percent of the 310 million tons of annual plastic production estimated by Project Drawdown. But that was fourteen years ago, and at the time, China’s use of agricultural plastics had a growth rate of 25 percent. And those numbers don’t account for other uses of plastic in agriculture, like the tons of silage plastic used to cover feed for New Mexico’s dairy cows. “Right from the beginning, I never used plastic,” says Fidel Gonzalez, of Los Jardines de Moktezuma farm. “I personally didn’t get into it. The pro is it helps with the weeds; at the same time, it doesn’t help the soil to interact with the ecosystem, so I try to use organic material.” In terms of the eco-campaign at the market, Gonzalez says, “I was one of the ones who was happy with it. The bags are a little more expensive, but we’re also protecting the environment for the next generation—that’s my son and my daughter.” At the same time, he says, “I want to sell my salads—I do prepared salads. What kind of containers am I going to be able to use?” Rachel Zulevi, who runs Wasteless Life NM and volunteers on the Sierra Club’s Zero Waste team, likes the idea of reusable takeout containers, where you would pay a deposit and be able to return the container to any participating vendor or restaurant. “I prefer no single-use at all,” she says, but “plastic films and styrofoam present a more immediate challenge to our local community [than paper and compostable bags]; they’re not recyclable, and when they don’t make it into the landfill, they turn into microplastics.” She refers to the report on microplastics in rainwater in the Rockies, to reports of WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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Left: Plasticulture in Vietnam, photo by Briana Olson. Top right: Reusable mesh nylon bag, plastic-free zero waste alternative, photo by Richard Carey. Bottom right: Knowaste recycling station, photo courtesy of Knowaste.
microplastics in the air. Plastic already comprises 20 percent of the trash we bury (Albuquerque buried 506,103 tons of waste in 2019), and there’s at least one study that finds landfilled plastics leach into the soil and groundwater. According to an explainer for the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, introduced by Senator Udall and Representative Alan Lowenthal, humans swallow a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. The bill would shift the burden of recycling from cities to plastics and packaging producers, spurring development of products that are truly recyclable. It would require producers to scale up their use of recycled material. Not least, the bill proposes a temporary halt to construction of new “cracker” plants—factories where “virgin” feedstocks will be turned into new plastics, like the huge plant Shell is building near Pittsburgh, where more than a million tons of new plastic will be produced every year. “It sounds radical,” says Sarah Pierpont, director of the New Mexico Recycling Coalition, “but it’s happening all over Europe.” Even China has announced plans to ban the production and sale of thin plastic bags and mulches by the end of 2020, with plastic produce bags to be phased out by 2025. 70
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“I got it, Dad!” a boy calls past me in the produce section at La Montañita’s Nob Hill store, which switched to compostable produce bags while I was working on this story. He holds open one of the bags, demonstrating his success—not an easy task, I realize, trying to pinch apart the bag’s two sides. But this is hardly a new problem, and I’m more curious about how the bags function. For a week, every time I open my produce drawer, I half-expect to be presented with a festering mass where my red romaine had once been. That never happens. Neither, yet, has my month free of plastic. (Even Zulevi, whose family generates just one pound of landfill trash every three to four months, admits to buying plastic-wrapped cheese!) Systems changes are hard, and they take time and open minds. It’s true that a plastic bag ban, in isolation, won’t transform a deranged food system. But if we want to so much as cut in half the twelve billion metric tons of plastic waste projected for 2050, households and small businesses will have to be part of the solution. As Gonzalez says, “We all really have to participate.” cabq.gov/solidwaste/recycling, friedmanrecycling.com, soilutions.net, littlegreenbucket.com, facebook.com/wastelesslifenm, recyclenewmexico.com
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The Heart of Meat THE CONVERSATION ON CELL-BASED MEATS AND THE FUTURE OF LOCAL RANCHING COMES TO NEW MEXICO By Willy Carleton
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Photo by Ariel Greenwood.
In an age of urgent climate precarity and public health concerns, cellbased meats certainly hold legitimate promise as a better alternative to a bankrupt livestock system reliant on concentrated animal feedlots operations. But . . . the best environmental and public health solutions seriously consider the vitality of rural communities. 72
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think we’re actually trying to achieve the same ends, but maybe with just a slightly different approach.” A disbelieving laughter rose to the carved vigas of the large conference room at La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, where roughly three hundred people had gathered from around the state and the country to discuss the future of regenerative agriculture at Edible Institute 2020. The room fell quiet and all eyes focused on the panelists seated at the front of the room, especially the panelist with the microphone, David Kay of the Berkeley-headquartered, cell-based meat startup Memphis Meats. The other two panelists, Paul Willis of Niman Ranch in Colorado and Don Bustos of Santa Cruz, New Mexico, politely listened. “At Memphis Meats we are not producing a meat alternative,” Kay explained moments later. “Our products are real meat. They are animal flesh . . . it’s just produced without the animal.” Another swell of laughter. Then, moments later, the moderator took the mic and asked, “What are some ways we can work together and have a more productive conversation about this?” Again, laughter before silence. In the rising global debate about the future of meat and its role in the viability of our planet for many species, including our own, this last question has gained new urgency. Cell-based meat, known alternatively as cellular, synthetic, or (to industry chagrin) lab-grown meat, is made using new technologies, derived from stem-cell technologies in the medical field, to provide a scalable alternative to meat from slaughtered animals. In this process, cells from live animals are isolated in a lab, fed a nutrient solution known as “cell feed,” and grown in large fermentation tanks that, according to Kay, vaguely resemble brewery tanks. The resulting flesh, genetically identical to the flesh of a slaughtered animal, is designed to closely mimic traditional animal meat in taste, texture, and nutrient profile. The motivations of Memphis Meats, Kay explained to the crowd, stem from “a desire to protect the environment, . . . a desire to have strong animal welfare, [and] a desire to promote public health. We envision a meat production system that doesn’t require antibiotics [and] that can greatly reduce bacterial contamination and disease epidemics like swine flu, which is a huge issue, particularly right now.” Although the extent to which a large-scale transition to this production system could lead to long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is still being debated among researchers, certain environmental problems associated with feedlots, such as water pollution, could almost certainly be alleviated. For industry advocates such as Kay, embracing cell-based meats could mean the reduction of some of the most significant and dire environmental, animal welfare, and public health issues surrounding industrial livestock production. If priced low enough, and the public were willing to eat it, it could, theoretically, mean the end of industrial livestock production as we know it and send shock waves through the entire industrial agricultural economy. Given the extreme urgency of the climate crisis and the increasing threat of livestock-related epidemics, cell-based meat technology deserves consideration as an alternative to industrially produced meats from slaughtered livestock. But the panelists at the table at the Edible
Institute 2020 needed no convincing of industrial agriculture’s need for radical reform. The questions for the panelists, and for those of us in the audience, were, one, how does this type of technology line up with the values of local, regenerative agriculture and, two, what might it mean for the future of small-scale ranching. Paul WiIlis is a longtime farmer at Niman Ranch, a network of more than seven hundred forty farms and ranches nationwide that employ methods of regenerative agriculture to raise livestock more humanely and sustainably. “Industrial livestock production is, in many ways, really something many of us don’t want to support,” explained Willis as he took the microphone, citing the examples of antibiotic use and water pollution from concentrated waste and fertilizers. “I guess we have to be open and accept that there are alternatives to [industrial livestock production] and see where it leads.” He then explained how Niman Ranch has created well-paying jobs to ranchers and scholarships to those ranchers’ children. Niman Ranch has committed to rural communities, his example implied, as it has honed a food-system solution to the climate crisis. Don Bustos, a local food advocate and long-time farmer at Santa Cruz Farms, similarly encouraged an open mind about the technology. He then explained that hogs were his “friends,” and that the human-animal connection he feels as a farmer is spiritual. He continued: “You’ve got to let communities decide what’s best for them, as community-based decisions. . . . We need to be able to have really good, deep discussions and be able to look each other in the eye and say, I respect what you’re doing, but let’s figure out a way that we can work together so that everybody benefits instead of just the onepercenters.” For both Willis and Bustos, something essential—the rancher and farmer, their communities, and the relationships to their landscapes—needs to be considered in the conversation of how to radically reform or altogether replace industrial agriculture. Sitting in the audience was Sarah Wentzel-Fisher, executive director of the Quivira Coalition, who later explained her reaction to the conversation. “It’s a distraction,” she offered unhesitatingly. “If the amount of investment and brainpower that’s going into these kinds of projects were invested into really understanding ecosystem function, particularly in grasslands landscapes that include large ungulates and how we can more effectively manage those for maximum carbon capture, we would have the solution. And to me, this feels like an opportunistic, capitalistic seizing of the moment rather than being a well-thought out, genuine part of a long-term solution.” For Wentzel-Fisher, such technology needs to be further understood before being embraced as a wholesale solution to climate and public health concerns. She implored more independent research into the environmental costs of this technology, and suggested that the human body is itself a complex ecosystem of microbiomes, and we do not yet know how a shift to cell-based meats might affect our bodies nutritionally or biologically. Beyond those concerns, Wentzel-Fisher argued that, if we concentrate our resources into land-based solutions, we have enough tools with tried-and-true technologies to solve our problems through agriculture. WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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Paul Willis of Niman Ranch, David Kay of Memphis Meats, and Don Bustos of Santa Cruz Farms speaking on a panel at Edible Institute 2020 in Santa Fe. Photo by Douglas Merriam.
“I think [it’s] totally possible [for] agriculture to get [carbon] neutral or even [have] some positive carbon capture,” Wentzel-Fisher argued. She listed a host of other components of our food system that also need attention, from reducing food waste and transportation emissions to rethinking consumption habits so that we eat less meat generally and eat better quality meat when we do, that could all help address the climate crisis without turning to cell-based meat technology. “I think it’s possible to be positive-carbon-capture within our entire food system, but we also have to be thinking and talking about other things, like transportation.” For Wentzel-Fisher, one of the most glaring concerns about cellbased meats is the social side of the technology. “This is not a grassroots approach to food systems. What they are proposing is a very proprietary, corporate approach to a food systems solution. . . . People are not part of the equation.” Indeed, Memphis Meats, which recently raised $161 million to open a pilot production plant and whose corporate investors include Tyson Foods, has not outlined how they will structure their business model in the future. Regardless of the particular facets of the business structure among cell-based meat companies, the technology represents a potential for a very high degree of concentrated control over our meat production system—possibly even more than is already held by the handful of corporations controlling industrial meat production. Whereas everyone with some land and the necessary startup capital has free access to the “technology” of a cow in traditional agricultural systems, a production model based on 74
edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
patented cell-based technology will likely require all those interested in producing this meat to either develop their own technology (which will be prohibitively expensive, at least in the short- to medium-term future) or pay royalties or some other fee to lease or buy access to the technology from a relatively small group of well-funded companies. In an age of urgent climate precarity and public health concerns, cell-based meats certainly hold legitimate promise as a better alternative to a bankrupt livestock system reliant on concentrated animal feeding operations. But the reaction from the panelists and audience members like Wentzel-Fisher touch on an important, often under-represented argument in nascent local and global conversations around this technology and meat in general: the best environmental and public health solutions seriously consider the vitality of rural communities. In the case of cell-based meats, this might mean down the road pressing lawmakers to invoke anti-trust laws, or ensuring that land grant universities provide democratic access to all taxpayerfunded research and technology. But even with adequate access, this technology will be based on concentrated production facilities, not farms and ranches, and thus will unlikely be a boon for many rural areas. To strengthen rural areas, the message from the Edible Institute 2020 was clear: we need to continue to invest in regenerative agriculture and develop holistic solutions to environmental and public health problems that include ranchers, their communities, and the agricultural ecosystems they live in.
EXPERIENCE Oaxaca
Edible Travels–Oaxaca! | February 8–16 2021
Experience Oaxaca and all its flavor while traveling with Edible New Mexico.
We will come together around the tables of Oaxaca to share meals and
stories, discover new culinary traditions, and awaken our taste buds. Edible New Mexico patrons will appreciate special-topic visits with organic farms
and community members involved with Oaxacan sustainability efforts.
*Open Heart Tours will refund all fees paid, including the non-refundable deposit, should the US State Department issue a travel ban for Oaxaca.
OPENHEARTTOURS.COM WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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THE PLATE
Legal tender Saloon and Eating House A PHOTO ESSAY BY DOUGLAS MERRIAM
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edible New Mexico | LATE WINTER 2020
Chef Rory O'Brien, proprietor Murphy O'Brien, and chef Eliot Chavanne.
Sam Montoya
Jimmy Collins
Fitz Jay
Nile Quintana
Carson Blair
The Legal Tender Saloon and Eating House is located in the quaint village of Lamy, which serves as Amtrak’s Santa Fe station and was once home to one of several Harvey Houses in New Mexico, El Ortiz Hotel. The Legal Tender was built in 1881 as a general store, with the saloon added some time later. By 1953, the establishment went by the colorful name the Pink Garter. In 1970 it was remodeled and named The Legal Tender before it shuttered many years later. In 2019, Allan Affeldt renovated and reopened the historic railroad property as a restaurant and saloon serving elevated takes on comfort fare and spirits. 151 Old Lamy Trail, Lamy, 505-466-1650 legaltenderlamy.com
Eliot Chavanne
#EDIBLENM
EdibleNewMexico TAG us or use #edibleNM and your pics could be featured here.
bellab_sexyfood @farmandtablenm Located on 12 lush acres with a beautiful setting for for impeccable dining and they pride themselves on serving up locally sourced ingredients from farmers, ranchers and food artisans. #edibleNM
mollyinsantafe @rosewoodinnoftheanasazi Sandia y Pepino Margarita Silver Tequila, Cointreau, watermelon, cucumber, Tajin Lime Salt on the rim. #rosewoodinnoftheanasazi #edibleNM
violetcrownsantafe Appetizers should be shared. Except this one. #edibleNM
sweet.trails Happy 4th birthday @hippiecowgirlcouture #sweettrails #sugarcookies #edibleNM
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MARKET PLACE • LOCAL FINDS Your support for the advertisers listed here allows us to offer this magazine free of charge to readers.
Temporarily closed. Please visit our website to shop online.
Elevated Rooibos. Elevating Health. Celebrating Café. Celebrating Community. Espresso ground Rooibos. Antioxidant rich. Coffee alternative. Caffeine-free or caffeinated. Pure • Chai • Blossom • Earl finchescafe.com
Handcrafted Plant-Powered Skincare and CBD Products
1345 Pacheco St Santa Fe, 505-982-4494 Tierramadrebotanicals.com
TIN-NEE-ANN Trading Co. Family Operated - Family Friendly Since 1973
Our Future Our Past
SANTA FE Linking the pleasure of good food with local community.
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edible br ooklyn
TELLING THE STORY OF HOW THE CITY EATS AND DRINKS • NO. 52 SPRING 2018
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Drinks ISSUE
BOTTLING LIQUID COURAGE MAKING SPICEBUSH FIZZ BIOINTENSIVE ORCHARDS BOOM IRISH BARS’ FLUID IDENTITY A BREWERY-FERMENTARY-JUICERY IN ONE Member of Edible Communities
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Member of Edible Communities No. 39 | Winter 2019
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Celebrating the Harvest of the Hamptons and North Fork
No. 36 High Summer 2012
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TELLING THE STORY OF HOW GOTHAM EATS • NO. 30 JULY�AUGUST ����
NO. 10 FALL ��� 5
THE
TRAVEL ISSUE
REAL GREEK YOGURT LONG ISLAND CITY BEER CRAWL THE KINSTON KRAWL IN NORTH CAROLINA CONNECTICUT SENSE MEMORIES WHAT ARE BLUE POINT OYSTERS?
GOAT MILK SOFT SERVE CONSCIENTIOUS CATERING
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CATCHING THE BLUES
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Issue 45
Spring 2020 MARIN & WINE COUNTRY
Celebrating the harvest of Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties, season by season
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N O. 45
FALL/WINTER 2019
MEMPHIS FOOD, FARM AND COMMUNITY IN THE MID-SOUTH
FAMILIAR FACES KITCHEN QUARTERBACKS CLASSIC COCKTAILS UNSOLICITED ADVICE
ANDERSON VALLEY • LOW PROOF SPIRITS • BLACK VINES MEMBER OF EDIBLE COMMUNITIES
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Explore a world of local food through the magazines and websites of Edible Communities. We’ll introduce you to the chefs, farmers, brewers, home cooks and others who inspire and sustain local flavors across the US and Canada. ediblecommunities.com
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LOCAVORE BEER Member of Edible Communities
SEEDING CHANGE AT RIKERS ISLAND
Y O U R LO C A L S O URCE G UID E FOOD ARTISANS / RETAILER AlbuKirky Seasonings
AlbuKirky Seasonings specializes in finely crafted rubs, sauces, and jellies featuring red and green chile and other Southwest flavors. Albuquerque, albukirkyseasonings.com
Barrio Brinery
Bringing fine fermented foods to Santa Fe. We make our products by handcrafting small batches of flavorful goodness using only the finest ingredients.1413-B W Alameda, Santa Fe, 505-699-9812, barriobrinery.com
LODGING
Casa Gallina
Discover the art of a slow vacation. 609/613 Callejon, Taos, 575-758-2306, casagallina.net
Heritage Hotels & Resorts
Heritage Hotels & Resorts provides guests with an authentic cultural experience in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Taos, and Las Cruces. Hhandr.com
Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder
Bountiful Cow Cheese Company
Relaxing ambiance and opulent amenities. 20 Buffalo Thunder Trail, Santa Fe, 505-455-5555, hiltonbuffalothunder.com
Eldora Chocolate
A Curio Collection by Hilton. 125 Second Street NW, Albuquerque, 505-388-0088, hotelandaluz.com
Purveyors of fine cheese, meats, and provisions from around the world. 505-473-7911, B-cow.com
Hotel Andaluz
Eldora crafts chocolate using natural, organic, and fair trade ingredients. 1909 Bellamah NW and 8114 Edith NE, Albuquerque, 505-433-4076, eldorachocolate.com
Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm
Finches
Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi
Espresso ground Rooibos. Antioxidant-rich. Coffee alternative. Caffeine-free or caffeinated. finchescafe.com
Heidi's Raspberry Farm
Sumptuous, organic raspberry jams available throughout New Mexico and online! 600 Andrews, Corrales, 505-898-1784, heidisraspberryfarm.com
La Montañita Co-op
La Montañita Co-op is New Mexico's largest community-owned natural and organic food market. Locations in Albuquerque, Gallup, and Santa Fe, lamontanita.coop
New Mexico Ferments
Local, fresh, probiotic kombucha. Find us on tap at Albuquerque farmers markets as well as breweries and distilleries in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. newmexicoferments.com
Santa Fe Olive Oil & Balsamic Co
This local interactive tasting room offers the finest quality extra virgin olive oils, balsamic vinegars, gourmet salts, and specialty foods. Shop in-store or online. santafeoliveoil.com
Savory Spice Shop
Spice specialist with a variety of blends as well as extracts, sauces, and specialty foods. 225 Galisteo, Santa Fe, 505-819-5659, savoryspiceshop.com/santafe
Skarsgard Farms
Delivering fresh, local, and organically grown produce and natural groceries to doorsteps across New Mexico. 505-681-4060, skarsgardfarms.com
Talin Market
88 Louisiana SE, Albuquerque, 505-268-0206, talinmarket.com
Payne's North, 304 Camino Alire, 505-988-8011, Payne's South, 715 St Michael's, 505-988-9626, PAYNE'S ORGANIC Soil Yard, 6037 Agua Fria, 505-424-0336, Paynes.com
ORGANIZATIONS, EVENTS, & EDUCATION Eldorado Art Tour
May 16 and 17, 10am–5pm, in Eldorado at Santa Fe. eldoradoarts.org/studio-tour
New Mexico Cocktails and Culture
May 29–31, Santa Fe, nmcocktailculture.com
New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs
505-827-6364, newmexicoculture.org
New Mexico Museum Foundation
116 Lincoln, Santa Fe, 505-982-6366 ext.100, museumfoundation.org
4803 Rio Grande NW, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, 505-344-9297, lospoblanos.com
New Mexico Wine
Sophisticated modern aesthetic celebrating the Southwestern spirit. 113 Washington, Santa Fe, 505-988-3030
Open Heart Tours
Sarabande B & B
Comfort, elegance, and simplicity. 5637 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque, 505-348-5593, sarabandebnb.com
The Historic Taos Inn
125 Paseo Del Pueblo Norte, Taos, 575-758-2233, taosinn.com
The Parador
Our 200-year-old farmhouse, Santa Fe's oldest inn, is located in historic downtown Santa Fe. 220 West Manhattan, Santa Fe, 505-988-1177, elparadero.com
NURSERIES & SERVICES Alameda Greenhouse
Dedicated to growing and maintaining all manner of outdoor plants—veggies, fruit trees, flowers, shrubs, and perennials. 9515 Fourth Street NW, Albuquerque, 505-898-3562, alamedagreenhouseabq.com
deerBrooke
Irrigation and backflow prevention specialists. Repairs, installations, and consulting. 505-319-5730, NMLawnsprinklerexperts.com
Grow Y'Own
Year-round cedar raised beds with hoops and covers. 505-466-0393, raisedbed.biz
Osuna Nursery
A family-owned and operated nursery, gardening center, and landscaping company. 501 Osuna NE, Albuquerque, 505-345-6644, osunanursery.com
Payne’s Nursery
New Mexico Wine promotes local grape growing and winemaking industries. winecountrynm.com Travel with a conscience to Oaxaca. openhearttours.com
Slow Food Santa Fe
Slow Food is about enjoying food and the community it creates. Intrigued? Learn more at slowfoodsantafe.org.
OTHER SERVICES Garcia Auto Group
8449 Lomas NE, Albuquerque, garciacars.com
Sparky's
3216 Los Arboles NE, Albuquerque, 505-750-3740, sparkysabq.com
RETAILERS
Gallery Ethnica
Live globally! 1301 Cerrillos, Santa Fe, 505-557-6654, galleryethnica.com
Kitchenality
Irresistible and gently used gourmet cooking and entertaining ware. 1222 Siler, Santa Fe, 505-471-7780, kitchenangels.org
Next Best Thing to Being There
An eclectic shop for handmade products. 1315 Mountain NW, Albuquerque, 505-433-3204, beingthereabq.com
Sarabande Home
We have a passion for finding the perfect gift. 4022 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque, 505-344-1253, sarabandehome.com
Tierra Madre Botanicals
Handcrafted plant-powered skincare and CBD products. All organic, small batches WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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crafted using pure, plant-based ingredients. 1345 Pacheco, Santa Fe, 505-982-4494, tierramadrebotanicals.com
Tin-Nee-Ann Trading Co.
Family operated and family friendly since 1973. 923 Cerrillos, Santa Fe, 505-988-1630 facebook.com/TinNeeAnn
Parcht.com
Susan's Fine Wine and Spirits
1005 S St. Francis, Santa Fe, 505-984-1582, sfwineandspirits.com
WINE STORES 218 Camino La Tierra, Santa Fe, 505-9832100, arroyovino.com
Parcht
103 East Plaza, Taos, 575-758-1994,
l a c o l
t r o pp
Arroyo Vino
#su
Creative Casual Cuisine 221 Highway 165, Placitas 505-771-0695, www.bladesbistro.com Chef and owner Kevin Bladergroen brings together fine and fresh ingredients, artistic vision, and European flair in every dish. Sunday brunch, fabulous cocktails, and an award-winning wine list.
E A T & DRI N K LOCAL G UID E
colombian bistro
now open
tuesday-saturday 11am-8pm
3216 Silver SE, Albuquerque 505-266-2305, www.ajiacobistro.com Ajiaco’s varied Colombian cuisine is influenced by a diverse flora and fauna found around Colombia. Cultural traditions of different Colombian ethnic groups play a role in our choice of ingredients.
Café & Bakery
South Indian cuisine 505-204-7869 1291 San Felipe Ave, Santa Fe
ALBUQUERQUE
Grassburger
Mata G
Ajiaco’s varied Colombian cuisine is influenced by the diverse flora and fauna found around Colombia. 3216 Silver SE, 505-266-2305, ajiacobistro.com
Hartford Square
A collaboration between the owners of Bar Castañeda and Little Bear Coffee. 3128 Central, nobhillgrill.com
Ajiaco Colombian Bistro
Campo at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm
Rio Grande Valley cuisine rooted in seasonal organic ingredients from our own farm. 4803 Rio Grande NW, 505-344-9297, lospoblanos.com
Cutbow Coffee
The culmination of more than 25 years' experience by one of the nation's most accomplished artisan coffee roasters, Paul Gallegos. 1208 Rio Grande NW, 505-355-5563, cutbowcoffee.com
Farm & Table
Enjoy delectable seasonal dishes created from scratch, sourced from local farmers and our beautiful on-site farm. 8917 Fourth Street NW, 505-503-7124, farmandtablenm.com
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The feel-good, award-winning burger— 100% grassfed beef, vegan, or poultry! 11225 Montgomery and 5600 Coors NW, eatgrassburger.com Cozy downtown eatery; local, organic, and seasonal menu. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, & dinner-to-go. 218 Gold SW, 505-265-4933, hartfordsq.com
Il Vicino
Serving authentic wood oven pizza in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Multiple locations in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. ilvicino.com
Little Bear Coffee Co.
Nob Hill cafe now open! 5123 Central NE and 2652 Pennsylvania NE, littlebearcoffee.co.com
MAS Tapas y Vino
MÁS is a full-service restaurant and tapas bar located in the Hotel Andaluz, 125 Second Street NW, 505-388-0088, hotelandaluz.com/mas-tapas-y-vino
Unmistakably comforting, uncompromisingly fresh, and undeniably delicious. 116 Amherst SE, 505-266-6374, mata-g.com
Nob Hill Bar + Grill
Salt and Board
Salt and Board, a charcuterie-based cork and tap room in the heart of the Brick Light District. 115 Harvard SE, 505-219-2001, saltandboard.com
Savoy Bar & Grill
California wine country in the Northeast Heights. Farm-to-table dining and a casual patio. 10601 Montgomery NE, 505-294-9463, savoyabq.com
Seasons Rotisserie & Grill
Oak-fired grill, local and seasonal ingredients, and the best patio dining in Old Town. 2031 Mountain NW, 505-766-5100, seasonsabq.com
from local farms straight to your plate
seasonal • local • organic 218 Gold Ave SW, ABQ 505-265-4933, hartfordsq.com
Genuine Food & Drink Enchanting, Dusty... Wild West Style 28 MAIN STREET LOS CERRILLOS 505.438.1821 Thursday - Sunday blackbirdsaloon.com
Locally Grown
Est. 1984
TRIFECTA COFFEE COMPANY
Wholesale Specialty Cheese/Meats/Provisions 300+ Cheeses from around the World www.b-cow.com · 505-473-7911
413 Montano NE, Albuquerque 505-803-7579, trifectacoffeecompany.com We roast coffee, and brew it in unique ways utilizing some of the best methods available. All of our baked goods, sweet, and savory are made in house. WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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E A T & DRI N K LOCAL G UID E The Grove Cafe & Market
The Grove features a bustling café experience serving breakfast, brunch, and lunch. 600 Central SE, 505-248-9800, thegrovecafemarket.com
The Shop Breakfast & Lunch
Serving breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Sunday. 2933 Monte Vista NE, 505-433-2795
Trifecta Coffee Company
We roast coffee and brew it in unique ways utilizing some of the best methods available. All of our baked goods are made in house. 413 Montano NE, 505-803-7579, trifectacoffeecompany.com
Urban Taqueria
Tortillas made in house daily, sourcing locally whenever possible. 1 Central NW, 505-5080348, urban-taqueria.com
VARA Winery & Distillery
Spanish and American wines celebrating the origins of the American wine experience. 315 Alameda NE, 505-898-6280, varawines.com
Zinc Restaurant & Wine Bar
A three-level bistro featuring contemporary cuisine and late night bar bites. 3009 Central NE, 505-254-9462, zincabq.com
SANTA FE
D.H. Lescombes wine with your meal in our spacious comfortable lounge. 139 W San Francisco, 505-795-7075, lescombeswinery.com/santa-fe-herve
Iconik Coffee Roasters
Come visit the best specialty coffee shop in Santa Fe with amazing food, unique coffees roasted onsite, and super fast high-speed internet. 314 S Guadalupe and 1600 Lena, 505-428-0996, iconikcoffee.com
Il Piatto
An authentic Italian farmhouse experience, sourcing its ingredients directly from local farms and ranches. 95 West Marcy, 505-984-1091, ilpiattosantafe.com
L’Olivier
Serving classic French dishes made with local ingredients and Southwest influences. 229 Galisteo, 505-989-1919, loliviersantafe.com
Loyal Hound
Locally sourced modern comfort food paired with craft beer, cider, and wine. 730 St. Michaels, 505-471-0440, loyalhoundpub.com
Madame Matisse
A cafe and bakery with French specialties. 1291 San Felipe, 505-204-7869, madamematisse.com
Market Steer Steakhouse
Arable
Where refined dining meets fun dining. 210 Don Gaspar in the Hotel St. Francis, 505-992-6354, marketsteersteakhouse.com
Anasazi Restaurant & Bar
The original source for locally roasted coffee beans, gifts, and gathering. 505 Cerrillos and 1098 St. Francis, 505-982-9692, 507 Old Santa Fe Trail, ohoriscoffee.com
Inspired by the bounty of New Mexico, and the small community of Eldorado, Arable was born. 7 Avenida Vista Grande, 505-303-3816, arablesantafe.com Contemporary American cuisine inspired by locally sourced seasonal ingredients. 113 Washington, 505-988-3030, innoftheanasazi.com
Arroyo Vino
We serve progressive American fare inspired by our on-premise garden and local purveyors. 218 Camino La Tierra, 505-983-2100, arroyovino.com
Cafecito
Cafecito is a family-owned business blending the cultures to bring you a delicious menu in a beautiful gathering space. 922 Shoofly, Santa Fe, 505-310-0089, cafecitosantafe.com
Dolina
We serve modern American brunch with Eastern European influences. Open 7 days a week. 402 N Guadalupe, 505-982-9394, dolinasantafe.com
Dr. Field Goods Kitchen / Butcher Shop & Bakery 2860 Cerrillos, 505-471-0043 and 505-474-6081, drfieldgoods.com
Hervé Wine Bar
Enjoy a glass of locally produced
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edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
Ohori's Coffee Roasters
Paper Dosa
Bringing fresh, authentic homestyle South Indian dishes to your table. These bright and exciting flavors will leave you wanting more. 551 W Cordova, 505-930-5521, paper-dosa.com
Posa’s Restaurants
Posa’s tamales—our New Mexican tradition since 1995. 1514 Rodeo and 3538 Zafarano, 505-820-7672 or 505-473-3454, santafetamales.com
The Compound Restaurant
Chef Mark Kiffin preserves a landmark tradition of elegant food and service at his Canyon Road institution. 653 Canyon Road, 505-982-4353, compoundrestaurant.com
GREATER NEW MEXICO Bar Castañeda
Fresh takes on Fred Harvey classics. 524 Railroad Avenue, Las Vegas, kinlvnm.com
Black Bird Saloon
Genuine food and drink, wild west style. 28 Main Street, Los Cerrillos, 505-438-1821, blackbirdsaloon.com
Black Mesa Winery
Black Mesa Winery is an award-winning New Mexican winery using only New Mexican grapes. 1502 Highway 68, Velarde, 505-8522820, blackmesawinery.com
Blades’ Bistro
Chef and owner Kevin Bladergroen brings together fine and fresh ingredients, artistic vision, and European flair in every dish. 221 Highway 165, Placitas, 505-771-0695, bladesbistro.com
Michael's Kitchen Restaurant and Bakery
Regionally inspired eats with a tongue-incheek menu in a casual space decorated with knickknacks. 304-C N Pueblo, Taos, 575-758-4178, michaelskitchen.com
Pajarito Brewpub & Grill
Open for lunch Tuesday–Sunday. Open for dinner every day. Happy hour Tuesday– Sunday 2–5pm. 30 craft beers on tap. 614 Trinity, Los Alamos, 505-662-8877, pajaritobrewpubandgrill.com
Parcht
/pärCHt/= the physical condition resulting from the need to drink wine, eat good food, and shop…in Taos. 103 E Plaza, 575-758-1994, parcht.com
Revel
Farm to table, elevated comfort food, in a fast-casual environment. 304 N Bullard, Silver City, 575-388-4920, eatdrinkrevel.com
Radish & Rye
Doc Martin’s
Red Sage
The Gorge: Bar and Grill
Farm-inspired cuisine: simple yet innovative food and drinks sourced locally whenever possible. 548 Agua Fria, 505-930-5325, radishandrye.com Red Sage at Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder is perfect for your next romantic night out. Fare rotates seasonally. 20 Buffalo Thunder Trail, 505-819-2056, redsage-sf.com
TerraCotta
Seasonally changing, globally inspired cuisine and an extensive, value-priced wine list. 304 Johnson, 505-989-1166, terracottawinebistro.com
30+ year Wine Spectator Award Winner. Patio dining, fresh local foods, and live entertainment. 125 Paseo Del Pueblo Norte, 575-758-1977, taosinn.com Our menu is straightforward, yet eclectic, and chock-full of favorites made from scratch using as many fresh and local ingredients as possible. 103 E Plaza, 575-758-8866, thegorgebarandgrill.com
The Skillet
American, Southwest, vegetarian friendly. 619 12th Street, Las Vegas, 505-563-0477, giant-skillet.com
WWW.EDIBLENM.COM
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LAST BITE
Cherry Flip Mocktail Original mocktail from Natalie Bovis, The Liquid Muse Serves 1 2 ounces cherry juice 3 ounces coconut milk 3/4 ounce agave nectar 1 egg yolk Dry shake all ingredients, then add ice and vigorously shake again. Strain into a coupe glass, and add garnish. Find more mocktails from Natalie Bovis in her book Preggatinis™: Mixology For The MomTo-Be. theliquidmuse.com
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edible New Mexico | SPRING 2020
START SUMMER RIGHT! In Santa Fe, May 29-31
the sixth annual
NM COCKTAILS & CULTURE CULINARY FESTIVAL FRIDAY, MAY 29
TACO WARS
photos by Gabriella Marks
New Mexico’s original taco and cocktail competition partially benefits the Santa Fe Animal Shelter. SATURDAY, MAY 30
CHEF & SHAKER CHALLENGE
“Bootleggers Ball” 1920s themed cocktail party. Dress to impress! Food and cocktail pairings. Partially benefits the Santa Fe Youth Shelter. TACO WARS PARTICIPATING RESTAURANTS: Tako Ten, Rowley's Farmhouse Ales, Il Piatto Italian Kitchen, Last Call Baja Mexican Restaurants, Market Steer Steakhouse, Taco Emergency, New Mexico Hard Cider, Agave Lounge at El Dorado Hotel, Street Food Institute, La Plazuela at La Fonda, Dr. Field Goods, Eloisa, Jambo Cafe , Coyote Cafe, Paloma, Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, L'Olivier Restaurant, Joseph's Culinary Pub, Terra at Four Seasons Encantado Resort & Spa, Casa Chimayo, Jinja, and more. CHEF & SHAKER PARTICIPATING RESTAURANTS: Eloisa, SantaCafe, Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, Il Piatto Italian Farmhouse Kitchen, M'Tuccis, Sassella, Agave Lounge at El Dorado Hotel, Chef Johnny V’s Las Cosas Cooking School, La Boca, Palace Prime, Hollow Spirits, and Dinner For Two.
media sponsor
edible
FEEL FEISTY? THE NMCC PARTY PASS INCLUDES THESE TASTING EVENTS PLUS THE SUNDAY FUNDAY FIESTA!
TICKETS AT: THELIQUIDMUSE.COM Owned and Produced by The Liquid Muse LLC
M I C H A E L “ U N R E A L” B I R C H E F F
ARROYO VINO Restaurant and Wine Shop
Committed to the best seasonal & local ingredients On-site two acre garden Weekly wine seminars, wine dinners, half-price wine nights & more
R E STAU R A N T: T U E S DAY– SAT U R DAY S E RV I C E B E G I N S W I N E S H O P: M O N
11AM–4 PM,
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218 CHEF ALLISON JENKINS
C A M I N O L A T I E R R A , S A N TA F E
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