LLC
TER 2016 WIN
Farm-to-Table at Reevis Mountain
New guided tours to offer a taste of some of the finest produce in Gila County
Tanner Yeager
By Patricia Sanders
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Gila County is famous for a few things: copper mining, cattle ranching, the Pleasant Valley War—not so much for its farm produce. But if you are a chef at one of the Valley’s four-star restaurants searching for some of Arizona’s best asparagus, peaches, or lettuce, you just might find it here. For 35 years, Peter “Bigfoot” Busnack has quietly been growing some of the region’s highest-quality organic produce on his 12-acre farm in the Tonto National Forest, an hour’s drive northwest of Globe. Valley chefs such as Chris Bianco (Pizzeria Bianco), Aaron Chamberlin (St. Francis, Phoenix Public Market Café), and Chris Lenza (Café Allegro at MIM) compete for the output from Bigfoot’s garden and orchard. Reevis Mountain, Continued on page 38
Online Dating
The Grand Experiment:
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Taliesin comes to Globe-Miami By Linda Gross
The Superior Mushroom Man
The unlikely pairing of an internationally recognized school of architecture and a small rural mining community over the next four years will undoubtedly cause a stir and pique interest in a long-term project that might be called The Grand Experiment.
By Autumn Giles
Mike Montiel’s descriptions of his mushrooms fall somewhere between a good scotch and an alien lifeform. He calls oyster mushrooms “earthy and nutty” and speaks endearingly about the lion’s mane’s “pillowy, long tendrils. Each one of the tendrils grows out and as they grow out they grow together,” he says. “So at the tips you see these almost hairlike structures that you can pet. It’s very soft.” When you get up the nerve to “cut them up and cook them, their flavor is almost like salty shellfish and ocean.” He can tell you the best way to cook blue oyster mushrooms – sautéed with butter and seasoned to taste – but he’s just as excited to talk about the potential for fungi in agriculture, architecture, and remediation. “The applications for fungi have the capability to help any community,” says Montiel, who grew up in Superior and is one half of Symbiotic Farms, a Superior-based business that grows gourmet mushrooms. Mushroom Man, Continued on page 32
Git-R-Done Award Page 3
The campus of Taliesin West in Scottsdale is one of nine Frank Lloyd Wright works that have been nominated as a World Heritage Site.
As 2015 drew to a close, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture – also known as Taliesin – agreed to establish a neverbeen-done-before, four-year studio project in Globe-Miami focused on revitalization and community engagement. The agreement comes about after the community was instrumental in raising nearly half of the funding necessary to secure Taliesin’s future, which had been in question because of a federal ruling that affected their funding – which has always been closely tied to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Taliesin West, Continued on page 41
Photo by Thomass in Mickael CC BY 2.0, via Flickr
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