Flavors from Oaxaca come alive at Garcia's in Carbondale, one of many restaurants in the Roaring Fork Valley that serves up local specialties. David Frey photo.
Leticia Garcia’s hometown of Tlacolula is one of the great centers of cuisine in Mexico. At its weekend market, Oaxacan vendors crowd in from the surrounding mountains to sell everything from chiles to cocoa to crickets. But when Garcia moved to Carbondale, the fabulous foods of Oaxaca were nowhere to be found. (more…)
The Brasserie Lipp is famous for three things: Its choucroute; its cevelas, cold, squishy sausages smothered in mustard; and the man who made those sausages famous, a young writer named Ernest Hemingway, who came here when he had enough francs in his pocket for a cheap lunch. It’s not so cheap anymore.
I had come to Paris’s Left Bank on a quest for all things Hemingway, and I dragged my fiancée Cristina along. Cristina, who is from Mexico, has not read much Hemingway, but she has a great sense of adventure, which she exhibited by ordering the house special without having any idea what the house special actually was.
“What am I eating?” she asked, taking a stab into what looked like pink flesh wrapped in octopus tendon over gristly bone. (more…)
Slow Food USA has put Carbondale, Colorado’s Red McClure potato on its Ark of Taste, an exclusive list of foods that are delicious–and disappearing.
Long before Outside magazine named it one of the best towns in the West, Carbondale, Colo., was better known for potatoes than outdoor adventure. The potato fields vanished, though, and so did a potato variety that was born here. But a century later, the Red McClure is back, and getting some long overdue recognition.
Concerned that this heirloom variety had disappeared from its birthplace and was drifting into obscurity, the Roaring Fork chapter of the Slow Food movement conspired to track down the elusive tuber and bring it back. (more…)
Mourning Dove. Andy Purviance photo.
For local bird hunters, it is a rite of autumn.
On the last day of August, hunters from throughout western Colorado converge on the North Fork Valley, where thousands of mourning doves have filled the fields, gorging on grain as they make their migration from the Colorado high country to the desert.
The hunters have their own bacchanal, listening to bluegrass bands and filling up on local specialties at the Paonia foodie haven Fresh & Wyld. At dawn, they head out in camouflage and khakis and take aim. It’s the first day of dove hunting season in Colorado, and for hunters, the first hint of coming fall. It’s a great day to be a hunter, a bad day to be a mourning dove.
By evening, the doves are dinner.
“Dove breasts are among the absolute most wonderful flesh you can eat in the world,” says Jon Hollinger, owner of Aspen Outfitting Co., a high-end hunting and fishing outfitting company based at the St. Regis hotel in Aspen, who organizes the trip every year. “The North Fork Valley doves are the nicest-tasting doves I have eaten anywhere in the world.”
That’s high praise from Hollinger, who has hunted birds around the world, and who leads hunting trips for well-heeled clients throughout western Colorado. His shop has the feel you expect from a British gun club. The walls are lined with pricey double-barrel shotguns he orders from Spain’s Basque Country. It used to be, Hollinger sort of hid away his guns. Hunting has a long tradition in Colorado, but guns aren’t quite so popular in Aspen, where locals are more likely to hunt for wild asparagus than wild animals.
The local food movement may be changing that, though. Progressive attitudes toward food are shifting away from doing without meat to avoiding chemicals and hormones. As more and more consumers become conscious about where their meat comes from, many are willing to be carnivores as long as they can be locavores. (more…)
We know polar bears are endangered and rhinos have all but disappeared. But what about endangered chickens? Or cows? Or pigs?
Many of the barnyard breeds Americans ate for generations have all but vanished from the farm, not to mention the dinner table. It’s not because we ate too many of them, but because we stopped eating them altogether.
The result? Thousands of breeds of poultry, pigs, cattle, goats, and sheep have been threatened with extinction. (more…)
Vintners in the Grand and North Fork valleys may get all the
attention, but winemaking in the Roaring Fork Valley has a history that goes
back to the days when Italian immigrants were settling the region.
Hailing from the borderlands between France and Italy, two countries
synonymous with wine, immigrants here continued a tradition passed down
generation to generation, barrel to bottle to glass.
“A glass of wine with a meal was as important as a slice of
bread,” says Glenwood Springs resident Hank Bosco. (more…)
I’m a freelance journalist based near Washington, D.C., where I specialize in writing about food, the environment and travel writing from a shrinking globe. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to contact me at david@davidmfrey.com.