Edible Baja Arizona - September/October 2016 by Edible Baja Arizona

September/October 2016 • Issue No. 20 • Gratis

Celebrating the gastronomy of Tucson and the borderlands.

SHAKING THE TREE No. 20 September/October 2016

Growing Edible Trees • Female Farmers in the Balance Brewing Capital • A Short History of Craft Beer in Baja Arizona

Features

Contents

6 COYOTE TALKING

10 ONLINE What’s happening at EdibleBajaArizona.com? 12 VOICES We asked gardeners with One Seed Pima County: Why did you grow brown tepary beans? 18 GLEANINGS Baking with Big Skye; Growing the Naco Wellness Initiative; Tasting a slice of kindness; City of Gastronomy at TMY. 30 CALENDAR 34 BAJA EATS 44 THE PLATE 46 A DAY IN BAJA ARIZONA Exploring Oracle. 128 OUR ABUNDANT DESERT FOREST Linking Edible Arizona Forests (LEAF) connects people with trees and trees with their stewards.

49 HOMESTEAD Growing herbs, and growing soil. A primer. Spotlighting the Community Gardens of Tucson. 62 FARM REPORT 66 THE SONORAN SKILLET For the love of leftovers. 80 IN THE BUSINESS Sam Allison started at the Arizona Inn as a cook 15 years ago. Today, he leads the kitchen as executive chef. 84 TABLE Sally Kane is carving a corner for herself in Tucson’s culinary scene, from The Coronet to Agustín Kitchen and the new Aka Deli & Bakeshop. 100 HEALTH Can nutrition replace prescriptions? Medical educators at the UA are planting the seeds. 111 BAJA BREWS The long and short history of craft beer in Baja Arizona. 144 FEATURE Growing edible trees in Tucson is a way of life. 176 BUZZ Ten 55 Brewing is the first business in Arizona seeking to raise capital through equity crowdfunding.

152 FARMING IN THE BALANCE Baja Arizona’s female farmers are closing the agricultural gender gap and paving the way for the future of food.

186 BUZZ Kay Sather walks on food.

edible Baja Arizona

“TREES ARE POEMS THAT THE EARTH WRITES UPON THE SKY.” —GIBRAN

COYOTE TALKING

ucson and Its Bor der lands terroir got some delicious media attention during the dog days of August. Within the space of a week, two of the nation’s largest newspapers published glowing stories about Tucson’s food scene and its recent designation as the only UNESCO City of Gastronomy in the United States. For several hours, our fair city was literally front and center on the New York Times’ website with the headline “Tucson Becomes an Unlikely Food Star,” followed the next day in print with a huge spread on the front page of the Food section, with nearly a dozen photos, including one of eBA’s editor Megan Kimble shopping at the Heirloom Farmers’ Market at Rillito Park. ¡Híjole! And just days before that, USA Today gushed about our restaurants, brewers, and distillers—almost all of them regular Edible Baja Arizona supporters and story subjects during the last three years. In both stories, the writers began to understand what makes our gastronomic terrain worth special recognition. As quoted in the Times’ piece, Megan Kimble said: “Tucson has really figured out the connection game.” That sentiment was echoed by other sources in both stories. The Times story also prominently featured Edible Baja Arizona: “[Kimble] pointed to strong advertiser and reader support for the magazine as just one example of the love people have for local food in this city of about 500,000. The magazine consistently has more advertising pages than any of the other 90 published under the Edible Communities umbrella in the United States and Canada, said Nancy Brannigan Painter, the executive director of Edible Communities.” Take a bow, Edible Baja Arizona advertisers and readers! All of us who live, eat, cook, produce food, and work diligently to create connections in Tucson can be proud that the UNESCO designation is bringing international attention to Baja Arizona. It’s just the beginning of what we can do together to craft a vibrant, diverse, and prosperous local food economy. A staff note: Kate Kretschmann, whose title of Business Coordinator is shorthand for The Person Who Handles Every Little Detail—of Which There are Hundreds—with Aplomb and Good Humor, has been an invaluable addition to the eBA team. Managing nearly 200 advertising partner relationships, more than 1,000 subscribers, and the myriad and minute details entailed with publishing a top quality magazine every eight weeks is a mammoth task. As the central hub for all business data and interactions, Kate has worked tirelessly and with alacrity to organize and improve systems that make life better for everyone involved with this project—and for this we are profoundly grateful!

6 September /October 2016

is full of wonderful surprises, with some new voices and feature stories that you can sink your teeth into. Being a farmer is often an impossibly difficult endeavor. Being a woman and a farmer can be even more daunting. But as Debbie Weingarten writes in her feature on female farmers, women are increasingly “becoming the change-makers and innovators of small-scale agriculture.” And yet, it’s a tough row to hoe, with “female farmers fighting to be taken seriously in a field that still views women as an anomaly.” Another excellent reason to make it a point get to know your farmer—male or female—and support them by patronizing farmers’ markets, CSAs, and seeking out genuine local sources at retail grocers. hIs tWentIeth Issue

The importance of trees in a hot and arid place like Tucson can’t be overstated. Lisa O’Neill’s feature on edible trees introduces you to the good work of LEAF (Linking Edible Arizona Forests), an organization that “encourages and promotes the planting, care, harvesting, and celebration of edible trees, including native and cultivated species that yield fruit, pods, nuts and other products for people, wildlife and the environment.” And you’ll meet others who are helping to grow an edible forest in this desert environment. Plant a tree—and its water—today! As always, there is much more to discover in these pages. Please enjoy and celebrate the connections that make Baja Arizona such a magical and inspiring place. We’ll see you around the table. ¡Salud! 

—Douglas Biggers, editor and publisher

Editor and Publisher Douglas Biggers Editor

Megan Kimble

Art Director

Steve McMackin

Advertising Sales Director John Hankinson Business Coordinator Kate Kretschmann Online Editor Kate Selby Senior Contributing Editor Gary Paul Nabhan Copy Editor

Ford Burkhart

Proofreader

Charity Whiting

Designer

Chloé Tarvin

Contributors

Craig S. Baker, Amy Belk, Zotero Citlalcoatl, Kimi Eisele, Jesús Garcia, Autumn Giles, Marguerite Happe, Laura Horley, Edie Jarolim, Sara Jones, Ken Lamberton, Lisa O’Neill, Angela Orlando, Linda Ray, Kay Sather, John Washington, Rachel Wehr, Debbie Weingarten

Photographers & Artists

Adela Antoinette, Julie DeMarre, Tim Fuller, Autumn Giles, Jim Harris, Liora K, Molly Kiely, Elijah LeComte, Steven Meckler, Audra Mulkern, Bridget Shanahan, Jeff Smith

On the cover: Quince tree. Painting by Gretchen Baer

Interns Saul Bookman, Maya Holzman, Julia Ranney

Above: Baby goat near Elfrida.

Distribution Royce Davenport, Gil Mejias, Shiloh Walkosak-Mejias, Steve and Anne Bell Anderson

Photo by Audra Mulkern

We’d love to hear from you.

307 S. Convent Ave., Barrio Viejo Tucson, Arizona 85701 520.373.5196 info@edibleBajaArizona.com EdibleBajaArizona.com

V olume 4, I ssue 2.

Edible Baja Arizona (ISSN 2374-345X) is published six times annually by Salt in Pepper Shaker, LLC. Subscriptions are available for $36 annually by phone or at EdibleBajaArizona.com. Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without Say hello on social media the express written permission of the publisher. Member of the facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona Association of Edible Publishers (AEP).

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

From the blog

Water Harvesting on the Cheap

ater harvesting doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. In this post, Martha Retallick describes some easy and affordable ways to harvest water that don’t require pulling out the credit card. Check out a few of her ideas below: 1. Think like water: Want it to help you grow food? Before you plant that cute little mesquite tree, plant the water first. Here’s how: Dig a basin and build small trenches to direct rainwater to it. Line those trenches with rocks that will slow the flow and prevent the formation of gullies. You’ve just created a water-harvesting feature called a swale. 2. Collect used water in buckets, and redirect it outside. Your best graywater sources are the shower or bathtub, kitchen and hand-washing sinks, and bleed-off water from cooling systems.

ocaditos is our weekly newsletter that packs up the best of the Edible Baja Arizona online and sends it straight to your inbox. It features: • A exclusive original recipe, only available to Bocaditos subscribers. • A roundup of upcoming local events. • The best of the eBA blog and social media. • Weekly giveaways, like movie tickets to The Loft Cinema and gift certificates to local restaurants.

Go to EdibleBajaArizona.com/newsletter to sign up!

ur Instagram account has been bursting with photos from places we visit, restaurants we enjoy, gardens we grow, and behindthe-scenes looks at how we make the magazine.

3. Learn more about water harvesting for free, by joining the Watershed Management Group Co-op: bit.ly/WMGCo-op See the full list online, including more details on thinking like water, reusing graywater, and how to get involved in water harvesting, at bit.ly/WaterHarvestCheap.

instagram.com/EdibleBajaAZ youtube.com/EdibleBajaArizona facebook.com/EdibleBajaArizona 10 September /October 2016

instagram.com/ediblebajaaz (Left) Art director Steve McMackin braved the summer heat head-on for our Day In Oracle piece (see page ). (Center) Our first Baja Brews tasting event at Borderlands Brewing Company was a jam-packed success, with more than  people attending to sample cactus fruit beers from  local breweries. Join us on / at Barrio Brewing for the next tasting, featuring beers made with chiles & chiltepins. (Right) This little piggy went to market–and gave us one more reason to love La Estrella Bakery. Their cochitos cookies are not to be missed!

pinterest.com/EdibleBA twitter.com/EdibleBajaAZ

VOICES

We asked gardeners: Why did you grow brown tepary beans? Photography by Jeff Smith

by the Seed Library of the Pima County Public Library, One Seed is a community-wide effort bringing people together through the celebration and preservation of the food crops of our desert home. It’s much like ONEBOOKAZ, but instead of reading the same book, folks are encouraged to plant and grow the same variety of regionally significant seeds. For our inaugural One Seed, we selected the brown tepary bean, which has been grown by native peoples of the Southwest for thousands of years. Drought r esented

tolerant, heat loving, easy to grow, self-pollinating, and delicious, it’s the perfect crop to honor and learn about our rich agricultural roots. Did you grow brown tepary beans this year? If so, at harvest time set a small amount of your brown tepary beans aside and bring them to any one of the many drop-off spots around town (including any PCPL branch) to be combined with the harvests of others. The beauty of One Seed is not only in planting and growing but also conserving for future generations.

—Holly Schaffer, Pima County Public Library

12 September /October 2016

groW tepary beans because they are matched to where I live. They are easy. I have spent years growing more exotic things, and it is so much work and costs so much money to try to adjust the environment to meet their needs. Growing plants adapted to our area is much more rewarding and way less stressful. An added benefit is that our tortoises like to eat the tepary bean leaves. By the way, this community garden is the garden that was created after Gabby Giffords was shot. She used to live across the street from the garden and still visits the garden frequently. One of the plots has been permanently set aside in memory of the people who were killed that day. The plot was made with compost from all of the flowers that were left at the memorial at the hospital for the victims. The plot was originally planted with the living plants and flowers that were left at the memorial.

Gene Zonge

hen It ’ s too hot and humid to grow anything else, I grow tepary beans. This prehistoric food crop is the fastest growing bean in the West. It is very nutritious, with lots of fiber, protein, calcium, and iron, plus it is aesthetically pleasing and specific to our hot and dry region. The seed (bean) pods quickly mature to offer a bounty of beans to eat, save, and share.

Nancy Reid

to Tucson and being a chef, I thought the tepary bean project would be a good way for me to start learning about local and indigenous products literally from the ground up. Also, our team of gardeners at the Sunrise Drive Community Garden thought the harvest would be an interesting project for students at the Sunrise Drive Elementary School, which is adjacent to the garden. They can harvest the plants and then thrash the pods to release the beans. If it works out, I would love to help the students learn to prepare a recipe or two with the harvest. eIng neW

Harry Crane

chose to grow tepary bean seeds after reading the flier for One Seed Pima County at the main library seed-sharing kiosk. As an avid gardener I was looking for something different to grow during the monsoon season. I typically follow the Community Food Bank’s planting guide, which lists information about vegetables and fruits to grow during each season in Tucson. I have never grown tepary beans. I usually grow spinach, a variety of leafy greens, and peppers. The local connection between tepary beans, Native Americans, and the Sonoran Desert piqued my interest. The long, rich history of native people growing, cultivating, and eating and storing tepary beans for centuries, tied in with UNESCO’s designation as a City of Gastronomy, inspired me to try growing them in our backyard garden.

John Connelly

ur son ,

James, has become quite interested in growing native foods since learning about different edible plants in his ethnobotany course at Sky Islands High School. Since we recently started a home garden, we thought this would be a good opportunity to try growing some ourselves. The tepary bean seeds made available through the Seed Library provided the perfect occasion for us to try our hand at growing some beans to eat, as well as giving back to the community so others can have the chance to grow these edibles as well. We canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wait for our harvest!

Ceci Alter

16 September /October 2016

mIss gardening. As it became more difficult for me to garden, my daughter suggested a raised bed garden would be a great way for me to get back to gardening. We checked out free seed packets of tepary beans from the Pima County Seed Library for One Seed Pima County. ď&#x20AC;ź

Manuel Natividad

gleanings

Bodie Robins bakes pies, cookies, and breads to sell at farmers’ markets. “There’s no greater love than a pie,” he says.

Big Skye, Little Bakery

Bodie Robins is redefining the glamour of grain. By Marguerite Happe | Photography by Elijah LeComte

B odie R obins describes grain, the tone and timbre of his voice soften. He’s no longer discussing his job, the day-to-day minutiae of operating Big Skye Bakers and dispersing pies at farmers’ markets throughout Tucson and Sierra Vista. Rather, he’s detailing what he believes to be the true magic of baking. Robins is the owner of a new grain mill, and he’s been grinding his own grains into heirloom Sonoran white wheat flour, coarse-grained white flour, and other heritage wheat grain flours to make cupcakes, cookies, and more. “It’s a very loving process,” he says. “There are so many new possibilities, and such differences in taste. I’ve been working on my puff pastry, which is so delightful and an extraordinarily arduous project. You might spend five to six hours preparing this dough. When you roll it out and it puffs up to about four times its height, it’s just magic. Then I’ll find some fresh peaches and wonderful Ataulfo mangoes, lay the fruit out on top of the puff with almost nothing else, and it is just so beautiful.” The “swarthy and wholesome” coarse grain white flours, among others, that Robins has been experimenting with are a departure from his firmly established Tucsonan reputation as a mesquite flour baker. After the housing market crash in 2008, then-architectural designer Robins simultaneously discovered his love for baking and the abundance of mesquite: “There was this eureka moment. There’s mesquite everywhere: it’s ubiquitous, it’s abundant. I couldn’t even describe the taste. It was like trying to describe a summer rain. It was just phenomenal.” Robins began spending his time in the kitchen, baking for most of the day and taking mesquite treats over to the neighbors. In addition to the flavor of mesquite, which he describes as “somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and maple sugar,” he was attracted to mesquite’s high protein content, naturally clearing hen

18 September /October 2016

sugars that the body can process without insulin, and nutritious amounts of calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc. “I walked from my house to trees that I knew. I always collected from certain trees. Eventually, I perfected a small lineup of products, and began to sell them at the Rincon Valley Farmers’ Market in 2009.” Big Skye Bakers’ original lineup included what would become one of Robins’ specialties: pies made with mesquite flour. “There’s no greater love than a pie. To give a pie to someone is a hugely heartfelt thing,” he says. In his hometown of Walla Walla, Washington, Robins learned to make pie crust and pies from his grandmother, using wild blackberries along the creek to craft special treats. Today, Big Skye pies are vibrant and fresh, a stark contrast to the cloying, crumbly supermarket fruit concoctions. “I’m very disappointed in the state of modern crust these days,” says Robins. “That’s why I use blends of mesquite and whole wheat flour and white flour for my pies; there’s a nutty and nutritious quality to the crust. The pie then becomes a low-sugar healthy treat, but without losing that old-fashioned emotional quality that just makes us happy.” Today, Robins continues to experiment with grains. He produces mesquite flour cookies, pies, and breads, but takes delight in his delicate galettas and other handmade creations. “I bake in my own kitchen, and sell at the Heirloom Farmers’ Market in Rillito Park as well as out in Sierra Vista,” he says. He says that few people are immune to the charm and care of his products. “Customers will come up and look at my pies, and they just smile. Sometimes people even break out in a laugh. I don’t know if there’s anything particularly funny about my pies, but there is just something there that makes people happy.” BigSkyeBakers.com. Marguerite Happe is a writer, English teacher, and editor. Follow her on Instagram @margueritehappe.

edible Baja Arizona

g From left: Dora Grijalva, Lupita Sanchez, Tom Carlson, and Maria Elena Borquez, at the Jardín de Casa Hogar.

Growing Naco

The Naco Wellness Initiative is seeding healthy change in this border community. Text and Photograhy by Megan Kimble

N aco , Sonora, seeds sprout in unexpected places—from empty mop buckets, old stove pots, worn rubber tires. Backyards fill with scattered fruit trees, right-angled drip irrigation lines, and pyramids of piled compost. When the Naco Wellness Initiative (NWI) began in 2004, “There wasn’t a whole lot of gardening going on in the community,” says Tom Carlson, NWI’s president. NWI began as a diabetes prevention service, offering health and wellness services to Naco communities on both sides of the border. “When the fence was built in earnest in 2007, that basically stopped it,” says Carlson. He came to Naco in 2003, after retiring in Bisbee. Eventually, NWI built a brick-andmortar clinic that could be open five days a week. Today, Carlson and a dozen staff members run two walk-in clinics in town and teach classes on diabetes prevention and wellness. In 2015, they counted 10,000 service visits. “We want to get folks to pay attention to wellness—to catch things before they get out of control,” Carlson says. Recognizing that prevention begins with diet and that, in this town of 6,400 with unemployment as high as 70 percent, many clients didn’t have access to the foods that create a healthy diet, NWI launched a Community Gardens Harvest for Health Project in 2012. “It was clear we had to do something to help people not to have to go to the store,” says NWI’s garden program director, Maria Elena Borquez. “Because they can’t afford [fresh food] there. Now, they’re experiencing the joy of eating something that grows, that comes out of the ground.” Borquez has helped build and maintain more than 50 gardens throughout the community. To receive the support of NWI, individuals and families come to monthly classes about organic gardening for nine months. Twenty-two families graduated from the program in July, receiving seeds and drip irrigation supplies from NWI to start their own gardens at home. NWI is also working to build school and community gardens. “We’ve started a community garden for kids, so that the kids learn what it means to work on something as a community,” n

20 September /October 2016

Borquez says. “We’ve turned a lot of attention to kids. That’s where the habits start,” Carlson says. In early 2016, a garden was just beginning to sprout at CEME, the Centro de Educación Multiple Especial, an elementary school for kids with disabilities. “Gardening helps them develop a skill,” says Borquez. Teachers at CEME are trained in how to incorporate the garden into their lesson plans, and the CEME principal, Samantha Maldonado, says that the students love working in the garden, putting their lessons into practice. At Casa Hogar, Naco’s orphanage, a greenhouse made from recycled material remains a warm 65 degrees in March. Inside, old rubber tires filled with soil line the edges. The tires capture the heat of the sun during the day and release it at night. This is one of three greenhouses built and maintained by NWI. Seed starts are distributed to gardeners enrolled in the monthly classes. Lorena Cuevas enrolled in the gardening program last year. She’d gardened before, but not organically. Now, she’s learned how to turn compost and work with drip irrigation. In a long garden plot outside her home, she’s growing pumpkin, corn, tomatoes, chiles. “We had been cooking with vegetables before, but we bought them in the store. Now I’ll have a store in my house,” she says. Eventually, Borquez would like to create a market where gardeners can bring excess produce to sell to their community. “But first, we have to train more gardeners,” she says. Soon, Carlson will turn the program over to Borquez and Lupita Sanchez, director of community services, who will become NWI’s co-directors. Carlson says one of the strongest outcomes of their program is the network that’s being created. “People are setting up gardening classes in their own homes,” he says. “We’re creating a network of knowledge. This makes Naco a more resilient community.” NacoWellness.org. Megan Kimble is the editor of Edible Baja Arizona.

edible Baja Arizona

Falora’s Bene Bell pizza is a tasty reminder of the mission of Ben’s Bells, strengthening community through kindness education.

A Slice of Altruism

Falora and Ben’s Bells create awareness of intentional kindness with an unexpected pizza. By Rachel Wehr | Photography by Elijah LeComte

ur ns out , eating a pizza can be more than a delicious dinner—it can also help support a local nonprofit. Falora, an artisan pizza restaurant in Broadway Village, serves a pizza that benefits Ben’s Bells Project, a Tucson-based organization dedicated to infusing kindness into everyday life. The Ben’s Bells Project was founded in 2003 by Jeannette Maré after her son Ben died suddenly. Maré found herself feeling desperate, depending on the kindness of neighbors and friends to get by. She began working with the community on therapeutic clay projects, which blossomed into the activist organization she runs today. Ben’s Bells holds kindness education workshops that produce community-sourced art in the form of bells. By the time each bell is complete, at least 10 people have played a role in sculpting, painting, firing clay pieces, or stringing beads. Each of the Bene Bell pizza’s ingredients is significant. Falora’s classic base of red sauce from San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella cheese are topped with green peppers, artichoke hearts, and snap peas. The bell peppers play off of the nonprofit’s namesake, and artichoke hearts symbolize caring and empathy. Ben’s favorite vegetable, sugar snap peas, is a natural crunchy addition. The Bene Bell pizza, which debuted on the Falora menu three years ago, has raised more than $5,500 in donations. Now on the permanent menu, the dish has become a reliable source of funding for Ben’s Bells programming. At Ben’s Bells, “Our goal is to create a culture where kindness is in the air,” says Maré. And Ben’s Bells has done just that. The bright green Be Kind flower stickers grace bumpers and rear windshields throughout town. The bells themselves can be seen hanging on porches, decorating parks, and strung in trees.

22 September /October 2016

The Bene Bell is very much a conversation starter. Many people say, “That’s so Tucson!” referring to the collaboration between a nonprofit and a restaurateur, says Maré. Food is something around which we commune, and pizza starts conversations. “If you come to Falora, you are more than likely going to sit close to someone you don’t know,” says Ari Shapiro, owner of Falora. With long, shared tables and platters that serve many, Falora’s design is conducive to communal eating. “We’ve seen people make friends and we’ve seen people sharing pizza with strangers,” says Shapiro. “There’s very little awkwardness at this point.” “I was always intrigued by the roles that businesses can play in their community, in their towns, cities, counties, immediate surroundings,” says Shapiro. Shapiro met Maré around the time the Ben’s Bells studio opened in downtown Tucson in 2012; at the time, Shapiro owned a coffee shop, Sparkroot, just a few blocks away. The city of Tucson is repeatedly ranked as one of the most caring cities in the nation. “Tucson is prime ground for this to happen, but these seeds are being planted in other places,” says Maré. Ben’s Bells now has locations in Phoenix and Bethel, Connecticut. “We want people to see that kindness is a regular part of life,” says Maré. “It’s just like pizza.” BensBells.org. Falora Pizza. 3000 E. Broadway Blvd. 520.325.9988. Falora.com Rachel Wehr is a Tucson-based freelance journalist. She spends her free time in nature among cactuses and pines.

g Tucson Meet Yourself brings small entrepreneurs, families, and ethnic food businesses to downtown Tucson for three days in October.

A Food Arena

Tucson Meet Yourself expands with a new City of Gastronomy Kitchen Stadium and exhibit. By Kimi Eisele | Photography by Steven Meckler

v e r b e e n to a foodie rock concert? Well, this year’s Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival is offering one. Kinda, sorta. The City of Gastronomy Kitchen Stadium will celebrate Tucson food and foodways in a new arena, complete with bleacher seats, demonstrations, recipe sharing, food sampling, live music, and lectures throughout the three-day festival, Oct. 7 - 9. Its main purpose will be to showcase the many reasons Tucson was designated a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. TMY was named in the application to UNESCO as an example of the city’s long-term cultural engagement with foodways, said Maribel Alvarez, executive director of Tucson Meet Yourself. “It’s not just about Tucson’s fancy restaurant and chef scene but also about the living practitioners of cultural foodways embedded in Tucson’s diverse communities,” Alvarez said. Festival founder Jim Griffith’s vision was to highlight food-sharing as a vehicle for cross-cultural dialogue, said Alvarez. And while the food-culture connection has been a mainstay of the festival since its inception in 1974, it has sometimes been difficult to highlight because vendors don’t always have the time to talk about cultural traditions while they are preparing and serving food, Alvarez said. Half of TMY’s food vendors are small entrepreneurs, families, or ethnic and regional food businesses. The other half is nonprofit clubs, churches, temples, and associations, for whom the festival offers an important fundraising venue to support their cultural activities. Still, “We know that cultural exchanges happen,” she said. “Every year, 80 percent [of vendors] say first and foremost how happy they are to share their culture.” The City of Gastronomy Kitchen Stadium will connect the public with cooking and food stories. “And that is really central to the festival,” said Alvarez. It will provide a venue for the voices of indigenous community members, local producers, farmers, and cooks, all of whom help define a distinctly Tucson cuisine, said Liane Hernandez,

24 September /October 2016

Kitchen Stadium coordinator. For example, local herbalist John Slattery of Desert Tortoise Botanicals will share from his new book Southwest Foraging. Hernandez’s goal is to offer a place “that folks can drop in and learn together and gain familiarity and even a sense of community through the sharing of these recipes and voices.” There will be organizations engaged in social justice projects, such as Iskashitaa and the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, as well as some “pop-up” performances, such as Richard Noel and drumming circles. The Pima Community College culinary program is providing the mobile kitchen. A City of Gastronomy exhibit produced in partnership with the City of Tucson and the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Center for Regional Food Studies will offer visual displays and information about the many creative food initiatives that earned Tucson the UNESCO designation. “We know that these exhibits are very successful in connecting the public to information and history they might not otherwise learn,” Alvarez said. The exhibit curator, Dena Cowan, wants the exhibit to do more than just inform. “I hope people will be inspired to get involved and scale up and expand on the great work that many Tucsonans are already doing,” said Cowan. Community partners contributing to and supporting the exhibit include Watershed Management Group, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Mission Garden, Native Seeds/ SEARCH, Edible Baja Arizona, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Desert Harvesters, UA Compost Cats, and the UA Community and School Garden Program. Cowan said TMY is “a perfect framework” for celebrating the UNESCO designation since it is already a celebration of Tucson’s rich culture of gastronomy. “It didn’t get the nickname ‘Tucson Eat Yourself’ for nothing!” Indeed.  TucsonMeetYourself.org. Kimi Eisele is a freelance writer and multidisciplinary artist in Tucson.

edible Baja Arizona

28â&#x20AC;&#x192; September /October 2016

edible Baja Arizona

SEPTEMBER Saturday, September 10

Sun Cooking and Passive Solar Design

8 a.m.-12 p.m. Arizona Sonora Desert Museum 2021 N. Kinney Road

CALENDAR Sunday, September 18

Ollas & Self Watering Containers

Insect Festival Craft Tucson Pop-Up Beer Fest! Arizona 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

Passive Rainwater Harvesting

Friday, October 7 – Sunday, October 9

6-8 p.m. The Metal Arts Village 3230 N. Dodge Blvd.

8 a.m.-12 p.m. Las Milpitas Farm 2405 S. Cottonwood Lane

Sunday, September 11

Arizona Living Economy Forum 12:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. YWCA of Southern Arizona 525 N. Bonita Ave.

Monday, September 12

The 7th Annual Farmer + Chef Connection 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tucson Convention Center 260 S Church Ave.

Wednesday, September 14

UA campus Student Union, Grand Ballroom 1303 E. University Blvd.

Friday, September 23

Planting a Healthy Garden, Part 3

9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

Tucson Symphony Orchestra Ride & Dine

4-10:30 p.m. Sonoran Sno Cones Mercado San Agustin 100 South Avenida del Convento

Saturday, September 24

Wormania!

9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

Tucson Meet Yourself

11 a.m.-10p.m. Friday/Saturday 11 a.m.-6p.m. Sunday 115 N. Church Ave.

Wednesday, October 12

Wine Enrichment Series

5-7 p.m. Sierra Bonita Vineyards Tasting Room 6720 E Camino Principal Ste. 101

Friday, October 14

Garden Basics 101

9 a.m.-12 p.m. Las Milpitas Farm 2405 S. Cottonwood Lane

Wormania!

5-7 p.m. Sierra Bonita Vineyards Tasting Room 6720 E. Camino Principal Ste. 101

Friday, September 30

1-3 p.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

Friday, September 16

Garden Basics 101

Saturday, October 15

Wine Enrichment Series

Soil and Compost, Part 2 9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

In the Garden Fall Shabbat Potluck

6 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Tucson Jewish Community Center 3800 E. River Road

Saturday, September 17

Know and Grow your Pollinators

1-3 p.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

Born & Brewed: Tucson’s Beer Cup 6 p.m.-9 p.m. The Hotel Congress 311 E Congress St.

9 a.m.-12 p.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

OCTOBER Saturday, October 1

Cascabel Conservation Association Pancake Breakfast, Mesquite Milling, and Local Foods Potluck 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Cascabel Community Center

Eat, Drink and Be Giving 6-9 p.m. St. Philip’s Plaza 4280 N. Campbell Ave.

Friday, October 7

Make Nutritional Sodas Tucson Botanical Gardens 10 a.m.-12 p.m. 2150 North Alvernon Way

26th Annual Bisbee 1000 The Great Stair Climb

7 a.m.-12 p.m. Bisbee 1000 Start/Finish 201 Tombstone Canyon Road – Bisbee

5th Annual Bisbee 1000 Craft Beer Festival

1:30 p.m. - 6 p.m. Outdoors Next to Bisbee Coffee Co. 2 Copper Queen Plaza

Thursday, October 20

Edible Plants, Tour and Tasting 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m. Tucson Botanical Gardens 2150 North Alvernon Way

Friday, October 21

Introduction to Permaculture 9-11 a.m. Las Milpitas Farm 2405 S. Cottonwood Lane

Saturday, October 22

Backyard Chickens

9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

30 September /October 2016

Saturday, October 29

Beneficial Insects

9-11 a.m. Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona 3003 S. Country Club

NOVEMBER Tuesday, November 1

Beekeeping Basics

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Las Milpitas Farm 2405 S. Cottonwood Ln

Thursday, November 3

Soil Management

9:30-11:30 a.m. Tucson Botanical Gardens 2150 North Alvernon Way

Saturday, November 5

Sustainable Design, Part I 9-11 a.m. Las Milpitas Farm 2405 S. Cottonwood Lane

Sowing Seeds for Spring Veggies

10 a.m.-12 p.m. Tucson Botanical Gardens 2150 North Alvernon Way

Wednesday, November 9

Wine Enrichment Series

5-7 p.m. Sierra Bonita Vineyards Tasting Room 6720 E Camino Principal Ste. 101

R E P E AT I N G Thursdays

Twilight Thursdays

Tucson Botanical Gardens 5-8 p.m. 2150 North Alvernon Way

Saturdays

Public Brewhouse Beer-asana 11 a.m.-12 p.m. Public Brewhouse 209 N. Hoff Ave.

Saturday Courtyard Music

6-9 p.m. Mercado San Agustin 100 South Avenida del Convento

Sundays

Andy Hersey Live

5-7 p.m. The Parish Gastropub 6453 N. Oracle Road

FARMERS’ MARKETS

Saturdays

Sundays

Wednesdays, cont.

Heirloom Farmers’ Market

Shorey Family Farms

FoodInRoot Farmers’ Market

Thursdays

8 a.m.-12 p.m. Steam Pump Ranch, Oro Valley 10901 N. Oracle Road

FoodInRoot Farmers’ Market 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Plaza Palomino

FoodInRoot Farmers’ Market 8 a.m.-12 p.m. St. Philip’s Plaza

Our Garden

9 a.m.-12 p.m. 16500 N. Stallion Place

Rincon Valley Farmers’ Market 8 a.m.-1 p.m. 12500 E Old Spanish Trail

Bisbee Farmers’ Market 8 a.m.-12 p.m. Vista Park, Bisbee

St. David Farmers’ Market 8 a.m.-12 p.m. 70 E. Patton St., Saint David

Sonoita Farmers’ Market

9 a.m.-12 p.m. Southwest corner of Hwy 82 & Hwy 83, Sonoita

Shorey Family Farms

11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Mirage & Bird Botanicals, 10 Plaza Road, Tubac

8 a.m.-12 p.m. Rillito Park Food Pavilion 8 a.m.-12 p.m. St. Philip’s Plaza

Douglas Mercado Farmers’ Market 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Raul Castro Park, Douglas

Santa Fe Square Farmers’ Market 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Santa Fe Square Shopping Center

Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market 4 p.m-7 p.m. Mercado San Agustín

Sierra Vista Farmers’ Market 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Veterans’ Memorial Park 3105 E Fry Blvd., Sierra Vista

Mondays

Fridays

FoodInRoot Twilight Farmers’ Market

Heirloom Farmers’ Market

El Pueblo Farm Stand

Authentically Ajo Farmers’ Market

5-8 p.m. Maynards Market & Kitchen 3-5 p.m. Irvington Rd & S. 6th Ave.

Tuesdays

FoodInRoot Farmers’ Market 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. First and Third Tuesdays 6200 N La Cholla Blvd.

Wednesdays

Green Valley Village Farmers’ Market 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. 101 S. La Canada, Green Valley

Our Garden

9 a.m.-12 p.m. 16500 N Stallion Place

32 September /October 2016

11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Mirage & Bird Botanicals, 10 Plaza Road, Tubac

8 a.m.-12 p.m. Trail Dust Town 5 p.m.-7 p.m. 15 W. Plaza, Ajo

FoodInRoot Farmers’ Market 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Banner-UMC

77 North Marketplace Farmers’ Market 8 a.m.-12 p.m. 16733 N. Oracle Road, Catalina

El Presidio Mercado

9 a.m.-2 p.m. Corner of Church and Alameda

Elfrida Farmers’ Market 2 p.m.-6 p.m. 10566 Hwy 191, Elfrida

Sycamore Park Twilight Farmers’ Market 5-8 p.m. First Fridays Sycamore Park

the better part of the last decade as a busser, barista, prep cook, server, host, and office manager. I’ve seen the ins and outs of many restaurants, both in my hometown, Tucson, and in Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York, where I earned my MFA in fiction. Aside from food, my interests include board games, music, public land use, and literature. I have been eating for as long as I can remember—breakfast, lunch, dinner, the occasional snack. Now I am thrilled to put that practice to use as the new writer of Baja Eats, Edible Baja Arizona’s weekly column highlighting noteworthy places to eat in the Arizona borderlands. With Baja Eats, my goal is to capture what makes each of these places distinctive and worth visiting. It might be the mind-blowing enchiladas or the impressive array of velvet paintings. It might be the killer service or complimentary bibs or tableside salsa bar or house pickles, or all of the above. Style comes from confidence and clarity of vision. Greasy spoon or fine dining, deep-fried pizza or refreshing ceviche— if it has style, it’s worth the trip. have spent

ao T zu , the Chinese philosopher, said, “Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained.” While, doubtless, he was not referring to the Goodness on Campbell Avenue, his words felt especially resonant during a visit to the fresh food and juice bar. It was noonish on Saturday, and some of us had been good—

hours of sleep, yoga in the morning. Others, not so good—mezcal, cheap beer, and a Simpsons marathon. Goodness’ offerings met the needs of all parties. Choosing what to order was no small task, as the menu is extensive. Goodness offers breakfast, salads, savory bowls, acai and pitaya bowls, wraps, sandwiches, tacos, smoothies, juices, baked goods, and Savaya coffee. By the time we made up our minds and placed our order at the counter, there was an urgency behind our need for sustenance, so we got a slice of the gluten-free banana-date bread to tide us over. The bread didn’t look like anything special, but it was. Moist and dense with an almost caramel sweetness from the dates, it’s a must-try. Our well-rested yogi chose a 16-ounce Hot Tropic smoothie ($6.50) and the Roasted Chicken & Brie sandwich ($8.50).

eight 34 September /October 2016

Goodness (clockwise from top left): Smoothies, chicken brie sandwich, original breakfast burrito, Thai chicken bowl.

edible Baja Arizona

The color palette of her meal—gray and beige tones—belied its true flavorful and satisfying nature. The sweet and tart of green apple chutney on the sandwich was a perfect complement to the crispy leeks and melted brie, and the smoothie was fruity, tropical, and rich with quality ingredients. Though many of our fellow patrons looked like they had just come from the gym, Goodness’ overall vibe is welcoming and relaxed. People of all ages and body types sat around tables and at the bar, having a family lunch or grabbing a quick smoothie. There was none of the pretention one might associate with wheatgrass shots and acai berry bowls. The hungover duo settled on a 16-ounce Solar Power smoothie ($6) and an aptly named The Cure juice ($5.50) alongside an Original Breakfast Burrito ($8.50) and a Thai Chicken Bowl ($8.50). The Cure—pineapple, carrot, celery, cucumber, ginger—was dominated by pineapple and carrot, fortunately, as drinking celery juice sounds sad. It was sweet and light with a faint earthiness of root vegetables, and it lived up to its name. Solar Power had elements of both the Hot Tropic and The Cure, but it wasn’t as tasty as either. Vanilla and carrot proved to be an odd flavor combination, but the smoothie—rounded out with coconut, banana, honey, and orange—was still quite drinkable. Both the Original Breakfast Burrito and the Thai Chicken Bowl came in generous portions. While the burrito suffered from the same bland color palette as the sandwich (whole wheat tortilla, quinoa, eggs, and turkey sausage aren’t the most vibrant) the Thai Chicken Bowl, which comes with either quinoa or brown rice, was a bounty of rich color and texture. Both dishes hit the mark in terms of flavor and sustenance, and with full bellies the three of us walked out into the blazing Tucson heat feeling that we had, indeed, attained goodness. 36 September /October 2016

Wild Garlic Grill’s spiced-rubbed BBQ St. Louis ribs.

ild Garlic Grill is the Steely Dan of Tucson restaurants—familiar, unpretentious, and completely enjoyable. The restaurant, on First Avenue just north of Grant, is housed in a funky, low-ceilinged, 1950s-style building and has bar seating, a dining area, and a patio. The atmosphere is at once casual and nice enough for an occasion. The food is thoughtful and well balanced. The tablecloths and uniformed waiters clash with the low ocotillo ceilings and diners wearing cargo shorts, but it all works together to create a very Tucson take on French-inspired California cuisine. To get a sense of the food, one need look no further than Chef Steven Schultz’s background. A Tucson native, Schultz received his degree from Ècole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris. His time in France, paired with his love of the California wine country (including Gilroy, whose garlic is the restaurant’s inspiration), has clearly shaped the dishes at Wild Garlic Grill. Those familiar with Schultz’ previous restaurant, Red Sky, will recognize his style. Crowd pleasers abound, and while you’re not going to find much uncharted territory, you will almost certainly find something that delights. We ordered the

Roasted Beet Salad ($8.50) along with a delightful Pinot Noir from Et Fille, a winery in the Willamette Valley. The wine list at Wild Garlic is unchallenging but solid. Chardonnay, Zinfandel, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon dominate, but other styles can be found, and there were a number of choices in various price ranges. It would be hard not to find something you like on the list. The same goes for entrées. Main courses include San Francisco Pier Stew, New York Strip Steak, Roasted Garlic Chicken, hamburger, grilled salmon, and linguini Bolognese. There is something for everyone, even vegetarians, who can order an entrée salad of grilled Portobello mushrooms. The spice-rubbed BBQ St. Louis Ribs ($15) were served with garlic mashed potatoes, braised field greens, and, in theory, red chile onion rings. The ribs were slightly sweet and falling off the bone—just like you’d hope. Wild Garlic Grill has a number of specials priced a little higher than regular menu items. Our server, who had likely spent the better part of her busy night listing and then repeating specials, patiently did the same for our table. It was hard to catch the full list, but there was something about filet mignon with bleu cheese, pistachio-crusted lamb, and sea bass ($23), which was an ample portion of fish over lemon-dill risotto,

edible Baja Arizona

topped with a relish of corn, avocado, and tomato and accompanied by a small salad and vegetables in beurre blanc. The dishes shone with the confidence of a chef who had been making the same type of food for decades. Schultz knows his strengths. He knows what ingredients will work together, and how to complement various proteins. He knows what makes people happy. Nothing here will upend expectations, but neither will it disappoint. Wild Garlic, from the indecisively casual atmosphere to the approachable food to the candid service, provides the perfect backdrop to nearly any dining experience. In the same way that Steely Dan creates an atmosphere of comfortable, nostalgia-infused fun, Wild Garlic Grill offers quality, unfussy food and an atmosphere nice enough for a special occasion without worry—Uncle Frank can get his burger, Aunt Jane can get her lamb, the cousins can have French fries, Mom can get her salmon, and you can have whatever you like, all at a price that, given the quality, is very reasonable.

Miss Saigon’s khai vị thập cẩm sampler plate.

38 September /October 2016

he month of J une is never an easy one in Tucson, but it was made all the worse this year, at least for those living in the downtown area, by the temporary closure of Miss Saigon’s downtown location. Fortunately, monsoons weren’t the only relief brought by late summer—the Vietnamese staple has reopened its doors, and it’s bigger and better than ever. Miss Saigon is exactly what downtown Tucson needs more of. Affordable, delicious, and quick, it has enough atmosphere to make lingering over drinks an enticing option, but it is also perfectly suitable for carry-out or a quick workday lunch. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be on-trend, and the recent makeover, which includes an expansion and blue lighting behind the bar, is refreshingly unpretentious. While the two other Miss Saigon locations in town offer the same menu, only the downtown location has a full bar and a late night menu.

The menu is expansive, and includes a variety of soups, rolls, curries, stir fries, and drinks. Though entrée portions are generous, it would be a mistake to skip appetizers. The chả giò is a favorite—fried egg rolls filled with pork, mushrooms, and carrots and served alongside lettuce cups, vermicelli, and fish sauce. ($5.99) All elements combine to make little flavor bombs of hot and cold, crunchy and soft, sweet and salty. The spring rolls are good too, especially the chao tom cuon—grilled shrimp paste with shredded greens and vermicelli ($4.75)—and if you can’t decide what to start with, go for the khai vị thập cẩm, a sampler plate that includes several spring rolls and two egg rolls. ($9.99) It’s hard to go wrong at Miss Saigon, though some dishes wow more than others. A personal favorite is the com ca cari dua, grilled catfish topped with coconut curry and served alongside jasmine rice and greens. ($8.99) The sauce is a little sweet and a little spicy. It makes for a lovely, balanced meal and is a great choice if you’re not in the mood for soup.

edible Baja Arizona

The B Line’s fish tacos.

The soups at Miss Saigon come in three categories—beef broth with rice noodles (phở), chicken broth with rice noodles (hủ tiếu), and chicken broth with egg noodles (mì). Soup comes with a side of fresh bean sprouts, cilantro, lime, and jalapeño. The chicken broth has been known to cure colds, the flu, and malaise. It’s rich and sweet and needs little more than noodles, lime, and chile sauce to become a satisfying meal. The same can be said for the beef broth, which is the standard for pho, though both broths act as the backdrop for a variety of proteins. On a recent visit, we branched out and tried the bún bò huė, a spicy beef noodle soup with thick vermicelli, broiled beef slices, and Vietnamese pork paste. ($7.99 small/$9.25 large). The soup, described by one patron as “scrumdiddlyumptious,” was spicy not so much for heat, though there was a mild kick, but for actual spice—clove, cinnamon, and star anise—which gave the broth a depth of flavor. The result was something rich and complex, but not oily or overcomplicated. 40 September /October 2016

ome for the desserts , stay for the desserts. Whatever your approach, don’t miss the desserts, which are the highlight at The B Line. Pastry chef Terri LaChance and her team have been filling the case at B Line (and the other Wilke establishments—Time Market, Wilko, and Exo) for years, and their rotating selection of pies, cakes, cookies, custards, and more is a testament to the chef’s skill and taste. The raspberry rhubarb pie is tart and fresh, and I challenge you to resist it on a summer’s day, even if you’re already full from a big plate of lunch. The key lime pie is one of the best I’ve tasted, down to the graham cracker crust. It isn’t easy to make something that is both creamy and refreshing, but this pie pulls it off. Part of the joy of dessert is in the presentation, and B Line’s offerings deliver on that front as well. Pie crusts are arranged in adorable patterns, and garnishes are added to pots du crème with attention to detail.

Of course, the precursors to dessert are worthy of note, too. The B Line’s menu covers a lot of ground for such a little place. Lists of pastas, burritos, tacos, sandwiches, salads, and breakfasts line the walls near the front counter, where you place your order. The menu has a bit of this and a bit of that, and while it couldn’t hurt to do a little reconfiguring every now and then, there is some comfort in knowing that you can grow up in Tucson, leave for several years, and return to get the same Feta Jack Burrito you remember loving in high school. Their tuna salad is great, too, and it’s possible to have just half, served on Time Market’s toothsome levain, alongside a cup of soup ($7.95). On a recent visit I opted for the soup of the day, gazpacho, and the pairing made for a refreshing summer lunch. The fish tacos, two mahi mahi soft tacos with avocado, cabbage, cheese, and sauce on corn tortillas ($10.95), feature a generous serving of beautifully cooked fish alongside rice and beans. At first glance the price might seem high for fish tacos, but the quality fish and the portion account for the cost. The B Line offers wine, beer, coffee and tea, and it tends to draw a laidback crowd. Casual counter service makes it a good place to meet with friends, as there’s no need to worry about separate checks or members of your party showing up late. It’s also a nice family brunch spot, or a good place to read or study solo over coffee or a glass of wine. Space is a bit of an issue—it’s pretty small and seating is broken into three separate sections—so it might not be the best choice for a big group. Otherwise, it fits the bill for most any occasion.

edible Baja Arizona

El Güero Canelo’s Sonoran hot dog.

aniel C ontr er as , the founder of El Güero Canelo, opened his first hot dog stand in Tucson in 1993, and he hasn’t missed a beat since. In addition to owning and operating four El Güero Canelo restaurants and a meat market in Tucson, Contreras runs a bakery and tortilla factory in his hometown, Magdalena, Sonora. El Güero Canelo has gotten a lot of well-deserved press for its Sonoran dog—a hot dog wrapped in bacon, topped with pintos, pico, mayo, mustard, and onion, and served in a bolillo bun ($2.78). What sounds like a heavy and potentially indigestible meal goes down easy thanks to the thinly sliced bacon and soft, slightly sweet bolillo, and there is no shortage of additional condiments should you find you want your dog a little more spicy or covered in cheese. With roasted onions and jalapeños, pickled vegetables, fresh limes,

42 September /October 2016

and a variety of salsas, their toppings bar is easily the most extensive in town. Though El Güero Canelo got its start as a hot dog stand, the restaurant’s offerings go well beyond that today. Burritos, tortas, tacos, and quesadillas round out the menu. The carne asada torta ($6.59) comes on a toasted bun piled high with chopped beef, lettuce, and mayo. Order a side of guacamole and chips ($5.29) so that you can add a little avocado to the sandwich. The guacamole, served in an ample portion, makes a great side regardless. And of course, make use of the salsa bar. I’d like to take a minute here to dwell on the often-underappreciated bean and cheese burrito. Three simple ingredients—refried beans, cheese, and tortilla—excel in combination. As with anything simple, execution is the key to success. A perfect bean and cheese burrito is hard to find, and El Güero

Canelo does it just right. Creamy, well-seasoned beans and mild cheese wrapped in a soft, chewy tortilla, it is the ultimate comfort food. Conveniently, they offer burritos in various sizes, so it’s possible to avoid a burrito coma without having to exercise much self-control as long as you opt for a small, but maybe you should get the medium just in case. Though every Güero Canelo has distinct features, the locations are unified by their casual, almost cafeteria-like, ambiance. At the location on Oracle, where the original hot dog stand can still be found in the parking lot, diners are surrounded by floor to ceiling windows. Orders are called out as they come up, and relics of Contreras’ past, as well as childhood photos, lend warmth and intimacy to the otherwise streamlined aesthetic.  Laura Horley is a writer from Tucson, Arizona.

edible Baja Arizona

The Plate Plate the

The one thing they should never take oﬀ the menu.

1234 Photography by Maya Isabella Holzman

Garden Veggies Curry with Coconut Chutney Govinda’s Natural Foods Buffet Check online for daily specials. These organic garden veggies come simmered in coconut chutney, served over rice. Don’t forget the salad bar. $9.95 711 E. Blacklidge Drive

44 September /October 2016

Quesadilla Tacos Poco Take a break from Bisbee’s beauty with these vegan tacos. Organic corn tortillas are filled with vegan daiya cheese, folded around cabbage slaw, pico de gallo, and chipotle aioli. $9 15 Main St., Bisbee

Rainbow Wrap (Raw) Urban Fresh When you need a boost of raw energy. Sunflower seed paté, avocado, bell peppers, sunflower shoots, beets, carrots, and jicama come wrapped in collard greens and smothered in lemon cashew dressing. $8.25 73 E. Pennington St.

Miso Eggplant Tasteful Kitchen It’s like your kitchen, but tasteful. Eggplant medallions come with miso glaze, coconut black rice, green curry sauce, and Asian greens. Soup or salad on the side. $18 722 N. Stone Ave.

edible Baja Arizona

A Day in

Baja Arizona

Oracle Text by Ken Lamberton | Photography by Steve McMackin, Kate Selby, and Megan Kimble

“I

t’s easy to lose track of time here,” residents say, describing life among the Precambrian granite boulders and oaks an hour north of Tucson. Maybe it’s the history. The town of 3,500 in the northern reaches of the Catalina Mountains was once the mining camp of Albert Weldon, a Canadian prospector who came here in 1880 with his partners to look for gold and silver. Weldon named his first strike after the ship that brought him safely around stormy Cape Horn. He called it: The Oracle. Driving north on Highway 77 toward Oracle, you’ll pass the turnoff for Biosphere 2, the masterpiece in self-sustaining artificial habitats—the kind we might build to survive on Mars. Originally dubbed the “White Elephant in the Desert,” the $200-million greenhouse was an integrated facility with five distinct biomes—a coral reef ocean and coastal fog desert, a mangrove wetland, rainforest, and grassland savannah—with

46 September /October 2016

living quarters and a farm, all enclosed in the largest airtight envelope ever created. In 1991, the first mission crew of four men and four women entered Biosphere 2 and closed the airlock doors. For the next two years, the biospherians planted, raised, harvested, and cooked their own food, recycled their own waste, in what is arguably the most productive half-acre of farmland in history. When Columbia University took over management, it refocused the science (like studying the effects of carbon dioxide on plants), and built classrooms and housing for visiting research students. Today, the University of Arizona uses Biosphere 2 to study issues like global climate change. Tours begin at 9:30 a.m. each day and last about an hour and a half. Whether or not you choose to visit Biosphere 2, your first stop in town should be the Oracle Patio Café (270 W. American Ave.). Sit in the stone-walled courtyard and choose from

among fresh soups, salads, and panini sandwiches. But be sure to try the coffee and a sundried tomato, green onion, and cheddar scone. Friendly locals will fill you with stories about the area, and if you’re fortunate, you’ll bump into redheaded Sue Parra of Sue & Jerry’s Trading Post (1015 W. American Ave). She may share her tales of her four decades in Oracle while showing you her husband’s metal sculptures that decorate the café. Chula’s Tortillas (405 E. American Ave.) is worth a stop, right across from the old Mountain View Hotel (now a Baptist Church) where a hundred years ago the aging, wig-wearing William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody deposited his disapproving wife while visiting his worthless Campo Bonito mines. Cody also favored the nearby Triangle L Ranch (2805 N. Triangle Ranch Road), one of Baja Arizona’s earliest dude ranches. Mixed-media artist Sharon Holnback owns

it today as a bed-and-breakfast and its metalworking studio and gift shop feature regional artists. In 2015, the ranch inaugurated its year-round, public art venue know as Triangle L Ranch Land, which features a six-acre sculpture park along the high-desert trails and an art gallery with rotating exhibitions in an historic adobe barn. Pick up a green chile burro at Chula’s for lunch at Peppersauce Canyon and follow the East Mount Lemmon Highway into the oak-draped foothills. The old back road to Summerhaven swings past the American Flag Ranch, once a post office serving the tent town of Campo Bonito and the dozens of gold claims between here and Apache Peak. It’s Arizona’s oldest surviving territorial post office. If you brought a metal detector, take the dirt track west to Campo Bonito under Apache Peak. Probe the drainages or climb the road to the mines where rocky debris spills onto the dry slopes. Sweep the tailings

9 for nails, tin cans, and rusted bolts. You might get lucky. In 1880, while taking lunch to her husband, Gillette Young sat on one of these outcrops to catch her breath. She began picking at a vein of quartz with her hairpin when she noticed a dull yellow color. She gathered up a few pieces and carried them to her husband. It was the richest ore he’d ever seen. John Young named the claim—which would produce half a million dollars in gold— for his wife: Southern Belle. These days, abandoned mine works dot the hillside like the nests of giant digger wasps. It’s all that’s left, save for the stories of Spanish treasure and intrigue. Like the one of Buffalo Bill Cody and how unscrupulous mine promoters

duped the aging circus star into pouring his fortune down played-out mine shafts. But if prospecting isn’t your thing, continue toward Peppersauce Canyon until you hear the screams. “It’s more fun if you scream,” says Emily Goff, an owner of Arizona Zipline Adventures (35406 S. Mount Lemmon Road). She’s referring to pairs of adventurers in hardhats, making the last leg of their ecotour at 70 miles per hour on 1,500-foot Diamondback lines strung high over the mesquite and ocotillo. Oracle’s newest attraction opened earlier this year, says Goff, a young member of one of the area’s longtime ranching families. The Peppersauce Station also offers a “Leap

8 of Faith,” giant swing, low ropes, hiking trails, gold panning, and delicious food from their new restaurant. Plan on a “moonlight zip” during a full moon. Goff will set you up with a headlamp and glow sticks for a wild ride across the silver landscape. Call ahead for reservations. Complete your day in Oracle with a bone-out ribeye or charbroiled salmon at the historic (since 1938) Oracle Inn Steakhouse (305 E. American Ave.). The main dining room has a copper fireplace hood and booths draped in vintage red-velvet curtains where you can peruse a museum case of artifacts and lose yourself among news stories related to Buffalo Bill and the Mine with the Iron Door. Somewhere

among the old maps, rusted picks, and gold pans, you might even find a clue to a treasure trove of Jesuit gold hidden in the nearby hills.  Ken Lamberton is the author of six books, his most recent being Chasing Arizona: One Man’s Yearlong Obsession with the Grand Canyon State.

1 Treasures to be had at Sue & Jerry’s Trading Post. 2 Get ahead of the game at Triangle L Ranch. 3 It’s better when you scream at Arizona Zipline Adventures. 4 Wonder what’s happening to 1 at Biosphere 2. 5 Chula’s Tortillas. 6 Pork burger at the Oracle Inn Steakhouse. 7 Enjoy a cold pint of local beer at the Oracle Inn Steakhouse. 8 Stop in for a bite at the Oracle Patio Café. 9 Sunset on Route 77. edible Baja Arizona

Homestead Skills for self-sufficient living & eating

An Herbaceous Endeavor Growing herbs in the desert is easier than it seems. By Amy Belk | Illustrations by Adela Antoinette

t is a common misconception that herbs are finicky and diﬃcult to grow. I’ve heard many woeful stories of herbs that never thrived, only to give up the ghost after a mere month or two of the most devoted plant pampering that a gardener can dole out. I know that the stories are true, too. These precious plants are often placed in prominent spots near the kitchen, or on countertops or windowsills inside the house. They’re planted in charming, labeled containers, protected from the harsh elements, and watered multiple times a day. Why would any plant wither under such careful, doting supervision? Even the most seasoned green thumbs will admit to losing an herb now and then, but great gardeners usually want to investigate what went wrong and try again under the right conditions. Those who do some digging into herb gardening first learn that the word “herb” isn’t descriptive enough to specify the type of care a plant might require. There are a lot of different types of herbs, and they don’t all prefer the same treatment. We can, however, learn

a lot about what an herb will want by discovering whether it’s an annual or a perennial. Annuals do all of their growing in one season, and this fast growth means that they’re generally the thirstier herbs. They’re also more likely to be shade-tolerant, and to do well in petite containers in protected locations, as many of them are small and herbaceous (nonwoody). In Baja Arizona, annual herbs are planted in spring and fall. When their season is over, they often bolt, putting all of their energy into producing flowers and seed before they succumb to the change in weather. Some may straggle along past their due date, but leaf production and visual appeal go downhill. Once this happens, they’re cleared to make room for the next season. Perennials stick around for a few years or more. Some may go dormant for a season or two, but they regrow from woody stems or hardy roots when the conditions are right. These herbs are more likely to be larger in stature, needing bigger containers or a spot in the garden to spread their roots and grow. As it happens, many of our favorite savory herbs are from the Mediterranean, where summers are bone dry and winters are wet. Perennial herbs from this region stay quiet and still through the heat of the summer, and begin to grow again when temperatures cool down. They prefer

edible Baja Arizona

fast-draining soil, a sunny location, and good air circulation. Our summer monsoons are a tough time of year for this group of herbs because they dislike having their roots wet for extended periods of time, especially while they’re dormant. In fact, wet soil is the No. 1 killer of Mediterranean perennials. Make sure that these herbs have ample drainage, and allow at least the top inch of soil to dry before watering. Speaking of drainage, when growing herbs in any kind of container, it’s important to ensure that the container has a drainage hole. Very few herbs will tolerate boggy soil for very long. When grouping herbs together in containers or a bed, pair them up with herbs that have similar watering needs for the best chances of keeping everything happy. Alex Atkin, the farm manager of Tucson Village Farm (TVF), notes that it’s also important to use a quality potting mix for herbs in containers or raised beds. I recently talked to Atkin about TVF’s failures, successes, and what they love to grow in their herb garden. With 6,000 kids passing through the farm on a yearly basis in classes or camps, each of whom gets to plant a seed, the farm gets to try growing a lot of different veggies and herbs in a lot of different ways. Atkin is very proud of their newly revamped, wheelchair accessible herb garden. She couldn’t wait to get it planted, and admits to transplanting some of the herbs a little too early in hopes of cooler weather blowing in with the rain. There’s a shade cloth covering the mostly inactive herbs to help them along until September or October, when they’ll really start to put some roots down. TVF gets their herb starts from Lorien Tersey of Dreamflower Garden. Atkin and I agreed that a good, local source is important. Some cultivars do better in our climate than others, and local sources more likely carry the ones that are successful where you live. It’s also easy to start root-layering or making cuttings this time of year if you have a friend who’s growing a fall herb that you’d like to try. One good lesson that TVF learned from their old herb bed was to keep their mints separated from other herbs, and in containers if possible. Mint is an oddball, a thirsty perennial that tends to grow wherever moisture is present in a bed. It was an endless chore for them to keep it from choking out the other herbs in the garden. When asked about the farm’s most popular herbs, Atkin immediately says, basil. It’s an easy herb for beginners, and it’s really the only summer annual grown in our region. There are lots of different flavors to try, from cinnamon to Thai. “Really, though,” she says, “we just like to grow what we like to eat.” Her current personal favorite (and her go-to in the kitchen) is thyme. Fall is an active time of year in the herb garden. Besides general maintenance tasks like pruning and dividing, there’s a great selection of annual herbs you can plant now and, in my opinion, there isn’t a better time of year to plant many of the perennials. When the thermometer stays consistently under the 100-degree mark, it’s time to get your hands dirty.  Tucson Village Farm holds a weekly U-pick farmers’ market at 4210 N. Campbell. One of their biggest events is the popcorn harvest festival in November. Visit TucsonVillageFarm.arizona.edu for more information. Amy Belk is a garden writer and photographer, a certified arborist, and a certified nursery professional who has been learning from her garden for 15 years. She and her husband homestead on a little piece of the desert in the heart of Tucson. 50 September /October 2016

Herbal Highlights A quick guide to a selection of the most popular cool season herbs in Baja Arizona. Fall Annuals:

Borage is a fuzzy herb with a cool cucumber flavor. Flowers and leaves are both eaten. It prefers dry soil and a sunny location, but will accept some shade, and is easy to grow. Calendula grows through the winter and fades away when things heat up. Its bright, pretty flowers are a nice bonus. Cilantro is a two-for-one herb; the seeds from this self-sowing annual are called coriander. It does well in the cool temperatures of fall, and can be planted again by seed in spring. Dill also serves as a spring annual in our climate. It can get fairly tall and needs protection from freezing temperatures. Fennel is a slow-growing annual that can grow slightly taller than dill. It is a drought tolerant herb with a flavor reminiscent of licorice. Florence is a cold tolerant cultivar, while Zefano tolerates more heat. Nasturtium has a flavor that is likened to radish. The stems, flowers, and leaves are all edible. It tolerates shade and loves water, but prefers sandy soil. Parsley enjoys ample moisture and some afternoon shade. Flat-leaved Italian parsley is the most popular kitchen variety.

Fall Perennials:

Bay plants can get very large, but dwarf varieties are available. Give them good drainage and prune in fall if necessary. Chamomile is an evergreen groundcover that accepts full sun or light shade. Garlic chives work well in containers. Divide them in fall if they become too overcrowded. Lavender flowers and leaves are both edible. English lavender has great flavor and Munstead is a cultivar that grows well in our climate. Spanish lavenders also do well here. Lemon verbena loves the full sun, but tolerates some shade, too. Oregano dislikes having wet roots. Make sure it has a sunny spot, good drainage, and good air circulation. Allow the soil to dry between water applications. Rosemary does extremely well in our climate, as long as it has excellent drainage. Upright varieties that don’t produce too many woody stems are ideal for culinary use. Sage is a spring flowering perennial that comes in many forms, but usually thrives in fast-draining soil and full sun. Hummingbirds enjoy the flowers, while people savor the leaves. The flavor begins to decline after a few years of growth, so it’s recommended to replace culinary sage every three years or so. Tarragon freezes to the ground for many of us in the winter, but comes back from hardy roots in spring. It takes full sun, and does very well in containers with good drainage. Thyme comes in many forms with many varieties that are welladapted to our climate. Some make great groundcovers; there are even a few that you can walk on. Replace every few years for the best flavor.

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Homestead

Grow Your Soil By Zotero Citlalcoatl | Illustrations by Adela Antoinette

id you know that one teaspoon of top-notch garden

soil can hold a billion bacteria, beneficial fungi, protozoa, and nematodes? You might be asking yourself, “What are protozoa?” Or exclaiming, “I thought nematodes are bad for your garden!” The key to growing plants successfully is to build, feed, and sustain the soil microbiology in your garden, thus creating a soil food web. In order to do this, we must first understand what goes into a healthy and vibrant soil. The science of soil biology can be intimidating. But by covering the basics and keeping it simple, everyone can learn how to grow healthy and delicious plants in our desert environment. A soil food web is a community of living organisms in soil. In that community live bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, earthworms, arthropods, and the roots of living plants. These are the workhorses of your garden. These living organisms break down the compost and soil amendments we add to our gardens. A lack of healthy organisms means that any nutrients present in the soil will not be available in a water-soluble form for plant roots to uptake. So it’s not just about adding organic amendments. You need to add living organisms and create conditions for them to thrive in your garden. If your garden soil is lacking any one of these major living organisms, your plants are going to exhibit signs of stress and attract garden pests. Growing our own food and medicine is a labor of love that requires us to set our own roots down into the earth. This means that, along with nurturing our own connection with nature, we must also be open to the lessons our land and soil are teaching us. I didn’t fully understand the importance of microbes until my

garden started to struggle and produce unhealthy plants. Every season I added fresh compost to my garden. Every season some plants would succumb to the weirdest and seemingly random diseases and bugs. As I interacted with my little piece of land, I soon came to see and experience the web of life that was crucial to sustaining healthy conditions. The specific plant diseases and bugs destroying my plants also pointed to a pattern: healthy soil life and fertility are critical for a healthy garden. Just as in the human body, plants need the right nutrients to communicate health and wellness. Plant nutrients are classified into two groups: macro and micro. The macronutrients, what plants need more of, are: nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and magnesium. The micro, what plants need in small amounts, are: boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc. Plants use their roots to take up these nutrients via water. This is why soil pH matters—pH is a logarithmic scale ranging from 0 to 14, where 7 is neutral. The pH stands for the “potential to be” a hydrogen ion. The hydrogen ions in the soil actually determine the alkalinity or acidity of soil. In the rocky foothills of the Tucson Mountains where I garden, the soil is alkaline (low in hydrogen ions) and annual vegetables and fruits prefer a slightly acidic soil. For plants to have access to the water-soluble nutrients in the soil, we need to have the right pH. This is why gardeners in Baja Arizona dig their garden beds two feet down, amending with 50 percent native soil and 50 percent compost. We need to inoculate our soil with quality organic matter, preferably rich in microbes, to create conditions that our plants can thrive in. So what can you do to fortify and help establish a healthy soil

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food web in your garden? You can start a worm bin and make a compost tea brewer. Worms are a key organism in the soil food web because they convert biomass into a plant-soluble form by creating worm castings and aerating the soil in the process. Their manure is full of beneficial microbes, growth enzymes, humus, and so much more. Compost tea is made by aerating high-quality worm castings for 24 hours or more to extract and multiply the microbes in the castings into the billions. Compost tea yields the most value from “worm work” (theirs and ours). A monthly soil drench of your garden soil with aerated compost tea, using high quality worm castings, will jump-start the soil food web. We are all busy. As a parent, I want to work smarter, not harder. Saving time, money, and physical labor are also important factors that influence how we interact with our gardens. Another benefit of “worm work” is the biorecycling of food waste that may otherwise unnecessarily end up in a landfill. Save your time, money, and lower back all while decreasing your carbon footprint (another reason I love worms). Once you have a successful worm bin, you can use worm castings (i.e. worm manure) to build your soil. Building and maintaining a worm bin is also a great hands-on lesson for children. It is an excellent minilab that integrates environmental science with fun, and 54 September /October 2016

is perfect for small spaces and classrooms. In my house, both of our elementary-age children built their own bins and now maintain and harvest from them. Worms need shade, water, and food to do well in our hot summers. They don’t like very cold weather either, so it’s important to place them in a good microclimate in your yard. Generally speaking, worm bins kept outside are made out of wood, so they breathe better, and they are relatively cheap to build. The best set-up for an outside worm bin is under a shady mesquite tree. Storage totes and five-gallon buckets are very popular as well, but they tend to heat up outside because they aren’t as breathable. I like placing indoor worm bins in the laundry room, under kitchen sink cabinets, or in closets. Go to my YouTube channel, The Sonoran Desert Grower, to find a step-by-step video for building an affordable worm bin and compost tea brewer. In the next issue of Edible Baja Arizona, I will walk you through how to build a worm bin, showcasing both super affordable and more professional models. Stay tuned!  Zotero Citlalcoatl is a permaculture designer and herbalist of the Sonoran desert. Follow him on Instagram at @the_sonoran_desert_grower.

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How to Make Compost Tea

ou’ll need four to six cups of

worm castings (EcoGro sells quality worm castings), four gallons of dechlorinated water, six tablespoons of organic, unsulphured molasses, and a home-scale compost tea brewer. A home-scale compost tea brewer set-up consists of an air pump, air tubing, an aquarium air stone, a five-gallon paint strainer bag, and a five-gallon bucket with a lid. To make compost tea, place the worm castings into the five-gallon paint strainer

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bag, tie it with a knot, and place into the five-gallon bucket. Inside the bucket, place the airstone with up to four gallons of dechlorinated water. Connect the air tubing from the air pump to the air stone inside the five-gallon bucket, aerating it for the brew process. You want an aquarium air stone that produces big bubbles instead of small bubbles; bigger bubbles won’t damage the protozoa and fungi in the tea. Typically compost tea is brewed for a 24- to 36-hour period. If you own a microscope, you can see the microbial

activity in your tea, and identify some of the main players of the soil food web. Some gardeners use a microscope to dial in the brew time, so they’re using their tea when it’s the most microbially active. It’s important to use compost tea within six hours after turning off the air pump. The most it can be stretched out is for an additional 48 hours, by keeping it aerated, and adding more molasses to feed the microbes in the brew. Just remember that fresh tea is always the best for your plants, but extending the brew time is an option.

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Fields of Dreams Community Gardens of Tucson cultivate cooperation and sustainability. By Angela Orlando | Photography by Jim Harris

prinkled throughout Tucson are 24 secret gardens. Some abound with produce and flowers, while others want for a little tending. Most are invisible to the general public: drivers-by and casual pedestrians wouldn’t know they’re growing. That is, unless they’re one of approximately 400 members of Community Gardens of Tucson (CGT), representing cultures from around the world and across socioeconomic divides. Almost 25 years ago, a University of Arizona Cooperative Extension agent, George Brookbank, began Community Gardens of Tucson by planting two vacant lots. He divided them into plots and rented them out at a minimal cost, fostering a new community of passionate local food growers. The CGT’s modern mission still honors Brookbank’s overarching goals: to encourage healthy eating; educate citizens about local foodways; and inspire positive interaction among diverse Tucsonans sharing the love of sustainably cultivating one’s own produce. As membership in the nonprofit increased from 1990 to 2004, Brookbank expanded CGT’s properties into six, and most of those still thrive. The years 2005 and 2006 were slower for the organization due to economic pressure, but in 2010, CGT earned several obesity-prevention grants. The number of gardens soon quadrupled. Accessibility to healthy food for all Tucsonans became increasingly important to the nonprofit’s mission. CGT embodies a symbiotic “teach a person to fish” concept: they demonstrate ecologically respectful gardening practices, meanwhile helping members reach lifelong wellness.

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Plant choices showcase members’ heritages and tastes. Some particularly interesting crops include Armenian cucumbers, Jerusalem artichokes, 10-foot-tall Tohono O’odham sunflowers, and edible loofas. Bhutanese and Congolese families grow fruits and mustard greens to cook the recipes their families make in their homelands, while connoisseurs of Mexican food grow purple tomatillos. “One thing that crosses cultural lines is gardening. CGT integrates refugees, locals, and immigrants into a singular community,” said head technician Jessica Paul. Gardeners trade produce with one another, and in high yield seasons, some individuals sell at farmers’ markets around town. Others donate their harvests to nonprofits including the Community Food Bank, the International Refugee Committee, and Iskashitaa Refugee Network. But as Susanne Kaplan, chair of the CGT board, noted, “In the movie Field of Dreams, they said, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ and that’s not true”—not always, anyway. Most of the gardens have at least a few vacant plots: 60 square feet of soil just waiting to be planted. The Davidson Garden at the Jewish Community Center on River Road is the newest and one of the most verdant. It is situated at a convenient public location. Yet even that lovely Community Gardens of Tucson head technician Jessica Paul (left) and Susanne Kaplan, chair of the CGT board, take a break after a day of work in the Jewish Community Center garden.

Homestead

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“Access to water is one of the main reasons members use community gardens,” said Kaplan (left). Gardening together is a communal experience.

space, with its whimsical handmade soda bottle wind turbine, has several empty parcels ready to be nurtured. As Paul said, “It’s surprising that so many people are interested in the food movement, but no one actually wants to garden.” Too few want to, anyway, for all the CGT gardens to flourish. A few, especially on Tucson’s west and south sides, lie mostly fallow and are at risk of closing because of membership shortage. Most gardens in jeopardy happen to be in the city’s worst food deserts—areas of town where inexpensive fast food is readily available to residents, but nutritional, locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables are less accessible. Members pay for their plots, but scholarships provided by member fees and donations render participation within reach for all. The $18 monthly rent includes irrigated land, free water, tool usage, and classes by master gardeners. Recipients are expected to contribute four hours of what Paul called “sweat equity”: helping install irrigation and building fences and walls, for example. All members cooperate by helping one another harvest, weed, and water when they are unable to tend their land. Plots are large enough for two or more to share, so CGT keeps a list of “garden buddies” who want to split spaces, thereby decreasing cost. “Access to water is one of the main reasons members use community gardens,” said Kaplan. “It’s convenient and it breaks the barrier of using prohibitively expensive water at home.” And “gardening together is a communal experience,” said Kaplan. “Volunteers learn successes and challenges, and bring that to their gardens at home.” 60 September /October 2016

Upon receiving the key to their community garden, members agree to not use toxic pesticides and herbicides. Preservation of local plant species has become increasingly important to the CGT mission, and cross-pollination is a potential problem. If maintaining singular varieties’ integrity is key to one garden’s community, everyone must agree about which to plant. For example, members of the Chaverim Garden at Congregation Chaverim near Speedway and Willmot agreed to grow only one type of corn. Members include experts and novices, and every level in between. Their ages range from about 20 to 50, and many pass down their knowledge by bringing their children. Local schools also use the gardens for educational purposes. Among other schools, Sunrise Drive Elementary School has been a partner with CGT since 2008. Teachers incorporate on-campus plots into their curricula, providing hands-on, experiential education to explain topics like local food systems, nutrition, math, and botany. Word of mouth and participation at events such as the Tucson Festival of Books are CGT’s primary marketing techniques. The gardens are short-staffed of volunteer administrators (such as a newsletter writer) and gardener members alike. For more information, call 520.795.8823 or visit CommunityGardensof Tucson.org.  Angela Orlando is a cultural anthropologist who is passionate about the Sonoran Desert, indigenous foodways, cooking, and eating.

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Farm Report By Sara Jones | Photography by Liora K

nlIK e In other parts of the country, Baja Arizona farmers’ markets operate year round, with very distinct warm and cool seasons. During the winter, cooler weather plants like leafy greens and roots are prolific. During the summer, fruiting vegetables grow well. Fall at the farmers’ market is mostly an extension of summer, as many farmers take advantage of midsummer monsoon rains to plant new summer crops that will produce well into the fall months. “It is awesome to farm in a region where we can get a second chance with summer crops,” says Dana Helfer of Rattlebox Farm. “The milder weather in the fall is kinder on both plants and farmers,” she says. “Plus fall, like spring, is a bridge season, when we can get a little bit of seasonal overlap in the produce.” During September and October, farmers are busy getting their winter crops in the ground. Crops like garlic and potatoes are planted now, to be harvested in late spring and early summer next year. Leafy green crops and root vegetables are also planted for late fall and winter harvests. For farmers, removing old crops and starting new ones is a near-constant activity but in the fall this work can be particularly daunting. Most cool weather crops are compact and low growing and can be tilled directly back into the soil to increase the organic matter. Summer crops, however, grow quite large and have a tendency to sprawl and creep. Farmers often use stakes and trellis systems to support climbing plants like cucumbers, tomatoes, and beans. As the weather cools and these crops start to die, untangling these plants from their supports and removing, cleaning, and storing the stakes and netting is an arduous task. Since pests like squash bugs and tomato viruses can overwinter on plant debris, farmers must diligently remove the often overgrown and spiky plant matter to compost elsewhere on the farm. Fruiting vegetables, like tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and cucumbers should all be available at markets throughout the fall season. This is also a good time of year for green beans. Look for green and purple beans, as well as flat Romano beans and the strange-looking yard long beans. All these beans are

62 September /October 2016

great roasted or quickly sautéed in a hot skillet until blistered and lightly charred. Dress with a simple vinaigrette and serve immediately, or add to cold salads. September and October are good months for peppers, both sweet and hot. Sweet peppers can be a tricky crop to grow in our region, as intense sun can scald the fruits before they have a chance to mature. To avoid sun damage farmers grow sweet pepper varieties that ripen quickly or have denser foliage to block the sun. Many of these scald-resistant sweet peppers look like hot chile peppers. If you are unsure if a pepper is hot when you are shopping, ask the farmers. It is possible to find hot green chiles preroasted at markets, but they are also easy to roast at home. If you have a gas stovetop, the chiles can be laid directly onto the metal grates of the stove top. You can also place chiles under the broiler or on an outdoor grill. Once the peppers are mostly charred, remove then from the flame, place in a paper bag, and fold to seal. The steam will help loosen the skin, which should slide off easily once the peppers are cool. The first indications of the changing season are usually large piles of winter squash that farmers start bringing to market. There are many small squash to choose from, including the honey nut and metro squash, which are both miniature butternut varieties. Buttercups, acorn squash, and dainty delicatas are also good single-serving squash. There are also massive squash in all different colors and shapes. These squash look beautiful on display but can be intimidating to cook. But their flesh is delicious and versatile—well worth the effort. Combine with end-of-summer produce like peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes. Or use winter squash in place of zucchini in recipes for an unexpected twist. Dishes like ratatouille and eggplant caponata are delicious with the addition of winter squash. Of course, the winter squash are also great in any sweet pumpkin recipes, like pies, breads, and pumpkin butter. Sara Jones is a longtime employee of the Tucson CSA.

Fall Veggie Hash Ingredients: About 1½ cups winter squash, peeled and diced ½-inch thick 1 cup potatoes, diced 1 cup mixed veggies (use any combo of eggplant, zucchini, green beans), diced 1 medium sweet pepper, diced 1-2 green or red chiles, minced 1 onion, diced 2-3 tablespoons oil 1 teaspoon Italian herb mix Salt and pepper to taste 2-3 ripe tomatoes, sliced Instructions: Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add all the ingredients and toss well to coat. Cover the hash and let cook about 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until veggies are tender and browning on edges. Serve each portion with slices of tomatoes and one or two fried eggs.

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Butternut Squash Fajitas Winter squash is a perfect addition to fajitas. Cooked alongside sweet and hot peppers and lots of onions, this combo is great served in tortillas with all the fixings, or piled onto toasted bread with cheese melted on top like a Philly cheesesteak. Ingredients: 1 medium winter squash, peeled, seeded and cut into long strips about ¼-inch thick 2 sweet peppers, cut lengthwise into strips 2 onions, cut into strips 2 hot green chiles, cut into rings 1 teaspoon garlic powder 2 teaspoons chile powder 1 tablespoon olive oil Drizzle of soy sauce, optional Salt and pepper Instructions: In a large bowl, toss veggies together and sprinkle with spices, salt and pepper. Drizzle with oil and a bit of soy sauce and toss well to coat. Spread veggies in an even layer on a baking sheet and cook at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes, turning about halfway through to brown evenly. Serve in a sandwich or tortillas with all the fixings. 

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For the Love of Leftovers Text and photography by Autumn Giles

s much as I adore cooking without a plan—canvassing the fridge and making something unexpected—a little planning can go a long way in service of good leftovers. To be frank, just because I like to cook doesn’t mean I want to do it for every meal. Yet it always amazes me how my week improves when I have home-cooked food on hand for an on-the-go lunch or a quick dinner. When it makes sense, I try to maximize my cooking time by making larger quantities of foods like grain salads that really shine as leftovers. With reason, a common gripe about leftovers is that, after a few days, it’s just not that fun to eat the same thing. As it’s nothing short of a triumph when my partner and I get to eat dinner together, I tend to assume I’m cooking for one. So even when I’m aiming for leftovers, I try to make enough to last two or three days rather than the whole week. This helps cut down on leftover fatigue. I also gravitate toward recipes that lend themselves to repurposing. For example, if I make a big batch of roasted

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vegetables, I can eat them as they are, toss them with arugula, use them in fried rice, and—when I get really tired of them—make them disappear into a frittata. As a cook, I’ve come to really relish the challenge of successfully repackaging leftovers. The recipes that follow are equally as good made and enjoyed right away as they are utilized throughout the week for work or school lunches. They’re portable by design and their f lavors work great together. I’d argue for a batch cooking day to make them all. They’re meant to share oven and stovetop space. I can say from experience that the Maple Mustard Roasted Sweet Potatoes are great stirred into the Wild Rice Salad and a spoonful of Pear Cinnamon Compote is perfect atop the Honey Yogurt Panna Cotta. The Lentils en Escabeche makes a delicious, unexpected taco filling. You’d be remiss not to try the Green Chile Meatloaf on a sandwich. Keep an eye out for the seasonal ingredients like fennel, pears, and red peppers to pop up at the farmers’ market this time of year.

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Green Chile Meatloaf

The one thing that I like more than meatloaf is leftover meatloaf. I think this is a somewhat controversial opinion, but I like my leftover meatloaf cold. I use quick oats as a binder because that’s what my mom always used and because I think folks are more likely to have quick oats in their pantry than they are to have bread crumbs. Don’t use a super-lean ground beef here. The fat in the meat and the green chiles help keep this from drying out. I used hot green chiles here, but if you’re making this for kiddos or other spice-sensitive folks, use mild. Makes four mini meatloafs. Ingredients: 1 teaspoon garlic powder ¼ teaspoon ground cumin ½ teaspoon dried oregano flakes ½ teaspoon ground paprika 4 turns freshly ground black pepper ½ teaspoon kosher salt 2 eggs 1 4-ounce can of green chiles, well drained ⅔ cup quick oats 1 pound of ground beef Instructions: Preheat the oven to  degrees. Mix together the garlic powder, cumin, oregano, paprika, salt, and pepper in a medium bowl. Stir in the eggs, whisking to fully combine. Stir in the drained green chiles. Add the oats and ground beef and mix until homogenous. I find this step is easiest to do with clean hands by just smushing everything together. Some elbow grease and a wooden spoon will also work. Form the mixture into a ball and cut the ball into quarters. Form each quarter into one small loaf or ball. Place on a parchment-lined rimmed baking pan and bake  until the internal temperature is  and the edges are crisp and brown, about  minutes. Serve immediately and refrigerate any leftovers.

Lentils en Escabeche

Escabeche, the puckery Mexican pickled vegetables with a kick of heat, provides the inspiration for this salad. What we’re doing here is essentially making a super-quick pickle that provides both the dressing and the much-needed crunch in this lentil salad. Black lentils work best in salads like this one because they hold their shape once cooked. If you have a food processor, use the slicing blade and knock out the slicing this recipe requires in no time. A mandoline would also make this job especially easy, but you can just slice things as thin as you can with a knife if that’s what you have. Replace the jalapeño with half of a green pepper for a milder salad. Serves about 4 as a side. Ingredients: 3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 teaspoons sugar ½ teaspoon dried oregano flakes 4 medium carrots, about two cups sliced very thin ½ small white onion, sliced very thin 1 medium jalapeño, sliced very thin 1 small clove garlic, minced ¾ cup black lentils 1 bay leaf Salt and pepper Instructions: In a large bowl, combine the vinegar, olive oil, oregano, and sugar, whisking together until the sugar is dissolved. Toss the carrots, onion, jalapeño, and garlic in the dressing. Cover and leave at room temperature to marinate while you prepare the lentils. Bring  cups of water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add a pinch of salt and a dried bay leaf. Add the lentils and return to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the lentils are tender, but still holding their shape. This should take about  minutes. Near the end of the cooking time, the water level may get low. Add more water as needed. Drain the cooked lentils well and let cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the lentils to the marinated vegetables and stir to coat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Eat immediately or allow the salad to marinate in the fridge.

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edible Baja Arizona

Wild Rice Salad with Shaved Fennel, Red Peppers, and Cotija

If you pulled out your food processor or mandoline for the Lentils en Escabeche Salad, keep it out and use it to quickly shave the fennel and red peppers for this recipe too. Wild rice salads with celery, some type of nuts, and dried fruit often make an appearance on the Thanksgiving table. For the same crunch as celery, but with a ton more flavor, we’re using sweet red peppers and shaved fennel here. If your garlic clove is too big, the flavor can be a bit overpowering, so select a small clove for this recipe. Wild rice (the long, thin, black grains) can be expensive. Wild rice blends are a less costly alternative. Makes about six servings as a side. Ingredients: 1 cup wild rice blend, such as Lundberg 1 large fennel bulb, tough inner core removed and very thinly sliced 1 red pepper, deseeded and very thinly sliced 1 small clove of garlic, minced 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 tablespoons lime juice Cotija cheese for serving Salt and pepper to taste

Maple Mustard Roasted Sweet Potatoes

These cook at the same temperature as the meatloaf. So if you’re doing a big batch cooking day, these can go in the oven at the same time. If your sweet potatoes are organic or come from a trusted source, you don’t need to peel them, just give them a good scrub. Makes about six servings as a side. Ingredients: 2 pounds sweet potatoes, about 2 to 3 large, cut into 1-inch chunks 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard 1 tablespoon maple syrup 1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary Salt and pepper to taste Instructions: Preheat the oven to  degrees. Arrange the sweet potatoes in a single layer on a parchment-lined rimmed baking pan. Mix together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, and maple syrup until fully combined. An easy way to do this is to shake them all together in a jar. Drizzle the dressing over the sweet potatoes and sprinkle them with the rosemary. Right on the baking pan, use a spatula to mix everything together until the sweet potatoes are evenly coated with the dressing and rosemary. Bake at  degrees until tender, about  minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately and refrigerate any leftovers.

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Instructions: Prepare the wild rice blend according to the package instructions. Use the time that the rice is cooking to slice the fennel and red pepper. To prepare the dressing, mix the olive oil and lime juice in a small jar until fully combined. In a large bowl, toss the fennel, red pepper, and garlic with the lime olive oil dressing so that the vegetables are coated. When the rice is done, stir it into the dressed vegetables and season with salt and pepper to taste. I’d recommend going light on the salt because the cotija is quite salty. Top with crumbled cotija cheese to serve.

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Cinnamon Pear Compote

I think simple is best when it comes to beautiful, in-season fall fruits. This basic compote is great with the Honey Yogurt Panna Cotta, but is also perfect stirred into your morning oatmeal or yogurt. Almost any type of pear will be lovely here, but I’d avoid Asian pears. They have such a distinct, crispy texture that I think cooking them does them an injustice. Starting with pears that are ripe, but not mushy, will ensure that they don’t break down too much during the cooking process. Makes a scant two cups. Ingredients: 3 pears, about 1 ½ pounds, peeled, cored, and cut into ½-inch cubes 1 tablespoon lemon juice ¼ cup sugar ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Honey Yogurt Panna Cotta

Panna cotta has become one of my go-to desserts over the past couple years. I love that the prep time is next to nothing and it’s endlessly adaptable. You’ll often see panna cotta recipes unmolded and served on a small dessert plate. I forgo that here for the sake of portability. If you make these in small jars like quarter-pint Mason jars, they travel really well. A note about honey: You can choose either a dark or light honey here, keeping in mind that a darker honey will mean the final product will taste more like honey. Makes 6-9 depending on serving size. Ingredients: 2 teaspoons unflavored gelatin powder 1 tablespoon cold water 1¼ cups heavy cream ⅓ cup honey 1¼ cups full fat plain unsweetened yogurt 2 teaspoons vanilla extract Instructions: Use a fork to stir the water into the gelatin in a small cup or mug and set aside. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, combine the heavy cream and honey. Heat, stirring, until the honey is incorporated and the mixture begins to steam, about  minutes. You do not need to bring it to a boil. Remove from the heat. Oﬀ the heat, scrape the gelatin and water mixture right into the pan and stir until completely dissolved, about  minutes. Once the gelatin is dissolved, stir in the yogurt and vanilla extract. A wire whisk can be helpful for this step to help break up any lumps in the yogurt. Divide the mixture evenly into about  quarter-pint jars and let cool to room temperature. Cover with two-piece Mason jar lids and refrigerate until ready to serve.

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Instructions: Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan over very low heat. Cook stirring frequently until a layer of liquid forms on the bottom of the pan, about  minutes. Increase the heat to medium low and cook until the pears are tender but not falling apart, about  to  minutes. The cooking time here will depend on how ripe your pears were. Let cool to room temperature and refrigerate until ready to serve.  Autumn Giles is a freelance writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in Modern Modern Farmer and Punch. She’s the author of Beyond Canning: New Techniques, Ingredients, and Flavors to Preserve, Pickle, and Ferment Like Never Before.

IN THE BUSINESS

Part of the Family Sam Allison started working at the Arizona Inn as a cook 15 years ago. Today, he leads the kitchen as executive chef. Interview by Craig S. Baker | Photography by Tim Fuller

I heard you got into cooking earlier than most. Can you tell me a bit about that?

I started cooking, actually, when I was a little kid. The first toy that I really enjoyed was a little Playskool cooking set; my parents talk about it all the time. And I was always embarrassed by it, like when my friends would come over I’d hide it. Then my brother, who was four years older than me, worked at a Chinese restaurant when he was 16 and they needed a dishwasher … so I actually started a little bit under age when I was there. I started out at $3.75 an hour washing dishes, then when I turned 13, I had to go on the official wages, so then I got $4.25 an hour. So, that was how I got my start. It was kind of under the table at first. I worked there for a while, and then I went to a Holiday Inn in Cody, Wyoming. And in Cody, basically it’s the reverse of Tucson; busy in the summer, dead in the winter, and so everyone works the summer tourist season to save up enough money to go to college the next year, or whatever it was. I lived in Yuma for a year because my brother was my legal guardian, and he was a corpsman in the Marines stationed there with the Navy. I was attending a junior college there, but I spent the summers working in Wyoming. I was going through my second year of college when I realized the classroom just wasn’t working for me, but I didn’t know what else I was going to do. My brother said to me, “You love cooking. You have so much more fun doing that. Why don’t you look at culinary school?” So the next year instead of going to college after the summer, I went to Portland for culinary school. 80 September /October 2016

How did you come to find yourself working at— eventually rising to executive chef of—the Arizona Inn?

I had a job at a restaurant in Corvallis, Oregon, but it just wasn’t quite what had been advertised to me during the interview process—it was very institutional-grade, not-edible-for-human-consumption kind of stuff. It just seemed like it wasn’t the way I wanted to go in my life, so I ended up moving down here because my brother was in Tucson at that point in time. I actually found the Inn through an ad in the paper. I interviewed here, and then when I left I had an interview at Blue Willow and I got hired there on the spot. The next day was supposed to be my first shift at Blue Willow, but I got a call to do a second interview here and I thought, “Maybe I should go.” It was more the direction I wanted to go with my culinary career, and so I ended up getting the job as a banquet cook here. I worked for about nine months before becoming a banquet supervisor, and I got to run the banquet on the chef’s days off. Then, when he stepped down, I took over as banquet chef. I did that for about eight years, then was executive sous chef for Chef Odell Baskerville for about a year and a half. I stayed on as de facto chef for about six months, then in August of 2009, I got the official title … If you talk to most chefs, they’ve kind of jumped around to get to where they are unless they’re at a place where everything just works out perfectly. And it kind of did for me—I got lucky. Sam Allison started working at the Arizona Inn as a banquet cook. Today, he's the executive chef at the historic hotel.

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Do you use any local ingredients on your menu?

Local is everything to us; we just don’t put it on our menus as much. But because we’re trying to maintain a consistent quality throughout the resort—in the dining room, by the pool, for banquets—it’s hard to source everything locally. A lot of the local places, when they get started, their operations aren’t big enough to support our whole operation. So, I’ve kind of got to think about everything because I don’t want to use an all-natural grass-fed beef in the dining room, for instance, if I can’t also use it for banquets. So, we’re using Willcox tomatoes, we’re using local prickly pear syrup, local ingredients like that, but we don’t always label it as local on the menu.

What’s on the horizon for your dining room?

We’re doing whiskey dinners with Whiskey del Bac. We did a wine dinner with Lawrence Dunham Vineyards. Now I’m trying to put together dinners with Iron John’s Brewing and Sentinel Peak Brewing for the fall. Me, I’m a beer guy. That’s what I prefer to drink. I can drink wine. I just don’t get as much satisfaction out of it as with a good beer. I’ve had $300 bottles of wine; I’ve had a $1,000 bottle of Dom Perignon. I’d rather have a $10 Stone IPA, or something like that. So we’re trying to get that started.

The Arizona Inn has played host to a slew of old-Hollywood celebrities in its 85-year history, and has been owned and operated by four generations of the same family, beginning with Arizona’s first congresswoman, Isabella Greenway. What’s it like working in that atmosphere?

We’re very much a family and a team at the Arizona Inn—that’s just the way it’s run. Where else can you come to work at a place like this every day and see the owner [Will Conroy] walking around? And it’s been the same core group of people since I’ve been here: the general manager [Patrick Cray] is the same, the PR people are the same. I mean, there’s a guy who works with me who’s been there longer than I’ve been alive. His name is Danny Seymour. He runs garde manger for the banquet department and he started here in January of 1978. It’s kind of a different culture—kitchens can be cutthroat and it’s not really like that here. There are a few dishes on the menu that will probably never change because they’re traditional—like the chicken salad. If I come back when I’m 50 or 60 years old, that’ll still probably be on the menu. But we’ve also got families that have made it their tradition to eat here for the holidays every year. We see the same faces on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas. And then they bring their kids, and they bring their grandkids, and that’s really the tradition for us. That’s the history that we tie into, and it always comes back to the fact that we’re all like a family here.  Arizona Inn. 2200 E. Elm St. 800.933.1093. ArizonaInn.com. Craig S. Baker is a local freelance writer. You can see more of his work at CraigSBaker.com.

The Arizona Inn's Southwestern Benedict comes with chorizo, ranchero sauce, and hollandaise sauce, served over a crispy polenta cake. 82 September /October 2016

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TABLE

The Joy of Cooking Sally Kane expands her fine-dining chops from The Coronet’s intimate, brasserie-style fare to Agustín Kitchen and the new Aka Deli & Bakeshop. By Edie Jarolim | Photography by Julie DeMarre

ally K ane was born to be a restaurateur. Her earliest memories include dangling her feet from a bar stool at the Tack Room, the restaurant at Rancho del Rio guest ranch that was originally run by her father, Jud. She says, “My father loved to talk about where the food and wine came from, what the room looked like, what people were wearing. I was very young, but I remember his strong sense of place, of aesthetics.” After Jud Kane died at the age of 44, his widow, two sons, and 6-year-old daughter struck out for California. It was the beginning of a journey that would eventually lead Kane back to Tucson and to the creation of her own dining spot, The Coronet. Key stops along the way included a stint as manager at E.G. Kroeger’s Espresso in the San Francisco Bay area. Kane credits the cafe’s owner, Edith Kroeger, with an education on the importance of doing things right. “Some of the staff found Edith overbearing,” Kane says, “but I appreciated her quest for real quality.” The time that Kane spent as a dishwasher, prep cook, and baker at the Seventh Heaven restaurant in Galway, Ireland, was similarly instructive. It not only taught her the restaurant business from the ground up but also helped shape an affinity for what she calls “home-cooked food steeped in global tradition.”

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Recipes for a superb chocolate gateau filled with hot rum and “the world’s best fish chowder” were side benefits. All these experiences clearly paid off. USA Today named The Coronet Tucson’s top restaurant two years in a row and the cafe was featured in a Wine Enthusiast piece that ranked Tucson No. 1 on its 2016 list of Top Under-the-Radar Food Towns. Not too shabby for an eatery that’s been open for less than three years. The internationally inspired, locally sourced menu is definitely a draw. You’re likely to find walnut feta paté, venison kofta meatballs, tilapia roasted in parchment ... all in expert preparations that let their fresh ingredients and distinctive flavors shine through. At the same time, The Coronet owes part of its success to its intimate atmosphere. The brasserie-style dining room and patio feel like they belong to another era and place, even though The Coronet straddles two of the buzziest restaurant stretches in town: It sits at the end of Fourth Avenue, just before the underpass to downtown’s Congress Street. Sally Kane, the co-owner of The Coronet, sits in front of a bar that dates to 1906; she and her partner tracked it down in a small Arizona town.

Clockwise, from top left: The Coronet’s Fish Platter, with steelhead gravlax, smoked oysters, sardines, crème fraîche, roasted tomatoes, cucumbers, and crackers; a selection of raw oysters from Agustín Kitchen; ginger turmeric cheesecake with Cointreau whipped cream; The Coronet’s Rhubarb Braised Short Rib, with roasted peewee potatoes, haricots verts, and watermelon and mint salad.

The restaurant comes by its retro ambience honestly: It was formerly the dining room of the 1928 Coronado Hotel. The painstaking restoration, which received an award from the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, was part of a group effort led by Kane, who attended the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and, when she first returned to Tucson, opened Surface Works interior design studio. Architect Bill Mackey brought her vision to life but Kane and co-owner and partner Gregor Kretschmann worked out a lot of the details, including installing their collection of Hitchcock chairs and buying a 1906 bar from a small Arizona town. One of Kane’s most distinctive contributions was the floor, a bistro classic with encaustic tiles arrayed in intricate fleur-de-lis patterns—patterns reflected in the restaurant’s iron gate. 86 September /October 2016

It was while The Coronet was under construction that Kane met Erika Bostick-Esham and formed the bond that gives the restaurant its heart—and its collaborative mojo. Bostick-Esham was the kitchen manager at Sparkroot, a vegetarian café on Congress Street that Kane frequented while supervising the restaurant restoration. Bostick-Esham recalls, “I had a lot of free rein there and was able to create specials. Sally used to come in every day and I would show her the menu. I could count on her to get an honest assessment of my work.” Kane, in turn, was impressed by the energy and talent of the young Sparkroot manager. “We both love food and love talking about it, and we have similar ideas about it,” she says. Like Kane, Bostick-Esham was introduced to the joys of the table at an early age. Growing up in Tucson, she says, “I used

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to watch cooking shows on PBS because it was too hot to play outside. My mom let me have fun in the kitchen when I was still a kid.” Steeped in the family tradition of Sonoran-Mexican cooking, young Erika learned how to make queso fresco and queso panela. “My mother showed me the deliciousness of spreading soft curds on a warm flour tortilla with a sprinkle of salt,” she says. The connection between the two women grew sufficiently strong that Kane decided she wanted Bostick-Esham to help open The Coronet. She jokes, “I knew she was the one. I asked her out on a business date to propose.” Bostick-Esham initially had cold feet; she worried because she wasn’t formally trained. That was fine with Kane, who wanted “a cook, not a chef,” but not until Kane’s cousin Jake Alpert agreed to share the responsibilities of opening the restaurant did Bostick-Esham agree to sign on, too. She was extremely glad she did. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, being able to buy the equipment we wanted and start out in a business before it was completed,” Bostick-Esham says. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of doing.”

The brasserie-style dining room and patio feel like they belong to another era and place, even though The Coronet straddles two of the buzziest restaurant stretches in town. Now Kane and Bostick-Esham are embarking on another from-scratch culinary adventure together: The creation of Aka Deli & Bakeshop in downtown’s burgeoning Mercado San Agustín complex. What goes around comes around. Just as Kane got to know Bostick-Esham by observing her in her natural foodie habitat, so a customer with the power to impact her career became a regular at The Coronet. Adam Weinstein and Jerry Dixon, developers of the Mercado San Agustín and owners of Agustín Kitchen, were so impressed with Kane that they asked her to come in as a partner in Agustín Kitchen. They gave her the freedom to make any changes she wanted.

(Top) The Coronet’s intimate atmosphere give the restaurant a cozy, Old World feeling. (Bottom) Now the executive chef at Agustín Kitchen, Erika Bostick-Esham (right) helped Kane start The Coronet from scratch. 88 September /October 2016

Those changes started off slow when Kane took the reins in October 2015. “People had been coming to Agustín since it’s been open and we had to respect that,” Kane says. The most recent menus reflect what Kane calls a “New American brasserie” aesthetic—and also The Coronet’s global scope. Steak frites with Whiskey del Bac bavarois, for example, mingles on the dinner menu with king salmon in dashi miso broth with chilled spinach ohitashi. In contrast, Kane and Bostick-Esham were able to immediately put their mark on the associated bakery and deli that will open in September in the Mercado. Kane calls Aka—the name alludes both to Agustín Kitchen and to the aliases that they can play with in advertising—“a mashup between Coronet and Agustín.” Anticipating the lunch hour crowd at the new Caterpillar headquarters going in across the street, as well as the expansion of the Mercado to include a 500-seat event space and, eventually, several residential complexes, it’ll be a grab and 90 September /October 2016

go, but will also have a seating area. There, customers will be able to enjoy a rotating menu of sandwiches, fresh patés, salads, and baked goods as well as a selection of wine and beer, gourmet coffee, and Italian sodas. As at The Coronet, where “drinkies” appear on the bill of fare, a spirit of whimsy prevails at Aka. For dessert, classic French pastry like buttery apple tarts might turn up alongside Ding Dongs made on site. Kane may have inherited the fine dining gene from her father, but sometimes girls just wanna have fun.  The Coronet. 402 E. Ninth St. 520.222.9889. CafeCoronet.com. Agustín Kitchen. Mercado San Agustín. 100 S. Avenida del Convento. 520.398.5382. Edie Jarolim is a freelance writer whose memoir, Getting Naked for Money: An Accidental Travel Writer Reveals All, is coming out in November.

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TMY 1

TMY 2

HEALTH

Peas Before Pills Can nutrition replace prescriptions? Medical educators at the UA are planting the seeds. By Linda Ray | Illustrations by Molly Kiely

“T

how your grandmother cooked,” says Dr. Randy Horwitz, the medical director for the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. “If you want to start with a good diet, start there. Only cook what you recognize. This is a chicken. This is not a frozen packaged chicken with 15 ingredients.” Horwitz has evangelized for whole, fresh foods since he completed a fellowship in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona in 2003. Today, he’s the chair of the American Board of Integrative Medicine. Using detailed case studies from evidence-based clinical practice, he trains more than 100 physicians annually through the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine’s fellowship programs. He pulls an example from a presentation he used recently in an elective lecture to students in the UA College of Medicine. “I saw a patient in her mid-to-late 50s. She had prediabetes for a few years and her numbers were going up. Her hypertension was controlled with two medications.” The woman’s doctor had recommended a common diabetes drug. “The FDA recommends using the drug as an ‘adjunctive therapy’ for diabetes, along with exercise and diet,” Horwitz says. “She went on an anti-inflammatory diet, which was Mediterranean. She stopped fruit juices, which are just sugar and water. She stopped her bagels that she was eating daily. No diet hInK a Bout

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soda, no fast food, no processed food. She stopped her sugar and salt. So what happened? She dropped to normal levels in three months, and she was able to even stop her blood pressure meds.” Horwitz says, “Nutrition often takes a back seat [in medical school] because practicing physicians just don’t give it its due.” Research backs him up. A widely published longitudinal study of nutrition education in U.S. medical schools shows that there is not only too little time dedicated to nutrition in medical school curricula, but also that the amount of time is declining. Horowitz concurs with a cadre of integrative health leaders who are urging medical schools to substitute nutrition classes for organic chemistry. The notion is not new. It was first advanced by Dr. Jim Dalen, dean of the UA College of Medicine from 1988 to 2001. It was Dalen who worked with Dr. Andrew Weil to establish the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine in 1997 and to develop the integrative medicine field in the late ’90s. The practice of integrative medicine involves a wide range of approaches to helping a patient achieve and sustain good health. Doctors and nurses may practice conventional medical techniques and prescribe medications, but they also work to support patients in making essential changes to their environment, sleep habits, activity level, relationships, resiliency, spirituality, and nutrition.

The focus is on healing, and the physician’s role as a coach for a patient’s self-care to prevent illness and maintain health. The UA established the first residential fellowship in integrative medicine for physicians already in clinical practice in 1997. Its goal was to seed the country with practitioners over a 10-year period. Shorter-term resident and online fellowships are still offered. To date, the UA has trained 1,200 fellows, including MDs, DOs, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants. The UA also offers an Integrative Medicine in Residency program at more than 100 sites around the country, including Banner-University Medical Center. As director of Integrative Medicine in Residency for the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, Dr. Patricia Lebensohn assures that a thread of nutrition education is sustained throughout the students’ preclinical and clinical years. She also leads nutrition education for residents at Banner. Lebensohn says she stresses the importance of taking a thorough nutritional history of each patient and analyzing it for insights. “The interest is greatest among students who want 102 September /October 2016

to pursue family practice,” she says. “In the Family Medicine Residency here, we do a lot of nutrition education with them [including] food preparation, how to cook healthy foods, preparation of gluten-free and dairy-free diets.” Arizona Health Sciences Center’s farthest-reaching nutrition education program is its annual Nutrition and Health Conference, now in its ninth year. The four-day conference attracts physicians as well as other professionals concerned with healthy eating. There’s a focus on ways to incorporate nutritional information in a clinical setting and how to evaluate risks and benefits of nutritional recommendations. But panels also cover topics ranging from nutrition and mental health to agricultural practices affecting the nutrition content of produce and the role of microbiomes in heart health. In 20 years, education in integrative medicine has grown to the extent that the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine now has more than 65 members, including some of the most distinguished medical schools in the United States: Scripps, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and more.

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of these practices are as old as those of Florence Nightingale, and in clinical practice it is often nurses and nurse practitioners who are the front line in nutrition education. They are usually the only resource for school and community programs and some patients of community clinics. “Access to clean food, clean water, and fresh air was kind of the cornerstone of how Florence Nightingale thought about nursing,” says Mary Jo Koithan, Ph.D., R.N., and an associate professor in the University of Arizona College of Nursing. Koithan says that nurses’ frequent interaction with hospitalized patients, and their intake functions in clinics and doctors’ offices, offer them first line opportunities to assess dietary habits and the nutritional condition of a patient. Often, she says, doctors will refer patients to their nurses for information about nutrition. “The College of Nursing has really adopted an integrated health approach,” says Koithan. “One tenet of integrative care is to believe that the human body knows how to heal itself if you support it properly … It’s a whole-person, whole-systems an y

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approach focused on prevention and health promotion. Another tenet has to do with a sustainable community. The health of us … is connected to our space and place. “We spend a lot of time on how to intervene with specific symptoms, and we’re looking at nutrition to intervene in a noninvasive … natural way,” she says. Koithan says the College of Nursing is taking steps to standardize a holistic view of nutrition’s role in both preventive and diagnostic care throughout its own curriculum. In 2016, the college will launch an Integrative Nursing Faculty Fellowship program. “So we’ll be talking about the new way of thinking about nutrition and how it’s connected to the whole of the environment and the whole health of the person,” says Koithan. The field of community nursing, in clinics and community service centers, offers nurses the best opportunity to educate people about nutrition and dietary changes that can improve their quality of life. Community nurses give classes on preventing and managing diabetes, heart conditions, and celiac disease, and they offer nutrition counseling to expectant mothers. School nurses

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teach nutrition as part of health classes, and also help families manage students’ diabetes and asthma. Often they pitch in on school gardens to talk about how healthy foods help young bodies to grow and fight disease. Importantly, community nurses are close enough to their clients’ culture to know what recommendations will actually be sustainable. Koithan describes a program working with the Tohono O’odham to control diabetes with traditional foods, and outreach to home-bound patients to make sure that recommended dietary changes are within the patient’s capabilities. As more health care providers and their patients become aware of the role of nutrition in good health, insurers and other payers seem to remain oblivious. General nutrition consulting is not covered in a routine office visit. And coverage for food-related disorders, such as diabetes and celiac disease, are generally covered only when referred to specialists. The national healthcare business consultant Dr. Eric Justin, also an MBA, has worked as a clinical physician and now consults for healthcare, health insurance, and employee benefits companies. 106 September /October 2016

Asked whether compensation issues constrain opportunities for doctors and nurses to provide preventive nutritional counseling, Justin says, “There is no question that insurance carriers, among others in the larger healthcare space, understand the utility of nutrition education. The dramatic increases in … obesity and diabetes alone have awakened most players. “Executing on that perceived need is another matter.” Horwitz highlights the paradox. “There’s no other medication, if you will, that’s taken with such regularity as food. And it really does impact health. Most of our lifestyle diseases can be delayed several years, if not put off forever.” Here’s his prescription: “There are ample studies that support increasing healthful fats in the diet, and mainly having a plantbased diet is helpful, using meat as a side-dish if you want. If you can tell me what all the ingredients are, you can eat that.”  IntegrativeMedicine.arizona.edu. Linda Ray has written news and feature stories for as long as she can remember. She wrote press releases for the first national conference on integrative health, held at the Tucson Convention Center in the mid-1970s.

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f o L o h cal Hoppin c r a e S ni ess The Baja Brews pro

ject is a year-long collaboration between the region's craft brewers and Edible Ba ja Arizona. Explore, celebrate, and taste Baja Arizona's extra ordinary craft beer in this six-part series. Drink loc al!

Tasting events will feature local breweries using a different indigenous ingredient to create a special small batch. Drink beer and help benefit innovative nonprofit organizations working for food security. The next event is Sept. 29. See p. 122 for more information. Sponsored by VISIT TUCSON and the ARIZONA CRAFT BREWERS GUILD

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Park Brewery on Pennington Street, served, according to an 1ď&#x2122;&#x2039;69 advertisement, lagers, ales, and porters. Image courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society.

was even a town, you could have sat down at a bar and ordered a craft beer. In 1864, 13 years before Tucson was incorporated, Alex Levin and Frank Hodges opened Pioneer Brewery on the north side of Camp Street (now Broadway) between Church and Stone. A few years later, Levin—described by Tucson historian C.L. Sonnichsen as “a fat, jolly, outgoing German”—opened Park Brewery, on Pennington Street, which served, according to an 1869 advertisement, lagers, ales, and porters. John Spring—Swiss émigré and fellow Tucson brewer—commented about the beer at Pioneer: “The less said about its quality the better.” The quality, however, would improve. Levin found better water sources (he had been using water from the Rillito), started using beer yeast instead of bread yeast, and sent Spring to buy better bottles from Hermosillo. By 1884, the Arizona Daily Star described the Pioneer as “the sink of drunkenness, vice, and debauchery,” which, in early Arizona brewing days, may very well have been a description of success. At these early breweries—by 1873 there were three, Pioneer Brewery, City Brewery, and Park Brewery— early Baja Arizonans, according to historian Ava S. Baldwin, “spent hours playing poker and wrangling over matters of opinion.” When the first railroad chugged into town, in 1880, the boxcars brought not only raw goods and finery from the East, but also opened up a new beer market. What was at first a boon for Boss Levin, as he came to be known—he could start shipping his beer across the state—eventually put local craft brewers out of business. Larger brewers would soon start shipping their beers into Baja Arizona. It was a trend that would continue for a century, and not until more than a hundred years later, in the late 1990s, would Tucson once again boast three breweries. Today, the Old Pueblo has 16.

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The long and short history of craft beer in Baja Arizona. By John Washington | Photography by Jeff Smith

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e (and I mean to encompass all of us in the collective pronoun) have been drinking beer for about 10,000 years, more or less. Egyptian pharaohs drank suds out of golden bowls. Ancient Chinese farmers fermented sorghum and got sozzled. In the southwestern United States, Apaches got tipsy on tiswin, which came to be known as Apache beer, and was made from fermented corn, with juniper berries replacing hops as the bittering agent. Locally, Tohono O’odham made a version of tiswin flavored with saguaro fruit. East Coast English-style alehouses, in the late 18th century, were where the first militias were formed, and where the thinking behind the American Revolution fomented. Beer, in sum, has been an integral part of the human project since the project began. Early American beer drinkers swilled mostly ambient-temperature ales. That changed starting in the 1830s when German immigrants started coming to the United States, bringing with them their love of cold lagers. Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association, explained that changing shipping

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technology, the rise of the quicker clipper ship, which traveled more northerly (cooler) routes across the Atlantic, also led to the ale-to-lager shift. Lagers are brewed at colder temperatures, and lager yeast dies when it warms. Thus, the rise of lagers—still by far the most commonly imbibed beer in America today—closely followed the rise of refrigeration. It wasn’t until the 1880s, with further advances in cooling technology and the advent of pasteurization, that beer could effectively travel. Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, Schlitz, and Pabst all trace their origins to the newly refrigerated mid-19th century. In 1873, the same year there were three breweries in Tucson, there were 4,173 across the United States. A hundred years later, by the 1970s, there were just over 40 breweries nationwide. Today there are 4,600 breweries, with another 1,000 in the works. What caused the drought, and the recent resurgence? As soon as beer was able to move from state to state without skunking, you didn’t need a brewery in your town, especially if you lived along the railroad. (The beer-rail connection is still in play in Tucson: Barrio offers $1 off pints when the train goes by.

Patrons gather at Barrio Brewing’s popular brewery near the railroad tracks south of downtown. Last year, Barrio brewed 9,000 barrels of beer.

At Borderlands, drinkers observe a forced moment of silence—a chance to reflect and stare into your glass—when passing trains shake the bar.) By 1891, Anheuser-Busch was selling more than a million barrels of beer a year nationwide. Consolidations and takeovers continued until the temperance movement killed off, or sent underground, hundreds more breweries across the country. In 1919, when Prohibition began, major brewers, including Busch, shifted to producing ice cream, soda, and yeast—essential ingredients for a sixth birthday party, but not quite enough to take the edge off a sharp day. Even after Americans started drinking legally again, breweries didn’t bounce back. In fact, they continued their decline. By the 1970s, the 40-some remaining breweries produced almost nothing but low-alcohol, hop-zero, pale lagers, also known as yellow swill. Many of these beers, including those produced by Budweiser and Coors, contained rice and corn additives (and still do today). In 1987, changing Arizona laws paved the way for microbreweries to pour their own beer at the same location

they brewed it, opening a once-barricaded door for craft brewers. Previously, there were regulations to stop beer and wine producers from distributing or serving their own product—and the firewall is still in effect for major domestic brewers. The idea, a relic from Prohibition days, was that “brewery ownership of bars was a primary reason for the overconsumption and abuse of beer,” writes Steve Hindy in Craft Beer Revolution. In my experience, however, over-consumption has more to do with approaching deadlines and the state of your soul than it does with exactly who is pouring the pints. Just a few years after the laws lined up right for brewers in Arizona, in 1991, Dennis Arnold started cooking grains on University Boulevard at Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company. The brewery would expand to become Barrio Brewery, though still maintaining its Gentle Ben’s site to serve beer and food. Raise your glasses: the Anno Domini of decent beer had come to Baja Arizona. Nationally, the ’90s stood as the demarcating decade of BC (Before Craft) and AD (After Domestic).

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Dennis Arnold started cooking grains on University Boulevard in 1991 at Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company.

a r nold broke into brewing by smuggling steel into Tijuana. In the ’80s he would buy stainless steel from Escondido to smuggle south into Mexico, where he had set up a shop to turn the scrap metal into brew tanks. With the money he made from welding, he was able to construct his own kettles. Barrio still has, and uses, two fermenters and three bright tanks that Arnold built from the illegal steel. He first tried opening a brewery in San Diego, 30 years ago. When that didn’t stick—San Diego city officials said there would never be a brewery within city limits because of the “stink,” though now San Diego is the one of the craft brew capitals of the country—Arnold and his wife, Tauna, decided to try again in their hometown of Tucson. Arnold is a fast-talking man with a large personality, a convincing tan, obvious business acumen, and lots of stories to tell. He spent about 20 minutes describing the history and varieties of al pastor tacos—a new happy hour menu, featuring the high-expectations tacos, is coming to Barrio soon. As we talked tacos and beer in his office, he rocked in a steeply reclining chair underneath a St. Arnold (the patron saint of beer) tin plaque. A team of Barrio workers was running the canner just outside the door, loudly filling up six-packs of Barrio Rojo.

ennIs

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Just as Gentle Ben’s Brewing was expanding beyond capacity in the early 2000s, Arnold moved the brewing side of the business into an old Quonset hut, basically a tin-skinned tent, by the railroad tracks south of downtown. On a recent hot and lazy Saturday afternoon, the place was packed, and I could barely get a table to enjoy a pint of Rae’s Grapefruit IPA—made with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. Last year Barrio brewed 9,000 barrels of beer, which is up 40 percent from 2014. Since 2010, their distribution has spiked about 1,000 percent. Soon they’ll be selling their cans in Fry’s supermarkets across the state, and you can already find them in town, pretty much wherever beer is sold. City-wide distribution and popular appeal didn’t come easily for local craft brewers. In the late ’90s, as Steve Tracy, owner and brewer of Thunder Canyon Brewery, told me, “The whole brewery thing was a novelty.” He and other brewers had to put in a lot of sweat and money, and somehow find a critical mass of drinkers. Establishing a successful brewery “isn’t just sitting around and drinking beer,” Tracy explained. It may, however, be crucial for making a mouthwatering product, which is the first step toward financial sustainability. Thunder Canyon currently employs 80 people in two locations, and for the last four years has set record production

At Thunder Canyon, Adam Marshall (left ) and Kyle Ratcliff continually tweak their IPA recipe to reflect Tucson’s changing tastes.

numbers. Some of Tracy’s recipes, his amber and blonde ales, haven’t changed over two decades of cooking. What has changed, however, is people’s appreciation for them. Tracy, and Thunder Canyon’s brewmaster, Kyle Ratcliff, have been tweaking their IPA to match Tucson’s changing (read: enlightening) palate. Thunder Canyon’s original IPA, in 1997, was 5.5 percent ABV (alcohol by volume) and had 45 IBUs (International Bittering Units, which basically measure hoppiness); now his flagship IPA, stronger and with more flavor, is 6.8 percent ABV and has 75 IBUs. I asked both Arnold and Tracy what they thought had spawned the craft brew craze. They both reached for analogies and theories to explain the phenomenon—kids don’t want to drive what their parents were driving, the rise of Starbucks 120 September /October 2016

habituated the public to more bitter flavor profiles, the antiglobalization pushback sparked an interest in drinking locally. Even beer economist Bart Watson had trouble putting his finger on it. “Generational change is a powerful force,” he told me, though many previous generations certainly seemed content with their macrobrewed lawnmower beers. Watson also speculated that the “expectation of choice” might have something to do with it. Millennials, who grew up with 17 flavors of Vitamin Water, make up a “generation of experimenters,” Watson told me. Tastes, however, are fleeting and subjective, beholden to the mysteries of suggestion and the tides of trend, and maybe the best explanation for the rise of craft beer is as sententious as: Because it’s better.

Establishing a successful brewery “isn’t just sitting around and drinking beer,” says Steve Tracy, owner of Thunder Canyon Brewery

2010. Dennis Arnold is drinking a beer at his bar. He turns around and sees a gaggle of “sweet little ladies,” as he calls them, from the Red Hat Society (a global society that supports women in pursuit of “fun, friendship, freedom, fulfillment, and fitness”) drinking Hefeweizens and IPAs. That was the moment, Arnold told me, “I realized my world had changed.” When Tracy, of Thunder Canyon, first started brewing in the ’90s, “You couldn’t give away an IPA.” Part of the job of a local brewer, Arnold said, was to “get people moving up the flavor scale.” Both Thunder Canyon and Barrio worked to educate and sophisticate Tucsonans’ palates, pushing them toward more “forward-flavor” products. “You stay in the game long enough,”

t Is

Arnold said, “and you can convert the unconvertible.” And once you win those people over, they tend to stay in the craft brew camp. Arnold: “I don’t know of anybody that’s ever gone back” to the “MichUltra days,” as he calls precraft consciousness. “Babies don’t want to go back to baby food, to eating peas out of a jar, after they’ve tried real food.” Thunder Canyon’s Good Vibrations IPA is a delicious example of real food. It’s continuously hopped, which means that hops are added during all of the stages of the brewing process. Typically, hopping beer in an early brewing stage lends a beer its bitterness. Dry-hopping (the hops added when the beer is done brewing) will give a beer its hoppy aroma. The hyper-hopped end product, the Good Vibrations, as Ratcliff

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described it to me, is piny and resinous, with a citrus touch on the tongue. It’s a classic Northwest-style IPA, full of flavor everywhere, lingering in your nose, even following the liquid down your throat. But a brewery isn’t just about beer, no matter how frothy the suds or thirsty its drinkers. What you want to develop in a brewery, Ratcliff told me, is “a sense of community. [Where] everybody knows everybody and you can sit and have a pint after work and talk to a buddy.” Basically: a place to wrangle. Tom Storey ordered his first amber ale at Thunder Canyon in 1997, the day Thunder Canyon opened its doors, and has been drinking the same beer and participating in neighborhood meetings at the brewery a few times a week ever since. “Thunder Canyon is like a family,” Storey told me. “It’s comfortable in here.” We talked a while about the importance of community space, but Storey and another long-time regular, kept bring-

ing the conversation back to beer. And then back to community. And then back to beer. Which seems to be the way it works: the beer lubricating community and the community downing the beer, brewing up a symbiotic sort of fermentation. In 1864, in the midst of the American Civil War, Levin’s Park Brewery stood, according to Sonnichsen, as “a symbol of community cohesiveness.” Walk into either Thunder Canyon or Barrio, and you’ll see that the same holds true today.  My recs from this article: Thunder Canyon’s Green Tea Saison, and Barrio’s Mocha Java Stout on Nitro. Special thanks to the local historian and editor of Rio Nuevo Publishers Jim Turner for his help in researching early Arizonan breweries. John Washington is a writer and translator. Visit jblackburnwashington.com or find him on Twitter at @EndDeportations.

bAJA bRewS TASTING! Come and taste more than a dozen singular beers made with a distinct local ingredient! Every eight weeks, Baja Arizona s craft brewers are concocting special beers using different ingredients from plants indigenous to Baja Arizona and based on seasonal availability. Proceeds from the events will benefit four amazing nonprofit organizations working to improve food security in our communty: Native Seeds/SEARCH, Trees for Tucson, Iskashitaa Refugee Network, and Desert Harvesters. A $15 donation includes tastings of all beers made by participating breweries. There is no competitive aspect to the tastings. 122 September /October 2016

The second Baja Brews Tasting Event features beers made with... chiles and chiltepines!

WHEN: Thursday, September 29 from 6-8 pm. WHERE: Barrio Brewing, 800 E. 16th St., downtown Tucson

HOW MUCH: $15 gets you tastes of all special brews from more than a dozen local breweries.

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Linking Edible Arizona Forests connects people with trees, and trees with their stewards.

Our AbuNdanT DeseRt FOrest By Lisa Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill Photography by

Steven Meckler

my earliest memories are of trees in our front yard. In the spring, the sweet olive burst with blossoms, cascading underneath the canopy, their white petals the closest thing we had to snow in Louisiana. Southern live oaks dripping with Spanish moss created archways for roads. My dad’s backyard lemon tree produces such abundance that he fills his wheelbarrow with bagfuls, posts a sign, and arrives home to find it empty. When I moved to the desert almost a decade ago, I didn’t notice the trees at all. I noticed saguaro and cholla and prickly pear and agave and creosote. I noticed the zigzagged slopes of the Catalinas rising violet against the sky. I fell in love with the landscape, but to me, that landscape was not about trees. In Louisiana, trees grow gigantic, impossible to ignore; you put a tree in the ground and it grows. In the desert, what appears to be a stick or shrub could be a burgeoning tree. In the desert, care is required for trees to take root and thrive. But the desert also teaches you—if you are willing to learn—that it is bountiful in ways that, on first glance, you could not have imagined. “I think most people don’t think about trees when they think of the desert, maybe even those of us that live here,” says Ann Audrey, steering committee chair and project manager for the Linking Edible Arizona Forests Network, or LEAF. The LEAF Network is a community-based organization focused on teaching Arizonans about trees. Partners include the Arizona Community Tree Council, Pima County and Phoenix Parks and Recreation, Trees for Tucson, Tucson Oasis Initiative, Iskashitaa Refugee Network, American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association, GRS Landscape Architects, Sustainable Cities Network, and the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension. Audrey wonders: “What will it take for people to think of trees as being a vital part of the landscape?” Part of that shift means awareness and education and LEAF is at the forefront of this work, working to connect trees with people who can serve as stewards and educate people about the benefits of edible trees. And there are many. Trees provide shade and cool the air around them through the process of transpiration. Many trees convert nitrogen from the air into fertilizer for the soil. They help reduce the urban heat island effect and add beauty to urban landscape. And, of course, edible trees provide local food that people can use to sustain themselves and their families. ome of

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(Previous page) Barbara Rose. Foothills palo verde, prickly pear, and saguaro. (Below) Beverly Babb. Loquat tree.

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Jesus Garcia. Fig tree in the foreground. Grape vines on the arbor.

decade ago , Jesús Garcia, director of the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project, began traveling the Southwest to collect cuttings from descendants of trees brought by European missionaries, including Father Kino, in the 1600s. He applied his academic interests and horticulture experience from growing up in orchards in Mexico to the cultivation and propagation of these trees. Mission Garden, a recreation of the historic Spanish Colonial walled garden of the San Agustín Mission, was an empty dirt lot in 2012. Now, there are row upon row of trees, teeming with white pomegranates, Mexican limes, Seville oranges, and black and Sosa Carrillo figs. In 2010, Audrey wrote a grant for the City of Tucson to facilitate work in Mission Garden: the planting of 100 trees, water harvesting workshops, installing irrigation, and holding a September 2012 workshop where the group formed what would become LEAF. LEAF then partnered with the Arizona Community Tree Council to apply for a two-year-long Western Competitive Grant—awarded in 2014 by the USDA and facilitated by the State Forestry Department. Over the past two years, this $250,000 award has allowed LEAF to create a comprehensive Arizona edible tree database, which lists more than 70 edible tree species with information on water needs, suitable climates, and harvest seasons; and an Arizona edible tree guidebook, available free both in print and as a downloadable file, which will give Arizonans information on how to plant, water, prune, harvest, and process edible trees. The grant also funded a Tucson-specific guidebook, a website, a statewide conference in Phoenix in 2015, and educational events and tree celebrations, including the Membrillo/Edible Tree Fest to be held at Mission Garden in October. The goal is to make resources accessible, both for experienced growers and newbies. “We want the layman to be invited, to be able to stick a tree in the ground and get started,” Audrey says. “And we also want to provide more resources for those who want to really dig in.” LEAF members emphasize right tree, right place, and creating a plan before planting. Audrey says that edible trees “need more care—they need to be pruned and watered, you have to learn how to process [the edibles]. There’s more effort that goes into committing to plant and care for an edible tree.”

L a nc a s t e r walks through the urban food forest that lines his sidewalk in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood. Trees arch over the mulch-covered walking path, creating shade in the 95-degree summer morning heat. When he and his brother, Rodd, moved to the neighborhood in 1994, none of this was here. Now, shades of green and brown are everywhere, the canopy of trees and understory of vegetation punctuated by bursts of color—the bright fuchsia of cactus fruit, yellow flowers bursting from creosote bushes. Lancaster is a water-harvesting expert and a founding member of Desert Harvesters, a nonprofit grassroots effort that educates people on planting, harvesting, and processing native plants. Natives are adapted to the landscape so they establish relatively easily and use minimal water. He, his brother, and neighbors obtained trees through Trees for Tucson and learned about planting and harvesting native plants in part by learning from Tohono O’odham elders like Stella Tucker and Clifford Pablo. Since 1996, Lancaster and other community members have planted 1,400 trees in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood. In only 20 years, what were dirt paths and empty yards are now a portal for walking and an abundant food forest. “It’s easier than you think,” Lancaster says. “All the plants here are self-sustaining.” Lancaster emphasizes the importance of planting the water before you plant trees or other vegetation. How do you “plant water”? You consider the slope of land when planting to make best use of rainwater runoff. You dig basins to encourage rainfall from the street to rush in and provide water to vegetation. You use graywater from your home to help supplement rainwater and encourage plants to thrive. In his yard, Lancaster fills permeable clay pots buried underground with cistern rainwater, and alternates labeled tubes attached to his outdoor washing machine to direct graywater to different trees. This landscape is a model for what is possible when people become invested in their surroundings and adapt their lifestyle and palate to the place they call home. It is also a model for the 180-degree turn Lancaster says must be made in desert landscaping. Typically nowadays, he says, “We plant trees from somewhere else, using water and fertilizer from somewhere else.” Thirty percent of drinking water in Tucson, he notes, is used to irrigate vegetation. But there is an alternative. “Instead,” he says, “let’s plant plants from here, use water from here, and fertilize from here.” r ad

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Lancaster picks up a handful of ironwood pods, holding them in his palm, and cracking them open to reveal small dark brown beans. “I call this the peanut of the tree,” he says and hands me one to try. The bean tastes hearty, dense, and a bit salty. By 2002, Lancaster and others realized they had an abundance of food, but not many people knew how to harvest or process it. They bought a hammermill and started Desert Harvesters. At first, they were trying to adapt to people instead of natural patterns, holding their annual mesquite milling event in October when it was cooler. They now hold it in June which “is more synced with the local ecological rhythm,” when mesquite trees are at their peak of producing. Desert Harvesters also educates people about how to differentiate quality trees and how to safely harvest. For example, mesquite pods should be harvested before the rain, before they are more susceptible to aflatoxin. They educate people on quality by letting them taste mesquite pods that are sweet, chalky, bitter, dry, and apple-like so they can sample trees in their yard and neighborhood and know where to harvest and which trees to avoid. Another member of LEAF and Desert Harvesters, Barbara Rose, lives and works at Bean Tree Farm, a 20-acre saguaro/ironwood forest, farm and learning center in the northern Tucson Mountains. She, too, emphasizes the importance of developing what she calls a rainwater budget, where even intermittent rainwater is harnessed as a valuable resource. On a Saturday evening in July, Rose fills a bowl with salsa made with all local ingredients: Pima lima beans and tepary beans with a tomato and chile paste. Rose, who touts the nutrient density of the beans, takes Palo Verde seeds in their green state, blanches, cooks and serves them with salt, like edamame. “The desert can feed you,” she says. When Rose became a caretaker of Bean Tree Farm more than 30 years ago, she began to hear stories from Tohono O’odham elders about the land. She learned the farm area hosted thriving communities of tens of thousands of Hohokam until between 500 and 1,000 years ago. This history is an essential part of the land as are the plants that are native to it. “Why not talk about foods that are native to this place?” she asks. “Why not rewild the urban core?” “Because I live in an ironwood forest and have watched it disappear over 30 years,” Rose says, “I can contribute that knowledge and take care of this land. Ironwoods can live for a thousand years. They hold the soil, the plants, animals, and insects. That’s what holds the Sonoran Desert together. They won’t if we continue to suck all the water out of the ground. “A forest is not just trees,” she says. “This is also about the understory, the cacti, the wolfberry, hackberry, the community of plants under and beside that mutually support each other. It’s a template of what a community can be.” 134 September /October 2016

R outson de G r enade , a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, grew up on a farm outside of Prescott. From a young age, she and her two brothers were exposed to horticulture by their parents and parents’ friends. Her brother Kanin became fascinated by orchards, traveling around the state to study them, and she began her botanical fieldwork with cacti when she was just 15. For her Ph.D. thesis, de Grenade researched orchards in Baja California. “I was looking at not just the persistence of heritage crops, but also talking with families who had been there for five generations and understanding the cultural relationship with the trees,” she says. “If you go way back to some of the original immigrants, these people are coming from other countries and bringing with them seeds or even young trees to recreate something valuable to them, part of their cultural memory. Food is a tremendous part of that: the flavor, the cooking, the smell, the cultivation is very much a part of people’s lives.” afael

The longevity of trees preserves a kind of cultural legacy. The longevity of trees preserves a kind of cultural legacy. In the best cases, food technologies— like grafting, planting, pruning, harvesting—are also passed on from generation to generation. “We live in a culture of loss. In terms of our relationship to growing, having hands in the soil, we’ve become more and more removed from that life as a global society,” de Grenade says. “However, I also feel this desire to reconnect … If there is a movement where children or elders can plant a tree, harvest a tree, take care of a tree, I wholeheartedly support it.” De Grenade and her family recently moved to a small farm in Skull Valley, near Prescott, because she wanted to raise her children on a farm, as she had been, with a close-knit community and connection to the land. “Edible trees thrive on intergenerational care and stewardship. That process of taking care creates a strong bond between people,” she says. “It carries the stories. A tree holds these things you may or may not be able to hold consciously. When underneath an old tree, you can’t help but think how this tree has experienced so much. The experience of that living being has surpassed the singleness of one life.”

Brad Lancaster. Creosote on the right, desert hackberry above, prickly pear behind, ironwood to the left.

ounIs h ammouda rubs a calamondin lime between his fingers and raises the small orange fruit to his nose. An asylum seeker from Palestine, Hammouda has been in Tucson for four months. Across the way, Jasoda Subedi, a former refugee from Bhutan and now a U.S. citizen, picks limes from the tree. Limes are a necessity for Bhutanese cuisine. Subedi holds up the limes, with stems still attached to prevent the entry of mold, to show Barbara Eiswerth, executive director of Iskashitaa Refugee Network, who nods her head in approval. In the next day or two, staff members and refugees will salt cure the limes. This is one of the three harvests that Iskashitaa does each week, gleaning fruit and food from private homes and public spaces and converting food that some see as ornamental or inedible into dishes in their own homes and products to sell. In 2003, Eiswerth started the year-round gleaning program Iskashitaa—in Somali and Maay Maay, it means “working cooperatively together”—to prevent food waste in Tucson while empowering refugees. Refugees bring their agricultural knowledge and skills and are connected with resources and support in the Tucson community.

“What will it take for people to think of trees as being a vital part of the landscape?” These calamondin trees are next to a Sun Tran building. While the group gleans, two Sun Tran employees come by and sit on a nearby bench for a smoke break. The two seem a bit mystified by the harvest. “I have no idea what the hell those are,” one says to the other. “This exactly illustrates the problem,” Eiswerth says. People don’t see or know how to work with the bounty right in front of them. For example, high in antioxidants and usable as a lime substitute, calamondins are the least frost sensitive of all Tucson citrus and can be eaten at all stages of development: greening, mature, flowering. Calamondin jam is one of Iskashitaa’s most popular products. “Fruit waste equals water waste,” Eiswerth says. “Grapefruit is falling all over, enough to fill a swimming pool, but we go and pay our $3.99 for Ruby Reds from Texas. One fourth of the people in Tucson are food insecure. How is that? Why is that?” Eiswerth says change happens from the ground level. “People don’t need to know how to harvest,” she says, “We can teach you. Refugees can teach you.” Iskashitaa harvests 127,000 pounds of food annually. Fifty percent of this goes to those harvesting, 5 to 10 percent goes to value-added products sold at farmers’ markets, and 40 percent goes to local food banks. They are always looking for innovative ways to use the food they harvest. Eiswerth hands me a sugar stick made with dried calamondins, salt-cured calamondins, citrus-infused sugar, and crushed chiltepines. “Plaza [Liquors] wants to sell these as beer salt,” she says, “and La Cocina is going to make a dish with it.” 136 September /October 2016

l enart , a LEAF member and author of Life in the Hothouse, says, “In 50 years with warming, a lot of that food that has certain requirements for chill hours won’t survive.” Being strategic about what varieties of edible trees to plant and planting water for them first is essential, for climate change and food security. “We are living in the desert and most of the agriculture is likely to be alfalfa or cotton, things you don’t necessarily eat,” Lenart says. “People have to transport food to feed us.” She notes that transportation of food is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases and that even local food can sometimes have a heavier environmental footprint than we realize. Local figs grown in Arizona may be transported to Michigan, a destination for food sorting, before being loaded back on trucks and stocked in Arizona grocery stores. “We are so used to walking into a grocery store and buying our food. That’s how many of us grow up,” Lenart says. “Even with the water issue, water comes from the tap. Where did that water start? “One thing we’ve been seeing around the country is heavier rainfall events,” she says. “A simple way to think about it is that if you have a house and a yard the same size as the house, if you collect water from the roof, you can double your rainfall.” Lenart, who has taught water harvesting at the University of Arizona, teaches science and agriculture courses at the Tohono O’odham Community College and notes that many of the agricultural strategies that people are returning to now have deep roots in O’odham tradition. “The Tohono O’odham have been using these techniques for hundreds if not thousands of years,” she says. “Clifford Pablo”—a Tohono O’odham tribal member—“watches where the water is flowing and incorporates that into the design of the landscape of the garden. The O’odham have been harvesting mesquite pods for centuries. They’re gluten-free, low-glycemic, good for diabetics.” Ann Audrey notes that Arizona is distinctive because of its many microclimates and elevations. “So many different trees that can grow in different parts of Arizona now might become important in the next 50 years as other climates throughout the West shift into more extreme heat, drought, or rainfall patterns. We can create the genetic stock now that can be used in times ahead where weather is less predictable and trees that used to survive can’t.” In a way, the LEAF organization models the sort of expansive forest they are connecting people to and cultivating: the canopy of thousands of trees spread across the state creating one forest, these individuals and their organizations working as one large web. “Each one of us has our own hub and spiderweb of connection and we come together as LEAF network,” Audrey says. “If I visualize that and see the forest at Slide Rock State Park and piñons of northern Arizona and citrus groves in Phoenix and what’s going on in Yuma with commercial orchards and people’s backyard grapefruit trees … Any place a mesquite is growing is producing fruit, or the oaks or junipers are producing. It’s everywhere. You can actually imagine Arizona as a fruiting place.”  elanIe

Visit Mission Garden for the Membrillo/Edible Tree Fest on Saturday, Oct. 22, from 2-5 p.m. Lisa O’Neill is a freelance writer in Tucson. Her work focuses on intersections of social justice issues. Visit Lisamoneill.com.

Melanie Lenart. Fig tree.

Katie Gannon. Young velvet mesquite. Holding young foothills palo verde.

Edible Trees for Tucson

play a critical role in creating healthier, more livable, and prosperous communities, especially in arid, hot cities like Tucson. From cooling the environment through shade and evapo-transpiration to adding beauty to the landscape, trees have tangible value that grows over time. Planting and caring for trees is one of the smartest investments we can make today. The trees we plant today are tomorrow’s urban forest, a term that defines the entire mosaic of introduced and native trees on both public and private properties. Conditions can be very challenging for trees in the urban environment and we need a variety of trees to choose from to meet a range of goals; we need trees that can withstand heat-absorbing hardscapes and fill different space and microclimate requirements. Plants native to the Sonoran Desert are beautiful and functional, but pests and disease can attack native trees, too. Heirloom trees make heritage visible and provide deep cultural value, but there are also newer varieties that perform very well. A resilient forest contains many kinds of trees, of varying ages, from diverse genetic sources. Since 1987, Trees for Tucson has been the urban forestry program of Tucson Clean and Beautiful, Inc., a nonprofit that rees

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works to improve the community’s quality of life. Trees for Tucson provides home delivery of professionally grown trees, selected to perform well using low or moderate amounts of water. The LEAF Network developed this list of edible trees suited for the Tucson area. Loquats can do very well if protected from the western sun; plant one to the east of a mesquite. A jujube is tough, and once established, extremely drought tolerant, but it can expand out of control. Kumquats do well in a pot, and can tolerate low temperatures. Carob trees make good shade trees if sheltered from the wind. The native desert hackberry produces sweet edible red berries, makes a great security hedge, and provides excellent bird habitat. Plant the right tree in the right place. Find the best tree for the goals you want to achieve, and plant it in the type of location it requires. Always plant the water as you plant the tree—pay attention to how water flows on your property and use wells and other landscape strategies to capture rainfall. And don’t forget to mulch, which is crucial to retaining soil moisture. —Katie Gannon, program director, Trees for Tucson Visit TreesforTucson.org or call 520.791.3109.

Native Trees

Understory (bushes, shrubs, etc.)

Cherry – wild black (Prunus serotina) Mulberry – wild (Morus celtidifolia) Agave (Agave spp.) Palo verde – foothills Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) Barrel cactus (Ferocactus wislizeni) (Parkinsonia microphylla) Ironwood (Olneya tesota) Chiltepin Walnut –Arizona black Oak – emory (Quercus emoryi) (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum) (Juglans major) Mesquite – velvet (Prosopis velutina) Cholla (Cylindropuntia spp.) Grape, wild (Vitis arizonica)

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Desert hackberry (Celtis pallida) Passion fruit (Passiflora foetida) Prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) Sonoran oregano (Lippia palmeri) Wolfberry (Lycium spp.)

Non-Native Trees Almond (Prunus dulcis) Apple (Malus x domeďŹ&#x2020;ica) Apricot (Prunus armeniaca) Bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) Carob (Ceratonia siliqua)

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Fig (Ficus carica) Jujube (Ziziphus jujuba) Loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) Citrus (Orange, Kumquat, Lime, etc.)

Understory Mulberry (Morus spp.) Olive (Olea europaea) Persimmon (Diospyros spp.) Pomegranate (Punica granatum) Quince (Cydonia oblonga)

Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) Goji berry (Lycium barbarum, Lycium chinense) Grape (Vitis vinifera) Passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) Pineapple guava (Acca sellowiana)

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FEATURE

Plant a Tree Growing edible fruit trees in Tucson is a way of life. By Jesús Garcia | Illustrations by Kat Wright

ver the last 12 years I have been on a journey into the plant world that has changed my life. Through my work as an education specialist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum I have been involved in a project called the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project. The goal of this project is to locate, propagate, and replant historically and horticulturally appropriate varieties of fruit trees brought to the Pimeria Alta region (southern Arizona and northern Sonora) by the first missionaries in the late 1600s. From Hopi country in northern Arizona to the tip of Baja California Sur, Mexico, the Kino Heritage Fruit Tree Project has become a vehicle to revive traditional agricultural knowledge of the region. Growing up in a rural community near Magdalena, Sonora, I was in the mecca of traditional colonial agriculture in northern Mexico—I just didn’t know it. It turns out that my community and my parents not only held knowledge about the Mediterranean crops that arrived with the missionaries in the late 1600s but also had a tremendous wealth of traditional knowledge of the native flora. They were literally putting together the best of both worlds where humans have selected, managed, and harvested the fruits of their environment.

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Let’s start with the well-known Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So, let’s plant an edible tree garden today. At first, the concept of planting, caring for, and managing a backyard orchard can seem overwhelming. For me, that complexity of variables and infinite options are the reason I like to garden. Edible fruit tree knowledge is cumulative. First and foremost, start with what you like and what you want. An important first step is getting to know your microclimate. Look around and see what fruit trees are growing in the neighborhood: what is thriving and what is not. Meet and talk to neighbors who seem to like gardening and get to know what they are doing. Get to know your piece of property. Identify what areas of your house are the hot spots, the cold spots, the windy spots, where the soil is drier or wetter, and where you can channel rainwater. You want to choose a variety of edible fruit tree that makes sense to you and suits your needs. There are many reasons to like a tree. It could be for its shade, the flavor of its fruits, the fact that it’s a good barrier between you and your neighbors,

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or that it provides habitat for pollinators and birds, or because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an heirloom tree that has been in the family for a long time, or simply for its aesthetics. Growing trees in your backyard is different from growing trees in a commercial orchard. You can make your own rules because it is your space and your trees. The main reason you see lots of space in commercial orchards is because they are designed for heavy equipment to drive through and harvest the crops as fast as possible to meet market demands. Basically, they are designed to produce as much quantity as possible of a single crop. At home, however, you want to do exactly the opposite. Plant the trees as close together as you can. You only need enough space to walk by, and you can maximize the space and diversity of fruit trees instead of growing just one kind. If you have multiple trees, you can plant different varieties with different ripening seasons so 146â&#x20AC;&#x192; September /October 2016

you will have fruit at different times of the year and in quantities appropriate for you and your family, neighbors, and friends. Another important aspect is the size of the trees. Shape them to a size that is convenient for you through pruning. Nurseries often sell dwarf or semidwarf trees, which is another way to control their height. One reason to minimize the height is to avoid the need to use a ladder when harvesting. However, here in Tucson, a tall shade tree can make the ladder worth it! If so, choose a standard size tree and prune to encourage upward growth. Drip irrigation is highly recommended and mulching is a must. Mulch will reduce the ground temperature, optimize irrigation by decreasing evaporation, increase bioactivity in the soil, and lessen your need for commercial fertilizer. Mulch will also reduce weed activity in your garden. Fruit trees are a longterm commitment. As you increase your knowledge from year to year, your trees and garden will show the difference.

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If irrigation is not your thing—most nonnative trees require a lot of water in Baja Arizona—then turn your attention to the native edible trees. Acquire a taste for their fruits, flowers, and pods by sampling from existing native edible trees. You’ll not only be gaining nourishment, you’ll also gain a taste of place. Start with prickly pear or cholla cactus, and expand into the numerous legumes with edible pods and flowers, such as mesquite, palo verde, and ironwood. There is a great source of traditional knowledge for caring for our colonial heritage trees. There are many people in our region who are still keepers of these traditions and horticultural techniques. Most of them don’t have university degrees; they don’t use sophisticated equipment and state-of-the-art green 148 September /October 2016

houses to grow their trees. They rely on the skills their ancestors passed on to them, and their own experimentation. In many cases this process involves failure. Failure is a great way to learn. A tree is a living organism, and taking care of a tree is like taking care of a pet. A green thumb is not about having a natural talent; it’s about having interest and paying attention on a continual basis, from planting to harvesting. And don’t forget to harvest! That’s what it’s all about.  Jesús García is an education specialist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He teaches natural history and cultural programs throughout Baja Arizona. He has been director of the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project for more than 10 years and is a board member with the Friends of Tucson Birthplace at Mission Garden.

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Anastasia Rabin leads a pack of goats near her small Elfrida farmhouse.

“In nature, nothing exists alone.” Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Farming in · the Balance

Baja Arizona’s female farmers are closing the agricultural gender gap and paving the way for the future of food.

By Debbie Weingarten Photography by Audra Mulkern

Anastasia Rabin leans against the doorway of her small Elfrida farmhouse. The porch looks out into a yard dotted with tools, a wood stove, an antique bed frame. A pair of antlers hangs from the branches of a tree. A hundred yards away, a dozen goats stamp their hoofs and three pigs root in the mud. On the other side of Rabin’s 160-acre property is a series of conventional commodity operations and the silver silhouettes of grain silos rising in the distance. One of the goats is Rabin’s favorite. A neutered male, trained as a pack goat, who follows her everywhere—hiking in the mountains, into the desert to browse the mesquite, sometimes even into the onebedroom farmhouse, and she must shoo him out. Now his bladder is bursting—urinary calculi—and he must be put down. Rabin conducts a dress rehearsal, which is to say she gets the .22 pistol, steps into the corral, and looks into his eyes. On this day, the crystalline sky is strangely bright against the starkness of the gun barrel. The goat looks at her with his yellow eyes. “Not today,” she tells him and puts the gun down. The next day, his eyes wander. He stares off at nothing. She cannot get him to meet her gaze. So she locks up the other goats in their pen and gets her gun. It is almost monsoon season, and the air feels like a blanket. They walk for hours on the range. The sun is high in the sky when she sits down in the shade of a tree to watch him nibbling the brush. It is getting too hot when he suddenly lies down right beside her. She imagines he is surrendering, that perhaps he knows it is time.

She is long past the tears, and she is ready. Now there is just the anxiety and the action of the kill. She stands, levels the gun, and shoots. 154 September /October 2016

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Rabin's cat lends a milking hand.

does not respect personal boundaries, exhaustion levels, or breaking points. It is a lifestyle, a spilling over of beauties and emergencies—sick animals, bolting crops, impending freezes, equipment failures, last minute orders—and all of the coinciding human actions and emotions. A farmer cannot ever fully leave her farm. According to the 2012 agricultural census, Arizona is the state with the highest proportion of female farm operators—45 percent of the state’s principal and secondary farm operators are women. Nationally, that same statistic is 30 percent—a total of nearly 1 million women operating farms or ranches on more than 62 million acres and generating $12.9 billion in annual agricultural sales. In the United States, women have made and continue to make an enormous impact on agriculture, but only in the past 40 years have they been counted at all. In 1978, when the USDA began tracking gender statistics, women accounted for approximately 5 percent of the principal farm operators in the United States. Today, 14 percent are women. That female farmers are leaders is an understatement. They are shaking the tree of arid lands agriculture and paving the ar ming

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way for the future of food. Anastasia Rabin isn’t surprised that women are finding a home in agriculture. “I think that women are just naturally good at it. At being attentive to the needs of other living things, observing, and at balancing and managing complex systems, and problem solving,” she says, “That’s what good farming and [animal] husbandry is all about.” Audra Mulkern, photographer and creator of The Female Farmer Project and the photographer for this story, agrees. In her work, she has visited more than 100 farms in the United States and Europe, collecting stories and photographs to document the rise of women in agriculture. As she has traveled and listened, she’s thought about why so many women are farming. “One of my working theories is based on the long tradition of the interaction between women and nature,” she says, “Even in literature, men are portrayed as adventurers and women are the observers, trying to figure out how things work together. When I look at women working in agriculture, I see women observing ecosystems. Over and over, female farmers tell me that their definition of success is figuring out how to work within systems, instead of conquering them.”

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When applied to female farmers in southern Arizona, Mulkern’s theory takes on an enhanced meaning. “These women are finding ways to be creative with their water, their plant breeding, their seed selection. They’re creating community. They’re being strategic about how to integrate family and when to farm based on the unique climate,” she says. “Working within natural systems, not dominating them.”

f the 14,654 women operating farms in Arizona, 9,185 were listed as American Indian or Alaska Native in the 2012 census. Jaime and Shaime Encinas, twin sisters, are members of the Tohono O’odham Nation and farmers at the 860-acre San Xavier Co-op Farm just south of Tucson. Growing up, the Encinas sisters did not farm. In 2007, after earning a degree in fine arts, Shaime found a job at the San Xavier

(Top) Clockwise, from left: Nicole Devito from Aravaipa Creekside Growers; Cris Breckenfeld; Kara Jones and Audra Christophel from the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. (Bottom) Shaime Encinas (left) and Jaime Encinas from the San Xavier Co-op Farm.

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Co-op Farm. She learned to plant gourds and corn, how to clean and dry tepary beans. Year after year, she learned new skills: driving tractors, managing irrigation, cutting hay. “I always say I fell into this, but it has really opened my creative outlet as well,” Shaime says, “In my paintings, I use what I see here on the farm.” Jaime also began working at the farm growing and preparing food to be sold on the TO Nation and in Tucson. Of her relationship to agriculture, Jaime says, “Farming is a lovehate relationship. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I hate it.” She pauses. “But I gravitate towards it. It pulls me back.” This pullback towards agriculture is being experienced on a community level. The Encinas family is part of the association of O’odham allottees (landholders) who have combined their land in order to return to community food production—a way of life that was lost in the early 1900s with the forced assimilation and restrictions of Native people by the U.S. government. Thus, for the Co-op farmers and allottees, the values of community and cooperative structure are critical to reclaiming O’odham food sovereignty. “We’re a team here. Everybody does their part. We can’t make the machine go without everyone,” says Shaime. The farm focuses on desert-adapted plants and traditional crops that improve the health of tribal members suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes. Shaime says, “It amazes me sometimes that I’m involved in this kind of work. To have this history as a people and to know that this type of agriculture can withstand time and still provide so many things for us.” 160 September /October 2016

Maya Dailey, owner of Maya’s Farm.

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pring has flipped into summer at Forever Yong Farm. Artichokes form tight globes and burst into flower. Yong Rueb cuts bulbs from the two tons of garlic draped in the shade. Here on 20 acres at the end of a dirt road in Amado, Yong and her husband, John, have been farming vegetables and garlic for nearly 20 years. As a child growing up in Seoul, South Korea, Yong spent summers in her cousin’s melon and tomato patch outside of the city. Away from urban life, she encountered a quieter world. She sunk her hands into the dirt, ate tomatoes right out of the fields. It was the 1960s, a decade after the end of the Korean War. Ingredients and refrigeration were scarce. Yong learned to cook from scratch from her mother—to ferment and preserve foods, to stretch meals in order to feed their family of nine. After earning an accounting degree in Chicago, Yong moved to Tucson with her husband and their two sons to realize John’s dream of being a full-time farmer. For the Ruebs, the farm has been the center of the universe, another member of the family. Most of the important decisions have been made in alignment with the needs of the farm. The balance is tricky. The essence of their farm, she says, has been the hard work and role of each person, including the kids. Still, the farm is a demanding family member. “There is always endless work,” says Yong, “We are always behind the 8-ball. There are always a million things to do. It can gobble you up.” Maya Dailey, owner of Maya’s Farm, groans when I ask her about balance. “It’s torture,” she says. “Farming is all-consuming. You can’t shut it off. It’s like having a kid in a crib. You’ve got to be there all the time.” Dailey has been raising vegetables, eggs, herbs, and meat goats on multiple leased plots in the Phoenix area since 2006. When Dailey leased her first quarter acre from a friend, she cleaned houses to pay the salary of her farm manager. Later, as a single mom with young children, she struggled with priorities—caring for children or making a living. Neither was optional, and the two often seemed to be at odds. She remembers weighing her options: “Do I go to the football game or fix a pipe? Do I make Zoe’s softball game or deliver that emergency order?” “I’ve had to sacrifice myself,” she says. “My personal life, the ability to take time out, balance. I’ve been trying to put the balance back in now; put my own gas mask on first, to use the airplane analogy. It’s like Where’s Maya? What do I need to feed my soul to keep doing this work?”

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Yong Rueb, co-owner of Forever Yong Farm.

Yong Rueb says farm work can "gobble you up."

em ale far mers are becoming the change-makers and innovators of small-scale agriculture. Statistically, they are more likely to utilize organic or sustainable practices and direct-market sales. On average, they farm smaller acreage than male farmers. They tend to grow a mix of crops or raise livestock, as opposed to a single commodity crop. But female farmers are still fighting for access to critical financing and training resources, and to be taken seriously in a field that still views women as an anomaly. Female farmers have more trouble gaining access to land, loans, and technical assistance. In general, they make less money than male farmers—75 percent of female farmers report less than $10,000 in annual sales—and are less likely to claim farming as their primary occupation. More than half of Arizona’s female farmers supplement their income with off-farm jobs. Yong and her family arrived in Tucson in October of 1996. She remembers taking in the sparseness of the landscape, the sunset colors. The cactus and trees were strange; she was used to green grass, azaleas, star-shaped maple leaves. Twenty years

later, the desert is familiar, as are the curves in the road that carry Yong from her part-time accountant job in Tucson back to the farm, week after week. The plan was always for John to farm full-time and Yong to maintain a part-time job as an accountant. “It made sense that I have a job that can bring home a steady paycheck,” Yong says, likening the farm to a surgery team—“a brilliant surgeon, who can’t do that job by himself if there’s no support staff. John is the surgeon, and I am such an integral part of it. He could not have done this without me helping. My function is as important.” Nicole DeVito of Aravaipa Creekside Growers also works part-time to supplement her farm income, while her partner, Andrew Carhuff, works fulltime at the farm. Though the goal is for DeVito to transition to the farm full-time, for now she also works as a massage therapist. While her massage career is helpful financially, it’s a logistical hindrance. She lives both in town and at the farm, and she must protect her hands from farm-related stress injuries and calluses. It’s ironic, she says, that both jobs require the use of her hands, but in very different ways.

Female farmers are becoming the change-makers and innovators of smallscale agriculture.

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to needing solitude—even craving it during times of high stress. But rural isolation has also created a tapestry of challenges, some of which she says have been “harrowing.” There is no one to depend on, to help with chores, to hold the wire taut while repairing a fence, to share in the beauty and risk of the operation. To put down a sick animal. Within this space, Rabin has fought to acquire the vast knowledge and skills necessary to survive: marketing, agronomy, lease writing, computer skills, accounting, animal husbandry. “It’s almost like I went to the school of hard knocks and hands-on,” she says. It is a school that many female farmers are familiar with. A 2012 Pennsylvania extension report describes the reality of male-dominated farmer training, largely perceived by female farmers as “unwelcoming, if not hostile.” Female farmers reported feeling talked down to by so-called agricultural “experts” and not taken seriously by instructors and participants. Furthermore, the programming was often less relevant for female farmers, focusing on a scale and type of agriculture that most women do not practice. U.S. agriculture has a long history of discriminating against female farmers. In 2000, a number of female farmers filed claims against the USDA for loan discrimination. Farmland inheritance laws were also discriminatory. Greta Hardin, a researcher for the Female Farmer Project, says that it was not until 1981 that estate laws changed to allow a widow to inherit land from her deceased spouse without paying an inheritance tax. Because farm women were considered “helpers” instead of “farmers,” and not regularly included in business documents or land deeds, widowed female farmers were forced to prove their essential role in the farm operation, or pay a hefty inheritance tax. Before 1981, many widowed female farmers were forced to sell off their land to avoid the tax. Today that sexism is not entirely erased. Perhaps a bit more hidden and insidious, sexism is an everyday phenomenon ingrained in the world of agriculture. Female farmers regularly report being passed over for work, not being taken seriously by customers or male farmers, a bi n a d m i t s

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Farmers like Rabin are still fighting for access to critical financing and training resources.

Statistically, female farmers are more likely to utilize organic or sustainable practices.

not consulted for their opinions by agriculture experts, or not being prioritized for farm-based learning opportunities. DeVito says customers will often direct technical questions about mushroom-growing toward her partner, instead of toward her. Dailey recently hired a male tractor driver, who argued with her vision for the field. “I know exactly what I want done,” she says, “After 20 minutes, I was like, ‘O.K., can you do what I want you to do? If not, the conversation is over.’” 168 September /October 2016

Dailey also says she’s not taken as seriously as male farmers. People regard her booth as “pretty” as opposed to a successful business. “I think everybody thinks that Maya’s got a pretty booth,” she says. “They say, Oh, she does such a nice job at marketing. But why aren’t they thinking, Maya’s really productive? Off .67 of an acre, I made $80,000 right off the shoot. It’s an incredible amount of money, but no one is looking at Hey, that’s a crapload of money. How is Maya doing it?”

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of the Pantano Wash, Dana Helfer and her husband, Paul Buseck, are growing vegetables, melons, and flowers at Rattlebox Farm. When they purchased their 4.5-acre property in the fall of 2013, it was a blank slate dotted with creosote bushes, and the result of a decade of dreaming and more than two years of searching for suitable farmland in the desert Southwest. n the edge

After moving to Tucson in 2003, Helfer worked for the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, creating the organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home garden program and original 10-acre production and education farm. From early in their relationship, Helfer and Buseck knew that they wanted to farm together. They also planned to have children. But after a series of miscarriages and a family illness, Helfer and Buseck had to take stock of their

A field of vegetables at Rattlebox Farm.

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Dana Helfer, co-owner Rattlebox Farm.

present and future. Helfer says, “That time forced me to ask myself: what do I want to spend my time doing? How do I reduce stress in my life? How do I continue to do work that I love?” She quit her job and began operating a multiplot urban farm—Menlo Farms—in Tucson’s Menlo Park neighborhood. “I’ve wanted to farm since I was a teenager,” she says. “I thought, Now is the time to do this.” Buseck supplemented their income with his off-farm job, while Helfer negotiated plot leases, built 172 September /October 2016

garden beds, and began selling vegetables through a CSA. When they finally found the Pantano property, Helfer was pregnant with their second child. They have been as mindful in their farming practices as they have been with the balance of farm and family. They farm organically, use drip irrigation, maintain a focus on soil-building through the use of compost and reduced tillage, and have planted a buffer of native plants as a pollinator habitat.

“I love farming. The planning, the way it engages my mind and my body, that I can be outside. I love having my hands in the dirt and nurturing things to grow, and all those little constant daily decisions,” Helfer says. “Will I do it forever? Will this be my only career? I don’t know. I just love it.” 

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

BUZZ

Local Cents Ten 55 Brewing is the first business in Arizona seeking to raise capital through equity crowdfunding. By Megan Kimble | Photography by Steven Meckler

alk south from Broadway on Fourth Avenue and you’ll find it—a sprawling red brick warehouse built in 1936 as a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Groups of four and five people cluster in the courtyard outside. Twinkle lights cast warm orbs of light. A disc whooshes across a shuffleboard. Misters release a stream of cool fog—“Actually, we’ve gone back and forth on that one,” says Chris Squires, the builder behind this dreamscape and the cofounder of Ten 55 Brewing. “Probably no misters.” No misters. Instead, patrons press cold pints to warm foreheads while they await orders of house-made artisanal sausage—“Probably not at first, but we plan to pack our own sausages within the first year or two,” says Squires. Inside the exposed-brick warehouse, below vaulted wood ceilings, bartenders pull taps and fill pint glasses with beer fermented 50 feet away. Squires stops and looks around the empty 11,000-square-foot warehouse. Today, there are no taps, no fermentation tanks or chattering patrons. There’s only the vision that Squires and John Paul Vyborny, Ten 55’s cofounder and head brewer, have for this space and for the brewery they founded four years ago. They just have to raise $1,999,363 before they can build it. A month before Squires had walked me through the quiet warehouse—which is still on the market—I’d sat with him in two camp chairs crammed in the back of their tiny brewery in an industrial park near South Dodge Boulevard. “The crux of it is that we are constrained by capacity,” says Squires. “Demand has outpaced our ability to produce supply.” So, half

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an hour later, I signed a contract authorizing the purchase of 500 Series A Preferred Membership Units issued by Ten 55 Brewpub LLC. And just like that—quicker than I could finish my pint of cherry-infused XOXO Coffee Stout—I became an investor. Ten 55 is the first and only company in Arizona to utilize an intrastate crowdfunding exemption to fund an investment offering. Passed in April of 2015, H.B. 2591 allows companies to raise up to $2.5 million in equity capital through crowdfunding. “This is the strangest subject to most people. You can go online and raise money for your church group, or to launch a project. But as a general rule, you’re not allowed to sell shares of stock in a company,” says Jonathan Frutkin, the founder of the Phoenix-based Frutkin Law Firm and the author of Equity Crowdfunding. “That surprises people.” That’s been true since 1933, when the United States passed the Securities Act, the first major federal legislation to regulate the offer and sale of securities. (A security is an intangible investment, like a stock or bond.) The logic behind this regulation is obvious—to protect the public from investing in shady offerings and losing all their money. Companies that sell on global exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange are subject to strict regulation and accountability standards. But for a small Ten 55 head brewer J.P. Vyborny (right) says that people should invest in the brewery he founded with Chris Squires because of their proven commitment to quality beer.

Squires and Vyborny have held several informal conferences at downtown’s Reilly Pizza to answer questions about their investment offering and to meet with potential and current investors.

business—a local brewery, say, or a hair salon—the legal fees and paperwork required to register an investment offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are cost- and labor-prohibitive. The SEC has long offered regulatory exemptions with these very small businesses in mind. Each exemption comes with its own set of rules—namely, how much money a company can raise, and how and to whom they can advertise the offering. Most of these offerings are accessible only to accredited investors—that is, someone with an annual income of at least $200,000 for a single person or $300,000 for a married person, or a net worth of more than $1 million. The U.S. House of Representatives recently included as accredited those investors who pass certain “measures of sophistication” in their financial knowledge. Basically, to be an accredited investor—to have access to most of the investment offerings in the United States—you have to have money to lose or the knowledge to lose it smartly. Most of us are nonaccredited investors. My net worth hovers somewhere around the sticker price of a new Subaru Outback; my business credentials include an E-Trade account and a dog-eared copy of Suze Orman’s The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous 178 September /October 2016

& Broke. People like me are mostly excluded from investing in anything except the stock market—no matter how we might feel about sending all our savings to Wall Street. In 2012, President Obama passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which included a provision to allow equity crowdfunding, or the sale of securities to nonaccredited investors through a publicly solicited crowdfunding campaign. When the rule-writing required by this new legislation stalled, states took matters into their own hands and passed intrastate exemptions. “We thought it was a very unique idea to allow these smaller companies, or even bigger companies, to be able to get funding and not go into debt right away,” says Arizona Representative Jeff Weninger, who introduced Arizona’s equity crowdfunding law. He says that the current investment structure is elitist: “They’re basically saying, let the big boys handle this; you just sit there and you can invest in stock, but you’re not sophisticated enough to invest in this”— to invest in your own community. Under the law, businesses can only accept money from Arizona residents. “This is a huge buy-local program,” says Weninger. “You’re being forced to stay within the state and invest in companies in the state. We’re growing companies here.”

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Squires (left) talks with Ian Wilson about increasing his investment in the brewery. Wilson and his wife, Erin, were Ten 55’s first investors.

quir es and V ybor n y always knew they wanted to brew big. They were both working business jobs—Vyborny in I.T., Squires in corporate recruiting—when they caught the homebrewing bug. In 2011, Vyborny and his cousin entered a Double IPA in the Oktoberfest Homebrew Challenge. Out of 87 entries, their beer won first place. Although they’d been brewing together for years, “It was the first time that other people also said, ‘Whoa, that’s good beer,’” says Vyborny. “Once that happened, we were like, ‘Let’s go.’” Squires and Vyborny traveled around the western United States looking at other breweries and comparing concepts. They knew they wanted to build a large production facility with the capacity to distribute beer across the state, but they soon realized that they also wanted to build a gathering spot in downtown Tucson. “When you’re at a brewery, you’re drinking beer,” says Squires. “Which makes you want to talk to people. And your friends and neighbors are the people there with you. Breweries fill this unique role that I think the community has an interest in supporting. There is a social value outside of the purely economic value.” In 2012, they rented a small space in an industrial park and started churning out beer. This small startup was intended to

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be a proof of concept, a way for Squires and Vyborny to gain valuable experience and expertise. It was quickly proved. “Almost immediately, within six months or a year, we were working this poor little three-barrel system harder than it was designed to do,” says Squires. They were debating how to capitalize their expansion when Squires went to a craft brewing conference in Portland and learned about equity crowdfunding. “We liked the idea of raising money in our own backyard,” he says. “The people that stand to gain the most from having a brewery downtown are our most likely investors.” To some extent, they’ve been a crowdsourced brewery from the beginning, starting with that first Double IPA. “I have a lot of friends who do research and development for us,” says Vyborny. Their Betts’ Brown Ale began when Vyborny’s friend brought in a recipe he’d tested at home. They honed the recipe over four more rounds of home brewing; a year later, it’s one of Ten 55’s bestsellers. “There’s no recipe I haven’t tweaked in some way, but it’s still important for us to incorporate others in our recipe development,” says Vyborny. “Both on the small scale with homebrewers and friends and family, and also on the large scale with collaborations with other breweries.”

Vyborny chats with potential Ten 55 investors at Reilly Pizza after an investor conference.

So as soon as Arizona passed its crowdfunding legislation, Squires and Vyborny jumped. They hired a lawyer, wrote a 132-page prospectus, and launched an online investment portal. They set the minimum investment at $10,000, which is also the maximum a nonaccredited investor can contribute. (They’ve offered numerous exceptions to this minimum, including to beer-loving reporters with $500 to spare.) If they raise less than $1.6 million—80 percent of the offering—all investors will have to reauthorize funds before the project can proceed. By late August, they’d raised almost $950,000. There have been two kinds of investor so far, says Squires. The first is already connected to Ten 55—to the beer and taproom, and to Squires and Vybrony. “They don’t care about the financials,” says Squires. “They know our beer, and they saw us going places. A lot of these investors just came in and handed me a check.” The investors that do dig into their financials find a small brewery breaking even or losing money. That’s common for a company at their stage and scale, says Squires. “We were never going to make a lot of money at our size,” he says. “We break even most of the time. Last year, on a balance sheet of $200,000, I think we lost five grand.” 182 September /October 2016

Instead, these investors ask, “Are we adding value to the marketplace?” says Squires. “And will we act in the best interest of the company?” In this sense, what most investors, accredited and nonaccredited alike, are assessing is Squires and Vyborny. “People are assessing J.P. and me before they look at any financial statement,” says Squires. “Someone told me early on that people weren’t going to invest in the plan. They were going to invest in us.” The criticism that’s been leveled at equity crowdfunding is that it enables unsophisticated investors to sink their savings into risky and illiquid offerings. But if what Squires says is true, and that most investors simply want to know if they can trust the people behind a business, then what equity crowdfunding does is democratize access to community capital. Assessing trustworthiness is a skill most of us practice every day—except when it comes to investing our money. With new, localized options for investing, we can again decide whom to believe in, and to what extent. We can either see the vision, or not. “What these community capital projects enable is shared expertise,” says Squires. Someone in the final investor group might know a lot about media relations, while others might contribute project management skills or marketing expertise. “The group

Vyborny says he views their investor group as a resource. “They’re all successful, passionate people who want us to succeed.”

will learn together,” says Squires. Investors are owners forever; we can sell our shares back to Squires and Vyborny after five years, but there’s no buy-out clause in the offering. As Ten 55 grows, so do we. “This concept of fundraising is not unique. The concept is the same as it’s always been,” says Squires. “Have a good idea, convince people it’s a good idea, and find ways to prove it.” 184 September /October 2016

The idea is patio games, craft sausage, and a historic warehouse in a thriving downtown. But for Ten 55, the proof is in the glass.  Ten 55 Brewing. Invest.1055Brewing.com. Megan Kimble is the editor of Edible Baja Arizona and the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food.

LAST BITE

Walking on Food By Kay Sather

nce , standing in the checkout line after a dismal shopping experience at Safeway, I had a minor meltdown. Waving my arms, I exclaimed to my companion, “I’m telling you, it’s all wrong!” He glanced around at the many pairs of eyes suddenly fixed on us. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down in a minute,” he said. My patience with grocery stores had been disintegrating for years. More and more food hidden in airbrushed packages. Bags so tightly inflated you couldn’t feel for quantity. Hard-to-recycle plastic replacing compostable waxed paper in dairy and other products. Ingredients written in small, hard-to-read caps, with the scarier ones—pesticides, hormones—not even listed. Promisingly tart CRANBERRY-POMEGRANATE 100% JUICE? Mostly sugary apple. Cherry “cordials” with no liqueur whatsoever. (Must be the other meaning of “cordial”: these chocolates are warm and sincere.) Choices abound, but studies show too many choices make us cranky and tired. I feel tricked. Manipulated. How much of this settles into my soul, coloring the rest of my day? I escape into the true abundance of my back yard, a profusion (especially during the monsoons) of native and cultivated edibles. Once I dreamed my pathways were strewn with pizzas, and I was walking on them. Because I really had been walking on food: fallen mesquite pods, wild mustard in yellow bloom, shoots of now-wild arugula descended from the great-grandfather seed I’d planted, little two-lobed sprouts of mesquite and palo verde trees, seedlings of purslane and amaranth, even a few new-green pads emerging from fallen prickly pear rerooting itself in harm’s way. Though not pizza, all of these were edible. How could I just trample them? Yet they were everywhere, so how could I not? Once a friend stopped by and pointed at a tough plant I knew as cheeseweed (named for the seed pod, which looks like handmade rounds of cheese). “You know, you can eat that,” she said. “No!” I said. “Don’t say that.” “Huh?” She looked at me funny. I just muttered, Never mind. With cheeseweed on the list of edibles now, I wondered if I’d be able to navigate my yard at all.

186 September /October 2016

My overgrown pathways weren’t a serious problem, of course. Mostly I felt blessed, like Eve in Eden before the Fall. The Universe was smiling. So why not just switch food sources entirely? Abandon the grocery store? Well, if I wanted pizza, I’d have to grind mesquite pods into flour for the crust. For a spinach-like topping I’d have to pick and destem the amaranth or purslane. Roasted nopales could be a topping, too. Meatier bits would require trapping a bird or mouse. Cheeseweed pods wouldn’t work for the cheese, though, despite the name. I’d have to milk a lactating squirrel, then … Obviously you don’t want to take a recipe from elsewhere and try to replicate it with local ingredients. You get acquainted with those ingredients, learn their flavors and seasons, and let them say what they want to be. You learn from native people; traditions still remembered by the elders are priceless. And you can start with substitutions. Try some of those little sprouting trees on your pizza for a surprising peanut-y taste. I grow the familiar crops in my yard, too. But I’m a mediocre gardener, so I rely on farmers’ markets for many fruits and vegetables. Everyone’s friendly and charges fair prices, given their produce comes from the sweat of the brow—from dusty farms outside Paradise. Both wild and farmed food sources require more preparation time than processed storebought food. Ironically, though, plucking and chopping can also create time—by stretching lifetimes and cutting downtimes through better health. We know these foods are better for us. Their superior taste is a given. But I also like them because I don’t have to fund any brand names. I don’t like being fooled, or forced to make garbage. And I hate wondering what else I’m funding, behind the scenes. Because if I research those brand names—even those associated with smiley, honest faces like the oats-peddling Quaker—I find they’re owned by giant corporations committing global horrors. I enjoy stiffing them. The fresh, living food I eat instead is the beginning of love.  Kay Sather is a graphic designer, illustrator, and freeform-adobe builder who is working on a memoir about building a mud casita. She learned to harvest saguaro fruit when she moved to Tucson in 1979 and is still discovering desert edibles 37 years later.