Edible Baja Arizona - November/December 2014

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November/December 2014 • Issue No. 9 • GRATIS

On the Road: Hermosillo, Sells, Yuma, Highway 80Chasing Chimichangas · Growing Garbage

Celebrating the foodways of Tucson and the borderlands.

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On the cover: A bountiful harvest of heirloom winter squash from Big D Farms. Thanks to Andy Mayberry, a sixth generation farmer and physician in Benson, for lending his truck, a 1953 Chevrolet 3100. Shot on location at Saguaro National Park West. Photo by Steven Meckler.

Above: Photo by Steve McMackin

Features 118 AN EDIBLE RIDE

Journey along Historic Highway 80 to find cooler climes, rolling hills, and new eating adventures.

132 GROWING GARBAGEIf turning organic waste into compost uses less energy, cuts emissions, reduces food waste, and, eventually, grows better food—why aren’t we all composting?

ContentsNovember - December 2014

6 GRIST FOR THE MILL

8 VOICESWe asked Tucson chefs: What’s your favorite dish to make at home in 20 minutes or less?

14 GLEANINGSAshley White draws local in chalk; The Screamery brings homemade ice cream to the people; Rex’s Perogies offers tradition for breakfast.

35 PLATEThat one dessert they should never take off the menu.

37 KIDS’ MENUMixing it up with Haile Thomas.

41 EDIBLE HOMESTEADThe neverending garden; hope for procrastinators; gardener Q&A with soil wonk Jay Quade.

52 FARM REPORTWhat’s in season on Baja Arizona’s farms?

56 IN THE BUSINESSUna confiable tradición culinaria.

60 TABLELe Buzz Caffé provides the far-flung eastside of Tucson a place to meet up and smell the cinnamon rolls.

70 TABLEWith support from Tohono O’odham Community Action, Desert Rain Café gathers a community around healthy native foods.

78 ARTISANFor Alethea Swift, making goat milk, cheese, and yogurt to sell as Fiore di Capra is more than a vocation—it’s a passion.

86 MEET YOUR FARMERAlong with his wife, Eunice, Larry Park grows fresh, flavorful produce—in spite of himself.

102 PURVEYORSChimichanga!: Chasing a southwestern food icon.

154 SABORES DE SONORAFrom food carts to fusion Sonorense— an eating tour of Hermosillo.

168 BUZZAt Prison Hill Brewing Company, three entrepreneurs are bringing beer culture to a city of intersecting cultures.

184 INK

189 SOURCE GUIDE

202 LAST BITEAurelie Sheehan recounts her education by fork.

edible Baja Arizona 5

EDITOR AND PUBLISHERDouglas Biggers

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHERJared R. McKinley

MANAGING EDITORMegan Kimble

ART DIRECTORSteve McMackin

SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORGary Paul Nabhan

DESIGNERLyric Peate

COPY EDITORFord Burkhart

ACCOUNT MANAGERKaty Gierlach

ADVERTISING CONSULTANTSPaco Cantu, Carl Fallwell, Kenny Stewart

INTERNNicole Thill

CONTRIBUTORSLisa O’Neill, Eric Swedlund, Sara Jones, Dan Sorenson, Curt Stetter, Mike Gerrard, Lisa Levine, Molly Patrick, Edie Jarolim, Lourdes Medrano, Molly Kincaid, Haile Thomas, Aurelie Sheehan, Michael Mello, Ken Lamberton, Bill Steen, Renée Downing

PHOTOGRAPHERS & ARTISTSSteven Meckler, Jeff Smith, Tim Fuller, Liora K, Chris Bermudo, Chuck Feil, Stephen Eginoire, Jackie Alpers, Bill Steen, Danny Martin, Bridget Shanahan

WE’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU.307 S. Convent Ave., Barrio ViejoTucson, Arizona [email protected] EdibleBajaArizona.com

Volume 2, Issue 3. Edible Baja Arizona (ISSN 2374-345X) is published six times annually by Coyote Talking, LLC. Subscriptions are available for $36 annually by phone or at EdibleBajaArizona.com. Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without the express written permission of the Publisher. Research and community outreach is cosponsored and funded by the W.K. Kellogg program in Borderlands Food and Water Security at the University of Arizona. Member of the Association of Edible Publishers (AEP).

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CCOYOTE TALKING

This ninth issue of Edible Baja Arizona goes on a road trip. From a new brew-ery in Yuma, to the amazing Desert Rain Cafe in the town of Sells in the heart of the Tohono O’odham Nation, to a culinary odyssey in the thriving city

of Hermosillo just three hours south in Sonora, to a meander on motorcycles down historic Highway 80 from Benson to Douglas in search of local color and comestibles, to a year long quest to find the perfect chimichanga, from Globe to Thatcher and Tumacácori—our writers traversed the territory. A word of warning: After reading these stories, you may find yourself hitting the road to explore Baja Arizona for the express purpose of finding a wonderful meal!

In a comprehensive look at composting in Tucson, Dan Sorenson surveys the state of large scale composting of food waste generated in metro Tucson. It’s estimated that Americans throw away 40 percent of their food, most of which ends up in landfills that produce methane gas, a major contributor to climate change. Although the best use of food is to nourish ourselves and our families, several organizations and companies in Tucson are pursuing innovative ways to mitigate wasted food by turning it into a product that can improve soil quality, save water, and grow better food.

Renée Downing introduces you to Margaret Hadley, the big heart behind Le Buzz, a much-loved gathering spot, bakery, café and coffee roaster on Tucson’s far eastside; Lisa O’Neill visits the thriving Fiora di Capra goat farm and dairy in Marana where Alathea Swift and her family have followed a dream; and Michael Mello meets Larry Parks, a passionate local farmer, also in Marana, who just can’t quit growing vegeta-bles, no matter how hard he tries.

Starting in the middle of the magazine, you’ll begin to see beautiful black and white portraits of a few of the 500 passionate folks who actually subscribe to this magazine. It’s part of a marketing campaign to ask you, dear reader, to consider becoming a subscriber in 2015. Although a casual perusal of this 204-page issue would indicate that Edible Baja Arizona is well-supported by local business-es—and you’d be right about that—it’s also true that producing the magazine is an incredibly expensive endeavor. Our printing costs are massive, freelance writing and photography deservedly take a large portion of the budget, and distribution and modest salaries for our amazingly talented and hard-working staff consume the rest of our revenues. We’ve considered converting this “free” magazine to a paid circulation model to help raise more revenues and keep advertising rates affordable, but for various reasons we’re wary of the logistics.

So, if you love the magazine, we’d like to encourage you to sign up for a year for $36, which nets us about $20 after postage and handling costs. If 5,000 of you did that, we’d have an extra $100,000 per year to pursue our mission of making our food system in Baja Arizona more secure and sustainable, contributing to a strong local economy that benefits all of us. And…we’ll throw in an Edible Baja Arizona Sustainer Card that will entitle you to benefits at many of our incredible advertisers. It’s like dessert for free!

And speaking of commerce: Tis the season to spend your holiday dollars locally. As our good friends at the incredible Local First Arizona organization tell us: “Shifting your spending from national chains to locally-owned businesses keeps up to four times more money in Arizona. By shifting your spending to local businesses this holiday season, you will play a significant role in strengthening your local economy.” It’s absolutely true. Practice localism this holiday shopping season—and what better guide than this issue of Edible Baja Arizona? Please support our amazing advertisers and thank them often!

We’ll see you around the table. ¡Salud!—Douglas Biggers, editor and publisher

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We asked Tucson chefs: What’s your favorite dish to make at home?

Photography by Steven Meckler

VOICES

Poisson Provençal(Provençal fish)

by Coralie Satta

Owner, Ghini’s French Caffe

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Wolf Lollipopsby Mike Hultquist

Chef/Co-owner Lerua’s Fine Mexican


Vegetable & Cheese Tartby Renee Kreager

Owner, Renee’s Organic Oven


Early October Migas, with Kitchen Under

Constructionby Rani Olson

Executive Chef, Food for Ascension




Some things are so familiar we take them for granted. Chalkboard menus, for one. We see them almost every day, but anyone who’s seen the menus at the Flying Leap

Vineyard Tasting Room at St. Philip’s Plaza or at Diablo Burger on Congress knows these black and white gems can be works of art.

These and other menus you’ll see on the walls of bars and restaurants around town are the work of artist Ashley White. Originally from South Carolina, White moved to Tucson in 2009.

“I came for graduate school,” she says, “and stuck around because I love the downtown vibe and Armory Park neighbor-

hood, and I love the new spaces popping up for creators and entrepreneurs like Xerocraft and Connect Coworking.”

Although White has some artistic background—both her maternal grandparents were artists—she has no formal art training herself.

“I suppose I’m a representation of my generation in that way,” she says. “I have a bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in higher education and am working in a field that’s completely unrelated to my degrees.”

So how do you go from a bachelor’s in psychology to draw-ing chalkboard menus in a burger joint?

“I’ve done hand lettering and made my own fonts since I

gleanings

The Art of ChalkLocal food needs a local menu.

By Mike Gerrard | Photography by Steve McMackin

Ashley White balances in front of a work-in-progress chalkboard for Savaya Coffee at Dove Mountain.


was a kid. I used to make really elaborate notebook covers for my classes and write my friends’ names in all these different fonts. So I used to think, Wow if I could do this for a job, that would be perfect, not thinking that was actually possible. I was working at the University as an adviser, and I loved work-ing with the students, but the 9 to 5 office environment just wasn’t a good fit for me. I was really feeling the entrepreneur-ial spirit. One day I saw an ad on Craigslist from a restaurant looking for a chalk artist and thought, Hey, I could do that! I bought my first chalk markers at Posner’s on University and that started the whole thing.”

The bigger chalkboards that you see at places like Flying Leap can take two to three days of actual work and another day of designing beforehand. White does most of her work on location, spending all day on ladders or scaffolding. “It’s definitely tough on the knees,” she admits. She uses regular chalks, or chalk mixed with water, but says she’s learned a few tricks of the trade along the way (tricks she’s keeping to herself).

White does a wide variety of other work, including paint-ing a mural on the bottom of someone’s swimming pool (“Unfortunately that job was in the middle of July!”), making jewelry from guitar strings, creating a 3D floating restroom sign for Poppy Kitchen at La Paloma, and designing and building custom tap handles for bars, restaurants, and brew-eries.

Visit ModernAquarian.com.

Mike Gerrard is an award-winning travel writer who divides his time between the United Kingdom and southern Arizona. He has written for National Geographic and American Express.

No small task: A custom chalkboard designed and drawn by White can take up to three days of work.

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I Scream, Ice CreamPasteurizing milk and making magic.

By Lisa Levine Photography by Steve McMackin

Kenneth sarnoski believes in four ingredients: whole grass-fed milk, cream, egg yolks, sugar. From simple chemistry comes success: On his eastside

store’s opening day, Sarnoski scored a landslide win in a handmade ice cream competition at downtown’s Maynards Market. The Screamery was born a victor.

Owned and operated by Sarnoski and his wife, Linda, the clean, cheery shop entices customers with the allure of in-house pasteurization and pure ingredients, formed “the way ice cream used to be made,” says Sarnoski. In-house pasteur-ization allows them to start with a homemade base, instead of the commercial base purchased by many shops.

Sarnoski’s ice cream is made in a machine shipped from Maryland, which underwent rigorous approval from the Dairy Control Board (formally the Arizona Department of Agricul-ture). Although such high standards made opening the place feel a little like Snow White—“sleepy, sneezy, grumpy, grouchy”—customers see the resultant magic in ice creams like Sweet Cream Honeycomb and Game Day Chocolate Guinness Beer.

Even the décor is food-savvy, with a bar-style seating area that invites customers to be “more aware of what they’re eating”—a nod to the Paleo diet that inspired his first exper-

At their eastside ice creamery, Kenneth and Linda Sarnoski use only grass-fed milk, cream, egg yolks, and sugar.


iments with ice cream. While restricted from dairy, Kenneth perfected a coconut milk ice cream for Linda, and found that ice-cream-making appealed to his beliefs about diet and food sourcing. Now he makes traditional ice creams with “the best milk and cream possible.”

The way ingredients behave under pasteurization fasci-nates Sarnoski: “Nobody understands the butter fat,” he says. “What happens when you heat it up, cool it down at 155 de-grees for 30 minutes, cooling it to 75 degrees, then the fridge at 35 degrees.” The process’s core nature is change, and it happens cold: “Cooling overnight does its biggest change in flavor,” he says, still awed by the science after thousands of batches: “It changes, five times, you get five different flavors [because] it still has minerals, caramel, in it.”

Understanding the science yields a back-to-basics set of dietary and food beliefs that are evident in the clean, open décor—as well as the ice cream manifesto spanning the entry wall, along with requisite chalkboard flavor menu. All the success motivates Sarnoski to think of younger generations, to whom, he hopes, The Screamery offers “a taste of what really good food was like 50 years, 30 years ago, before big food companies got involved.”

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From creamy to dreamy: At The Screamery, the Sarnoskis pasteurize their milk in-house before churning it into ice cream.


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Perogies for BreakfastNana would approve.

By Lisa Levine | Photography by Steve McMackin

For kelly Dewey of Rex’s Perogies, it’s not organic vege-tables or local cheese, but tradition that brings the crucial ingredient to her perogies. Perogies are “a tradition we

brought from Pennsylvania and Michigan to the Southwest,” she says, and the flavors bear her story out: potato, cheese, and roasted green chile are her best sellers.

Her story follows a corporate-to-culinary tale of Alice in Wonderland madness, ending with Dewey’s improbable image of an outdoor table, laden with her perogies under a beautiful, madcap, starry night. While her former life as a supervisor and banker for a large worldwide bank helped sustain her financial-ly, she left the job to discover a less linear lifestyle: “When I had my son, Rex, I felt like change. I wanted to spend time with him.” Imagination, and a child-like delight in “food for foodies,” became the vision behind her culinary dream life.

Sitting at Dewey’s found-family table is the extended world of the Heirloom Farmers’ Markets, where Rex’s Perogies got its start. The business, named for her son, incorporates farmers’ market flavors as much as re-imagined tradition. Like many vendors, Dewey sees the farmers’ market as a community “re-ally like nothing I’ve ever worked with.” The community was

partly her inspiration to integrate organic, non-GMO, local vegetables into her traditional recipes.

In the Polish tradition from which the flaky, savory tarts have branched into diaspora cuisine, the table where they’d be served would also feature fresh cucumbers, dill, handmade kielbasa, onion, and sour cream dressing.

Her style has a lot of tradition plus innovation, seen in her suggestion that customers try her perogies for breakfast, not just as “a singular item for a meal.” Even as she’s cooking up tradition, Dewey looks to ultramodern resources such as Go-FundMe and Facebook to build her business. “I’ve never taken a bank loan,” she says.

As the busy holiday season approaches, Dewey plans to offer Thanksgiving perogies and Christmas perogies; for Dewey, perogies suit any special time because she knows them from the treasured times in her life—“Nana teaching us in the kitchen … it was a special time for my sister and me, snacking on the stuff and her joking that if we ate everything, there’d be nothing left to make the perogies.” She believes in Rex’s Perogies as a way to “take a step back to remember what we did with our families.”

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Kelly Dewey got the inspiration to make and sell perogies from her son, Rex: “When I had my son, I felt like a change [from banking],” she says.



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Buy Local HolidaysThis December,

holiday shopping goes local.

From black friDay to christmas door busters—No-vember and December can be draining months for both your budget and morale. Last year, Americans

spent more than $600 billion on food, gifts, travel, and more during the winter holidays. More often than not, that money is spent at malls supporting big corporations. This December, Local First Arizona is launching Buy Local Month, asking us to consider the power of that money, redirected to local businesses.

“During this time of increased spend-ing, it is import-ant now more than ever to con-nect the dots be-tween individual spending habits and community prosperity,” said Erica Pederson, communications director for Local First Arizona. “Studies show that shifting your spending from national chains to locally owned businesses keeps up to four times more money in Arizona. Those dollars create new jobs and build vibrant communities across Arizona. By shifting your spending to local businesses this holiday season, you will play a significant part in strengthening your local economy.”

Supporting a local food economy also means supporting our local economy in general. From November 21 – 23, Local First Arizona will partner with the Tucson Museum of Art to offer a Holiday Artisan Market, featuring more than 125 local artisans.

Give a bottle of local wine as a gift. For friends and family that like to cook, consider signing them up for a Community Supported Agriculture subscription. Buy a Tucson Originals giftcard; with almost 50 participating restaurants, even the pickiest eater will find something local to love. And a gift subscription to Edible Baja Arizona is the perfect gift for the discerning foodie on your list.

Visit LocalFirstAz.com to find Buy Local Month deals and events.

—Edible Baja Arizona

2014

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We’re lucky to witness an era where every month it seems that there are several new options for eating, not just in Tucson, but all over the border-

lands. In part, that’s due to the repurposed and new buildings that accommodate new audiences, bringing a diverse array of people downtown.

But long before those with investment capital decided our region—both Tucson and the broader borderlands commu-nity—was interesting and worth some dollars, we enjoyed a tradition of talented gastronomical artists expressing their art with or without an audience, often nested at hole-in-the-wall locations. I have made it my mission at Edible Baja Arizona to explore both the old and the new so I can share with our audience how I fill my considerable appetite—hence the name “hungriest foodie.” I owe the moniker to Tim Steller of the Arizona Daily Star, who used it to describe my gastronomic explorations in a column last year.

European DelightsCafe Marcel (344 N. Fourth Ave.) opened in 2008, right when the world economy tumbled. It is easy to miss, even strolling by on foot, but it’s worth the stop. When you decide to treat yourself, reserve the whole morning and make sure you like your dining companion. They take their time to craft fine European-style crepes, both savory and sweet. Ingredients are fresh and made to order. Insider tip: Give yourself time for a nap afterward.

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Caffé Milano (46 W. Congress St.) has been tucked in the middle of bustling and growing downtown for a decade and a half, and serving great food all the while. New ownership took over about a year ago and the changes are all positive. Caffé Milano survives due to a solid lunch crowd, but I highly suggest hitting them up for dinner. If you go, I’d say go all the way with an appetizer, primi piatti, secondi, and dessert (and a bottle of wine). This is the real-deal Italian. In addition to providing authentic Italian cuisine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, chef Fulvia Steffenone (known as La Fufi) has made it her mission to give away all her secrets and teach you classic Italian cooking. She has started a new cooking school located at the Community Kitchen at Mercado San Agustín. For more information, call 520.628.1601.

Soups of the EastI spent three weeks in New York City this past summer; my girlfriend and I must have eaten at a dozen ramen shops. Since then, we have been obsessed. In Tucson the best we’ve found so far is on the northwest side at Ikkyu (2040 W. Or-ange Grove Road). They have three styles: shoyu (soy based broth), tonkotsu (pork based broth) and miso. My favorite is the tonkatsu ramen—though it seems like a cream-based broth, the creaminess comes not from dairy but rather from pork fat—no wonder I love it so much. Ikkyu has a full Japa-nese menu and, given the work required to make it, ramen is only offered Thursday through Saturday.

I really, really love ramen and phÔ. But recently I was


reminded of another absolute favorite soup from Thailand: tom kha gai, or Thai coconut chicken soup. Bai Thong (4853 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson) works hard to source from several importers for their ingredients to make good tom kha gai. The availability of ingredients like lemongrass, galangal (a root related to ginger but big-ger and fleshier), and kaffir leaves (from a variety of citrus rare in the United States) make keeping this great soup on the menu a challenge. Somehow, they manage just fine. This soup has a magical sort of flavor that only Southeast Asia could produce. The soup is savory, but the aromatics from the lemongrass, kaffir leaves, and galan-gal raise the flavor to a higher plane.

Authentic Baja Arizona FareA few years ago I lived in Barrio Anita, a neighborhood situated

between I-10 and the train tracks south of Speedway Boulevard. I

discovered my new home on a spontaneous weekend bike ride through the west side of town and, I swear, one rea-son I ended up moving was for the Anita Street Mar-ket (849 N. Anita Ave.). Run and managed by its third

generation, Barrio Anita is a favorite of plenty of well-nested Tucsonans. They produce some

of the best tortillas and tamales in town. The food is better than many well-known Mexican restaurants, and often much cheaper. Though it is technically a restaurant, eating there feels more like having a meal with your nana. The adobe building of the market is not much different than most residential homes on the street. You can also stock up on ingredients like cho-rizo, queso fresco, or chiltepines.

Over the years, I have made another tiny little eatery a habit, especially when nursing hangovers. Located south of downtown, but north of South Tucson, the ambiance of Birria Guadalajara (304 E. 22nd St.) is unassuming, and much like restaurants found all about Sonora. Though the restau-rant is brick-and-mortar, it feels almost like a food truck; you order at a window and sit on a covered patio outside. For birria and cabeza tacos, it doesn’t get better. For rough mornings when your head throbs

and your stomach is queasy, the menudo is not only delicious, but also practically medicinal.

Since I keep thinking about soup (must be the long-awaited chill in the air), I should mention Tooley’s Cafe in the Lost Barrio (299 S. Park Ave.). There are many reasons to love Tooley’s, especially at breakfast time. But for me,

it is the posole that brings me back over

and over again. Posole is like the Mexican version

of pho. Both are hearty soups, often both are topped with fresh ci-lantro. The hominy, chile, and cumin are what make this soup such a perfect breakfast in Tucson. After your soup, check out rest of this little secret neighborhood (they don’t call it “lost” for nothing). There are lots of alluring and artisan retail shops and businesses within a couple blocks of each other.

A Few New PlacesTubac has a few new eateries ready to nourish you while hop-ping around its maze of shops and galleries: Soto’s PK Outpost (14 Camino Otero) was originally located in Nogales. Serving primarily Sonoran cuisine, their fajitas are to die for. Also in Tubac, The Goods (24A Tubac Road) is a sandwich and smoothie bar that has a little something for everyone.

Bisbee has a new option for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The young owners of The Quarry (40 Brewery Ave.) describe their fare as “locally sourced comfort food.” Meatloaf, pot pie, and braised lamb shanks have already made this place a local favorite.

In downtown Tucson, at the corner of Fifth and Broadway, a promising new restaurant is bringing something to town that’s totally new, er that is ...old. Barrio Cuisine (188 E. Broadway) will feature contemporary Native American cuisine grounded

in the traditional roots of both the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui

tribes. It looks like they should be open sometime in November, but we will be patient. ✜

Jared McKinley is the associate publisher of Edible Baja Arizona.

D i s c o v e r

T u b a c, A r i z o n aTubac Fall Arts & Craft Festival - November 7, 8 & 9, 2014

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Tubac Festival of the Arts - February 4-8, 2015

E x p l o r e T u b a cUSA Today Travel named Tubac 1 of 10 Best Places to Escape the Cold

Conde Nast Traveler Named Tubac 1 of 14 Up-and-Coming, M u s t S e e D e s t i n a t i o n s i n 2 0 1 4

USA Today Travel named Tubac 1 of 10 Best Places to Escape the Cold

Conde Nast Traveler Named Tubac 1 of 14 Up-and-Coming, M u s t S e e D e s t i n a t i o n s i n 2 0 1 4


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Photography by Jackie AlpersThat one dessert they should never take off the menu.

1234Frost Frost BitesIf you think one frozen bonbon provides a mouthful of flavor, try 12 of them. Flavors include (from front to back) coconut, sea salt, chocolate, and peanut crunch. $14.95 for 12. 7301 E. Tanque Verde Road

Trattoria Pina Pope’s PillowSweet strawberries, whipped cream, and crumbly pastry—a dessert airy enough for a holy head to rest upon. (And indeed, it’s been on the menu ever since the pope visited Arizona in the 1980s.) $7. 5541 N. Swan Road

Shlomo and Vitos Chocolate-Dipped Coconut MacaroonsThis is a macaroon you don’t want to mess with—some say it’s a mountain of macaroon. Dip the mountain in milk chocolate and you’ve got a momentous dessert. $4.50 2870 E. Skyline Drive

Rosa’s Mexican Food SopapillasThe original puff pastry—a thin sheet of dough, deep-fried until it puffs up into a pocket full of sweetness. Caution before eating: Served piping hot. $6 1750 E. Ft. Lowell Road

The PlatethePlate

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KIDS’ MENU

Mixing It UpWith Haile Thomas

Directions:

Add all ingredients to blender and blend until smooth.

Ingredients:

3 tablespoons pumpkin puree 1 cup vanilla almond milk ½ banana 1 cup ice (6 cubes) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract ½ teaspoon pumpkin spice ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon nutmeg 2 tablespoons agave syrup


It’s pumpkin season—a sweet reminder that fall is in full swing! Pumpkin is one of my favorite

fruits (yes, it’s a fruit!). It’s incredibly versatile. It soothes and warms in soups; it excites our sweet tooth in pies, butters, and granola; and it’s a satisfying addition to hearty breakfast oatmeal, indulgent pumpkin eggnogs, and yummy pumpkin lattes.

Pumpkins are popular not only for their ability to become a satisfy-ing part of almost any dish, but also because they are low in calories and have very little fat content. Talk about a delicious and nutritious bonus! So, of course, I’ve been in my kitchen thinking of creative ways to use this popular fall ingredient to satisfy my sweet tooth while keeping it healthy, and I’ve come up with a Perfect Pumpkin Smoothie. This recipe is awesome because it’s vegan and includes palate-pleasing spices and fresh fruit. You can even top it with pecans and coconut flakes to kick it up a couple notches. I invite you all to give it a try, and as always give me a shout-out on Twitter @chefhailetho-mas and let me know if you like it. Enjoy the recipe, and the fall! ✜

Haile Thomas is an eighth grader at The Gregory School, a motivational speaker, and a young chef featured on the Food Network’s Rachael vs. Guy: Kids Cook-Off. Haile is also the founder of the HAP-PY Organization, which partners with the YWCA to offer kids’ cooking classes, fun physical activities, and nutrition education. Visit TheHappyOrg.org.

Nov 29–30 American Legion Auxiliary Holiday Arts & Crafts Fair

Dec 20–21 Plaza Palomino Fine Art Festival

Feb 28 5th Annual Rodeo Days Arts Celebration

Ongoing:Farmers & Artisans Market Every Saturday 10AM - 2PM

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Distinctly Tucson Specialty and Boutique Shopping & Dining

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Nov 29–30 American Legion Auxiliary Holiday Arts & Crafts Fair

Dec 20–21 Plaza Palomino Fine Art Festival

Feb 28 5th Annual Rodeo Days Arts Celebration

Ongoing:Farmers & Artisans Market Every Saturday 10AM - 2PM

www.plazapalomino.com

Distinctly Tucson Specialty and Boutique Shopping & Dining

"Come stroll the promenade and also visit Plaza Palomino's additional merchants"

maya


[EdiblE HomEstEad]

The Neverending GardenBy Jared R. McKinley | Illustrations by Danny Martin

I grew up in New York state; when I talk to friends who still live there, I realize they think of my home as something akin to sand dunes in the Sahara Desert or

the moonscape-like scenes of the Atacama Desert of South America.

But Baja Arizona is nothing like this. Rich in flora and fauna, our region is actually more nurturing to plants than you might think, especially if you’re coming from the green-soaked East Coast. Sometimes we maintain a foreigner’s prejudice when considering our gardens.

And, the Sonoran Desert is one of the wettest deserts in the world. While in many parts of North America, growing food stops for almost half a year (unless you have a greenhouse), in most of Baja Arizona you can grow all year long—indeed, the prime time to grow is during the cool season. Perhaps it isn’t a surprise to learn that the oldest agricultural site in North America is not found in Ohio, Florida, or even California, but right here in Baja Arizona, at the base of “A” Mountain in Tucson. Many factors contribute to our region being great for growing—despite our water limitations—and our mild winter temperatures is one of them.

In the north, plant nurseries shut down their growing operation and focus on selling Christmas trees, poinsettias,

and holiday decorations. Sometimes nurseries slow down here, too. But it isn’t because there isn’t anything to grow. It is because many of us assume we can’t plant anything in the winter—which isn’t true. I am not suggesting you don’t enjoy your seasonal poinsettias and Christmas cacti. It is, after all, the holidays. But why not also spend a day in the garden? Get your knees dirty planting more seed, mulching plants, and harvesting food from your edible beds.

Hope for procrastinators

In the September/October issue of Edible Baja Arizona, I urged you to go through your garden, pull out those warm season crops, and start planting your greens,

root crops, and other cool season vegetables and herbs. But what did I do myself? Nothing. The garden my girlfriend and I maintain is on automatic irrigation. We’ve been busy this fall and so have hardly looked at the garden. The garden still produces some eggplants, squash, and Armenian cucumbers, and there are dried miniature luffa fruits all over. Yet, I could be enjoying arugula, cilantro, Italian parsley, and much more.

I suspect that some readers of this column might also have busy lives, and schedules that don’t always align with that

Napa cabbage(Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis)


of our garden. Luckily, we live

in a place where you can plant all winter long. In No-

vember and December, you can still plant some of the long-season varieties, as well as

any other season-appropriate crops. Keep in mind, however, that in the coldest months (December and January) some seeds will take longer to germinate, and some will germinate sporadically (cilantro is notorious for this sort of behavior). But thanks to our mild winter’s sunny skies, it isn’t too late for you or me to get the cool season garden going.

oH, snap!

In the next few months, expect cold snaps. The lack of moisture in the desert air allows for quick changes in temperature. Although they rarely last more than a

few hours, occurring at night and early morning, they can do lasting damage to your crops. Lettuce and other tender greens can be damaged by hard frosts, so it is a good idea to cover them when the temperature is forecast to drop. A cloth cover will work best, especially if it incorporates some sort of frame. Crops like parsnip, cabbage, and kale actually improve in flavor with frost. If you live in the higher elevations in Co-chise or Santa Cruz Counties, frosts are more severe and more frequent. In these regions, you can still grow most of the crops that grow in Pima County, but you must be much more diligent about frost protection for tender plants.

Another option is to use row covers, which can be purchased ready-made or made at home. A row cover is basically a frame covered with frost cloth or plastic. When making these frames—which can be made from wood, PVC piping, or another supportive material—make sure they can accommodate your tallest crops. They should be portable, so that in the morning you can remove them to let plants have light and air circulation, but not so light that they’ll be blown away on a windy night. You can always secure them to the ground using stakes.

If you leave row covers on, plants can become light-deprived (if row

covers are made of cloth), or they can overheat when daytime temperatures intensify and

turn those protective row covers into ovens (particularly if row covers are made of plastic). Make a habit of removing them during the day and replacing them at night.

Over the next few months, hold off on feeding your garden save for some side dressings of compost. Feeding encourages more tender growth of crops, and growth rushed with plant food is more susceptible to cold damage. You should also decrease the amount and frequency of water you add. Over-watering is bad for soil and plants, and of course it is wasteful. Mulching with straw or coarse compost saves water and also holds in a fair amount of warmth.

constant Harvest

The nicest thing about the cool season garden is that most of the crops that flourish this time of year are tidy and lend themselves to successional plant-

ings; you can also get more food per square inch because most plants in the cool season are entirely edible—for example, you can eat the leaves and roots of turnips and you can eat the a turnip at any stage of growth (as seedlings or full-grown). The winter garden also presents a consistent abundance as there is always something to cull from the beds. Just about every part of every plant growing in a cool-season garden is destined to be eaten, with only a few exceptions.

If anything, the most difficult challenge is not wasting food. Learn how to make sauerkraut or kimchi, or start ex-perimenting with more creative ways to pickle your bounty. A great resource for preservation projects is The Art of Fer-mentation by Sandor Katz. You might also work your excess vegetables into soup stocks that can be frozen for later use.

Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius)

Mostaza Roja

Brassica sp.

This mild mustard green has an obscure history. Originally grown by the Tarahumara it was probably a weed that came in with other

crops introduced by missionaries. Over time, it’s become a tough and useful vegetable. Eaten fresh or cooked, the sturdy but tender leaves are delicious. Seed is always a little scarce partly due to the popularity of the vegetable, although Native Seeds/SEARCH (NativeSeeds.org) members have access to it, so join up and order some seeds.

Plant from seed in full to partial sun and thin to let rosettes develop. Young seedlings are tenderer than full-grown plants. Plant in succession if you wish to have a steady supply of young, tender greens.

Agretti Salsola soda

This curious vegetable is still quite rare in the U.S. Agretti is prized in Italy (and among savvy gourmet chefs) for its lively minerality and crunchy texture.

It is a welcome addition to any salad. Seeds are available from Seeds of Italy (GrowItalian.com). You might call them before you order and make sure the seeds are quite fresh, as argretti seeds do not stay viable for long. The Japanese have their own species, considered one of their oldest foods: Oka hijiki, or land seaweed (Salsola komarovii). This species is often more available than Italian agretti and the seeds having a slightly longer viability. Seeds available at Kitazawa Seed Company

(KitazawaSeed.com). Both species are easy to grow. Plant from seed and snip

tips to encourage branching. Grow in full sun. Little care is required except protection from hard frost.

Those of you who pay attention to botanical names might recognize the genus of both these species: Salsola. A familiar plant in our region is of the same genus, Salsola tragus or tumbleweed. Native to Eurasia

and North Africa, tumbleweed hitched a ride from the Old World to the new with the earliest invaders. Now

you can find tumbleweed in almost any site with dis-turbed soil. Always considered a weed, very few realize

that the seedlings possess the same delicious edible traits that are found in the esteemed agretti and oka hijiki. Tum-

bleweed is best harvested as very young seedlings. If you have a garden, you probably get volunteers all the time. Think of them as free food and pick before they get too

tough.

crop features

[E.H.]

fermentation project: milk kefir Text and Photography by Jared R. McKinley

Milk kefir is a great alternative to yogurt; it also helps improve digestive flora, the critters that help you digest food and maintain a healthy immune

system, but has the advantage of being much higher in spe-cies diversity, and requires no heat to make. In fact, making milk kefir is one of the easiest habits I have ever made. Every morning, no matter my mental and physical state, I can han-dle the process of making this delicious product. It resembles yogurt in flavor, but is more liquid in texture.

All you need are milk kefir grains and milk—cow, goat, or sheep milk will all work. Milk kefir grains are not grains at all. They are a combination of bacteria and yeasts in a matrix of proteins, lipids, and sugars. This symbiotic matrix forms the grains that resemble tiny little florets of cauliflower (milk kefir is not to be confused with water kefir, which is a differ-ent assortment of yeast and bacteria species and is brewed in unchlorinated water and sugar.).

I got my milk kefir grains online at KefirLady.com. They came wrapped in plastic and slightly moist.

Fill a pint jar three-quar-ters full of milk and add your kefir grains, about 2 to 3 ta-blespoons. Cover the top of jar with a piece of clean cloth and secure with a rubber band. Let sit at room temperature, pref-erably in a dark place, for 24 to 48 hours. The longer you

allow fermentation, the stronger and more acidic the flavor. The milk may separate into curd and whey, but this is

nothing to worry about. Take a spoon and stir the solution to a homogenous mix and pour through a finely meshed sieve made of non-reactive metal, like stainless steel, and into a drinking glass.

Put the strained kefir grains into a new, clean jar, and fill up once again with milk for tomorrow’s yield. Over time new grains will propagate and you will be able to share your extras with friends and family.

You can drink kefir plain or flavored with fruit in a smoothie. The flavor can vary depending on the ambient temperature, how long you ferment for, and the amount of kefir grains you use.

If you are traveling, or just need to take a break from kefir, you can suspend fermentation in the refrig-erator. I have done this for up to a few weeks with no negative results. ✜

Jared McKinley is the Associate Publisher of Edible Baja Arizona.

Step 1: Add kefir grains to whole milk. Step 2: Let the jar stand 24-48 hours Step 3: Strain out the grains and drink! Use the grains for the next batch.


KITCHEN 101Text and photography by Molly Patrick

DiY salaD Dressing

You wouldn’t know it by looking at the ingredient labels of store-bought salad dressings, but a good dressing should only have around five or six ingredi-

ents, tops. Vinaigrette is the most basic dressing, and once you see how ridiculously easy and versatile it is to make, you can take salad dressing off your grocery list permanently.

A good vinaigrette is made up of three parts extra virgin olive oil, one part acid, a pinch of pepper, and a generous pinch of salt. (It’s worth the splurge to buy good quality olive oil.) You can choose whatever acid you like. Balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, lime juice, or grapefruit juice are good options.

Add oil, acid, salt, and pepper to a jar, screw on the lid, and shake until combined. Consider this your base. You can leave it as is, or you can customize it from here. Maybe add a touch of agave to balance the acid, a little mustard to thicken it up, or throw in some fresh herbs and spices to give it some pizazz. Fresh chives, fresh basil, fresh mint, green onions, dried thyme, and garlic granules are all great ideas. Have fun and play around with it. You can make as little or as much as you want as long as you follow the three to one ratio.

tofu tHree WaYs

Tofu is like a sponge. It soaks up whatever you offer it. Offer it a few shakes of salt and little pepper and you are destined for boring tofu, only to encourage

the stereotype that tofu is tasteless. Marinate tofu in a yummy sauce with lots of spices and flavor, and it’s a different story.

For extra flavorful tofu, freeze the tofu first and then thaw it before you add flavoring. The texture will be even more sponge-like after it’s thawed and it will soak up even more flavor. Also, make sure to rinse your tofu and extract as much liquid as possible before cooking or marinating. You can use a clean kitchen cloth, a paper towel, or a tofu press, or you can set the tofu in a colander and cover it with something heavy for 30 minutes.

[E.H.]


[E.H.]pan frY

Slice or dice tofu and marinate overnight in the fridge. You can marinate it almost any-thing, but make sure it is has a ton of flavor.

One idea for a yummy marinade is soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, lemon juice, and some chopped garlic and ginger.

In a skillet, sauté some green onions, chives, or shallots (or all three) in a little olive oil. Add mari-nated tofu to the pan and cook until all the sides are browned. Drizzle the extra marinade over the tofu as it cooks. Cook until the tofu is firm and brown on the outside.

Serve hot alongside rice and veggies, add it to a sandwich, or refrigerate and toss it on top of a big green salad.

asian-stYle

Seaweed makes for a fishy flavor that you wouldn’t expect from tofu. When done right, even cold tofu dishes can pack a serious flavor punch.

Place a couple of tablespoons of dried Wakame seaweed (or any other variety of dried seaweed) in two cups of water for about 10 minutes, or until the seaweed becomes hydrated and soft. Strain the water from the seaweed and place the seaweed in a large mixing bowl. Take a package of firm tofu and cut it into bite-sized pieces. Place the tofu in the same bowl as the seaweed along with a few tablespoons of soy sauce, a couple of teaspoons of sesame oil, juice from a lime, a couple of cloves of minced garlic, half of a finely diced red onion, a teaspoon or so of peeled and grated ginger and a couple of chopped green onions. Gently mix everything together and place in the fridge for about an hour. Serve cold.

scrambleD

There’s a theme here, and it’s all about marination. For a lick-your-lips, “I need more now” tofu scramble, place your tofu

in a large bowl, mash it with a fork, add a bunch of seasonings, and leave it in the fridge overnight.

A good start to a basic scramble marinade is nutri-tional yeast, garlic powder, dried basil, sea salt, white pepper, balsamic vinegar, green onions, and fresh parsley. And don’t be skimpy; remember, tofu is like a sponge. In the morning, sauté some onions, garlic, peppers, mushrooms, and whatever other veggies you like, add in the tofu, and scramble for about five minutes, until everything is combined and heated.

Once your tofu scramble is cooked, heat up a whole wheat or corn tortilla, add some avocado and tomato, throw in the scramble, and you’re good to go! ✜

Molly Patrick blogs at BoldVegan.com.

HoW to cut an onion

Here’s a fast, thorough, and easy way to perfectly dice an onion every time—without the tears.

1. Slice the onion in half longways.2. Chop off the stem end and peel the onion. Leave the root end

on (the root end contains those tear-inducing chemicals).3. Place your hand flat on top of the onion with your palm pressing

down and slice 3 to 5 horizontal slices into the onion. 4. Slice vertically from one end to the other, making sure not to

slice all the way into the root. 5. Turn the onion and slice in the other direction. 6. Watch the onions pieces gently fall off the onion before your

nonwatery eyes. 7. Discard the root end and chop finer if needed.



[E.H.]

If caliche is “the kiss of death” for a garden, as Jay Quade argues, how does he grow 20 fruitful trees and more than 100 food plants, including corn, on that kind

of rocky ledge? It’s all about correcting the soil, says Quade, a geologist

at the University of Arizona. And that can be costly. “But it’s good therapy and exercise. And your food tastes better.”

Jay and Barbra Quade, a family therapist, have gardened, pesticide free, for 15 years on a West University lot of 120 by 60 feet. Almost every unoccupied inch is planted. “We’re over 50 percent food sufficient,” Jay says. “Sixty percent,” says Barbra. “This is a real urban farm,” Jay adds.

What’s up with Tucson soil?There are two types, two extremes of our native soil. Type 1 is down near the active washes, where there’s loose, sandy alluvium. It hasn’t been compacted, hasn’t built up salt. I call

it the young soil. It’s deposited in the flood plains. Young soil can be found by the Santa Cruz, for example, at low eleva-tions.

Type 2 is the old soil, up in central Tucson’s hills, at the University of Arizona, say, and in West University. It’s been sitting out forever, and now it’s all caliche and clay, on the topographic high points, up on the old terraces above the ancient Santa Cruz. Soil isn’t like wine. Soil gets worse as it gets older.

Once there was clay on top, but the developers pushed it away to level the home site, so my backyard is mostly caliche at the surface. That’s the kiss of death for gardening. You replace that.

Can native clay soil go in the new mix?The native clay is fine, and we put that aside. For the ca-liche, we dug 8 x 10 x 3 foot beds mainly with a backhoe. I jackhammered out the rest of the caliche. Soak it overnight,

Q&A: Quade’s GardenInterview by Ford Burkhart | Photography by Stephen Eginoire



[E.H.]really soak it, and caliche comes right out. Then, we put in a mixture of one third native clay, a third river sand, and a third compost, our own and some purchased compost.

How did your earliest garden work out?Back then, we had winter greens, lettuce, arugula, mus-tard, coriander, almost all the temperate herbs. But the soil wasn’t good for root vegetables, like beets, turnips, fennel, carrots. We were gardening on the native soil, on the fly. We ran with what we had, and the yield decreased the second year. Native soil is good for one year, then it needs amendment, a commercial fertilizer.

You used commercial compost? Yes, starting three years ago. And we bought it at several places—I don’t want to say where. But you have to be care-ful. It was too salty. Buyer beware.

At Acme Sand and Gravel, they provide a chemical analysis of their soils and were quite knowledgeable. Don’t buy commercial compost in big lots until you have given it a try.

When do you start your winter garden?We planted in early September. Before that, the leaf cutter ants would decimate the sprouting greens.

How much do you experiment?A lot. You try multiple varieties to see what takes. That’s vital if you are serious about this. And it’s important to ro-tate crops by location. We experiment constantly with that.

We tried Early Girl tomatoes. Not so good. Now we plant a mix of cherry tomatoes. They are prolific and taste good. We have good success with Russian tomatoes.We have an unusual climate and seeds from chain stores aren’t always appropriate. For seeds, you should look to areas with climates similar to ours. Like Yunnan in China. Turkey. Italy. North Africa and Spain. Wherever it real-ly heats up in the summer. Russian summers are like our winters.

Any failures?Many. For example, two years we had failures with Ken-tucky Wonder (a pole green bean) and Kentucky Blue Beans. They aren’t for this climate. Now we plant some Chinese beans, from Yunnan, China, which has weather similar to here in the monsoons. They go crazy here. And now in September, we plant the Asparagus Yardlong bean, from Gourmet Seed International in New Mexico.

A conspicuous failure was cucumbers, squash, and melons; all had infestations, of worms and aphids. A white worm eats the stem from the inside. You can slice open the stem and take out the worm, and the plant limps along, but that’s too much. ✜

Ford Burkhart has called Tucson home for going on 70 years; his 1917 bungalow has a tree he planted in 1947.


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[E.H.]

Farm ReportBy Sara Jones | Photography by Liora K

Here in sunny southern Arizona, our warm win-ters allow many farms to produce year-round. Some farms located in areas that rarely freeze need little

protection from infrequent cold snaps. Other farms, located at higher elevations or in river valleys that are more prone to freezing, must use individual row covers or greenhouses to protect crops.

On many farms, winter is a bountiful time. Delicate leaf and root crops that can’t take the summer heat thrive in our mild winters. Winter planting usually begins in September; this year, the unusual rains we received had a varied effect on regional farms, delaying winter planting for some because fields were too soggy to work, while farms that received less rain were able to benefit from the early September rains and plant in mild weather.

At the farmers’ market, look for quick-growing and heat-tolerant greens like arugula and mustard greens, fol-lowed by a wide variety of other salad and cooking greens as weather continues to cool. Radishes and baby turnips and beets will proceed bigger, full grown varieties. Tender greens like lettuce and spinach and heartier greens like kale and collards all have a milder and sweeter flavor in the winter months. The same goes for root crops, which can become bit-

ter or spicy during hot weather but have a sweet, mild flavor in cool weather. Take advantage of their wintertime sweetness and use them raw or cooked.

Head to AJ’s or Whole Foods for Sunizona hothouse grown tomatoes. The greenhouses on the farm are heated by firing sustainably produced wood pellets made on site to keep the tomatoes plants warm.

For fruit, there will still be plenty of apples available at lo-cal markets; citrus will likely appear at the end of December.

Look for plenty of winter squash of all shapes and sizes. These vegetables are storage crops and most actually get sweeter with age. They grow over the long hot days of sum-mer and are harvested in fall. Large, hard skinned squash can last for several months. Small squash such as the acorn squash and oblong multicolored delicata should be stored in the refrigerator if you don’t plan on using them within a week or so. Larger squash can be kept on display on a kitchen table or entry way as long as they are out of direct sunlight. If you don’t see a particular variety at the farmers’ market, ask around to see if anyone has them in storage at their farm. These are heavy items that take up a lot of space and most farmers will pack only enough for that day’s market.



[E.H.]

roasteD Winter squasH & garlic pureeThis super simple recipe is the starting point for a number of different

dishes. Heated with broth or coconut milk it is the base of many delicious soups. It can be tossed with pasta or stirred into risotto for an easy veg-an cheese alternative. Spread onto pizza it is delicious, especially with arugula and parmesan cheese. It is also an excellent filling for ravioli, lasagna, empanadas, enchiladas… If you start any of these recipes with

the pre-made puree you can get a cheap, easy, and nutritious meal on the table in no time.

2 heads of garlic, rubbed with oil 1 large squash or a few small (about 15 pounds), cut in half, cut sides rubbed with oil Salt and pepper to tastePreheat oven to 375. Lay squash, cut side down, over the heads of garlic on a well oiled baking sheet. Bake about 1 hour, until tender. Let cool, then scoop flesh out of the skin. Using a serrated knife, cut the top off of the roasted garlic. Squeeze each clove lightly to remove from skin. In batches, puree squash and garlic together with a pinch of salt in a food pro-cessor or blender. For a sweet puree to use in baked goods, use cinnamon sticks and ginger in place of the garlic, and discard spices before pureeing.

Each variety of squash has a different texture and sugar level, but they can be used inter-changeably in most recipes (except for Spaghetti squash). Bodie from Big Skye Bakery likes to use the super sweet Cinderella pumpkins from Big

‘D’ Farm in his delicious pumpkin pies; find them at the Heirloom Farm-ers’ Market at Rillito Park.

When baking, to achieve the same consistency as canned pumpkin, drain the cooked flesh in a colander set over a bowl in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight. You can also cook it down on the stovetop, stirring often, to reduce the moisture. ✜

Sara Jones is a longtime employee of the Tucson CSAv

H:al

Tohono O’Odham H:al winter squash has been grown for generations. This locally adapt-ed squash doesn’t flower until the monsoons start so is often planted a little later than other winter squash and the crop arrives at the market about a month behind other varieties. The San Xavier Co-op Farm has a good crop coming in this year, available mainly at the Santa Cruzy Valley Thursday farmers’ market. This squash comes in a variety of shapes and colors, but most are large with very tough skin. To avoid knife mishaps large, hard squash, like the O’odham H:al, can be baked whole ( just pierce the skin once or twice with the tip of a paring knife). If the whole pumpkin or squash won’t fit into your oven, lay out newspapers over concrete and crack the squash open by dropping on the ground.

sleeping frog experimentation

The farmers over at Sleeping Frog Farm are experimenting with a new curly kale variety from High Mower Seed Company. They aren’t the only ones experimenting. After a global seed shortage began earlier this year, due in part to increased demand as the vegetable spiked in popularity, many farmers are seeking new seed sources and varities. Afraid you will miss your green smoothies, kale chips, and salads? Give other hearty winter greens, like collards and chard, a chance!

Squash (above) & arugula (top) from 5 Points Market & Restaurant.


Harvesting stormwater:

[] is affordable, start with a shovel .

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Una Confiable Tradición Culinaria

Tres generaciones de mujeres se adhieren a la cocina estilo Sonora por la cual El Minuto Café se conoce desde que Juan Shaar lo abrió

hace más de 75 años en Barrio Viejo.

Entrevista con Lourdes Medrano | Fotografía por Tim Fuller

¿Cómo se estableció El Minuto?Terry: Mi abuelo nació en Arabia, en Beirut, Líbano. Y cuando estaba joven se vino por México a Estados Unidos y fue a dar a El Paso. Mi abuelo hablaba los tres idiomas y mi papá también. Mi papá, que se llamaba George, nació en El Paso. Entonces iba a Nogales, Sonora, y ahí conoció a mi mamá. A mi abuelo siempre le gustaba la comida mexicana y tener restaurante mexicano. Entonces en 1936 abrió el restaurante El Minuto en la Congreso. Y siempre abría hasta las tres de la mañana. Había pocas cosas en el menú: tacos, menudo. La gente iba a comer el menudo después de los bailes a la una, dos de la mañana. En 1944 se vino para acá, donde estamos ahorita. Rosalva: El Minuto estaba en donde pasó el freeway, ahí en la Congreso, y el estado se lo pidió. Tuvo que mudarse.

¿Y la renovación urbana que años después transformó la zona de la nueva ubicación como los afectó?Terry: Aquí estaba la casa de nosotros y la tumbaron cuando hicieron el Tucson Convention Center. Entonces nos movimos. Era como en el ‘69, ‘70. Aquí estaba más chiquito. Le agregamos un cuarto en el ‘89.

Lourdes Medrano interviews the three generations of women—Rosalva Shaar, Terry Shaar, and Zulema Salinas—that have adhered to the same Sonora-style cuisine that El Minuto Cafe has been known for since Juan Shaar opened it more than 75

years ago in Barrio Viejo. To read this story in English, visit EdibleBajaArizona.com

LOS NEGOCIOS

¿Qué otros recuerdos tienen de esos tiempos?Terry: Yo me acuerdo que me podía asomar por la ventana del restaurante y podía ver a mi mamá trabajando. Y yo chille y chille. Estaba chiquita. Rosalva: Antes venían muchos artistas cuando estaba el Convention Center recién abierto. Edward James Olmos y Sylvester Stallone estuvieron aquí. Los Lobos todavía vienen muy seguido.

¿Siempre ha estado el negocio en manos de la familia?Terry: Si, siempre. Yo he trabajado aquí desde que estaba en high school y me gradué porque me encanta a mi el negocio de restaurante. Por eso abri el mío en la Broadway y la Kolb porque era lo que mas quería yo, tener mi negocio propio. Y pues lo tuve por 10 años. Sí teníamos mucha gente al principio pero la gente los comparaba los dos restaurantes y decía “me gusta el del centro mejor”. Me regresé aquí y ahorita somos tres generaciones trabajando en el restaurante: mi mamá, que tiene 83 años, su nieta y yo.

¿Como se reparten el trabajo?Mi mamá hace todos los pedidos y mi hija Zulema y yo trabajamos de noche y cerramos. Mi mamá está muy fuerte todavía. Lo único que no hace es manejar la computadora. No quiere saber nada de la computadora.


Desde la frente: Las tres generaciones de mujeres, Rosalva Shaar, Terry Shaar, y Zulema Salinas, manejan el restaurant.


¿En que dirías que se distingue El Minuto en un lugar como Tucson donde hay tantos restaurantes de comida mexicana?Terry: Pues yo creo que porque está muy buena la comida. Rosalva: Pues es lo que oímos. Los clientes nos dicen que les gusta que está muy constante la comida. No vienen una vez y está buena y luego vienen otra vez y no está. Terry: Y es que como no ocupamos cocineros, como otros lugares, que ocupan cocineros y los dejan que hagan ellos la comida como ellos lo saben hacer. Aquí no porque tienen que hacer la comida como mi mamá la quiere. No pueden meter recetas que ellos conocen. Nunca cambiamos la comida. Rosalva: Los empleados tienen muchos años trabajando aquí. Terry: Los clientes también conocen a los meseros y piden un mesero que les gusta. También eso les gusta, que no hay un mesero diferente cada vez que vienen.

¿Cual es su platillo más popular ?Terry: La carne seca. Rosalva: Aquí la cortamos, aquí la secamos, aquí hacemos todo. Terry: También el menudo. Siempre habla la gente y pregunta si tenemos menudo. Y es que muchos restaurantes lo tienen viernes y sábado pero nosotros lo tenemos todos los días.

¿Y nunca han sevido comida libanesa?Terry: Aquí no, pero si hacemos en la casa. Una vez en el otro restaurante hice un arroz al estilo libanés que me fascina. Lo aprendí a hacer de mi mamá y mi mamá aprendió a hacerlo de mi abuela. Y una vez lo hice allá porque hicimos puerco, porque no tenemos puerco en el menú aquí.

¿Qué tipo de clientela tienen?Rosalva: En el almuerzo vienen muchos trabajadores del estado, del gobierno. También hay clientes que tienen muchos años viniendo, que venían con sus papás cuando estaban chiquitos y ahora traen a sus hijos y a sus nietos. Hace unos días vino una pareja ya mayor y estaban recordando que empezaron a venir aquí cuando estaban de novios.

¿Como encaja El Minuto en la escena culinaria de Tucson?Terry: Yo diría que por una parte tenemos tantos años en el negocio que por eso nos hicimos famosos por decir. Y por la comida estilo Sonora. Y muchos tratan de hacer comida mexicana diferente, y fusión, pero nosotros siempre la hemos tenido igual. Como por ejemplo, mucha gente pide nachos que es una cosa que nunca voy a poner en el menú.

¿Por qué no?Terry: Porque para mi no es mexicano eso. ✜

Rosalva Shaar muestra una foto de su hijo, George.

El Minuto Café. 354 S. Main Ave. ElMinutoCafe.com.

Radicada en Tucson, la periodista Lourdes Medrano comparte historias de ambos lados de la frontera. Síguela en Twitter @_lourdesmedrano.


PUEBLO WITHIN A CITY

“Time to go hit Le Buzz”—one cyclist to another. Heard

18 miles and 4,000 feet above Tucson at Windy Point, last April.

If you aren’t from Tucson—actually, if you haven’t spent time on the east side of Tucson —the cyclist’s remark is unintelligible. But if you have any sense of life as it is lived in the far-flung north-east corner of town, you get it. What one Lycra-clad road war-rior was proposing to the other was to head downhill and meet up in Mount Lemmon’s de facto anteroom, Le Buzz Caffé. This happens every day. Many times.

Tucked into a strip mall on East Tanque Verde Road at Cata-lina Highway, Le Buzz serves as a rendezvous, staging area, and refreshment center for the cyclists, hikers, and climbers rec-reating daily on the mountain, as well as a gathering place for the inhabitants of the sprawling, horsey, sparsely-restauranted Tanque Verde Valley. Surrounded on its busy corner by busi-nesses supplying the goods and services necessary to suburban life—Safeway, Radio Shack, GNC, a UPS store, a dental office, a pool-supply place, McDonald’s—Le Buzz offers something rare and precious: a place where a low-density community can

meet up, relax, and make itself at home. The crowds of regular customers park their bikes out front; they bring their kids, an-cient parents, and dogs to hang out on the shady front patio, re-fuel with Parisian-quality pastries after hard workouts, and, above all, converse.

All morning, nearly every day of the year, Le Buzz buzzes with animated chat.

Tanque Verde and Catalina Highway is a really long way from downtown Tucson, and so is the vibe of Le Buzz. Laptops

are the exception. While everything—including the locally famous array of galettes, pies, cakes, scones, cinnamon rolls and cookies—is fresh and expertly homemade, languid hipsters—in fact, languid persons of any description—are rare. The café’s offerings may be sophisticated and urbane down to the last lump of Demerara sugar, but at heart it’s a jumping neighbor-hood joint with a happy, wide-open atmosphere all its own.

TABLE

The Buzz About Le BuzzThis eastside coffee shop provides a far-flung community

a place to meet up, rearrange the chairs, and smell the cinnamon rolls.

By Renée Downing | Photography by Steven Meckler

Above: Pastries at Le Buzz are baked fresh daily. Right: The paradox of choice... besides pastries, patrons can choose from an array of egg dishes, sandwiches, and salads. Next page: An employee

puts the finishing touches on a Le Buzz window greeting.



True story: A quilting group to which I belong had a mem-ber fall by the wayside a while back. We were talking about what had happened to her when one member, who knew her best, explained that she’d begun spending all her free time at Le Buzz. We haven’t seen her since.

“It’s a living thing,” says owner Margaret Hadley, who grew up in Tucson and who, with her husband, Dennis, opened Le Buzz in 1996 as a pioneering espresso bar with a few baked goods. (Dennis Hadley died in 2012.)

Hadley arrives most mornings at 4 a.m. and is everywhere on the floor and behind the counter, carrying trays of baked goods, clearing tables, and sweeping up. Many longtime patrons have no idea that she’s the owner.

“Of course, it’s evolved over the years, which is good and necessary,” she says. “Dennis was a big appreciator of change, even of chaos. If you don’t make change, things get old.” Hence the quote from Buddhist “crazy wisdom” teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on the café’s website: “Chaos should be regarded as very good news.”

Over the past 18 years, the menu has expanded to include a dozen regular breakfast items and as many light lunches, plus daily specials, including the much-loved Friday pot pie, avail-able during the cool months.

“Our staff is young, and they’re all foodies. Our pastry chefs, Rebecca Morrow and Felicia Weipert, are always wanting to try something new—and then they work and work to come up


The café’s offerings may be sophisticated and urbane down to the last lump of Demerara

sugar, but at heart it’s a jumping neighborhood joint with a happy,

wide-open atmosphere all its own.

with the best possible version. Then we put it out and see what catches on. There’s a back and forth between what our cus-tomers ask for and what we want to be giving them,” Hadley says.

“The other day a guy asked me whether we were ever going bring back the strata”—a savory bread pudding. “We haven’t offered it for two years, but now I’m thinking about it. We’ll talk it over, and maybe this winter the strata will return.”

Before moving to Tucson to open the café and be closer to Margaret’s mother, she and Dennis lived in Los Angeles, where they worked in publishing and marketing. On weekends they went to museums and explored the local coffee culture, then in its infancy.


“There were all these little independent espresso places springing up, each one differ-ent. We loved the coffee, loved the scene, and wanted to be part of what was happening. Dennis, who was very good at figuring things out, taught himself to roast,” Hadley says.

Neither of them had any experience in the restaurant business, but they thought that running an espresso bar and patisserie would be fun.

“How hard could it be, right? We had no idea. When you start out, you are the staff. At the beginning we were cra-zy—we opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 8 at night, seven days a week. We had a cot in the back and an SUV in the park-ing lot out front so we could grab naps during the day: At night we’d close, go to bed, get up and do it again.”

They managed to survive the early days, and Le Buzz took off, becoming the center of a bustling, convivial social scene. Among the early loy-alists was KGUN Channel 9 anchorman Guy Atchley, who still hangs out there. Atchley took the atmospheric photos of patrons, staff, and food on the restaurant’s website.

“My husband was very social, wonderful with names and faces—he really enjoyed getting to know each of the customers. I am not that person, but many of our staff are like Dennis. The front of house crew, led by managers Kara Willard and Nick Hoe-nig, know not only the cus-tomers’ names but [also] their kids’ and dogs’ names. Our chef, Tony Berber, is great with people, too. He keeps an eye out and says hello to the regulars and starts their orders before they get up to the reg-ister.

“The whole staff, of course, is like family to me.”

She laughs. “And to them

I’m the nagging mother, always telling them to go clear tables.”

A recent crop of staff babies, all girls, especially delights Hadley: “We’ve got a whole softball team growing up at Le Buzz. And our newest dad, Chris Fellers, will be the per-fect coach—as long as everyone agrees to wear St. Louis Cardi-nals red.”

Another development that excites her is the ongoing res-urrection of downtown and the burgeoning of the Tucson restaurant scene. “It’s what all of us longtime Tucsonans have been hoping would hap-pen—our part of the country is linking up with the national food scene,” she says.

This time of the year, things are still relatively quiet at Le Buzz. From January through May the place becomes, in Hadley’s term, “anarchic.”

“Our customers act like they own the place—which, really, they do. They come in here all full of oxygen and exhilarated from their morning rides and start rearranging tables and chairs, moving things around. Sometimes it feels like it’s out of control, but when things are really hopping and we all get into a sort of zone—honestly, it’s sort of thrilling.”

Hadley complains about being slower than her younger employees, but she still likes to get in the kitchen and get floury. Recently, on a Saturday morning, she decided to make a banana pecan toffee coffee cake.

“I found this banana that was almost liquid—just pure ripe banana-ness, the way you want it for baking. I went through all the steps, toasting the nuts, and so on, thinking the whole time, ‘This is taking forever and it’ll just be a waste. It won’t rise—I’ve loaded the batter with too much stuff.’

“But it rose fine. I cut a few slices, set it out, and then went off to do something in the back.

“Our customers act like they own the place—which, really, they do. They come in here all full of oxygen and exhilarated from their morning rides and start rearranging tables and

chairs, moving things around. Sometimes it feels like it’s out of control, but when things are really hopping and we all get into a sort of zone—

honestly, it’s sort of thrilling.”


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Margaret Hadley opened Le Buzz with her late husband, Dennis Hadley, in 1996, and it evolved into a community gathering spot—for both pets & people.

“And when I came out a couple minutes later, all but three pieces had vanished. Poof! The woman who’d gotten the first piece had told the person behind the register that when the aroma of the warm cake wafted toward her, it was as if it had been made just for her. It was exactly what she wanted.

“That’s what makes it all worthwhile—it’s when you put out that thing that makes someone superbly happy.” ✜

Le Buzz Caffe. 9121 E. Tanque Verde Road. 520.749.3903. LeBuzzCafe.com.

Renée Downing has been eating and writing in Tucson for nearly 40 years.


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TUCSON’S BIRTHPLACE


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How did the Desert Rain Café, a casual dining room in a remote town of 3,000, come to have so much culinary clout?

It’s a long story dating back thousands of years to when the Tohono O’odham began foraging and hunting for food in a vast swath of the Sonoran Desert west of Tucson. The shorter version starts in 1996, when Terrol Johnson and Tristan Reader formed the nonprofit Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA), and when Johnson began to dream about opening a restaurant in Sells, his nation’s tribal capital.

Johnson first met Tristan Reader, a nonnative, in 1994. “He and his wife had started a traditional food garden,” Johnson says. “I suggested we also harvest desert foods like cholla buds and saguaro fruit.” Figuring he’d enlist a few younger members of the community to help with the foraging, something he’d long been accustomed to doing with his family, Johnson was amazed to discover that they didn’t have a clue about collecting native plants.

He loaded a group of kids into his truck and taught them.He soon realized that the young people of the community

were bored and cut off from their culture. Reader and John-son, a renowned basket maker—his work has been shown at

the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, among other places—started art classes, with local artists teach-ing basketry, painting, and gourd crafts. The garden became a gathering place—and a spot for Johnson to talk up the impor-tance of eating native foods.

Johnson, 28 at the time, had recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. “In the 1960s, when we ate native foods rather than white bread and McDonald’s, we weren’t obese and didn’t have diabetes but now they’re rampant,” he explains. Indeed, the Tohono O’odham have one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world, with more than 50 percent of adults suffering from the disease and children as young as 7 diagnosed with it.

But it’s not only the typical American diet that’s to blame for the nation’s health crisis, though genetics make that diet more dangerous to many native peoples than to other ethnic groups. Even before fast food became ubiquitous, American Indians forced onto reservations were given U.S. government rations of white flour and lard. “A lot of people think of fry bread when they think of native foods,” Johnson says. “Fry bread is not tra-ditional to any Native American people in the country.”

Which foods of the past were healthier? For the Tohono O’odham, it was tepary beans, a low-glycemic, high-protein

Desert Rain, Desert FoodWith the support of Tohono O’odham Community Action, Desert Rain Café

gathers a community around healthy, native foods.

By Edie Jarolim | Photography by Jeff Smith

With pepitas and prickly pear dressing, even a simple greens salad gets a desert twist.

TABLE



menu staple. According to Johnson, the villages on the nation produced 1.5 million pounds of tepary beans in his grandparents’ heyday. “When we started TOCA, you could barely get 100 pounds of them,” Johnson says. They had to turn to a seed bank to start planting more beans.

TOCA slowly became the go-to place for information about all kinds of native foods. “You want seeds, go to TOCA, you want fences put up, go to TOCA, you want someone to teach you how to cook traditionally, go to TOCA ... People were using us as a resource,” Johnson says. In turn, the tribal elders, including Johnson’s grandparents, were pleased to be able to contribute their knowledge to newly interested members of the community.

When in 2000, Johnson’s grand-father, Alex Pancho, died, Johnson asked his grandmother and aunts for permission to take over the fields his grandfather used to farm but even-tually abandoned. They agreed, and what came to be known as Alex Pan-cho Memorial Farm was once again farmed in the traditional, flood-based way, relying on the monsoon rains rather than irrigation for water.

A few years later, TOCA leased more than 180 acres of a tribal farm that once grew cotton, and that al-ready had dike systems and wells in place.

The smaller farm became an out-door classroom and a place to gather for harvest and planting festivals; the larger one was devoted to growing staple crops like corn and tepary beans. At the same time, more and more community members were learning how to forage for desert plants.

Johnson’s idea of opening a restaurant began to seem like less of a pipe dream.

TOCA co-founder Tristan Read-er had initially been dubious. (He’d been the pratical one, suggesting nonprofit status for the organization when Johnson wasn’t even sure what that was.) According to Johnson, “He kept saying, ‘Yeah, sure, right,’ whenever I brought up wanting a restaurant, but when we started the

farms, he began to see it.” Ingredients were now plentiful.

The next step was figuring out how to create restaurant-worthy recipes from them.

Enter Mary Paganelli Votto, an author who moved to Tucson from New York City in 2001. Eager to learn about her adopted region’s native ingredients, she was surprised at how little written information existed. Researching an article about traditional Tohono O’odham foods, she approached Johnson at TOCA. “Terrol introduced me to Frances Manuel, one of the tribal elders,” says Paganelli Votto. “We clicked immediately, and had the same vi-sion, which was also TOCA’s—pre-serve and share this knowledge.”

Paganelli Votto began compiling information, not only about wild des-ert plants and crops grown through traditional flood-plain farming but also about the culture surrounding them: the proper seasons for plant-ing and harvesting and the associated songs, legends, and personal reflec-tions of Manuel and other elders.

She also solicited and tested recipes. Lots of them. Not only tra-ditional ones from the community, but also several from contemporary Southwest chefs known for their local focus. The list of eventual contributors reads like a culinary Who’s Who, including Lois Ellen Frank, Deborah Madison, and Janos Wilder, all winners of James Beard awards—the culinary world’s Oscar equivalent—and Loretta Oden, a chef and food historian who won an Emmy for her PBS show, “Seasoned with Spirit: A Native Cook’s Jour-ney.”

The result was the beautifully illustrated From I’Itoi’s Garden: Tohono O’odham Food Traditions, a comprehensive compilation of na-tive foodways—and a repository of restaurant-worthy recipes.

Now TOCA had ingredients and menu options. All they needed was somewhere to put their restaurant.

That last piece of the puzzle fell into place in 2008, when the Tohono O’odham nation started revamp-ing Basha’s Plaza—now Tohono

From ribs to cornbread, the foods at Desert Rain Café take their inspiration

from the native offerings of the desert.


Above: Alice Marquez works in the café’s kitchen, where you won’t find a deep fryer or refined sugar—agave syrup is used as a sweetener.Below: Two patrons enjoy the array of vegetarian—and non-vegetarian—offerings.

O’odham Plaza—in Sells and offered TOCA a space.That was exhilarating—and not a little scary. “None of us

had any experience in actually running a restaurant,” Paganelli Votto says. “I had worked in restaurants and have a culinary background but I never started something and managed it from scratch.”

Paganelli Votto took a restaurant management class at Pima Community College, which helped her create a business plan. TOCA also got crucial assistance from Loretta Oden, who had opened the first native foods restaurant in Santa Fe, the Corn Dance Café.

In March 2009, a year after they were offered the space and more than a decade after Johnson conceived the idea, TOCA debuted the Desert Rain Café.

Sells is 60 miles southwest of Tucson on Highway 86, a sce-nic drive through pristine desert once you get past the traffic

on Ajo Way and beyond Three Points. There is no sign for the restaurant turnoff; instructions to get there say simply, “Turn left onto the (unmarked) Main Street at the blue hospital sign; if you get to the Shell station you have gone too far.” But a few blocks after you make the left, it’s impossible to miss Tohono O’odham Plaza and the stacked brick columns, sunny yellow wall, and blue metal rain cloud on the patio below the Desert Rain Café sign.

Inside, the café is equally cheerful, light-filled, with colorful local art on the walls of the two rooms. You order food at a counter; it’s hard to decide among the many appealing possibil-ities. Luckily, there are only seven main items on the combined lunch and dinner menu, and a combo plate lets you try half orders of any two of them. Try a combo of tepary bean and short rib stew with cornbread and the prickly pear chicken sandwich; or the cholla bud citrus salad and the Desert Rain quesadilla, made with tepary beans and cheese and grilled on a whole wheat tortilla.

The presentations are beautiful, the food fresh and tasty. Nothing costs more than $8.95, and nothing is fried or made with sugar; agave syrup is used to sweeten items like the iced tea.

Not surprisingly, the community has embraced the café. Typical patrons are William Bruce and Cheryl Lopez, young professionals who work in the nation’s public defenders office.

“A lot of people think of fry bread when they

think of native foods. Fry bread is not traditional to any Native American people in the country.”

Chose from hearty fare, with a tepary bean and beef stew, to light, with a cholla bud citrus salad. Food styling by Paganelli Votto



They eat here at least once a week they say, more often when-ever possible. Both agree they like the food because “it’s light.” Lopez often opts for the chicken sandwich and one of the smoothies, which comes in flavors like chia berry and banana mesquite. Bruce favors the Caesar salad, chased by a mesquite oatmeal cookie.

For Lopez in particular, health is key to the café’s appeal. She has tried to get the food vendors outside the shopping plaza to serve more beans and lettuce, less meat, but concedes it’s hard to change old habits. “If people educate themselves, they can put together something that’s not bad for them,” Lopez says, “but for walking in and knowing you can get a healthy meal, this is the place.”

Brian Hendricks, who has managed the café for the past four years, can attest to the positive change it’s made in his own life. He started out as a dishwasher, figuring it was “just another job,” one he didn’t especially want. But he soon noticed the upbeat atmosphere in the restaurant, and the pleasure people got from the food at the catered events he helped out with. This made him care about the job—and it showed.

Although the café gets about 75 percent of its business from the community, visitors from all over make the trip to Sells. Hendricks says many come from Europe and Asia after read-ing about the cafe in airline magazines or glossy publications abroad. From September through February, there’s also a major influx of U.S. snowbirds in RVs.

Ironically, because the café is only open from Monday to Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., it’s difficult for residents of Tucson and Phoenix who work during the week to find time to come. Hendricks explains that, because retail is limited in the Tohono O’odham nation, “We just don’t have a customer base on the weekend. Everyone takes off to go shopping in Tucson. One weekend we had a tribal election on Saturday and we de-cided to stay open. We had only one customer.”

The guest chef dinners organized by Paganelli Votto and offered periodically throughout the year give locals a chance to

sample the food in the evening. Participants have included Na-tive American chefs from other cultures, Tucson restaurateurs, and executive chefs from resorts like Canyon Ranch. They can cook what they like as long as they use some Tohono O’odham ingredients.

But while this outreach to the local food community is fun, the soul of the enterprise remains its communal spirit. In addi-tion to organizing special events, Paganelli Voto is in charge of menu development, recipe testing, and staff training. Hendricks handles day-to-day operations, and Alice Marquez and Cheryl Antone do the cooking. Johnson and other members of TOCA, as well as farmers and local foragers, work behind the scenes. “It’s a real collaboration,” Paganelli Voto says.

One of the most exciting things about the café is its observ-able impact on future generations. “You see kids here enjoying cholla buds, retraining their palates from the junk food,” John-son says, “after they get over the ‘eew, we’re eating cactus’ re-action.” And Hendricks reports that children have a great time touring the cafe in one of the many after-school programs that TOCA organizes. “They love going into the freezer, and when they see me chopping fresh fruits and vegetables, they say ‘Ooh, I bet chef is going to cut his fingers off.’” He adds, “Whereas many local kids—like me—used to associate tepary beans with the boring mush they got at grandma’s house, now they see they taste good in lots of different dishes.”

Johnson dreamed of a restaurant because, he says, “I didn’t want us to be known as the place where everyone has diabetes. I wanted something our people could look at with pride.” The Desert Rain Café is everything its founder envisioned—and then some. ✜

Desert Rain Café. Tohono Plaza, Main Street, Sells. 520.383.4918. DesertRainCafe.com.

Edie Jarolim is a freelance writer and editor. Her articles have appeared in Eating Well, National Geographic Traveler, Sunset, and Travel + Leisure. She is the author of three travel guides and one dog book.

From left: Cheryl Antone, Terrol Dew Johnson, Mary Paganelli, Brian Hendricks, and Alice Marquez.


When aLethea swift was 4 years oLd, her father, a photographer, was assigned to shoot the livestock being shown at the Pima County Fair. One goat

breeder couldn’t afford to pay for photographs so she traded for four baby goats for them instead. Swift immediately fell in love with the animals. A passion was born.

“Hi girls!” she says today, greeting the herd of 175 that live on the Fiore di Capra farm. She reaches over the fence to pet the head of Red Riding Hood, 13 years old and one of the el-ders. The other goats begin to flock to the gate for attention, nuzzling up against her hand. “They love attention,” she says, laughing. “They’re kind and so sweet. They’re really like dogs. If I opened the gate, I would have a hundred of them following behind me.”

All of the goats have names, used in part to keep the fam-ily lines together. There are nursery rhyme characters: Mary Mack, Bo Peep, Goldilocks; names from the color spectrum: Parallel Red, Pink Fiction, Violet Fire; place names taken from song lyrics: Dallas in the Dust, Savannah Sky; and even famous fictional characters: Hester Prynne and Scout Finch. Swift’s daughter Caitlyn, 15, has a line of goats named after flowers.

Most of the goats are LaMancha, a breed with tiny gopher ears with an array of colors and patterns: brown, tan, and black. They often have white patches on their chests or white dia-monds on their nose. Swift says, “It’s fun because it’s a surprise at every kidding.”

Swift grew up in Marana and participated in 4-H club and in competitions with her sister, Patrece, showing their goats under the name Altrece Dairy Goats. She continued to breed and show goats while she studied nutritional science at the Uni-versity of Arizona and, as many goat breeders do, she began to experiment with making cheese.

But it wasn’t until 1998 that dreams of something larger took shape. Knowing of her passion for goats, her then-fiancé, Michael Swift, had proposed that they start a dairy farm; when her father gave them a piece of land in Pomerene, near Benson, as a wedding gift, that dream began to become a reality.

As they built their dream, one of the main pieces of wisdom they received was not to take out loans or go into debt, so they took their time building infrastructure.

In 1998, Alethea and Michael moved onto the land, living in a mobile home on the property. By 2000, they had built their home. In 2004, Michael’s stepfather and stepuncle, both ma-sons, built them a barn. They put in the water line themselves. They got their dairy license. And in 2006, after years of plan-ning and building, they opened shop.

Michael retired from the Air Force, and both he and Alethea worked full time with their herd of 450. They sold raw milk to every Whole Foods in the Phoenix area. But with such a large herd, the two were working all the time. The milking alone took four hours in the morning and four hours at night. “It was killing us,” Swift says. “It was too much.”

They scaled back their herd to 175—coincidentally, right before Whole Foods stopped selling raw milk. Michael, a retired Air Force pilot, now does contract work for a private company and can be away for three months at a time, so Alethea often runs the dairy alone with the help of her daughter.

The goats, which are fed pesticide-free local alfalfa and Bermuda grass, are milked twice a day January through July and once a day when the milk production starts to slow down. It takes about five minutes to milk a dozen goats; the milk is immediately pumped through stainless steel pipes directly to a 300-gallon holding tank and chilled to 34 degrees. When mak-ing cheese, a gentle pasteurization process heats the milk to 145

ARTISAN

Flower of the GoatFor Alethea Swift, making goat milk, cheese, and yogurt to sell as Fiore di

Capra is more than a vocation—it’s a passion.

By Lisa O’Neill | Photography by Tim Fuller


Alethea and Michael's daughter, Caitlyn, says that the goats become part of the family:"We become the mamas."


degrees for 30 minutes instead of going to the highest temperature for a shorter pe-riod of time, a practice sometimes used by larger farms that can result in fresh cheese having a “cooked” taste.

“I think we get a really good flavor,” she says. “A lot of people are surprised. Goat cheese can be very strong. And it turns people off. We get people to taste our cheese because it’s very mild—a good, fresh taste.”

Goat milk is more easily digested than cow milk, and Swift is proud that many babies are being raised on her goat milk. “These moms will call and they have tried all kinds of formula. I can’t imagine a crying, constantly colicky baby. Nothing’s working and they’ll try the goat milk and it works. That’s so exciting for me.”

“People want milk chilled, filtered, and put in a bottle,” Swift says. “That’s what we try to do. You can find lots of weird things in things that are supposed to be just milk.”

Fiore di Capra sells milk, kefir, Greek yogurt, herbed chevre logs, fruit and vegetable tortes, aged cheese, baked and fresh ricotta, and truffles. (They’re one of only a few goat cheese producers in Ari-zona aging their cheese.) The herbs they use come mostly from fellow vendors at the farmers’ market and all the jams for the tortes come from Grammy’s, another local farm.

Swift comes from Italian and Greek ancestry and credits her heritage with her zest for inventing new recipes and flavor profiles. “I think it’s in our blood,” she says, smiling. One of their most popular products is baked ricotta, a family reci-pe passed down from Alethea’s Sicilian great-grandfather.

Inspiration for their name, which trans-lates from Italian as “Flower of the Goat,” struck one Christmas when Alethea and Caitlyn were visiting Michael, who had been sent to Italy for work. While in a store, Alethea saw a cheese named “fiore di latte,” or flower of the milk. Yes! she thought, Flower of the Goat. A friend de-signed the logo, in which a goat is perched inside a purple flower.

The herd is more than a livelihood; they are part of the Swift family. Everyone has their favorites; when some goats must be bottle-fed as babies, after their mothers refuse to recognize them, “We become the mamas,” Caitlyn says. Goat's milk, human hands: Alethea rolls freshly made goat cheese in pomegranate and herbs.


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The dairy itself is a labor of love; the family does all the milking, pasteur-izing, cheesemaking, and delivering. Michael helps with the upkeep of the space. Alethea milks the goats and crafts the cheeses. The mother-daughter duo makes deliveries during the week, often coordinating trips to Tucson with Cait-lyn’s soccer practices, and brings their fare to the Heirloom Farmers’ Market at Rillito Park on Sundays. Their prod-ucts are also sold at Blu: A Cheese and Wine Stop, Tucson’s Food Conspiracy Co-op, and Time Market.

While many teenagers might balk at getting dirty or spending time away from their smartphones, Caitlyn is a farm girl through and through. When she was a baby, Swift used to milk the goats with her snuggled into a front pack. “It’s nice to visit other places, and cities,” Caitlyn says. “But I always want to come home. I love the animals and I like living away from everything.”

But there are still challenges. Hay used to cost five or six dollars a bale when Swift was first breeding and show-ing. “Now, you’re lucky if you get it for $14 and in the winter, it’s $18 or 20,” she says. Those prices add up quickly when the herd is consuming seven bales a day.

Summer months are hard on farmers, when the weather is hot and so many of their customers clear out of town. But Swift has been inspired by the com-munity formed at the farmers’ market. When Fiore Di Capra placed second in the American Cheese Society’s 2014 Festival of Cheese with their Jalapeño Garlic Marinated Chevre, customers arrived early to the Sunday market with the Arizona Daily Star article in hand.

“I didn’t even know the article was out,” Swift says. “I hadn’t seen it or the photo. I was like, wow, people care that a big award happened. They were really excited about it, and sharing the news with each other.” Fiore di Capra’s Jalapeño chevre was chosen from 1,600 entries. Their chevre also received a gold medal in the American Dairy Goat Association Competition in both 2012 and 2013, with a Reserve Best of Show in 2012.

Farm dogs Atlas and Wish follow Alethea and me as we walk through the farm. A little black kitten, Simone, lies in the shade against the hay bales.

The goats of Fiore di Capra forage the desert's wild grasses, giving their milk and cheese a decidedly Southwestrn taste.


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Alethea points to the solar panels on top of the garage that were installed last spring and says they hope to be able to power the dairy with solar as well—a feasible goal, given the surplus of energy they’re already producing at home. To further reduce waste, they also stockpile whey for local farmers to feed animals and manure for those looking to enrich their soil.

One of Alethea’s dreams is to build a cave inside a nearby hill to age wheels of hard cheese. Cheese caves are typically built into hillsides or underground, which controls the temperature and humidity, a challenge in the desert. “People really want the hard cheeses,” she says. “They’re so in demand. But we just don’t have enough space to do as much as we’d like right now.”

The other members of the family are expanding their hori-zons as well. Caitlyn recently requested and received cows and has begun making butter. A few years ago, Michael became interested in bees and has built a hive on the property. They hope to make products featuring their own honey soon.

The dairy will also be expanding by adding sheep’s milk to the menu. While we’re talking, a sheep wanders down a dirt path leading up a hill, baaing. While the goats like to stay on the lower ground, the sheep love to climb up. Weeks ago, after some rainfall, the hill was covered in purple and orange wild-flowers. Swift says, “They were in heaven.”

For Swift, her goat herd is an inextricable part of her life, a passion born young. “I just got attached to them,” she says. “I love the goats and I love what I do.” ✜

Fiore di Capra. P.O. Box 271, Pomerene. 520.586.2081. GoatMilkAndCheese.com.

Lisa O’Neill originally hails from New Orleans but has made her second home in the desert, where she writes and teaches writing. Her favorite food to make is lemon icebox pie.

Above: Michael often travels for work, so Alethea, with Caitlyn's help, is the one who runs the show. Below: Even as the operations at Fiore di Capra diversify, the gregarious goats will always be at the center of the farm.



MEET YOUR FARMER

For years, Larry Park has lived with a medical condition. It wakes him up early in the morning, and recently, he re-tired from the landscaping job he held for years to better

address his needs.That condition? Farming.“It’s a disease,” Larry said flatly. “It just doesn’t get out of

your blood.”Larry and his wife, Eunice, are the growers behind Larry’s

Veggies, a mainstay at farmers’ markets in Tucson and Oro Valley.

What is now a thriving business started several years ago as a backyard garden in a rural section of Marana.

Larry’s green thumb meant that they had an overabundance of squash and other vegetables, but not enough neighbors to take home the extras. The question of what to do with the overflow led them to the local food bank, which they had heard accepted excess produce. Eventually, the Parks went public, pil-ing their vegetables onto a six-foot-long table at the Oro Valley farmers’ market.

“We made $75 [that day], and we thought we were in hog heaven,” Larry says. The pair eventually became regulars at farmers’ markets across the Tucson area. “It all started,” Larry said, “as a little hobby so I’d have some money to take my wife out to dinner.”

“I’m still waiting!” Eunice responds, wryly.

The peopLe who purchase the Parks’ offerings each weekend aren’t just customers. Eunice calls most of them family and knows their birthdays and the names

of their children. “The customers are extremely supportive of you,” she said. “They thank you for growing such good pro-duce.”

The Parks say that’s one of the joys of doing what they do: Providing produce that is not only nutritious, but delights the taste buds as well.

“Commercial farms have provided enough food to keep hunger down,” Larry said, “but we’ve lost the flavor and the nutritional value.”

Their close relationships with their customers came in handy recently when the Parks—along with dozens of other vendors—had to leave their longtime home at St. Philip’s Plaza for their new farmers’ market location at Rillito Park. Many of their customers, the Parks said, made the transition with them. Eunice is the public relations arm of the business, although she makes sure Larry comes along to each farmers’ market.

“He’d rather play in the dirt,” she said. “But people want to talk to him”—to ask how something was grown, or what might come into season soon.

Larry’s Green ThumbAlong with his wife, Eunice, Larry Park grows fresh, flavorful produce

—in spite of himself.

By Michael Mello | Photography by Jeff Smith

Larry Park stands among the seedlings of his success, future veggies to sell at farmers’ markets under the name Larry’s Veggies.



It wasn’t a whim that gave birth to Larry’s Veggies (“Get-ting fresh with your veggies,” the business cards boast).

Larry’s interest in agriculture started in his childhood in Douglas. When he was a sophomore in high school, he purchased an 80-acre plot to begin farming, paying for his purchase by driving tractors for other farms and working at his parents’ hamburger stand.

And it wasn’t as if he had been given lush, soft, ready-to-plant soil. He had to work for it, he said, wresting mesquite from the ground before he could start tilling the earth. Over time, after sinking a well on the property, he was able to en-tice vegetables from the plot and establish a nursery.

“Our children were raised there and helped us on the farm,” Eunice said. As they got older, their children eventual-ly left home—and the farm. At that point, in 2001, “We said, ‘Now, what?’” Eunice recalled.

“Downsizing” is probably too tame a word for what hap-pened next. The couple left their four-bedroom house in Doug-las and moved into a 900 square-foot apartment in Tucson.

Living in an apartment didn’t ease Larry’s love affair with the green. “He tried to go cold turkey on the agriculture thing,” Eunice said. “It didn’t work.”

He populated their patio with 15-gallon buckets stuffed with soil. Because the second-floor patio lacked a water spigot or a hose, he filled smaller buckets in the bathtub, hauling them outside to irrigate his urban crops.

Finally, in 2006, the couple put down new roots, settling on an acre plot among a few other homes in the farthest northern stretches of Marana. When they moved in, the land was emp-ty save for the home and a few palo verde and mesquite trees.

That changed quickly. Larry repurposed large tree stakes that were no longer being used by the landscape company he worked for. These he tied together vertically, augmenting and closing off gaps in the perimeter fence and—Larry says—cre-ating a microclimate on the property by walling out the wind.

After the housing bubble burst, developers no longer needed the enormous, vivid signs designed to draw potential buyers into subdivisions that once smelled of sawdust and fresh paint. Many of those signboards found a new life as side-walls for the 50 raised beds Larry eventually used to produce his vegetables. “Everything here is recycled,” Larry said.

Recycling isn’t the only way the couple is green. Recogniz-ing they make their living in the middle of a vast desert, every little sprout they grow is drip irrigated. “You’re not wasting water that way,” Eunice Park said.

“He tried to go cold turkey on the agriculture thing. It didn’t work.”

Larry and Eunice recently recolated their farm to formerly fallowed fields in Marana.



Many of the farm’s plants start out as “plugs,” seeds inserted into soil within small, cylindrical holes in a large piece of foam. After the seeds germinate, the plugs are transplanted into a raised bed or the open field. Each week, 3,000 to 4,000 of these plugs are put in the ground.

Now that Larry is retired—at least from his old job—they’re expanding production, and have leased five acres of land nearby.

Lack of diversity is not an issue with this farm; fig and pome-

granate trees will soon displace packed soil. Larry also intends to try out a lineup of vine treats, including blueberries, boysen-berries, strawberries, and grapes.

The Parks offer a healthy variety of produce for their customers, but they admit it’s not easy. “People will see your onions and other produce and think, ‘You’re making a fortune doing this,’” Larry said. “Then they try it, and it’s not [easy]. You’re going to lose a crop or two.”

It’s in the name: Larry’s Veggies is all about the vegetables, providing an array of locally grown greens, squash, tomatoes, and herbs for fall.


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T o the east and west of the Parks’ new fields, cotton and alfalfa sprout encouragingly, but the five acres the Parks leased have lain fallow for about a dozen years. Beets,

sweet potatoes, spinach, celery and watermelon already populate parts of the plot, but the high piles of horse manure at the site—along with the withering watermelon vines just waiting to be ploughed under—will soon add more of the organic matter that Larry says it needs to flourish. Already 150 tons of manure and other organic matter has been added, but Larry won’t be happy until he gets an abundance of his favorite tenants: earthworms.

It’s hard work, but Larry has been there before. It’s exactly the way he wants to spend his retirement.

Over the years, “We’ve had some years where we’ve made some good money and we’ve lost some good money,” Larry said. “As I get older, it’s about doing something that I love.” ✜

Larry’s Veggies. 520.250.2655. Facebook.com/LarrysVeggies.

Michael Mello is a writer who has worked for The Orange County Register and The Los Angeles Times. He is currently lost in Arizona.

Larry nutures seeds into seedlings before sending them into the earth to become crops.


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PURVEYORS

Chimichanga!Chasing a Southwestern food icon.

By Ken Lamberton | Photography by Liora K

At a table draped with red plastic, we eat chips and salsa. Norteño music plays from a radio in the kitchen. Dark-haired waitresses with square jaws crisscross the red and

white tiled floor like pieces on a checkers board. A newspaper article mounted to the wall says that La Fiesta Café won first place for Best Mexican Dish at a food show commemorating the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Is this still Arizona? Maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere in the dark.

In January, I begin my quest for Arizona’s best chimichanga in Douglas, half a mile from Mexico, by ordering a green chile chimi, enchilada style. My wife, Karen, asks about the ground beef tacos, if they’re deep-fried the way her father makes them. When the cheese-crisp appetizer comes, I taste mesquite-wood smoke. “Only in Mexico can you find tortillas as good as this,” I tell her. She knows. She was raised on tortillas from across the border.

My chimichanga fills the plate. Twin ice-cream scoops of sour cream and guacamole mound the bulging tortilla set in chopped lettuce and tomato. The chile is sinus-expanding, the shredded beef dark and moist within its deep-fried shell.

“You’re going to have to develop some kind of point system, you know,” Karen suggests.

“Like a zero-to-five scale? Zero being a numb state of food consciousness?” I lower my voice and announce: “You are barely aware that you are chewing. The flat texture and tastelessness in your mouth may put you to sleep face down in the refried beans.” I make a few notes on my napkin: “Category 5: Orgasmic. One bite and

people will ask if you want to be alone with your meal.” “Very funny,” she says. “You’ll also have to choose one

kind—green or red chile, chicken, beef, bean, or carne seca.”“I’ll stick with green chile. But I’m already biased. How can

anything beat Pancho’s?”I tasted my first chimichanga at Pancho’s on Grant in Tuc-

son when I was 9. Forty-seven years ago and I remember it like it was this morning. Carne seca. Rolled into a thin flour tortilla the size of a sombrero, and covered with a jacket of melted cheese, lettuce, and guacamole. I had to eat it with farm implements.

Pancho’s is long gone, but I’ve recently learned that Tuc-son’s El Charro Café and Phoenix’s Macayo’s Mexican Kitchen are laying claim to inventing the “thingamajig,” the G-rated translation of “chimichanga.” The word is probably an adap-tation of a Mexican curse word, one you might hear coming out of a kitchen after someone knocks a heavy bean burro into boiling lard. Which is exactly what the restaurant’s founder, Monica Flin, did at El Charro in the early 1950s, according to her great-niece, Carlotta Flores. Macayo’s president, Sharisse Johnson, however, insists that her late father, Woody Johnson, created it in 1946 when he deep-fried unsold burros to serve the following day.

Like all good chimis, the burro at Macayo’s comes smothered in sauce and with a generous side of refried beans.


“I’m searching for the best chimichanga in Arizona,” I announce the next month as I enter the Tumacácori Restaurant directly across from the historic mission.

“I can help you with that,” says Robert Ziegler, Jr.—his fa-ther, Robert Ziegler, opened the restaurant three decades ago. “The brisket is really good. I only use brisket.”

While he prepares my order, we talk chimichanga history. “I remember my first chimichanga when I was a kid growing up in Tucson,” I say. “It was huge, and covered with melted cheese and guacamole.”

“Tell me where—I know all the Mexican restaurants in Tuc-son.”

“Pancho’s, on Speedway, I think. There was a giant burning candle. It was family-owned, but it’s been gone for years.”

“Oh, yeah, Pancho’s on Grant Road,” he corrects me. “I miss that place.”

Maria brings salsa and chips, and asks what I’d like to drink. When I say Corona, her husband, Robert Sr., rises to his feet and slow-steps to fetch the beer from the cooler.

“How long have you two been together?” I ask the elder Robert.

“Married 30 years,” he says.“How many?” Maria interjects from the kitchen. “Fifty!”The two have been running the Greek/Mexican restaurant

for half their married lives. Robert Ziegler, a World War II Army veteran, is 90 and still retains a full head of white hair. He was born in Mexico where his dad worked on the railroad during the Depression, and met Maria in Nogales.

“Where my wife is from,” Robert says, pointing to the pho-tographs and paintings of Greek seaports and ruins on the walls.

My chimichanga arrives, covered with crisp lettuce and tomato, Spanish rice, and refried beans on the side. I cut into it with the edge of my fork. The brisket falls apart and spills out of the flaky tortilla along with freshly chopped green chiles. Steam rises and I inhale the tang of backyard summer cilantro. Category 3: Your taste buds come to attention and blood vessels dilate. Every chile on the planet becomes your best friend.

It is the best chimichanga since my childhood.

The word chimichanga is probably an adaptation of a Mexican curse word, one you might hear coming out of a kitchen after someone

knocks a heavy bean burro into boiling lard.


“I’m here for Woody’s so-called original chimi,” I tell our server, Martín, at Macayo’s restaurant. “You know, El Charro says they invented it.”

He laughs. “My father’s father was eating them in Nogales, Sonora, when he was a kid. He called them ‘chivichangas.’ I laugh every time I hear this story.” He looks like he’s enjoyed a few chivichangas himself.

Plastic macaws fly overhead among pine vigas. Spanish ballads play from hidden speakers. Karen orders a Patrón mar-garita for me while I look over the menu. It’s a mix of history and recipe, and I fill my journal with notes: The marriage of high-school sweethearts Woody and Victoria Johnson, Ma-cayo’s founders. The opening of the first restaurants in Phoenix and Tucson.

Woody’s story about inventing the chimichanga is familiar: “Legend has it that one day in 1946, Woody Johnson … acci-dentally dropped a meat-filled burro into a fryer, creating what is now a staple of Mexican restaurants across the Southwest.” This sounds suspiciously like Monica Flin’s claim at El Char-ro. I thought Johnson’s daughter Sharisse said her late father created it when he began frying up leftover burros to sell the following day … The mystery thickens. Like flan.

Martín takes my camera and snaps a picture of Karen and me with our food. Maybe it’s the Patrón tequila but the Chi-michanga de Macayo definitely floats to the top of the deep fryer. It approaches Category 4: You feel your skin expand with your awareness of the greater universe. Just the word “chimichanga” causes you to salivate.

I’ve spent the summer tasting chimichangas across Baja Ar-izona—15 Mexican food joints with names like Santiago’s and Tacho’s and Café Piedra Roja (Category 1: Grease and ash with a hint of lard.) Just in Tucson, I’ve dined at Casa Molina, El Minuto, Mi Nidito’s, Guillermo’s Double L, and, of course, El

Charro, the country’s oldest Mexican restaurant. All have fallen short of my memories of Pancho’s chimichanga. But now I’m hearing rumors about a Globe restaurant having the best green chile in the state and a chimichanga that’s unlike any other.

At La Casita Café’s location in Thatcher, a replica of Leon-ardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper hangs above a fireplace mantle crowded with ceramic figures of mustachioed and sombreroed Mexicans. “I hope this isn’t our last supper,” I tell Karen when she points out the painting. After mocking the popcorn ceiling and fake wood paneling, I turn over the menu to a picture of vaqueros riding bareback with reins flying. Paso de la Muerte, it reads—passage of death. “Great,” I say.

My resolve is wearing thin. How many chimichangas can one person eat in a year? In Revenge of the Saguaro, Tom Miller writes, “you know your chimichanga is authentic if an hour after eating it, you feel a log gently rolling around in your stomach.”

According to the menu, La Casita got started in Globe in 1947 and still uses Mother Salustia Reynoso’s original recipes. I order the green chile with rice and beans.

I harbor a fantasy that good food should have soul. That it should taste like a poem. There should be stanzas of flavor—smoke and wood, salt and oil, meat and vegetable—that come together to create something greater than the individual parts. A taste that becomes music with rhythm and texture. When asked what part of a poem should be the best, Arizona’s poet laureate Alberto Rios says, “It better be the part I’m reading.” The same can be said for food. The best part better be the part I’m eating.

After my first bite of Mother Reynoso’s chimi, surprising even myself, I tell Karen: “Another Category 4. I’m going to put it in my top three. Up there with El Charro and Macayo’s.” I had expected something greasy, but it tasted freshly baked with a pungent, green-chile Velcro clinging to the tongue.

There’s no right way to make a chimi, but one way is to pan fry it.


Sunday, November 23, 2014 • 9:00 a.m. – Noon

RSVP and invite your friends at facebook.com/watershedmg/events.

You’re invited to share a fun-� lled morning in celebration of the delicious shade of mesquite, pomegranate, olive, and other edible native and desert-adapted trees. Enjoy live music, an artisan market, and educational

presentations as you explore sustainability practices in action at WMG’s Living Lab and Learning Center. And come hungry!—we’re continuing a tasty Tucson tradition with the Mesquite Pancake Breakfast.

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You can have your shade—and eat it t

oo!

On a november evening, Karen and I slip into the near-empty town of Globe and pull into Chalo’s Casa de Reynoso. We find a seat at a plastic booth. The Vir-

gin of Guadalupe hangs above us on a wall next to a picture of a bull fighter. I’m reminded of Edward Abbey’s U-Et-Yet? Café.

While Karen considers beef tacos, I order another green chile chimi—this one “spicy.” Globe, they say, is all about Mexican food. The green chile is to die for. In fact, we meet a couple who drove 100 miles from Tucson just for the gollo burro, a flour tortilla filled with green chile pork, beans, cheese, and topped with butter.

“The burro was first created when someone rolled meat in-side a tortilla to keep it warm,” our tall, brunette server tells us when I ask about the famous burrito. “Look it up on Google,” she says. “And it’s ‘burro’ not ‘burrito,’” she adds, rolling the r’s perfectly. “A burrito is what you get in California or at Taco Bell.”

Her name is Roberta and she knows her food history. Her dark eyes narrow and she dismisses the chimichanga story I tell her about Macayo’s and El Charro, waving an arm as if shooing a fly. “Chivichangas is nothing new! In Mexico they fry everything! We bake our

chimichangas. We don’t want the oil to soak in and change the flavor of the meat.”

Did someone accidentally drop a burro into the oven? I ask her about a photograph of Salustia and Pedro Reynoso on the wall. She retrieves and unrolls a poster of Reynoso restaurants. There must be more than a dozen names on it and as many towns—I recognize La Casita in Thatcher.

“We were there just last week!” I say. “I ate my first baked chimichanga there!”

“Salustia started the first restaurant with her three sisters in the 1930s. All of these sprang from these four women,” says Ro-berta. Roberta’s husband, Gonzalo Anthony Reynoso Jr., “Cha-lo,” is the third generation. He started his place—the fourth restaurant on the list—in 1969. “Nobody wrote the recipes down. It was all in their heads. If something were to happen to him, this food as we know it would be done. When Sunset Mag-

azine came here, I wouldn’t give the editor the recipes. I couldn’t!”

A sense of place and histo-ry and culture you can taste, I think, miming Michael Pollan. As with all things, taste has its complications. A bite of chimichanga comes with layers, each one an echo of something elemental. The tortilla’s

The chimi at Tumacácori Restaurant comes topped with lettuce, tomato, and red onion—so it’s sort of healthy, right?

In Revenge of the Saguaro, Tom Miller writes, “you know your chimichanga is authentic if an hour after eating it, you feel a log gently rolling around in your stomach.”


CA

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wheat to the soil, the green chile’s chlorophyll to sunlight, the pork to the grain the animal fed on—all elements of earth, water, and sun. A recapitulation of the long contract between animals and plants, Pollan says. Between people and the earth.

Could it be that frying in oil masks this recapitulation, this complication of layers? And that the familia Reynoso knew about this generations ago? Could a traditional chimichanga be baked? When my chimi arrives, I smell the sweet tang of green chile and cubed pork in piecrust. This is it. I’m back at Pancho’s in Tucson when I was 9. Mariachis play from the Uno Mas Lounge in a room lighted by the largest known dripping candle. El Charro’s and Macayo’s chimichangas may have risen to the top of the deep fryer, but this one never fell in. Never fell from grace.

Roberta had told us that Mama Salustia had seven children. “She would not raise her children in Mexico. She wanted them brought up in the United States.” Today, those children, and their children, carry on a tradition of Sonoran-style Mexican food that has spread to 17 restaurants in a dozen towns across Arizona. Pick any one of them. From Thatcher to Show Low, Mammoth to Phoenix, the House of Reynoso has the best chi-michanga in Arizona, the place of its birth. ✜

Ken Lamberton’s latest book, Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2011. This essay is from his next book, Chasing Ar-izona: One Man’s Year-Long Obsession with the Grand Canyon State, forthcoming by UA Press in 2015.

Maria Ziegler shows the process behind Tumacácori Restaurant’s famous—or infamous—chimichanga.


Mary Beth Cabana – Founding Artistic Director

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For Arizona’s centennial in 2012, El Charro and Macayo’s began a petition drive to make the chimi-changa the state’s 13th official symbol after such icons as

the cactus wren (state bird), saguaro blossom (state flower), and bolo tie (state neckwear). The initiative never got much traction in the legislature, although the two restaurants and Citizens for Arizona State Food garnered 3,849 signatures. House Speaker Andy Tobin said the T-bone steak would make a more fitting state food. Sen. Steve Farley thought fry bread would honor the state’s Native American culture. Gov. Jan Brewer told reporters, “We certainly have a long heritage of Mexican food in the state of Arizona and I certainly like chimichangas,” but she was unwilling to immortalize them.

“We didn’t get enough votes for it,” the manager at Macay-os told me recently, but more likely the chimichanga never had a chance.

Apparently, the state legislature had better things to do.

Several legislators were against the timing of the proposal, saying that spending time voting on an official state food was preposterous, since the state was mired in economic woes.

But a billion-dollar budget shortfall didn’t stop the legis-lature from adopting our 12th state symbol only a year earlier. To best reflect the history, landscape, and culture of our great state, in May 2011, the legislature selected the Colt .45 Single Action Army Revolver as the official state firearm. The Peacemaker.

What the chimichanga didn’t have was a lobbying force of 40 Republicans, Colt’s Manufacturing Co.—Todd Rathner, a lobbyist employed by Colt, helped write the bill signed by Brewer—and the NRA. Sorry El Charro and Macayo’s. Chimichangas can’t measure up to the world’s right arm. The symbol that embodies Manifest Destiny. Although even Wyatt Earp might disagree, it was Sam Colt, not the chimi-changa, who made all yahoos equal. ✜

Chimichangas

UNITE



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Ore-laden wagons and stagecoaches of the late 19th century first scribed the rutted trails linking the mining towns of Benson, Tombstone, Bisbee, and

Douglas. It’s no coincidence that the towns are strung 20 miles apart, equal to a rough day’s ride by horseback.

We’ve been riding motorcycles for a combined 50 years, shooting photographs and documenting stories along the way. Our paths intersected in Bisbee seven years ago, with a love for motorcycling and adventure. We’ve ridden on back roads in the Southwest, in Mexico, Thailand, and Canada. Curt is the wordsmith and Chuck, the primary photog-rapher. When you get on a motorcycle and rev that engine, you connect with the ma-chine and the road in a different way. You’re more vulnerable, subject to the elements and unknown. Your awareness peaks. You want to go somewhere just to see where the sun sets. And with adventure, comes hunger. Hunger for food and for stories.

So we set out to find an edible adventure along historic Highway 80.

During World War II, domestic defense precipitated the need for a direct route to move materials and equipment from coast to coast. The transcontinental Highway 80, known as “The Broadway of America” was built to link Savannah, Georgia, to San Diego, California. In southeast Arizona, this section of highway served mining towns, which brimmed with extreme wealth—that

is, until the rich mineral deposits played out and powerful copper and silver companies pulled up stakes and left towns to fend for themselves. When U.S. Highway 80 was demoted to State Route 80, the once thriving roadway became a mere exit ramp from the new Interstate 10, squeezing these abandoned communities once again by rerouting traffic away from their main streets.

As their mines closed up and the traffic stopped coming, these abandoned mining towns sought to reinvent themselves. Ben-son turned to ranching and farming while Tombstone looked to tourism, cashing in on its colorful and poetic past. In the mid-’70s, a wave of hippies settled into Bisbee, trans-forming the town into an artistic community. Douglas invited international commerce as a gateway to Mexico. But these inventions and reinventions are still evolving. All the people we interviewed shared a common thread about why they chose to start up a business in rural southeast Arizona—to create a better life for their children or themselves by mak-ing a difference in their communities.

We motorcycled the back roads off one of the longest remaining pieces of the old U.S. 80 seeking out the brave entrepreneurs that prepare beautiful food or grow bountiful farms (plus a few other characters thrown in for fun).

So mount your two-wheeler or put down your top, and spend a couple of days exploring the edible delights along historic Arizona 80.

AN EDIBLE RIDE

Left: All roads lead to ... Highway 80, on a sign that once pointed the way outside Bisbee.

BY CURT STETTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHUCK FEIL

ARIZONA


Just one mile off I-10, in Benson, Mi Casa Restau-rant draws travelers off the freeway not by billboard but

by reputation, says owner Andy Sutton—online reviews from patrons whet the appetites of pas-sengers approaching the Benson exits. Andy’s wife, Santa, creates beautifully presented dishes filled with the flavors of La Paz, Mexico, where she learned to cook along-side her mother—the place where Andy and Santa met 20 years ago. Open Monday to Friday.

732 W. Fourth St., Benson. 520.245.0343.

A half-mile farther into town, after you pass a wonderful western mu-ral, you’ll come across

the classic neon signage of the Horseshoe Café. Patty Columbo and Michael Fagan took over the restaurant in 2010 and revitalized it by im-proving the quality of food, restoring the building’s ir-resistible charm, and started serving Columbo’s delicious homemade pies and cakes.

Open Monday to Saturday. 54 E. Fourth St., Benson. 520.586.2872.

Continuing south along Highway 80, before reaching the Mormon settlement of St. David, don’t miss the roadside stand emblazoned with the sign D&D Pe-cans. As the story goes, in the mid ’90s, Donna and

Donny started selling pecans out of a small trailer. A woman from a nearby RV park wanted a pecan pie with fresh pecans from Donny’s orchard for her Thanksgiving dinner. Donna assembled the ingredients but, running behind, apologized to her customer that she wouldn’t have time to bake it. The customer insisted that she sell her the pie anyway, saying, “I’ll bake it myself”—and the freshly baked pie was the hit of her holiday dinner. The next day, new customers were lining up outside Donna and Donny’s home, requesting un-baked pies. Today, the pies are a piece of history, but their fresh pecans are as tasty as ever, along with a large selection of pistachios and seasonal fruits and vegetables.

Open daily. 2302 W. Patton St., Benson. 520.720.4675.

Above: The Horseshoe Café in Benson features a mural by Doug Quarles. Below: Mi Casa co-owner Santa Sutton roasts green peppers.


Venture behind The Gift of Giving Thrift Store and you’ll find Tombstone residents Del (Doc) and Mary Roach tending a state-of-the art aquaponics

growing system. Years ago, Doc, a former clin-ical psychologist, decided that a combination of global warming and drought would drive up food prices, leaving behind people on fixed incomes; the large geodesic dome behind the thrift shop is Doc and Mary’s answer to the problem of food accessibility. Their aquapon-ics system, which produces both tilapia fish and fresh vegetables, uses 10 to 20 percent less water than a standard garden while producing nearly four times as much food. The Roaches are planning to build three more domes for production, allowing them to market locally produced fish and vegetables for their com-munity in Tombstone.

Open daily. 312 W. Allen St., Tombstone. 520.457.2442.

Like so many people who visit Tomb-stone, Mark Duke wanted to experience the Wild West as it was 130 years ago. He got more than just a gunfight on

Allen Street. Hailing from Oxford, England, Duke became a bit of a hero when he saved a historic building from demolition, starting Wyatt’s Coffee Saloon, Tombstone’s first real coffee shop. He also opened a boutique hotel called Wyatt’s Hotel and saved the pop-ular Doc Holiday “Gunfight” Theater. Stop by for coffee and ice cream confections, with brick oven pizzas coming soon.

Open daily. 109 S. Third St., Tombstone. 520.266.3344

Patty fishlock was a sales manager for Versace when she visited Bisbee’s The Shady Dell; those vintage trailers must have struck a chord within her inner

designer, as it was love at first sight. In Octo-ber 2001, Fishlock and her husband opened the Big Sky Café, and Patty got hooked on a world of matching fresh food to place and people. When she was widowed two years later, “I closed up, rearranged my life [and] found myself regularly slipping into Café Cornucopia in the heart of Old Bisbee for what I’d call beautiful comfort food.” In 2011, when the owners put the café up for sale, she bought them out, and stuck with their popu-lar, fresh-everything menu. Café Cornucopia’s lively little space and wild mix of customers suits her perfectly.

Open Friday to Tuesday. 14 Main St., Bisbee. 520.432.4820.

Above: 30 years ago, Del (Doc) Roach moved with his wife, Mary, from Oregon to Tucson. Below: Highway 80 wraps around the Lavender Pit mine near Bisbee.



Margaret hartnet doesn’t seem like a woman of international intrigue—but her past says otherwise. A former professional chef, Margaret prepared state dinners for

world leaders under the careful eye of the Secret Service. Now her secrets reside in the finishing of olives. Since a major freeze hit the area three years ago, all her specialty regional trees were shocked into nonproduction. Locals deliver olives by the bucketful to her home for processing; she also buys imported green and black olives. She finishes the Moroccan, Spanish (Manzanita), and Sicilian olives with rosemary, garlic, red wine, chiltepines, and red vinegar. She also sells her secret-recipe tapenade and pesto. Enjoy a chat with Margaret and sample her olives at the Bisbee Saturday Farmers’ Market at Vista Park in Warren.

At bisbee’s saturday market, you can also buy some heavenly greens to accompany your oil. Sacred Garden Sanctuary is a sustainable organic farm and intentional

back-to-the-land community located on 40 acres, 10 miles north of Douglas. Even on dual sport motorcycles, we paid close attention to the ruts, sand, boulders, and loose rocks that challenged us to stay upright. Bayse owns the land, and invit-ed a friend, Chris Willhoite, who had extensive plant and soil knowledge, to join the community. A wanderer by heart, Willhoite settled down to work with Bayse to develop the land and feed the region. “We eat and live well here because we do it ourselves, and want people to come and look at Sacred Gardens as a model for how to pro-duce healthy food gardens,” he said. We left the gardens as carefully as we rode in, but this time thinking about Chris’s words: “Most people think we’re farming plants. We’re farming dirt. The dirt we have makes everything possible.”

SacredGardenSanctuary.com. Open by appointment. 520.445.3119.

The boys at the Sacred Sanctuary suggested we stop for a coffee at a new coffee house in downtown Douglas. Douglas was designed by John Slaughter, the lawman and rancher,

and built by Phelps Dodge Mining Company to process copper ore. Walk along G Avenue (Main Street) to see the architecture that lingers from this time of great wealth and prosperity, and swing into Galiano’s Café and Smoothies. The owners, husband-and-wife team Robert Uribe and Jenea Sanchez, named the café after their young son; they serve salads, sandwiches, and smoothies. The rich coffee is imported from Chiapas, Mexico.

Open daily. 1113 G Ave., Douglas. 520.805.0122.

Top: Edwin Bayse shares his vision for the Sacred Garden Sanctuary. Above: Try a taste of the homegrown seasonings Margeret’s Olives.


We were warned that a motorcycle isn’t recommended transport to the agave fields of 47 Ranch, so we substi-tuted Curt’s 4Runner to make the trek. Deb and Dennis Moroney are well known in Cochise Country for their

organically raised beef and lamb, but that wasn’t why we made the trek. No, it was a casual mention of agave that piqued our interest. Inching over rocks and climbing out of washed-out ditches, we suddenly understood why our motorcycles weren’t welcome—the agave plants were dotted over mountainsides. Dennis said he hasn’t yet figured out how to harvest the 400-pound plants, which requires extracting a plant from the ground, rolling it down the mountainside, peeling the leaves, and hauling the 200-pound piña down the road to the barn for processing. We left him pondering the harvest problem, caught between mule and machine.

14 Davis Road, McNeal. Open by appointment. 520.642.9368.

Continuing on highway 80 east out of Douglas, the road takes you north, back to Tucson. But before you hit the open highway, a detour west along Route 533 is worth your time. Also known as Portal Road, the route takes

you straight to the town, café, country store, and lodge that all share the same name—Portal. Nestled at the base of the Chiricahua Mountains, Loni and Mitch Webster’s Portal Peak Lodge is the perfect base to explore the region. After a day of hiking, bird watching, or mountain biking throughout moun-tains with some of the highest biodiversity in the world, head back to the café for a wholesome meal (accompanied by a nice selection of libations). ✜

Open daily. 2358 S. Rock House Road, Portal. PortalPeak-Lodge.com. 520.558.2223.

Dennis Moroney surveys his agave plants at 47 Ranch in McNeal.


Second Saturdays, 5-8pm – Bisbee After 5 ArtWalk - Discover Bisbee’s Vibrant Art Scene. Over 35 galleries and shops open � Every Satur-day, 9am-1pm – Bisbee Farmers Market in Warren’s Vista Park � Wednesdays, 4-7pm – Midweek Organic Market the Gulch in Old Bisbee. Buy Local, eat organic and keep our community aLIVE � Nov. 1st - WhyldAss One Year Anniversary Party + Open Mics Every Friday � Nov. 1st-16th - Central School Project

presents Dia De Los Muertos - Art and Altars Juried Exhibition Nov. 1st-16th � Saturday, Nov. 29th - FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS - "Small Town Holi-day" an old fashioned holiday shopping event throughout historic Bisbee from 10 AM - 8 PM � Friday, Nov. 28th - Saturday, Nov. 29th - 32nd Annual Bisbee Historic Home Tour & 13th Annual "Chairs of Bisbee" Art Chair Auction The Bisbee Woman's Club presents the 32nd Annual Bisbee Historic Home Tour bisbeehometour.com

A n u n u s u a l a r t t o w n b u i l t d e e p i n h i s t o r y . . .

Bisbee ,ArizonaT H I N G S T O D O T H I S S E A S O N I N B I S B E E

s t a y i n b i s b e e

Historic photos courtesy of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum

E X P L O R E B I S B E E

e a t & d r i n k i n b i s b e e



Growing Growing Growing Growing GarbageGrowing

GarbageGarbageGarbageGarbageGarbageIf turning organic waste into compost uses less energy,

cuts emissions, reduces food waste, and, eventually, grows better food—why aren’t we all composting?

By Dan Sorenson | Photography by Steven Meckler


Compost. It’s a nice word for what happens after na-ture’s wrecking crew—microscopic bacteria, fungi, and various other small critters working in the dank dark—deal with our organic waste. It’s near religion

to some, turning food scraps and waste back into food—and a stinking, disgusting mess to others.

Done right, with the correct ratio of aerated “brown” (car-bon-rich material) to “green” (nitrogen-rich material) mixture, it doesn’t stink—much. And at the end of the process it’s actu-ally earthy, pleasant—if you’re a fan of sniffing rich soil. It’ll drastically increase crop yields, especially on our notoriously poor desert soil, or produce green lawns without the chemicals that make an already wasteful practice even worse.

Done wrong, an improper ratio of carbon to nitrogen or under anaerobic conditions—without oxygen—it can turn into a stinking mess attracting bugs and rodents, or produce explosive methane.

Americans, by some esti-mates, throw away 40 percent of the food they buy. Most of it goes into the garbage can, then out to the dumpster to be hauled to a landfill by the municipal dinosaurs that roar down our streets and alleys every few days, hauling off the evidence of our wasteful society. In landfills, our un-eaten food and less degradable trash—plastics, chemicals, heavy metals from batteries, or prematurely dysfunctional Chinese crap—contribute to water and air pollution in an environmentally and econom-ically costly process. It wastes the land it’s on and can pollute the land around it, the water below it and downstream, and the air above it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 18 percent of U.S. methane emissions come from landfills. And while CO2 is more prevalent, the EPA says, “Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 [methane] on climate change is over 20 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.”

We have to burn fossil fuels to get trash to the landfills, and then more to bury it. And, unlike rich and well-balanced com-post, it contributes nothing to our well-being by being buried.

It’s a sweltering summer afternoon as University of Arizona students Emily Soderberg and Madeline Ryder motion across acres of farmland in front of them, a stone’s throw from the San Xavier Mission south of Tucson and

just west of Interstate 19. They struggle to describe the extent of the ocean of red waste they saw here just a few months earli-er, hundreds of thousands of tomatoes, 400,000 pounds, semi-truck loads dumped on this land to be processed into compost. It was the hideously wasteful result of an oversupply that overwhelmed the U.S. market and backed up in the produce brokerage houses of Nogales and Rio Rico last spring.

Nogales is the largest inland U.S. port of entry for produce. The quantities that come through just 70 miles south of Tucson

some weeks could supply en-tire regions of the country. So, giving it to food banks isn’t the whole answer, although Ches-ter Phillips, director of the UA Compost Cats program that employs Ryder and Soderberg, says it is the first call that’s made.

“It was striking and kind of horrifying,” said Phillips, de-scribing the result of the toma-to glut at those border produce brokerage houses. Phillips is ASUA’s (Associated Students of the University of Arizona) sustainability program coor-dinator, the Compost Cats project director, and an avid backyard gardener and long-time composting proponent.

He’s working with others around town to find cold stor-age for this produce, a place to hold it until it can be distribut-ed, processed, or canned. But he said the food banks can only

take so much. It’s in the works, is all he can say for now.“Composting is great, but let’s feed people first. Composting

is not the highest and best use, at least not while people are hungry,” Phillips said.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of true waste, inedible stuff that makes it into the Compost Cats daily stream. Ryder, a UA conservation biology major, is the sales and marketing head of the growing student-run compost project that started just a few years ago picking up scraps from the Student Union. Soderberg, majoring in sustainable built environments, is a Compost Cats

We have to burn fossil fuels to get trash to the landfills,

and then more to bury it. And, unlike rich and

well-balanced compost, it contributes nothing to our

well-being by being buried.


Wanted: Tractor driver. Must love dirt. Students who work for the Compost Cats get real-world farming experience.


technician. They, like Bruno Loya, an environ-mental studies and environmental science double major and the Compost Cats safety manager, have paid positions.

After they pick it up, the student crews form the waste into windrows, long triangular rows of compostable material—everything from land-scape trimmings and those wasted tomatoes and other produce scraps, to “zoo doo,” the herbi-vore dung harvested from the elephants, zebras, giraffes, and other vegetarian quadrupeds at the Reid Park Zoo.

Students use big farm machines to churn the contents of the windrows every few days, check the interior temperatures to make sure it’s hot enough for long enough to kill pathogens and weed seeds, and eventually sift the material to sort out the large woody chunks and other pieces that haven’t been broken down. A percentage of the compost is used by the San Xavier Cooperative Farm and the rest either goes to the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona for its backyard gardening program or is sold to the public to be picked up by the load.

Phillips said Compost Cats quickly grew from picking up waste in the Student Union to servic-ing some local campus-area restaurants, then a couple of Whole Foods stores, and now is in a partnership with the City of Tucson, taking the separated commercial compostable waste that city trucks pick up from stores and restaurants and composting it at the San Xavier Co-op Farm on Tohono O’odham land adjacent to the San Xavier Mission.

“When I was hired,” Phillips said, “I was ba-sically told, ‘There’s this idea that a few students have had to create compost from the food scraps at the Student Union. Make it real.’ That was about it. At that time we never knew we’d grow into what we are now, partnered with the City of Tucson, the Tohono O’odham … In addition we have brokered deals between Student Union restaurants and the [San Xavier Co-op] farm. It means more local foods [on campus] and ex-posure for San Xavier. That partnership at San Xavier is a long-term relationship.

“I love the work we do,” Phillips said. “Every semester there are more [students] coming in. We have about 60 students from sustainability this year. It just keeps growing. The environ-mental bad news isn’t going away any time soon, but there’s a hunger to find something to do about that.”


The Compost Cats have partered with the City of Tucson to accept compostable waste that city trucks pick

up at local businesses and restaurants.

Breaking down organic waste into compost is not just a matter of saving landfill space, avoiding pollution, or cutting down on

food waste, says Emily Rockey, a plant sci-entist working for local compost producer Tank’s Green Stuff. She said better qual-ity compost significantly improves crop production and noticeably reduces water consumption.

Rockey, director of sales and marketing for The Fairfax Companies, owner of Tuc-son-based Tank’s Green Stuff, is a Univer-sity of Arizona plant science grad. “I did a grow study using compost, Tank’s product versus [national brands],” Rockey said. “I planted directly in our compost, compared it to some of these others that you’ll find in big box stores. I used 100 percent compost and [planted] some veggies, flowers, and kale, and the same amount of water and sunlight, no additions. And then I weighed them afterwards.” She found the plants grown in the locally produced compost had, on average, 20 times greater mass.

She attributes some of the success to water retention. “Our compost has varied size particles [which is] important for moisture and drainage,” Rockey said.

She and Fairfax CEO Jason Tankersley also say their compost has more nutrition-al content because it contains less sawdust and filler than the national brands sold by the bag. And while it sounds odd to brag about manure, Tankersley said it’s a big deal to him that their compost contains 30 percent organic dairy manure from Shamrock Farms.

“It’s very important to me,” Tankersley said, “that we know we’re not using pet-rochemicals. We’re using organic certified sulfur amendments,” which is added to compost to balance it. “And we use a cer-tified organic microbial mix called Bacti-Feed, which helps break it down and helps build a healthy environment in the soil.”

Tank’s Green Stuff is Tucson’s largest local producer of commercial compost; it’s sold by the bag at Ace Hardware stores and nurseries in Tucson, Green Valley, Sierra Vista, and Bisbee, or delivered in bulk by truck.


After Compost Cats students pick up waste from local businesses, they dump it into windrows,

long triangular rows of garbage that will soon become soil.


The closer composting gets to the source of its com-ponents and the place it will be used, the less waste—and cost—added by transportation and packing. But there are obstacles. Composting in backyards and at

school and community gardens is ideal, but it requires some understanding of the ratio of inputs needed, which aren’t always consistently available on a small scale.

Successful aerobic composting requires a proper mixture of what is referred to as “brown”—leaves, straw, newspaper, sawdust and wood chips, corn stalks—and “green”—food scraps, vegetable and fruit scraps, fresh grass and weeds, coffee grounds, chicken manure, garden debris such as dead flowers, plant leaves, and stems. Brown is high in carbon, while green is high in nitrogen; you want a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of be-tween 25 and 30 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. If there’s too much carbon, decomposition slows down to a near halt. A pile of dry wood can last for ages under certain conditions. And if there’s too much nitrogen, you get a stinking mess.

Most stuff we’re likely to throw into a compost pile, bin, or drum will have some carbon and some nitrogen—and proba-bly not a 30 to 1 ratio. Hitting the magic ratio is trickier than

throwing in 30 handfuls of leaves for every handful of table scraps.

There are dozens of books and pamphlets on composting, and nearly as many devices that promise to make it easy. The best are easy to roll, tumble, or rotate so you can mix the con-tents frequently.

“I got into gardening because I’m named for a victory gardener who fed eight people, my mother’s grandmother Martha,” says Martha Retallick, a Tucson photographer, copy-writer, and web designer. To Retallick, composting is a natural part of gardening.

“I started it out by using five-gallon pots and sticking my hand in to mix it up,” Retallick said. She recently switched to a rotating horizontal 55-gallon barrel composter she bought off Craigslist. “My brown material is what falls from my mesquite tree. The green material is what comes out of the kitchen.” Some of it she chops up to speed up the process—usually about three months for a load to turn into usable humus.

In our dry, hot Arizona air, she said keeping the mixture moist, as well as turned, is important. “Otherwise it’ll dry out and instead of compost you’ll have an archive.”


The Compost Cats now collect “zoo doo,” the herbivore dung harvested from elephants and other vegetarian quadrupeds at the Reid Park Zoo.


Moses thompson’s a Pied Piper, but with kids in-stead of rats. The students of Manzo Elementary follow him around the school’s former courtyard even after school, shouting, “Mister, mister!” They

want to check the worms in the vermiculture tank, pick pro-duce, or feed bugs to the chickens in the school’s center court-yard-turned farm.

They’re into Manzo’s—Thompson’s—gardening program, even the grubby sometimes-smelly composting part of it. Organic egg-producing chickens, a greenhouse with a jungle full of tilapia-fueled aquaculture plants, a garden of radishes, kale, and other healthful greens—and bins of ripening compost. There’s also a big, oblong galvanized stock tank where a herd of red wiggler earthworms turns cafeteria food waste into soil in short order.

The kids love the worms, said Thompson. They sift the worms’ output, the byproduct of the mixture of food scraps and straw and wood chips donated by a local landscaper, removing the worms and the larger undigested pieces. They move that from the dark, rich soil, back into the compost production line, where the worms continue the process with a fresh load of input material.

“We use all the gardening we do here academically,” he said. As the kids sift the worms out of the coarser, unfinished ma-terial, they keep track of the worm population. A white board has nine groups of four vertical lines, each with a diagonal slash through it, plus two more vertical lines. “We’re teaching the kids to count in groups of five,” says Thompson of the day’s census of the 47-worm herd.

But worm ranching is a richer school’s game. These days, Thompson said, red wigglers—the most efficient species for vermiculture—go for $20 a pound, plus shipping. So vermicul-ture takes a back seat to bin composting. Each school day stu-dents add carefully sorted lunchroom waste to one bin.

“The most responsible thing you can do with your food is eat it,” Thompson said he tells the students about the lunch program vegetables and fruit served at Manzo. “Even compost-ing is not a good use of those resources, the water that was used, the transportation, the packaging. The best return on school lunches needs to be in nutrition to the kids. Composting is only a better option to sending it to the landfill.”

Thompson started out as a counselor at Manzo in Barrio Hollywood, an old Tucson Unified School District school be-tween West Speedway and St. Mary’s Road; he now runs the

At Manzo Elementary, students learn math through compost, counting out red wiggler worms from their vermiculture bins in groups of five.



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gardening programs for 10 TUSD schools. He has a master’s degree in counseling from Iowa State University. Thompson said the school’s gardening and composting program is a nat-ural match for counseling, and that’s how Manzo’s program started. “Kids associate the office with stress; it’s where you go when you’re in trouble. But out here, they’re on more of an equal footing. They have buy-in,” Thompson said.

There are eight bins for compost. Waste, mostly food scraps from the cafeteria, are added each school day. This is all done by the kids, down to churning the compost with pitch forks.

“We teach tool safety,” Thompson quickly points out. Each of the eight compost pens is churned every school day. But before that, the temperature of each is measured by a student and the internal temperature entered on a log. Internal temperatures need to get up to about 160 degrees to kill seeds, undesirable bacteria, and pathogens.

Thompson said the produce and eggs are sold to Manzo students’ parents at a discount, since the students labored to produce them. The rest is sold at a Manzo farmers’ market.

A focused approach: Students take the temperature in the compost piles daily, learning how to record scientific data in the process.



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Big composting operations like the UA Compost Cats and Tank’s Green Stuff, the restaurants and grocery stores that segregate their compostable trash and pay to have it picked up, and the little school programs

and community gardens all add up. But the organic waste of a metropolitan area of one million dwarfs the rest. And right now, there’s no one answer.

The city is working on that. The City of Tucson’s

Environmental Services Department took over collection of compostable material from Compost Cats’ 14 campus-area businesses in late June and is continuing to add busi-nesses, said Sherri Ludlam, a plant scientist working on the program. But she said the city collection department is only adding businesses in locations roughly contiguous to the current route. Ludlam said they have extended the twice weekly commercial pickup route beyond the UA and downtown corri-dor up North Campbell Avenue and over to Amphi High School.

Staff members of the UA’s Compost Cats are training employees to avoid contaminating the source material at busi-nesses where they collect future compost. When a standard city refuse truck drops off commercial compostables at the San Xavier Farm twice a week, Compost Cat workers have to pick through the long windrows of compost material to remove non-biodegradable debris like plastic produce baskets and product stickers.

Ludlam said the pro-gram is a one-year experi-ment that will be evaluated to determine whether it will be terminated, contin-ued, or expanded. “We have to figure out what it’s costing us [to provide the service]. Since we’re a department of the city government, we have to cover our cost, but we don’t have to make a profit,” Ludlam said.

The city charges commercial customers $20 a month for once-a-week pickup and $40 a month for two pickups per week, no matter how much material they leave out. Ludlum said some customers have left as much as two tons for a single pickup. And she said one prospective customer has the potential to have as much as 10 tons per week.

Asked if there have been any surprises during the first few months of the new service, Ludlam said, “Surprises? Well, I

don’t think it smells as bad as you’d think in Arizona heat. That’s unless it’s con-taminated with protein. And I never gave much thought to how much it weighed.” Ludlam said the compostable waste is re-markably dense, so heavy that containers can’t be filled to the top.

She and other city environmental services staffers said there has been no discussion of expanding compostable pickup to res-idential customers.

“Locally we do have Scraps on Scraps,” Ludlam said, referring to a new company offering residen-tial pickup as a subscrip-tion service.

Scraps on Scraps pro-vides customers with an airtight and watertight five-gallon plastic bucket that the company picks up every other week for a $13 monthly fee. They take the full can and leave a clean empty can. For $7, residential customers can drop off a bucket of compostable material every other week at the Thursday Santa Cruz Valley Farmers’ Market at the Mercado San Agustin or the Sunday Heirloom Farmers Market at Rillito Park. For just $2 a month more, they can drop off a bucket every week. The collected compostable ma-terial is turned over to the

Community Food Bank’s Las Milpitas Farm for composting.Since the business started in January, Shannon Sartin, one of

the founders, said it has been adding an average of two custom-ers a week, reaching a total of about 60 residential customers.

Food waste from the Manzo cafeteria that doesn’t become compost becomes chicken feed (and, eventually, fuel for egg laying).



She expects to add some commercial customers later in the year.With roughly 100 U.S. cities already providing curbside

composting, a local residential program would seem inevitable. But the discussion isn’t yet on the table in Tucson, according to Cristina Polsgrove of the city’s Environmental Services Di-vision. They get asked about home composting a lot, she said. “The answer is if we put another container out there, that’s going to increase costs.

“There’s a fixed cost with just putting the truck out on the street. It would have to be done as a separate pickup. Our trucks we have now have only one compartment. With recycling,

you can get everybody. But our costs are based on those two containers. We don’t have a way to process those materials,” she said. “The question becomes, do enough customers want to pay an additional fee to make it economically viable for the customer and our department? Do the Compost Cats have the ability to take on that [volume] of processing?” ✜

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Dan Sorenson is a longtime Tucson newspaper reporter, freelance writer, musician, and more recent gardener.

By basing their operations at the San Xavier Co-op Farm, the Compost Cats have been able to accept more waste to turn into compost.



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Jason tankersley has a diabolical—yet environmentally positive—business model.

A near constant line of landscaping crew trucks pulling those familiar, rattling metal mesh-sided trailers rumbles

into Tank’s Green Stuff’s East Side lot throughout the day. The company’s huge lot and landfill is in the 7300 block of East Speedway, next to and behind the East Side City Hall. The landscapers are there to dump the grass, hedges, and branches they’ve accumulated in the big trailers—which are also stuffed with leaf blowers, rakes, shovels, and the other implements for reversing the effects of photosynthesis run wild in the desert sun. It’s an endless cycle here, as long as the water and sun hold out.

Tankersley’s crew weighs the stuff being disposed of, charges the landscapers $30 a ton, and then, on the way out, sells them some compost or mulch made out of the very stuff they were paying to drop off. Brilliant.

It’s an all-around good deal. It saves the landscapers a longer haul to an outlying landfill, and they can pick up supplies they’ll need anyway. It’s actually just a commercial reflection of the way all composting works, with a little charge for value added. You take a plant, give nature a little help breaking it down, and it produces a nutritious base to grow more vegetation.

At first, Tankersley said, the beautiful financial simplicity of it didn’t work quite that way. But now, just over three years into

the Tank’s Green Stuff story, it’s so popular, they’re having a hard time keeping up with demand.

Their product kind of sells itself, he said. Compost and mulch help conserve water on landscaping while promoting plant growth.

While he’s started doing big volume business with some golf courses and commercial landscapers, he credits gardeners with much of Tank’s success. “It really started with the garden-ers,” he said. “I got on Facebook and started communicating with Tucson Backyard Gardeners.” Now, it’s common to see members of the gardening group recommend Tank’s when a newcomer raises a question about how to enrich a garden plot or just where to find compost.

“We got into a couple of the Ace Hardware stores and people saw the benefits, the water savings, stopped using fertilizer and things that kill the healthy soil. A lot of these compost products you see out on the market are almost solid sawdust packed with fertilizer, basically toxic to the soil in the long run.”

Beyond not using sawdust and other non-nutritious fillers, Tankersley said they also avoid using cactus and palm in the compost mix.

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4th AvenueThe Crazy Heart of TucsonSHOPPING • DRINKS • VINTAGE • FASHION • FOOD


Sonora has never been known for culinary excellence. Unlike Oaxaca, it is not the land of fried grasshoppers, complex moles, or endless arrays of chiles and spices. In

contrast, Sonora has been snubbed as the place where, in the words of José Vasconcelos, “civilization ends and carne asada begins.”

However, Sonoran cooking is deceptively complex. Sonoran cooking evolved as a brilliant response to the harsh and arid climate of the Sonoran Desert, which is characterized by a lack of diverse food products. Hundreds of years ago, threatened with constant attacks by Apaches, “There wasn’t a lot of time to sit around playing the piano,” said one Sonoran friend. There was, instead, a need to bring to the table food that was filling, nutritious, and flavorful.

North of the border, Sonoran food all too often consists of oversized, bland burritos, excessive amounts of gooey yellow cheese, and watery salsa made with canned and unripe ingre-dients. In reality, the traditional food of Sonora demonstrates a sophisticated and intelligent use of local and seasonal ingre-dients.

The city of Hermosillo is a city in transition when it comes to food and cultural arts. In addition to many well-executed tra-ditional classics, cooks and chefs are extracting new tastes from the austerity of the surrounding landscape. In other words, as my friend and author, Alan Weisman, wrote about Hermosillo in 1988 for the now-defunct City magazine, “It is no longer the place where civilization ends.” City magazine editor Chuck Bowden wanted Alan to write something that would enable readers to understand that Hermosillo was more than just a

bunch of stop lights between Tucson and the beach at Bahia Kino. It is a worthy destination in itself.

Where is Hermosillo? It is a comfortable, three-hour drive south of Nogales on a well-maintained, four-lane road that leads to a modern and progressive city with a population of around 800,000.

The idea of touring eating places in Hermosillo came out of conversations between me and Ernesto Camou Healy, a former researcher at Hermosillo’s CIAD (Centro de Investigacion en Alimentación y Desarrollo) with a Ph.D. in social anthropol-ogy. The opportunity to sample diverse foods throughout the city sounded ever so intriguing, irresistible, and delightful, even though it would most likely be exhausting. Sonoran hospital-ity, whether in a home or on the street, has a simplicity and completeness that stands in stark contrast to the rapid pace of modern life.

Ernesto was the perfect companion for a culinary adventure of this type. Both he and his wife, Emma Paulina, are highly regarded and well-published anthropologists who have written extensively about Sonoran rural culture and foods.

At best, this article represents a very small sampling of the many great food venues available in the city of Hermosillo. Al-though Sonora is a meat-oriented state, vegetarian options can be found at every place reviewed below.

SABORES DE SONORA

Destino: HermosilloFrom food carts to fusion Sonorense—an eating tour of Hermosillo.

Text and photography by Bill Steen

The menu chalkboard at La Hacienda restaurant shows the daily specials and the chef’s recommendations.



Taqueria el Chino Mario

Deciding how to begin our tour was easy for Ernesto. “We should begin with what is a common tradition here in Mexico, unique by re-gion, los tacos mananeros (morning tacos),” he said. “For some they can be breakfast, for others a morning snack or even an almuerzo (early lunch). Typically, they consist of slow-cooked meats, stews, and, for those wish-ing a lighter fare, quesadillas or frijoles. And of course they are popular for hangovers.”

Tacos mananeros are typically eaten either while standing at puestos callejeros (street carts) or sitting at open-air taquerias that open anywhere from 5 to 6 in the morning. We began our expedition on a Monday morning at the popular Taqueria el Chino Mario. It’s a delightful, clean, open-air taqueria with metal tables situated under the shade of a large ficus tree.

Maria Antonieto Romo greeted us at the counter. Maria, who has worked for the owner of the taqueria, Mario Valenzuela Vera, for 23 years, opens the taqueria daily at 6 a.m. and closes it at 1 p.m. After clos-ing, she begins cooking the meats for the following day, goes home, and rises again at 3 a.m. to begin preparations for the next day. Her husband has also worked as a taquero, making tacos for more than 40 years.

Ernesto tells me, “Here beef is the common ingredient. Most popular are the tacos de cabeza (meat from the skull), but you can also order tacos de lengua, sesos, ojos, cachetes (tongue, brains, eyes, and cheeks). To bring out the taste, you can choose from a variety of salsas, finely chopped onions, cabbage, and lime. You have to be careful because they are very juicy and it is difficult to eat four to five tacos without messing up your shirt. It is a good idea to tuck in one’s tummy.”

Intersection of De Anza and Roman Yocupicio

Double AA Tacos—Taco Fish

Next stop was a taquería serving a newer variation of tacos mananeros, fish, shrimp, and cahuamanta (manta ray). Cooked in a batter, they might be described as a Baja-Sonora-Japanese fusión. Mayonnaise, chopped vegetables, and salsas complete the tacos.

From behind a shiny food cart that occupies a prominent space in the open-air eating area, German Palafox, brother of the owner, Abel Palafox, is there to greet you with a smile when you enter Double AA Tacos—Taco Fish. The atmosphere is bright, the place spotless.

Ernesto suggested we try the cahuamanta tacos, saying, “Cahuamanta is served either as tacos on corn tortillas or as a delicious caldo (soup) with small pieces of manta, tomatoes, carrots, celery, and spices. It is fantastic either as tacos or soup and it is typically served with finely shredded cabbage, onions, lime and a salsa prepared from chile del arbol. The ta-cos are particularly great when accompanied by the clear broth known as bichy.” Cahuamanta was invented as a substitute for tacos and soups prepared from sea turtles, known as caguama, which have been placed on the endangered species list.

Intersection of Calle General Escobedo and Veracruz

Clockwise, from left: Tacos de cabeza are made the meat from the head of the cow, topped with chopped onions and cilantro. The outdoor seating area at Taqueria El Chino Mario stays full throughout the day. Maria Antonieto Romo has managed the taqueria for 20 years. German German Palafox, manager of Double AA—

Taco Fish and brother of owner, Abel Palafox, smiles with cashier, Brende. The “taco fish” comes full of fish, shrimp, marlin, and chile relleno.


Las Mujeres de Don Juan

What I remember most about this tiny, cute, open-air restaurant in the middle of Ejido Victoria, on the north end of Hermosillo, were the smiling faces of several women upon our arrival—and their delight upon seeing Ernesto. Las Mujeres de Don Juan is one of his favorite stops. The restaurant is run by three women, Dona Aure-lia Contreras and her two daughters, Maria Antonieta and Adelita. “This is the place to go when you want fantastic, classic, simple, Sonoran food,” says Ernesto. When Dona Aurelia’s husband, Don Juan died, she and the daughters opened the restaurant as a tribute to him. Dona Aurelia makes all the day’s tortillas, both the small tortillas de ha-rina (wheat flour), called gorditas, and the large tortillas de harina that span almost 30 inches in diameter.

“The tamales are the best you will ever have,” says Ernes-to. “The daily traditional soups such as cocido, cazuela, gallina pinta don’t get any better … This food is the countryside, the streets, the heart of Mexico.”

My favorite meal of the day was a quesadilla made with Dona Au-relia’s gorditas, Sonoran cheese, and a side of chiltepin salsa, accompa-nied by Sonora’s traditional café colado, made from pan-roasted coffee beans with a raw sugar glaze.

Coming into Hermosillo, take a left at La Victoria and continue for approximately a mile and a half. The restaurant is on the right.

Mochomos

A voluminous voice from the back of the room greeted us. The voice was that of Alfonso Lira, the owner of Mochomos, an innovative, modern restaurant. His chef is Sergio Ivan Ruiz, who was formally trained in San Francisco. Since opening in 2010, they’ve continued to redefine the culinary map of Sonora by offering a sophisticated and contemporary version of Sono-ra cuisine. The word mochomos traditionally refers to a type of Sonoran ant; it’s also used as the name for dried shredded beef, machaca, that has been fried crisp.

We began with bocadillos de atun, cubes of Ahi tuna braised to perfection and served on lightly toasted crackers, topped with salmon mousse and a pepper sauce. Next came the papada de puerco, pork meat from the throat or chin grilled Mochomos-style. Completing the meal were servings of calamar rebozado de la casa, pieces of breaded and pan fried squid; pulpo al grill, small fillet pieces of octopus with a garlic, parsley, and chile sauce; and rib eye mochomos, marinated in herbs and a proprietary sauce. The menu is diverse, original, and reasonably priced, considering the offerings.

Mochomos.mx/index.php. Plaza Graciela, Blvd. Morelos 701

From top: Dona Aurelia Contreras makes the day’s tortillas on a hot comal. Their “heart of Mexico” Sonoran country food includes

gallina pinta and tamales. The gang’s all here: Maria Antonieta Villa, Adelita Villa, Dona Aurelia Contreras, and Tonya. The ribeye

from Mochomos comes marinated with herbs and a sauce “especial.” Mochomos bocadillos de atún don’t disappoint. Mochomos owner Alfonso

Lira with head chef Sergio Ivan ruiz.


Bermejo

“Bermejo is the original name of the Sea of Cortez,” Arturo Puigferrat, one of the partners in this recently opened restaurant, tells me. “The Sea of Cortez is the connecting link between Sono-ra and Baja where much of modern Mexican cuisine has evolved. This restaurant is about that connection. Our food celebrates the seafood from the Sea of Cortez, Sonoran beef, and the traditional foods like one would find along the Rio Sonora. We are creating a new Sonoran cuisine with an emphasis on local and fresh.”

Arturo’s partner in this venture is the highly celebrated chef from Baja California, Javier Plascencia. Javier’s innovative cuisine has turned Baja, Tijuana, and the Guadalupe Valley into culinary destinations.

Arturo told me, “We wanted the interior of the restaurant to be modern, tasteful, and comfortable at the same time. We used a mix of mesquite wood, driftwood, and handmade tiles from Hermosillo to decorate the bar. It is symbolic of the connection between the Sea of Cortez and the Sonoran Desert.”

“Bring us the Marlin tacos,” Arturo requested of one of the waiters. Like the surroundings, the presentation was elegant. Marlin prepared with fideos (toasted vermicelli), queso Mennonita (Mennonite cheese from Chihuahua), and Mexican cream. Next came the ceviche verde (ceviche with raw tomatillo sauce). And then aguachile negro—a serving of shrimp, scallops, a sauce from charred Serrano chiles, watercress, and red onion. The lonja de pescado, grilled fish served with crispy chinchulines (chitterlings), topped with chayote cream and a raw salsa verde, await me on my return. When visiting Hermosillo, Bermejo is required dining.

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Blvd. Kino 177, Local 20 Plaza Pitic

Asadero el LenadorWhen looking for carne asada in Hermosillo, there are is no

shortage of options, from the numerous street carts to the taquerias, asaderos, and high-end restaurants. Ernesto had made his choice when his daughter, 23-year-old Jimena, vetoed her father’s choice and suggested another option. “You should go to El Lenador, the Lum-berjack. The food is better and the prices are very reasonable,” she said.

The owner, Alfonso Ojeda, and his wife, Yolanda Sabela, opened El Lenador in 2000. Alfonso had worked at a Sizzler Steak House in San Jose, California. “When I returned to Hermosillo,” he said, “I wanted to make a restaurant that had a family atmosphere, reasonable prices, high quality beef, and a decent selection of liquors, wine, and beer.”

The menu is varied and extensive. I had a carne asada taco, served on top of a grilled nopal penca (prickly pear cactus pad) and a corn tortilla. Another dining companion suggested the empanaditas with cuitlacoche (wild corn fungus) and a cream cilantro sauce. They were flavorful, perfect for vegetarians. They also serve tacos light, with carne asada served on a romaine lettuce leaf. El Lenador also has the most exten-sive and highest quality salsa bar of anywhere I have been.

Calle Luis Donaldo Colosio 168

From top: Bermejo partner Arturo Puigferrat enjoys the bar in his new restaurant that connects the Sonoran Desert with the Sea of Cortez. Try

the ceviche verde or assorted artisan cheeses. At Asadero el Lenador, Alfonso Ojeda, reigns over an expansive salsa bar.


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Mercado Municipal

A visual and aromatic fun house, the main market in the center of Hermosillo is where you can find almost any ingredient used in Sonoran foods, along with a variety of places to eat. The most popular time of day is early morning, when people come to meet for cof-fee and breakfast. You can find tacos, tortas, comidas (meals), caldos (traditional Sonoran soups), liquados, and more. I stopped at a puesto (food stand) that caught my eye, called Carnitas La Dieta. The owner, Edmundo Castillo, told me his father had started the puesto 50 years ago; he’s been working there for 30. I think of carnitas as being somewhat like a pork confit. However, as far as I could tell, Edmundo serves every part of the pig—a surtida, or a little bit of everything.

Avenida Plutarco Elías Calles

La Casa Grande

The diversity of the menu at La Casa Grande was what caught my eye when I first visited. There was everything from modern and innovative cuisine to all the traditional favorites. My dining companions and I shared plates across the table—duck tacos, crepes with cuitlacoche (corn fungus) and cilantro, avocado cream, and mochomos (dried shredded beef fried crisp).

With indoor dining and an outdoor terrace, La Casa Grande is family-friendly and the prices comfortable. The breakfast is also diverse, making it a great morning choice. Around 9 a.m., once children are off to school and husbands have gone to work, the restaurant fills with women who meet for coffee and a late breakfast. La Casa Grande is located next to Sonora Steak in the Zona Hotelera (the hotel zone).

Blvd. Eusebio Kino No. 902

Bill Steen and his wife, Athena, are founders of The Canelo Project, a nonprofit organization in Santa Cruz County dedicated to “connecting people, culture, and nature.”

From top: Emundo Castillo, the owner of La Dieta, at the Mercado Municipal, where you can get morning coffee, newspapers, and discussion. A surtida of pork from La Dieta is simply a sample

of their many offerings. Although the bar heats up at night, in the morning, La Hacienda Restaurant

fills with women who gather for breakfast, coffee, and catchups. Right: Maria Antonieta Villa with a

bowl of gallina pinta, a traditional Sonoran soup


IF YOU GO: LodgingWhile there are many great lodging options in Hermosillo, these three hotels are in the Zona Hotelera, clearly visble when you

enter town off Highway 15. When calling from the U.S., dial 011.52 before area code. Call for seasonal rates.

Holiday Inn$85/night 800.315.2621

Blvd. Francisco Eusebio Kino y Ramon Corral

Fiesta Americana$75/night 662.259.6000

Blvd. Eusebio Kino No. 369, Col. Lomas Pitic

Hotel Ibis$35/night 662.208.4700

Boulevard Cultura 48



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Between the Colorado river and downtown Yuma is the old Territorial Prison, its hilltop guard tower over-looking both the restored wetlands and a reinvigorated

main drag. Less than a mile drive from that famous Wild West landmark is the Prison Hill Brewing Company, which when it opened in August became the only craft brewery for 165 miles in any direction.

The partners behind the gastropub and brewery embrace Yuma’s history, incorporating details like the iron bars on the Prison Hill logo, and the blending of cultures that comes from sitting at the convergence of Arizona, California, and Mexico. And in a scorching town where the thirsty have traditionally turned to the dominant mass-market brands, the curiosity and anticipation for a new, local brew ran high through the summer preparations.

“I think Yuma was thirsty for a brewery for a long time,” says Nathan Heida, one of Prison Hill’s three owners. “I don’t think beer culture has lines. It’s something that’s a mix. No matter where you are in the world, there’s a culture for it. Now we’re putting that culture smack dab in the middle of Yuma. It’s something for folks who are coming in from Mexico, from California, from Arizona, and for anyone who travels through.”

With its Guinness World Record as the sunniest city on Earth, Yuma thrives on those travelers, counting more than half a million visitors annually and nearly doubling in popula-tion during the winter months. Many are agricultural workers, part of a $3.2 billion industry. Others are military, stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma and Army Yuma Proving Ground. And then there are the outdoor enthusiasts, drawn by the Colorado River and the nearby sand dunes.

Across Interstate 8 from the Territorial Prison, founded in 1875 and now a state park, drivers entering downtown are wel-comed with signs proclaiming Yuma as the “winter vegetable capital of the world” and “gateway to the Great Southwest.” Heida, Amy Biallas, and Chris Wheeler hope to add to that reputation a great brewery.

Heida and Biallas started transforming Yuma’s nightlife and beverage culture in November 2012 when they opened the Pint House, directly across South Main Street from Prison Hill Brewing. Like most Yumans, the couple visit San Diego regu-larly and wanted to establish something local similar to what

BUZZ

So Good, It’s Crimin’ AleAt Prison Hill Brewing Company, Yuma’s first craft brewery, three

entrepreneurs are bringing beer culture to a city of intersecting cultures.

By Eric Swedlund | Photography by Chris Bermudo

Prison Hill owner and brewer Chris Wheeler made his first batch of home brew when he was a student at the University of Arizona.



they found on vacation less than three hours west. “We needed a place to match San Diego with better beer

variety,” Heida says. “Before the Pint House, the most adven-turous thing you could get was maybe a Sam Adams or a Sierra Nevada tap.”

Biallas, who tended bar at the venerable Red’s Bird Cage for a decade, and Heida, a general contractor, took over a down-town storefront from a failing restaurant, performed a whirl-wind renovation and opened nine days later.

“Everyone thought we were nuts, that Yuma was a town for just Bud Light and Coors Light and all that,” Biallas says. “There was really no craft-beer market in Yuma, so we just blew people’s minds. That first weekend, we blew through beer and had maybe six half-full kegs left. We’re up to 52 beers now. We’ve had so many cool new beers come in and we’re trying new stuff all the time, and it was just the next natural progres-sion to open a brewery.”

Wheeler, a fourth-generation Yuman who returned home in 2009 after a stint running a biomedical company in San Diego, was an old friend, a Bird Cage and Pint House regular with a homebrewing background.

While studying at the University of Arizona in 1992, Wheeler brewed his first batch of beer. He took a job at Nim-bus Brewing Company in 1997, starting on the bottling line before a daytime bartending spot opened up.

“It was so slow during the day that if you’re not doing anything behind the bar, you walk back and hang out with the brewer. If somebody didn’t show up, you get dragged in the back and put on gloves and an apron and do the grunt work,” he says. “Over the course of about two years, I just worked my way up and got more and more responsibility and picked up all the little things over time.”

Wheeler left Nimbus for a job at U of A Liquors, but contin-ued homebrewing, watching closely as the microwbrew indus-try began its years of explosive growth. The store’s selection ex-panded as the major Western craft brewers opened distribution to Arizona and Wheeler, along with his UA customers, began turning to more adventurous beers.

“When I first started brewing, I was a big fan of English ales. Sometime in the late ’90s [there was] that Pacific Northwest influence, but I didn’t buy into that heavily hopped style at first. I was a Harp lager and a Bass guy, and then got into my Belgian phase,” he says. “My palate didn’t change until probably 1999 or 2000. But when Stone [Brewing] hit the market, it changed everything. A couple Arrogant Bastards … changes your life.”

With business at the Pint House booming, Hieda and Biallas started thinking about the possibility of adding a brewery to the revitalizing downtown and, over beers, decided to join forces with Wheeler.

“It was a six-month ah-hah moment. It evolved [by] knowing

More than bar food: At Prison Hill Brewing Company, the sandwiches and salads are as homegrown as the brews.

Single-Origin COffee. innOvatiOnSuSing regiOnal ingredientS.

eSpreSSO, manual brew bar,COld brew, and lOCal baked gOOdS in an intimate hiStOriCal Setting.

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each other and knowing what everybody’s interests were and seeing the success of the Pint House and knowing Yuma was ready for it,” Wheeler says.

The Prison Hill flagship beers reflect the changes Wheel-er has incorporated into his style over the years, while being careful not to turn nonadventurous drinkers away. Jailbait Blonde, Lockdown Lager, Warden’s Wheat, Parolee Pale, and a special 3:10 Marzen are among the first offerings, while the brewery’s signature IPA—the Crimin’ Ale—is a special reflection on Yuma’s colorful history.

Yuma High School—the city’s oldest—opened in 1909 and after a fire destroyed the original building, classes were moved to the recently closed prison. In a 1914 state cham-pionship football game, the surprised and sore losers from Phoenix railed against those Yuma criminals. The name stuck.

So when the brewery partners settled on Prison Hill, the bells went off. The name—which had a much better ring than Yuma Brewing Company—opened a raft of possibilities, from the Crimin’ Ale to design elements like the back patio entrance, modeled after the prison’s fortified gate, the Sally Port (also the convenient namesake of the Sally Porter).

“The name is a big deal to us. The details are big things. The three of us as partners are completely different people, but we’re all perfectionists in our own way and we all want really cool stuff, everything from the plates to the light fix-tures to the way that the light reflects off doors,” Biallas says.

The demolition and build-out went quickly—and cheaply,

Even in a town as sweltering as Yuma, you need to fire up the gas to ferment grain into beer.

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FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2015Tucson Museum of Art

Taste phenomenal wines from around the world and culinary creations from Tucson’s

best restaurants, with a live performance by Cirque Roots, a special appearance by

artist Mat Bevel, and more!For tickets and more information call 520-624-2333

or order online at TucsonMuseumofArt.org


with Heida as general contractor shaving about 40 percent off the renovation cost. Every wire, pipe, and gas line was upgraded or replaced. Dating to the 1920s, the building has housed a temporary library, a shoe store, and a thrift shop. Today, the light fixtures are made from empty liquor bottles, a granite bar top anchors the middle of the room, and sturdy, wooden tables round out the 180-person space.

“We wanted things to be a little industrial looking and we just ran with that theme,” Wheeler says. “There are a lot of rustic elements, exposed wood, bare concrete floors. It’s in-viting without looking penal, but it certainly drew influence from the prison.”

The brewery began serving on Aug. 29, with a stand-ing-room only grand opening crowd that drained eight kegs of the First Offense, a light pale ale crafted especially for the occasion.

“The first week was just nonstop. It’s the buzz of the town,” says Wheeler.

The menu features selections that draw on Yuma’s ag-ricultural base, allowing for a heavy emphasis on fresh and local ingredients. Sauces incorporate the Prison Hill ales. Signature dishes include a burger called The Shank, a hand-pressed patty, stuffed with mozzarella cheese and bacon and served with beer-battered and deep-fried avocado and chipo-tle ranch; a smoked tri-tip steak sandwich with house-made salsa; Sprung Rolls, the Prison Hill version of spring rolls, made with locally grown produce; and a sampler plate of meats, all smoked over locally harvested mesquite and pecan wood.

In addition to its own stable of beers, Prison Hill plans to collaborate with guest brewers, ranging from locals who brew at home to visitors from larger Arizona and California breweries.

With its current infastructure, the brewery is capable of producing 500 barrels of beer a year.


“San Diego beers tend to be really straightforward, really bold. Arizona beers I think tend to be a little more experimental, like watermelon and peach ales,” Wheeler says. “We’re going to pull influences from both. We’re trying to put our stamp on the styles as they are.”

Prison Hill opens in Yuma’s centennial year. And with its growing population—Yuma County is forecast to hit 225,000 next year—Yuma will no longer be the largest metro area in the state without a brewery.

With its current configuration, Prison Hill is capable of producing about 500 barrels a year. The owners hope to expand into local keg distri-bution, eventually branching to the Phoenix and Tucson markets.

“I’ll make some subtle changes and tweaks for the first year or so,” Wheeler says. “I’m not going to go crazy with production until I know what sells. We have to throw the pro-verbial beer noodle against the wall a few times.”

While working on renovation and applying for all necessary local, state, and federal licenses, the Prison Hill partners have made sure to do their homework, visiting about 30 breweries across Southern California

and Arizona. They looked at systems, from fermenter setups to hops storage to beer-line configuration, conducted market research, and, of course, tasted and tasted.

“There’s a closeness in the brewing industry. Brewers don’t share recipes, but [they’re] very helpful in sharing information and tips. Every time I turn a corner, I’m taking things in. I don’t think I’ve ever come out of a place without learning something

new,” Wheeler says. “There might be a brewery that

has a 10-person taproom and a huge production facility, but it’s going to have a similar feeling to a place with a huge taproom and just a five-barrel system,” Wheeler says. “It’s about making something that is pure and true to the form and drinkable. It’s about the love of the beer. That’s something that’s come across from every brewery, whether it’s the mas-sive Stone plant or Four Peaks when it was tiny. And that’s the same goal we have.” ✜

Prison Hill Brewing Company. 278 S. Main St., Yuma. 928.276.4001.

Eric Swedlund writes about music, travel, and food and drink. He lives in Tucson. Find him on Twitter @EricSwedlund.

I think Yuma was thirsty for a brewery

for a long time. I don’t think beer culture has

lines. No matter where you are in the world,

there’s a culture for it. Now we’re putting that

culture smack dab in the middle of Yuma.

It’s a hot job, but someone’s got to do it. Brewmaster Chris Wheeler stirs a pot full of simmering wort.

Joey DeFrancesco Quartet

with Jimmy Cobb

Robert Glasper Experiment Dianne Reeves

Martin Luther King Day Festival Downtown

with local bands

JAZZJAZZT U C S O N

F E S T I V A L

Jan 16 Jan 18Jan 16 Jan 17 Jan 19Jan 18 Jan 19

Thank you to our sponsors!

For festival details, visit our website at www.tucsonjazzfestival.org

JANUARY 16-28, 2015

Jan 23Jan 23

The HotSardines

JD Souther with Special Guest

Billy Childs

Jan 24Jan 24 Jan 25Jan 25 Jan 28Jan 28

Allan Harris Tribute to Nat “King” Cole Burt Bacharach


All the news that’s fit to drink

Booze NewsBy Bryan Eichhorst

In a semi-clandestine room in the back of Vero Amore in Plaza Palomino, bartender Tiffany Eldredge is helping to nurse a craft menu of fairly accessible drinks that change

every other week. Tiffany’s tastes are rooted in an East Coast backbar-centric style, thanks to the training provided by her sister, Amy Eldredge, former lead bartender at Bar-X in downtown Salt Lake City. The Still is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with a general reservation-only policy (though they make exceptions if there is room). Ask around town for a wooden nickel with their reservation line printed on the back to score a spot at the bar. Once you find the Chianti bottle-doorknob, try the Indian Summer cocktail: El Dora-do Dark Rum, house chai syrup, fresh pineapple juice, with ground nutmeg across the top. Vero 2920 N. Swan Road. 520.325.4122. VeroAmorePizza.com.

Reilly Craft Pizza & Drink is expanding from two bars to three with the opening of the Tough Luck Club in their basement. Bar manager Nik Morris, who was recently fea-tured in Michael Dietsch’s book Shrubs, described his vision as a “straightforward no-bullshit cocktail bar.” The new bar promises to be a diversion from the stodgy pretension that has become associated with modern cocktail culture. Stop by to get a cheap beer, drink a cocktail you’ve never heard of, and listen to your bartender wax nostalgic about George Jones. 101 E. Pennington St. 520.882.5550.ReillyPizza.com.

PY Steakhouse, located inside Casino Del Sol, will be hosting Duggan McDonnell (of Encanto Pisco) and Jason Asher (from Young’s Market Company) as they pair cocktails for a four-course brunch. Spirits used for the breakfast cock-tails will be selected from the St. George line, Azunia tequila, and Encanto Pisco. The prix fixe menu will be $49 per person on Sunday, November 16, from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. 5655 W. Valencia Road. 855.765.7829.

Ciaran Wiese recently launched his first cocktail menu as the new beverage director at Agustín Kitchen. The standout on the list is the Hickory Old Fashioned: house-charred hick-ory chips infused with George Dickel Tennessee whiskey, raw sugar, Angostura bitters, and Xocolatl Mole bitters. Spirit for-ward and charcoal-driven, the cocktail is ready-made for your nightcap needs. 100 S. Avenida del Convento. 520.398.5382. AgustinKitchen.com. ✜


Elgin

Las CienegasNational

ConservationArea

Sonoita

to Patagonia (15 min.), N

ogales (

35 min)

To Ft. Huachuca (50 min.) Sierra Vista (1 hr.)

83

83

82

18.4 Mi.

6.3 Mi.

To New Mexico

To Tucson/PhoenixExit #281From this exit:2.5 Hours to Phoenix30 minutes to Tucson30 minutes to Sonoita

Elgin Rd.

Lower Elgin Rd.

Upp

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lgin

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Elgi

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to To mbstone (45 min. from 82/83 junction)

Note: Many roads have been omitted for clarity.

SONOITA/ELGIN & TOMBSTONE WINE MAP

To Sierra Vista (30 min.)To Bisbee(25 min.)

Tombstone N 1

st St

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E Allen St.Safford St.

To / 82

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45 min. to Sonoita via Hwy 8275 min. to Tucson via I-10

3 hours to Phoenix via I-10

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1 CHARRON VINEYARDS18585 S. Sonoita Hwy, Vail520-762-8585CharronVineyards.comFri–Sun: 10-6

2 DOS CABEZAS WINEWORKS3248 Hwy 82, Sonoita520-455-5141DosCabezasWineworks.comThurs–Sun: 10:30-4:30

3 AZ HOPS & VINES3450 Hwy 82, Sonoita888-569-1642AZHopsAndVines.comThurs: 11-4, Fri-Sun: 10-6

4 HANNAH’S HILL3989 State Hwy 82, Elgin(520) 456-9000HannahsHill.comBy Appointment Only

5 WILHELM FAMILYVINEYARDS21 Mtn. Ranch Dr., Elgin520-455-9291WilhelmVineyards.comOct–April: Daily 11-5May–Sept: Fri – Sun 11-5Mon-Thurs by Appointment

6 RANCHO ROSSA VINEYARDS32 Cattle Ranch Ln., Elgin520-455-0700RanchoRossa.comFri–Sun: 10:30-3:30

7 CALLAGHAN VINEYARDS336 Elgin Road, Elgin520-455-5322CallaghanVineyards.comThurs–Sun: 11-4

8 FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS342 Elgin Road, Elgin520-954-2935FlyingLeapVineyards.comDaily: 11-4

9 KIEF-JOSHUA VINE-YARDS370 Elgin Road, Elgin520-455-5499KiefJoshuaVineyards.comDaily: 11-5

10 VILLAGE OF ELGIN471 Elgin Road, Elgin520-455-9309ElginWines.comDaily: 11-5

11 SONOITA VINEYARDS290 Elgin Canelo Rd., Elgin520-455-5893SonoitaVineyards.comDaily: 10-4

12 LIGHTNING RIDGE CELLARS2368 Hwy 83, Elgin520-455-5383LightningRidgeCellars.comFri-Sun: 11-4

13 TOMBSTONE WINE WORKS15 N 4th St, Tombstone520-261-1674TombstoneWinery.comDaily: 12-6

14 SILVER STRIKE WINERY334 E Allen St., Tombstone520-678-8200SilverStrikeWinery.comDaily: 12-6

Cochise & Graham Counties

Fort

Grant

Rd.

191

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to Do

uglas

(75 m

in.)

Dragoon Rd.

S. Railroad Ave.

Robbs Rd.

Lucky Ln.

E. Arzberger Rd.

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olden

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Jefferson Ave.

Business Loop

N Central Ave.

Exit #336

Exit #362Exit #331

Exit #318

Note: Many roads have been omitted for clarity.

186

to New Mexico (3 hrs. to Las Cruces)

186

WillcoxS. Railroad Ave.186

186

N. Haskell Ave.

W. Rex Allen Dr.E. Maley St.

W. G

rant St.E.Stew

art St.

WILLCOX AREA & BISBEE WINE MAP

From Bisbee1 hour to Sonoita2 Hours to Tucson

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1 SAND-RECKONER130 S. Haskell Avenue303.931.8472Sand-Reckoner.comBy Appointment Only

2 FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS:WILLCOX TASTING ROOM100 N. Railroad Avenue520.384.6030FlyingLeapVineyards.comWed-Sun: 12-6

3 KEELING SCHAEFER154 N. Railroad Avenue520.766.0600KeelingSchaeferVineyards.comWed-Sun: 11-5

4 CARLSON CREEK115 Railroad Avenue520.766.3000CarlsonCreek.comThu-Sun 11-5

5 ARIDUS TASTING ROOM145 N Railview Ave520.766.9463AridusWineCo.comTasting Room Daily: 11-5Crush Room Daily: 11-5 w/appt.

6 ARIDUS CRUSH FACILITY 1126 N. Haskell Avenue520.766.2926Mon-Fri: 11-5, Sat-Sun: By Appt.

7 PASSION CELLARSAT SALVATORE VINEYARDS3052 N. Fort Grant Road602.750.7771PassionCellars.comBy Appointment Only

8 CORONADO VINEYARDS2909 E. Country Club Drive520.384.2993Mon-Sat: 9:30-5:30, Sun: 10-4 CoronadoVineyards.com

9 FORT BOWIE VINEYARDS156 N. Jefferson, Bowie AZBy appointment only520.847.2593

10 BODEGA PIERCE TASTING ROOM4511 E. Robbs Road602.320.1722Daily: 11-5 or by appt.BodegaPierce.com

11 PILLSBURY VINEYARD6450 S. Bennett Place520.384.3964Pillsburywine.comThurs-Sun: 11-5, Mon-Wed: By Appointment Only

12 ZARPARA VINEYARDS6777 S. Zarpara Lane602.885.8903Zarpara.comFri-Sun: 11-5, Mon-Thurs: By Appt.

13 KEELING SCHAEFER VINEYARD10277 E. Rock Creek Lane520.824.2500Wine Club Events Only

14 LAWRENCE DUNHAM VINEYARDS13922 S. Kuykendall Cutoff Rd.602.320.1485LawrenceDunhamVineyards.comM-Sa: 8:30-4, Sun 10-3

15 GOLDEN RULE VINEYARDS3649 N. Golden Rule Road520.507.2400GoldenRuleVineyards.comBy Appointment Only

16 FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS:BISBEE TASTING ROOM67 Main St. BisbeeWed, Thur & Sun, Noon to 6pmFriday & Saturday, Noon to 8pm520.384.6030

About five years ago, on the eve of leaving a three-

year stint in New York City, my sister and I had one of those unforget-table, life-altering meals at one of the city’s most celebrated and yet under-stated restaurants, Prune. I remember the tiny bowl of crispy, salty-fried chickpeas that came as a surprise starter. So simple, so perfect.

Next came the deep-fried shrimp toasts, which I have always dreamt of recreating. Our entrees were both exquisite, too, and the service was impeccable. Prune is the rare restaurant where expectations are always met and often surpassed. Gabri-elle Hamilton, its head chef, has achieved this through consis-tently high standards and pickiness, which shines through in this book of her kitchen secrets.

Written as if to instruct a new line cook, the recipes here are straight from the restaurant kitchen’s notebook. The pages are adorned with coffee and sauce “stains,” and pieces of tape that appear to have been slapped on the pages instruct on how to multiply batches for eight, 16 or 32 people. While the purpose of this is presumably to prep a busy dinner service, it‘d be help-ful when hosting a dinner party, too.

Scribbled notes accompany nearly every recipe, such as “When you butcher fish, PLEASE: Don’t shingle. Leave skin on; tweeze pin bones out. Reserve skeletons and heads for fam-ily meal. Donate last 4” of flat tail end to family.” It’s rather fun to be scolded by Hamilton, as if you were a member of her staff.

Many recipes make use of unusual meats or cuts that might be tough to find in a supermarket. Grilled blade lamb chops are brined in salt water and rosemary, and whole rabbit is roasted with pan drippings, for example.

Other recipes are more accessible yet still distinctive in their execution; an artful Greek salad is topped with a slab of feta, pork butt is stewed with creamy hominy and salsa verde, and farmhouse chicken legs are braised in hard cider.

A section on “Daily Prep” includes restaurant gems like pre-served lemon butter, homemade chili flakes, and simple smoked tomatoes with Berbere spices. A “mixed-meats stock with walk-in detritus,” which Hamilton refers to as “mutt stock,” makes use of any scrap of pork belly rib bone, foul carcass, or chines from lamb racks. The same method can take longer at home,

but bones can be stored in the freezer until enough have accu-mulated to make a rich stock.

The vegetable section is especially useful to the home cook, offering simple yet succulent preparations of farmers’ market offerings. Soft-cooked zucchini are spiked with green onions and poblanos. Roast beets are nestled on a blanket of fresh silky aioli. Fresh pumpkin wedges are slow-roasted with ginger beer and brewer’s yeast. A simple dal is paired with carda-mom-braised chard and “gunpowder”—a toasted cayenne and cumin spice mix.

The book refreshingly demonstrates that good restaurant cooking doesn’t have to be about fancy machines and trendy, impossible-to-find ingredients. Fresh quality ingredients and time-honored methods do the trick just fine. Now if you’ll ex-cuse me, that shrimp toast recipe is calling my name.

A C o n v e r s a t i o n with Arizona-na-tive Rafael de

Grenade must be pretty intense. She’s seen things, and her descriptions of those things will haunt you for days. As a teen, she be-gan working for Cross U Ranch in the Santa Maria Mountains, “riding, shoe-ing horses, and branding cows.” Later, she trained as a land steward and a scientist; in her 20s, her work led her to live at Stil-water Station, in northern Australia.

Along with a re-al-life-cowboy gang of ringers and stockmen, her task at Stilwater was to wrangle cattle in this wild and beautiful landscape. Her ethereal descriptions of the landscape belie the perilous environment and the sometimes brutal life of the cattle rancher.

“Mudflats and mangroves patterned the gulf country, and we each had our own, less visible, emotional topography. I thought the reason the red cow had died in front of me, with one quick slam into the gate, was that I needed to write of her death. I needed to pause in the raucous tumult of loading and find the words of poetry that would be a strange prayer for this one death among thousands. I needed to brush one hand on the red swirled hair of her forehead before turning back to the

INK

Reviews by Molly Kincaid

Prune By Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House, 2014)

Stilwater: Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback

By Rafael de Grenade(Milkweed, 2014)


cattle in the race. The wild wasn’t tender when it came to life and death. This cow had been born beneath some gnarled bloodwood in the gulf country forest to live among the heat and flies of the coast, only to die suddenly in a chute because people wanted their will imposed where they thought there was none.”

Hesitant though she was about the morality of the cattle business, de Grenade didn’t waver, but carried out mat-ter-of-factly each task she was given. She looked on with an unflinching eye as a cohort castrated, dehorned, and brand-ed a writhing calf, swiftly and casually, dabbing its searing wounds with iodine before turning it loose. Later, she held a bag as another worker dumped in chunks of fresh wallaby meat to be used as bait to catch crabs—having just killed the wallaby’s joey in its pouch, still clinging to a teat.

Her reflections on the intensity of her situation demon-strate how such raw sights can’t help but change a person, particularly one of such a tender age. “The crocodiles in the black water would be witness to my metamorphosis, if I made it through alive,” she writes.

Somewhere along the way, de Grenade begins to accept the violent imperatives of the business, finding beauty and mercy in the harshness of the operation. When an older cow is killed for food, she reflects, “We would all eat, nourished by that animal that was made mostly of grass and sky and salty air.”

De Grenade delivers a captivating memoir with Stilwa-ter—a sensitively written record of a fearless young woman’s wanderings.

The Meat Hook Meat Book: Buy, Butcher, and Cook

Your Way to Better Meat By Tom Mylan (Artisan, 2014)

At first glanCe, The Meat Hook Meat Book is a

coffee table book for foodies—those seeking “cred” by proving their knowledge of Brooklyn’s trendiest butcher shop. It also happens to be a supremely witty and en-tertaining guide to eating meat more sustainably and economically, cooking it better, and understanding under-appreciated cuts of meat.

Many cooks strug-gle with the thought of spending more money on locally sourced meats from local butcher shops (although some of us wish we had the option). In Tucson, you can buy local meats from Tucson CSA, farmers’ markets, and the UA Meat Sciences Lab. But even if it is more expensive, Mylan argues it’s well worth the cost if you know how to buy and work with meat. Even if all you know how to do is toss meat scraps in a pot and make stock, it will still make you feel pious.

As Mylan notes in his delicious-looking beef pastrami recipe (which takes two weeks to cure), the recipes in this book are not meant for the “uncommitted.” Many of them require rolling up those sleeves, pulling on a “butcher bra” (a chain mail protective apron—for the record, you don’t actually need this for most reci-pes), and prepping your kitchen for a little blood spatter. But most of them, including the lamb belly pancetta that will run you seven days, seem like they’d be worth it.

Then there are the recipes that can be done in a day or less. The campagnella, a wine and tomato based ragu, utilizes a cheap heel of beef with tendon, and looks drool-worthy. (If you want to be really legit, spend the hours it’s bubbling away making fresh pasta and pulling some fresh greens from your garden for a salad). The Fat Kid Burger is simple enough too—grind your own meat incorporating bacon into the chuck, and then top the burger with Funyuns and American cheese.

The section on poultry offers a helpful how-to on breaking down chickens, and a guide to a stress-free Thanksgiving. Mylan recommends brining your bird (so worth it, if you haven’t before), whipping up a foie gras grease gravy (not everything in here is pious), and putting the leftovers into a turkey tamale pie.

Whether they’ll be displaying it on the coffee table or actually using it, this book would make a great holiday gift for the meat lover in your life. ✜

Molly Kincaid is a Tucsonan who is obsessed with tinkering in the kitchen and reading cookbooks. Her favorite foods are, paradoxically, kale and pork belly.

“The wild wasn’t tender when it came to life and

death. This cow had been born beneath some gnarled bloodwood in

the gulf country forest to live among the heat and flies of the coast, only to die suddenly in a chute

because people wanted their will imposed where they

thought there was none.”


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Dining & Drink Guide Restaurants, Cafes, & Bars in Baja Arizona

Dining & Drink Guide Restaurants, Cafes, & Bars in Baja Arizona

Source GuideThis SOURCE GUIDE is an annotated directory of our advertisers. Many of our advertisers are also distribution outlets where you can find a complimentary copy of the magazine. Our incredible advertisers are the reason we can provide this publication at no cost. Please make it a point to patronize them often and let them know how much you appreciate their support of Edible Baja Arizona and the local food and drink economy. Baja Arizona towns and cities are noted if the business is not located in Tucson.

CENTRAL

BEYOND BREAD Locally-owned and operated since 1998, we offer a variety of hand-crafted breads, delicious sandwiches, house-made soups, fresh salads and decadent pastries—all in a comfortable and friendly environment. We make just about everything from scratch, using only the finest ingredients. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 3026 North Campbell Avenue 520.322.9965 BeyondBread.com

GOODNESS Our goal is to create innovative and healthy food that tastes great. From fresh pressed juices to salads and wraps, we have something for everyone, and it’s all good. 2502 North Campbell Avenue 520.777.4465

KINGFISHER An American bar and grill specializing in regional cuisine from across the U.S. Specializing in several varieties of fin fish, shellfish, and oysters. Great intimate bar with happy hours and late night menus every day. 2564 East Grant Road 520.323.7739 KingfisherTucson.com

PREP & PASTRY We are a modern American eatery. Serving breakfast, lunch, and brunch. All food and drinks are prepared with fresh ingredients, locally sourced. 3073 North Campbell Avenue 520.326.7737 PrepAndPastry.com

DOWNTOWN, UNIVERSITY & THE SUNSHINE MILE

1702 A pizzeria, and craft beer extravaganza. On tap, 46 craft beers from all over the 50 states and world complements our fresh, hand-tossed pizza made with the best ingredients. 1702 East Speedway Boulevard 520.325.1702 1702AZ.com

4TH AVENUE DELICATESSEN Proudly serving Boar’s Head meats and cheeses, as well as Vero’s Bakery bread (locally owned). Come for the sandwich, stay for the pickle! 425 North 4th Avenue 520.624.3354 4thAveDeli.com

BOCA Tacos Tacos with attitude! Happy hour daily 3pm to 6pm. Come explore with us on Exotic Taco Wednesday. Catering services available. 828 East Speedway Boulevard 520.777.8134

CAFE A LA C’ART Enjoy your breakfast, lunch, or dinner in a casual atmosphere and surrounded by fine art. And try our famous desserts (with gluten free choices!). Join us at the historic Stevens House at the Museum of Art, or al fresco on the brick patio. Catering is also available. 150 North Main Avenue 520.628.8533 CafeALaCartTucson.com

CAFE PASSÉ Dedicated to serving great coffee and coffee drinks, locally-sourced organic food whenever possible, craft cocktails and an eclectic beer menu. It is also home to Tucson’s best patio and biergarten with a patio bar. Live music and local art. 415 North 4th Avenue 520.624.4411 CafePasse.com

CAFFE MILANO Led by the prestigious Italian chef Fulvia Steffenone (known as La Fufi) Caffe Milano offers a wide range of authentic Italian dishes: not only the classic pasta with tomato and meat sauce, but also the delicious salmon in foil, surprising salads, and fragrant rustic soups. They also offer classic Italian cooking classes led by La Fufi herself. Call for more information. 46 West Congress Street 520.628.1601 LaFufiCaffeMilano.com

CHE’S LOUNGE Cheap drinks, great art, great jukebox. Never a cover. Bringing the awesome since 2000. 350 North 4th Avenue 520.623.2088 ChesLounge.com

THE CORONET Brasserie-style restaurant, old world rustic cuisine, cute bar, quiet music, big patio with good shade, outstanding coffee. 402 East 9th Street on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 9th. 520.222.9889 CafeCoronet.com

DELECTABLES International selections in a casual atmosphere. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, & late night menus. Dog-friendly patio dining. Live music every Friday & Saturday. Full bar, excellent wine list, and homemade desserts. Vegan & gluten-free menus. Catering. 533 North 4th Avenue 520.884.9289

DIABLO BURGER Named America’s Best Burger in USA Today, Diablo Burger is a local foods-based burger joint serving 100% grass-fed, hormone-free and antibiotic-free, open range raised beef. “All about local” and totally committed to enhancing the connection of people committed to place through local foods. 312 East Congress Street 520.882.2007 DiabloBurger.com

DOWNTOWN KITCHEN & COCKTAILS Innovative farm-to-table cooking with global influences & killer cocktails from James Beard Award winner Janos Wilder in an art-filled, urban setting with roomy outdoor patio. Dinner, happy hour, bar menu seven nights a week and late night Friday & Saturday. 135 South 6th Avenue 520.623.7700 DowntownKitchen.com

EXO ROAST COMPANY We seek out the world’s finest coffees, craft roast them in small batches and extract them manually at our “slow bar.” Visit our cafe in a minimalist, historic setting and enjoy one of our “regionally inspired” coffee drinks using locally-sourced chiltepin, mesquite and mole. 7am-6pm, everyday. Free educational cupping Saturdays at 1pm. 403 North 6th Avenue 520.777.4709 ExoCoffee.com

FALORA In the historic Joesler-built Broadway Village, Falora builds pizzas & salads anchored in tradition with a sharply creative angle. Ingredients are simple, fresh; imported from Italy or sourced from local farms. Lunch & dinner. Charming patio or cozy interior. 3000 East Broadway Boulevard 520.325.9988 Falora.com

FLYCATCHER A bar and live music venue, Flycatcher is dedicated to live local, regional, national, and international touring music acts. Formerly Plush Tucson. 340 East 6th Street 520.207.9251 TheFlyCatcherTucson.com

FOOD FOR ASCENSION CAFÉ A new paradigm of sustaining community by providing pure food through fair systems that interact together and support a vibrant life, community, and self with the ultimate intention of reconnecting our body, mind, and soul. 330 East 7th Street 520.882.4736 FoodForAscension.org

FROG AND FIRKIN A locally-owned bar and restaurant right outside the University of Arizona campus Main Gate. Please come by, sit on the liveliest patio in town, and watch the world go by! Live music Thursday-Sunday evenings! DELIVERY AVAILABLE. 874 East University Boulevard 520.623.7507 FrogAndFirkin.com

GOOD OAK BARA celebration of Arizona. We focus on serving exceptional craft beer, fine wines, and great food directly from Arizona. 316 East Congress 520.882.2007 GoodOakBar.com

HUB RESTAURANT & CREAMERY Enjoy American comfort food, downtown made ice cream, and over 20 craft beers on draft. Located on historic Congress Street in downtown Tucson. Plenty of downtown parking and the SunLink streetcar route right outside our doors, a night on the town or dinner with the family is not only fun, but easy. 266 East Congress Street 520.207.8201 HubDowntown.com

LA COCINA RESTAURANT, CANTINA & COFFEE BAR We care deeply for our community and strive to provide a gathering place for all. Tucson musicians take the stage most days of the week. Our cantina pours local beer and we support our local farmers and ranchers. 201 North Court Avenue 520.365.3053 LaCocinaTucson.com

LINDY’S ON 4TH AVENUE If punk rock, heavy metal, Sinatra, tattoos, hotrods, choppers, low riders, a lazy Sunday afternoon, hot ladies, and the man’s man were all put into a burger that was so good you’d slap your mama, that’s what we’re servin’ up in this place. 431 North 4th Avenue 520.207.6970 LO4th.com

MARTIN’S COMIDA CHINGONA Nestled right on 4th Avenue, Martin’s is fun, casual and independent. Martin’s serves traditional Mexican food with awesome interpretations by chef/owner Martin Fontes. 557 North 4th Avenue 520.884.7909

MAYNARDS MARKET & KITCHEN We established the first downtown market and paired it with a charismatic restaurant & bar. Both are fueled by a passion for celebrating the best of place, product, and service. 400 North Toole Avenue 520.545.0577 MaynardsMarket.com

MISS SAIGON DOWNTOWN Each dish is re-created with the same recipes Grandma passed down. This is authentic Vietnamese, home-style cooking, with a warm and inviting ambience. 47 North 6th Avenue 520.884.4778 MissSaigon-Tucson.com


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PENCA Mexico City cuisine and international bar located in the heart of downtown Tucson. December 2013, Food & Wine magazine named Penca “one of America’s best bars.” 50 East Broadway Boulevard 520.203.7681 PencaRestaurante.com

PIZZERIA BIANCO James Beard Award winner Chris Bianco now has a location in downtown Tucson featuring his famous pizza. 272 East Congress 520.838.0818 PizzeriaBianco.com

PLANET SMOOTHIE We bring two fabulous worlds together…Real Fruit Smoothies & Self Serve Frozen Yogurt, in two charming and upbeat atmospheres: Oro Valley & Downtown Tucson. Open 7 days week serving Organic Acai Bowls, Gluten Free Pastries, Homemade Belgian Waffles, & Marley Coffee. Blending 7am to late night. 7315 N. Oracle Rd., and 345 East Congress Street. PlanetSmoothie.com

PLAYGROUND BAR & LOUNGE In the heart of historic Downtown Tucson on the corner of Congress St. and 5th Avenue. Whether you’re looking for the ultimate spot to watch the game, meet up with friends for some late-night dining, or looking to dance the night away on Tucson’s largest ROOFTOP dance floor with our VIP Bottle Service, Playground Bar & Lounge is the place to be! 278 East Congress Street 520.396.3691 PlaygroundTucson.com

PROPER A casual, urban dining establishment serving contemporary, farm to table cuisine. Brunch daily from 9am-3pm. Dinner nightly from 5pm-10pm. Happy hour Monday through Friday 3-6pm. Late night seven days a week, 10pm-midnight. 300 East Congress Street 520.396.3357 ProperTucson.com

R BAR Join us for a drink at R Bar, the Rialto’s 7-night-a-week bar. Great drinks, great times, no unicorns. Because they don’t exist. 350 East Congress Street, Suite 110 520.305.3599 RBarTucson.com

REILLY CRAFT PIZZA & DRINK Offering reasonably priced modern Italian food in a casual urban setting. Our menu features artisan hand-made pizzas, as well as craft drinks. We also offer fresh baked sandwiches for lunch and fresh hand-made pastas for dinner. 101 East Pennington Street 520.882.5550 ReillyPizza.com

ROCCO’S LITTLE CHICAGO PIZZERIA Real Chicago Pizza, right around the corner! Since 1998 Rocco DiGrazia has been serving perennially award-winning pizzas, buffalo wings, and chocolate chip cookies on Broadway’s Sunshine Mile. Check out our gigantic beer selection, too. You’ll agree it’s a HELLUVA pie! 2707 East Broadway Boulevard 520.321.1860 RoccosLittleChicago.comSIDECAR A neighborhood bar serving cocktails, craft beer, and wine.139 South Eastbourne 520.795.1819 BarSidecar.com

SPARKROOT A cornerstone of a burgeoning downtown, Sparkroot serves up Blue Bottle Coffee & vegetarian fare with flair, in a striking atmosphere. Vibrant community flavor, morning through evening. Great meeting spot; you can even reserve our loft! Beer, wine, & killer Irish coffee. 245 East Congress 520.623.4477 Sparkroot.com

SURLY WENCH Established 2004. Late night kitchen featuring fresh, never frozen beef and homegrown herbs. Delicious burgers, tacos, and more. Full bar. Black Cherry Burlesque, live music, DJs, billiards, air hockey, arcade, foosball, darts. Daily happy hour & nightly drink specials. 424 North 4th Avenue 520.882.0009 SurlyWench.com

TASTEFUL KITCHEN Modern vegetarian cuisine creatively prepared, farm to table fresh. We showcase regional heritage foods infused with Southwestern sauces and flavorings. Everything from scratch using whole foods, local organic when available, and few processed ingredients. Dine in, take out, weekly meals to go, boutique catering, cooking classes, and a private function room. Dinner is served Tuesday through Saturday 5pm-9pm. Free parking. Reservations recommended. 722 North Stone Avenue 520.250.9600 TheTastefulKitchen.com

TIME MARKET A historic neighborhood market that includes the best bread in Tucson (baked daily), incredible wood-fired pizza, a fantastic organic produce section, outstanding wines and beer, and a beer and wine bar with a patio. See our listing under markets, too. 444 East University Boulevard 520.622.0761

TOOLEY’S CAFE Fresh baked goods, scones, chocolate chip cookies, turkey tacos, killer mailman burro, pulled pork burro, posole, a great Mexican breakfast, limeade, and great organic coffee! 299 South Park Avenue 520.203.8970

TUCSON TAMALE COMPANY More than 30 different kinds of incredible tamales. Mild to spicy, meaty to vegan, savory to sweet, we have just about every kind of tamale you can think of and then some! GMO-free masa! 2545 East Broadway Boulevard 520.305.4760 TucsonTamale.com

UNPLUGGED We’ve sourced the wine world to find a unique blend of varietals at prices that are right for all occasions. Come downtown for this exceptional experience. We also regularly feature live jazz. 118 East Congress Street 520.884.1800 UnpluggedTucson.com

WILKO A modern gastropub featuring inventive classic American comfort food in the Main Gate district at Park & University. Everything is prepared on site. We use local, organic ingredients whenever possible. More than 30 wines by the glass, 11 quality brews on tap, and a craft cocktail bar. Check out our artisan cheeses and salume. 943 East University Boulevard 520.792.6684 BarWilko.com

EAST

BEYOND BREAD Locally-owned and operated since 1998, offering hand-crafted breads, delicious sandwiches, house-made soups, fresh salads, and decadent pastries in a comfortable and friendly environment. We make just about everything from scratch, using only the finest ingredients. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 6260 East Speedway Boulevard 520.747.7477 BeyondBread.com

JACKSON TAVERN New England inspired restaurant and bar located at Plaza Palomino. Classic tavern fare from Chef Virginia ‘Ginny’ Wooters along with modern classic twists that Metzger Family Restaurant have come to be known for. 2900 North Swan Road Suite 100 520.219.1235 JacksonTavern.com

LE BUZZ CAFFE A one-of-a-kind hangout popular with cyclists, climbers, and locals with great in-house roasted coffee, full espresso bar, sublime baked goods, hearty breakfast, soups, salads, panini, and quiches. The Le Buzz “house cookie” is worth the trip alone. 9121 East Tanque Verde Road 520.749.3903 LeBuzzCaffe.com

PITA JUNGLE “The Art of Eating Healthy.” Mediterranean-inspired dishes made from scratch daily with the freshest ingredients. The menu is based on offering a healthy and natural cuisine abounding with vegetarian and vegan options. Catering available. 5340 East Broadway Boulevard 520.207.6873 PitaJungle.com

RENEE’S ORGANIC OVEN Serving creative and traditional pizzas and so much more. We offer a casual space for you to enjoy a menu filled with local and organic ingredients. Everything we do is made possible by our connection to great people and we would love to add you to our mix. Happy hour, dine-in, take-out. Reservations encouraged, but walk-ins welcome. 7065 East Tanque Verde Road 520.886.0484 ReneesOrganicOven.com

THE SCREAMERY Hand Crafted Ice Cream pasteurized on-site with all natural ingredients to provide an old fashioned solution to modern day ice cream flavors. Its ice cream base is from the freshest cream and milk from Strauss Family Creamery out of California. Their cows only eat grass and are not treated with any hormones. 50 South Houghton Road Suite 120 520.721.5299 TheScreamery.com

TUCSON TAMALE COMPANY More than 30 different kinds of incredible tamales. Mild to spicy, meaty to vegan, savory to sweet, we have just about every kind of tamale you can think of and then some! GMO-free masa! 7153 East Tanque Verde Road 520.238.8404 TucsonTamale.com

ZONA 78 Tucson’s premiere destination for artisan pizza, Italian specialties, and an eclectic selection of wine, beer, & spirits. Zona 78 sources many ingredients locally and has an in-house charcuterie. 7301 East Tanque Verde Road 520.296.7878 Zona78.com

VERO AMORE Authentic Neapolitan Pizza Certified authentic by Italy’s renowned Verace Pizza Napoletana, Vero Amore features fresh, handcrafted wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, pasta, panini, salad, dessert, and daily specials, made with the highest quality ingredients. Vegetarian and gluten-free dishes always available. Open daily with two locations and mobile Pizza Truck for parties and events. Lunch, dinner, full bar, happy hour, catering, private Parties. 2920 North Swan Road 520.325.4122 VeroAmorePizza.com

NORTH, CATALINA FOOTHILLS

ACACIA Located in the Catalina foothills, Acacia offers an exquisite panoramic view of Tucson and features award-winning cuisine by chef Albert Hall. Fresh natural and local ingredients lovingly prepared in the friendliest and most comfortable setting in Tucson. Join us for lunch, dinner, Sunday brunch, and happy hour daily. 3001 East Skyline Drive 520.232.0101 AcaciaTucson.com

ARMITAGE WINE BAR & LOUNGE The setting changes character as the night lengthens, with its Old World ambiance and intimate conversation areas providing a relaxing setting for lunch, dinner, weekend brunch, or winding down after the workday. As the evening progresses, the lights dim and the music picks up tempo, transforming into an energized nightspot. 2905 East Skyline Drive 520.682.9740 ArmitageWine.com

CONTIGO Innovative and modern Latin Cuisine. We respect yet redefine contemporary Latin American and Spanish cooking with pan-Latin fare incorporating flavors from Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Spain, excellent specialty cocktails and fine wines from around the world. 1745 East River Road 520.299.1730 EatAtContigo.com

NORTH ITALIA Our love letter to Italy. Handmade pasta and pizza: every day, we start from scratch to create dishes like Strozzapreti with Bloomsdale spinach or supple ribbons of tagliatelle for our Bolognese. With the spirit of the Italian taverna, North is the place to talk shop over a cocktail or swap gossip sharing delectable chef creations. La Encantada, 2995 East Skyline Drive 520.299.1600 NorthItaliaRestaurant.com

TAVOLINO RISTORANTE ITALIONO Specializing in simple, elegant food, Tavolino’s Northern Italian cuisine features fresh salads, homemade pastas, wood-fired pizzas, succulent rotisserie meats, and luscious desserts. Lunch & dinner Monday through Saturday. Happy hour 3-6pm and 9-11pm. 2890 East Skyline Drive 520.531.1913

ZONA 78 Tucson’s premiere destination for artisan pizza, Italian specialties, and an eclectic selection of wine, beer, & spirits. Zona 78 sources many ingredients locally and has an in-house charcuterie. 78 West River Road 520.888.7878 Zona78.com

NORTHWEST TUCSON, ORO VALLEY & MARANA

BEYOND BREAD Locally-owned and operated since 1998, we offer a variety of hand-crafted breads, delicious sandwiches, house-made soups, fresh salads, and decadent pastries—all in a comfortable and friendly environment. We make just about everything from scratch, using only the finest ingredients. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. 421 West Ina Road 520.461.1111 BeyondBread.com


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GOURMET GIRLS GLUTEN FREE BAKERY/BISTRO Everything is gluten free, from the seasonally-inspired menu to the outstanding selection of handcrafted baked goods. Enjoy house specialties all prepared in a dedicated kitchen with no cross-contamination. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner by reservation. 5845 North Oracle Road 520.408.9000 GourmetGirlsGlutenFree.com

GRINGO GRILL + CANTINA A place to relax and enjoy fresh, simple flavors. More than 100 tequilas, hand-crafted cocktails, and seriously delicious food...you’ll always come back for more! Be careful, not many can handle the Desert Ghost Diablo! 5900 North Oracle Road 520.887.3777 GringoGrillTucson.com

THE PARISH A southern-fusion gastropub. It draws its inspiration from Louisiana, Texas and Arizona, comfort, cuisine, hospitality, and community. 6453 North Oracle Road 520.797.1233 TheParishTucson.com

PITA JUNGLE “The Art of Eating Healthy”. Mediterranean-inspired dishes made from scratch daily with only the freshest ingredients. The menu is based on offering a healthy and natural cuisine abounding with vegetarian and vegan options. Catering available. 7090 North Oracle Road 520.797.7482 PitaJungle.com

SOUTH & BARRIO VIEJO

5 POINTS MARKET & RESTAURANT Bridging South Tucson and downtown, we serve breakfast and lunch. We are also a grocery store and deli. 756 South Stone Avenue 520.623.3888 5PointsTucson.com

CAFE DESTA Offering authentic Ethiopian cuisine, great food and great coffee in a relaxing environment. 758 South Stone Avenue 520.370.7000

CUSHING STREET BAR & RESTAURANT Uptown comfort food, garden patios, full bar, and live jazz, have made this 1860s historic landmark a local favorite for 40 years. Book an intimate party in a private dining room or a wedding for 100 guests. Family-owned since 1972. 198 West Cushing Street 520.622.7984 CushingStreet.com

EL DORADO RESTAURANT Authentic Mexican cuisine in South Tucson. Where the locals go to eat. 1949 South 4th Avenue 520.622.9171

LOS PORTALES Our mission is to manage the satisfaction of our clients in a family environment where the art and the music merge to the flavor of the Mexican food. 2615 South 6th Avenue 520.889.1170 LosPortalesDeTucson.com

SONORAN SNO-CONES Highlights the traditional recipes for sweets made of fresh fruit and natural ingredients, instead of artificial sweeteners. 135 West Ajo Way, Suite A 520.889.0844 SonoranSnoCones.com

WEST

AGUSTIN KITCHEN Three-time Iron Chef winner Ryan Clark’s Agustin Kitchen is a twist on new American and classic French cuisine, with an emphasis on local ingredients. 100 South Avenida del Convento 520.398.5382 AgustinKitchen.com

COYOTE PAUSE CAFE Comfort food with a Southwestern twist! Menu inspired by local desert foods. Breakfast & lunch 730am-230pm. Omelets, salads, sandwiches, vegetarian choices, beer, wine. In Cat Mountain Station shopping center, unique art, antiques, buy-sell-trade fashion. Arts & Crafts Fair December 7th, Sale December 21st! 2740 South Kinney Road 520.883.7297 CoyotePauseCafe.com

MOTHER HUBBARD’S CAFE Serving contemporary Native American comfort food. Breakfast & lunch only. At the northwest corner of Grant & Stone--just minutes from downtown Tucson. Come taste the love! 7am-2pm, daily. 14 West Grant Road 520.623.7976

SEIS KITCHEN Experience the sights, sounds, and smells of Mexico’s beloved street food at its finest—warm handmade tortillas, hot off the griddle quesadillas, fire-roasted salsas, or artisan tortas, all served Seis Style, inspired from six culinary regions of Mexico. 130 South Avenida del Convento 520.260.6581 SeisKitchen.com

SONORAN SNO-CONES Highlights the traditional recipes for sweets made of fresh fruit and natural ingredients, instead of artificial sweeteners. 120 South Avenida del Convento Suite 120 520.344.8470 SonoranSnoCones.com

YOGI’S INDIAN CAFE & MARKET Delicious Indian food & delights! Largest selection of South Asian groceries in Tucson & you’ll love the prices too! Centrally located near UA & downtown. 2537 North Stone Avenue 520.303.3525

BISBEE

BISBEE BREAKFAST CLUB The best choice for breakfast in Bisbee, Arizona. Lunch also available. Open 7am-3:05pm every day. 75A Erie Street, Bisbee 520.432.5885 BisbeeBreakfastClub.com

CAFÉ CORNUCOPIA Made-from-scratch soups, sandwiches, quiche, and desserts, in the heart of historic Old Bisbee. Open Monday through Tuesday 11am-4pm, Friday through Sunday 11am-4pm. 14 Main Street, Old Bisbee

CAFÉ ROKA Celebrating 20+ years of serving the Bisbee community and Baja Arizona. We create a wonderful dining experience for our guests, providing delicious food, beverages, and warm hospitality. Reservations recommended. 35 Main Street, Old Bisbee 520.433.5153 CafeRoka.com

CONTESSA’S CANTINA Featuring traditional Mexican food for lunch and dinner. Full bar and live music. 202 Tombstone Canyon Road, Old Bisbee 520.432.6711 ContessasCantina.com

HIGH DESERT MARKET Gourmet food, gift market, and cafe. Open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with indoor and outdoor seating. We do all our baking on premises, serve generous gourmet salads and sandwiches, quiches, pizzas, desserts, and more. 203 Tombstone Canyon, Old Bisbee 520.432.6775 HighDesertMarket.com

JIMMY’S HOT DOG COMPANY Jimmy and his wife Pammy use genuine “Vienna Brand” Beef, Hot Dogs, Sausages, even condiments and buns as well as authentic Gonnella Italian Bread, flown in fresh from the northwest side of Chicago for your dining enjoyment. 938 West Highway 92, Bisbee 520.432.5911

MORNINGS CAFE We are a quaint and popular local diner with a friendly atmosphere and familiar faces. Our menu is simple with creative twists and our half-pound burger menu will impress! Hope to see you soon! 420 Arizona Street, Warren (Bisbee) 520.366.1494 MorningsCafeBisbee.com

SCREAMING BANSHEE PIZZA & WINE BAR A unique, eclectic restaurant housed in a renovated gas station, with lovely front and back patios. We take pride in our hand-crafted, wood-fired pizza, salads, small plates, calzones, and sandwiches. Featuring a full bar, signature cocktails, local beers, and unique wines. 200 Tombstone Canyon Road, Old Bisbee 520.432.1300 ScreamingBansheePizza.net

THUY’S NOODLE SHOP Authentic, from scratch Vietnamese food, specializing in pho, a noodle soup—beef or vegan. 9 South Naco Road, Old Bisbee 520.366.4479

WHYLD ASS COFFEE SHOP An organic, plant-based, culture experience. We feature “more than fair trade” coffee. Our restaurant offers healthy, tasty, vegan alternatives that are made with only the finest organic ingredients, mainly locally-sourced. Live music and poetry on weekends. 54 Brewery Avenue 520.353.4004

SONOITA, ELGIN, PATAGONIA

OVERLAND TROUT Farm to table restaurant in Sonoita by celebrated chef Greg LaPrad. Dedicated to supporting local and producing quality meals. Lunch, dinner, cocktails. 3266 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.9316 OverlandTrout.com

TIA NITA’S CANTINA Enjoy your favorite drinks in post-modern bordertown surroundings in Sonoita. Full bar opens at 2pm daily, serving Barrio Brewery beers on tap. Italian kitchen opens for dinner nightly, serving fresh, homemade pizza, wings, sandwiches, and more. Closed Tuesdays. 3119 South Highway 83, Sonoita 520.455.0500

NOGALES

LA ROCA Enjoy authentic Sonoran cuisine with the freshest ingredients from Mexico. Take in the rich ambiance of the historic Casa Margot. Visit our unique shops below the restaurant to find local art, hand-crafted home goods, and beautiful clothing. Calle Elias # 94, Nogales (on the Sonora side) LaRocaRestaurant.com

TUBAC/TUMACACORI

ELVIRA’S Established in 1927 in Nogales, Sonora, Elvira’s is now in Tubac, bringing you the best Mexican cuisine and award-winning dishes! 2221 East Frontage Road A101, Tubac 520.398.9421 ElvirasRestaurant.com

GREEN START JUICE BAR This juice bar at La Entrada de Tubac is locally owned and features organic juices made from the freshest ingredients. We offer super-food smoothies, juices, and salads. Gluten free, dairy free, sugar free, vegan. Try our juice or raw food challenge! 2221 Frontage Road, Suite N-101, Tubac 520.841.0001

THE GOODS Green smoothies, hearty & healthful bites for breakfast & lunch in the heart of Tubac. Soups, salads, sandwiches, baked goods, organic coffee, & teas + freshly tempered chocolates using healthful and often organic ingredients. Stop in for a cozy respite and a “good” meal. 26A Tubac Road, Tubac 520.398.2001 thegoodstubac.com

SHELBY’S BISTRO A southern Arizona restaurant, located in the artistic, historic town of Tubac. We offer Mediterranean-style cuisine. Lunch or dinner, it is a highly enjoyable experience! 19 Tubac Road, Tubac 520.398.8075 ShelbysBistro.com

SOTO’S PK OUTPOST Mexican Food, great margaritas, delicious fajitas, and a friendly atmosphere where the customer is #1. 14 Camino Otero, Tubac 520.398.3256

TUBAC JACKS Welcome to Tubac Jack’s Restaurant & Saloon! Discover delicious, authentic Southwestern cuisine infused with our own signature style. 7 Plaza Rd, Tubac 520.398.3161

WISDOM’S CAFE Your neighborhood restaurant for seven decades. Let our family serve your family mouth-watering Mexican food that is lovingly prepared and steeped in tradition. Owned and operated by four generations of the Wisdom family. 1931 East Frontage Road, Tumacocori 520.398.2397 WisdomsCafe.com

WISDOM’S DOS! Street tacos, Sonoran dogs, sliders, nachos, burritos, hummus, soup, salads, cheese crisps, and homemade ice cream await you when you want a quick, delicious lunch or want to stop in for drinks and appetizers before dinner. 4 Plaza Road, Suite 102, Tubac 520.216.7664 WisdomsCafe.com/Dos

FOOD TRUCKS, CATERING, PERSONAL CHEFS

BUDDHA’S BOWL Personal Chef Service Offering customized, ready to serve meals to complement your healthy lifestyle. Specializing in Vegan, Paleo, Low Carb, Gluten Free, and Omnivore diets, Affordable, convenient, and delicious. Free consultation. 520.668.9010 BudBwl.com


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ARTISAN PURVEYORS & DEALERS

ALEJANDRO’S TORTILLA FACTORY Corn and flour tortillas, bread, & chips. Look out for our new natural tortillas as well as our chiltepin and other flavored tortillas. Find us at many markets and grocery stores throughout Baja Arizona. 5330 South 12th Avenue, South Tucson 520.889.2279 AlejandroTortilla.com

ALFONSO OLIVE OIL A world of flavor, locally owned. We invite you to a unique tasting experience of the freshest, first cold pressed, extra virgin olive oils, and flavored olive oils from around the world, and all natural traditional aged balsamic vinegars from Modena, Italy! “Taste first…buy when the excitement becomes overwhelming.” Central location: 4320 North Campbell Avenue, Oro Valley location: 7854 North Oracle Road 520.441.9081 AlfonsoOliveOil.com

BISBEE HOT & SPICY The HOTTEST Place in Arizona. We have over 150 items - - all to tempt your taste buds and blast your head off with heat!! 51 Main Street, Old Bisbee 520.432.4332 BisbeeHotAndSpicy.com

BISBEE OLIVE OIL Come visit us in Bisbee and experience everything the town has to offer. We are located in a 111-year-old renovated building and carry 180 different items for sale. With 45 different olive oils and balsamics, there is a flavor for everyone. We also offer free tastings! 8 Brewery Avenue, Old Bisbee 520.432.4645

BLU—A WINE & CHEESE SHOP There’s a new cheesemonger in town! Tana Fryer of Blu has been crowned “cheesemonger in chief” by Tucson foodies. Also sold in Alfonso Olive Oil locations. 100 South Avenida Del Convento 520.314.8262 BluArizona.com

CHERI’S DESERT HARVEST Cheri’s all-natural products are made from fresh fruits and vegetables indigenous to the Sonoran Desert. Only the freshest prickly pear cactus fruit, citrus, honey, sweet peppers, and hot chile peppers are used in her preserves. 1840 East Winsett Street 800.743.1141 CherisDesertHarvest.com

DURAZO’S POCO LOCO SPECIALTY SALSAS Fresh fruit salsas with peaches, pineapple, and mangos at three different levels: Mild, Hot and Stupid Hot. Pico De Gallo, Salsa Ranchera (our more traditional), Guacamole, Ceviche with crab, shrimp, and baby clams, and Crab and Shrimp Dip. Find at Heirloom Farmers Markets. 520.884.7178

FERMENTED TEA COMPANY Family run and operated microbrewery of Kombucha which takes love, effort, and a desire to make the best batch, fermented with tea, every time. 520.286.6887 FermentedTeaCompany.com

GRAMMY’S JAMS Grammy offers artisan jams, jellies, chutneys, mustards, and pickles. Habanero Dills, Dilly Beans, Rolling Thunder, and Habanero Jams are favorites. Backyards, our trees, local farms, and orchards provide fruits for Grammy’s special products! Find Grammy’s at Heirloom Farmers Markets. 520.559.1698 Facebook.com/Grammys.AZ

HAYDEN FLOUR MILLS A family business working to revive heritage and ancient grains in the desert. We have revived the tradition that started in Tempe, Arizona more than 125 years ago by Charles Hayden and his Hayden Flour Mills. While not milled at the iconic Hayden Flour Mills’ building, our fresh flour harkens back to a time when flour still was full of nutrients and flavor. 4404 North Central Avenue, Phoenix. 480.557.0031 HaydenFlourMills.com

REX’S PEROGIES, LLC Making the most delicious traditional Polish Perogies—Handmade pockets of Love. Find us at the Oro Valley Farmers’ Market on Saturday and at the Rillito Park Farmers’ Market on Sunday. For more information call 520.250.1590

QUEEN CREEK OLIVE OIL MILL Oils & olives. A family-owned, local business that produces Arizona’s only extra virgin olive oil. Their olives are Arizona grown and pressed at their mill in Queen Creek, Arizona with four stores and tasting rooms in the state. At La Encantada, 2905 East Skyline, Suite 167, 520.395.0563 QueenCreekOliveMill.com

SANTA CRUZ CHILI & SPICE COMPANY Both manufacturer and retailer of fine chili products. At our Spice Center in Tumacacori we sell, along with Santa Cruz Products, a wide variety of gourmet southwestern foods, cookbooks, and more. 1868 East Frontage Road, Tumacacori 520.398.2591 SantaCruzChili.com

SKYE ISLAND OLIVE AND GRAPES We carry more than 30 different flavors of olive oils and balsamics! Come in and sample in our tasting room! Browse our gift shop for locally made items! Open Wednesday through Sunday 10am to 5pm. 3244 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.4627 SkyeIslandOliveAndGrapes.com

TORTILLERIA AREVALO We offer tortillas, cookies, and pancake mix, all made with the natural goodness of sweet-tasting Mesquite pod flour. Our products are traditionally made and delivered fresh to the Tucson area. Find us at Heirloom Farmers Markets. 520.822.0952

BAKERIES

BARRIO BREAD Tucson’s first Community Supported Baker. Don Guerra’s artisan breads, prepared with wild yeast cultures, long fermentation, and hearth baking create a truly inspired loaf. Crafting top quality bread and supporting local foods in Tucson since 2009. Find at Plaza Palomino Farmers’ Market on Sunday, and at the Tucson CSA. BarrioBread.com

BAVIER’S BAKERY Tucson’s premier provider of locally sourced, artisan, organic wedding cakes. Our pastries, cakes, and breads are enjoyed by thousands of Tucsonans every year. Trust us to create the perfect, unique cake for your wedding. 520.220.0791

BIG SKYE BAKERS Bodie from Big Skye Bakers will tell you that what he is selling is romance. Pies and cookies baked much the same as our grandmothers made. The nuanced difference is the addition of mesquite flour; taste of a summer rain. Inquire about special orders at [email protected] BigSkyeBakers.com

LA ESTRELLA BAKERY At the Mercado San Agustin: A Tucson staple with yummy traditional Mexican pastries and pan dulce you won’t find anywhere else in town. Monday-Saturday, 7 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday, 7 a.m.-2 p.m., 100 South Avenida del Convento 520.393.3320 LaEstrellaBakeryIncAZ.com

SMALL PLANET BAKERY We started baking bread in February of 1975. At that point, we were a collective of six, only one of whom had any baking experience. We now service many stores and do custom baking for eight restaurants and participate in many farmers’ markets. 411 North 7th Avenue 520.884.9313 SmallPlanetBakery.com

Food & Drink for HomeGrocery Resources in Baja Arizona

CHEF CHIC CATERING Your answer to your food time dilemma. We are a personal chef service that can handle all of your food needs. Including, prepped meals, table ready meals, special diets, special occasions, parties, catering, desserts, and cooking lessons. ChefChicAZ.com 520.406.2757 CHEF POLICE Your food has the right to remain tasty. A Personal Chef and Caterer of authentic Caribbean food. Chef Police focuses on delivering artisan interpretations of cuisine from the Caribbean West Indies & Latin America, with European, African, and Southeast Asian influences. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @ChefPolice 520.398.6596 ChefPolice.com

CHEF’S KITCHEN & CATERING A family affair, owned, operated by husband and wife, Chris and Mary Cryderman and son Ivor. Chris and Ivor have a combined 50+ years experience as chefs involving a wide spectrum of upscale cuisines. They use this knowledge and love of making fresh, healthy food from scratch to provide excellent, flavorful mobile dining and catering, like one could expect in a high quality restaurant. 520.903.7004 [email protected]

FOODIE FLEET A high class, high quality, low price mobile eatery in the Tucson area. We feature pressed sandwiches and waffles. We also offer tantalizing sides, and our special homemade sauce, that will keep you coming back for more! We make a concerted effort to source all of our products locally and organically. It is an experience that you’ve never had before. Catering Available. 520.329.3663 FoodieFleet.com

PLANET OF THE CREPES Bringing southern Arizona a modern twist to the French classic, PotC’s award winning crepes range from savory duck breast with fig jam to the decadent fresh strawberry and French custard. Daily specials and rotating locations make this food truck a destination. 520.271.6083 PlanetOfTheCrepes.com

ST. ANDREW’S CATERING Led by Deacon Jefferson Bailey (a Tucson culinary icon), this innovative caterer based at St. Andrew’s Espiscopal Church in the historic Armory Park district can do anything, from a locally sourced, organic, multicourse dinner to simply furnishing a pleasant space for an offsite meeting. Proceeds fund the non-profit Neighbors Feeding Neighbors program. 545 South 5th Avenue 520.622.8318


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BEER, WINE, & DISTILLED LIBATIONS

ARIDUS WINE COMPANY Family-owned Aridus Wine Company opened custom crush cellar doors in August 2012. Tasting Room open 11-5 daily. 145 North Railview Avenue, Willcox 520.766.9463 AridusWineCo.com

BEAST BREWING COMPANY Arizona’s first and wildest craft beer. Our mission is to inspire a renewed passion for flavor, one pint at a time. 1326 West Highway 92 #8, Bisbee 520.284.5251 BeastBrewingCompany.com

BODEGA PIERCE Our wines are made exclusively from 17 varieties of mature vines encompassing Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Spanish, and Italian grapes grown at the family’s estate vineyard south of Willcox, AZ. The wines are designed to express the high desert terroir of the Willcox Bench and have been found to be unsurpassed in producing spectacular world-class wines. 4511 East Robbs Road, Willcox 602.320.1722 BodegaPierce.com

BORDERLANDS BREWING COMPANY Devoted to crafting unique beers using local ingredients and sustainable brewing methods. Founded in 2011 by two friends, Borderlands has a unique tap room located in a 100 year old produce warehouse and is now providing beer for dozens of bars and restaurants in Southern Arizona.119 East Toole Avenue 520.261.8773 BorderlandsBrewing.com

CALLAGHAN VINEYARDS Located in the rolling, oak-dotted hills of southeastern Arizona, at an elevation of 4800 feet, we produce rich, complex red and white wines from a 25 acre vineyard. Mediterranean and Spanish varietals—Tempranillo, Mourvedre, Petit Verdot, Petite Syrah, and Grenache—are the basic building blocks for our red blends, while Viognier, and Riesling are blended for our estate white wine. 336 Elgin Rdoad, Elgin 520.455.5322 CallaghanVineyards.com

CARLSON CREEK VINEYARDS A cozy, comfortable tasting experience, with plush seating and charming staff. Carlson Creek’s cottage tasting room allows you to relax and enjoy our wines in a stress free atmosphere. 115 Railview Avenue, Willcox 520.766.3000 CarlsonCreek.com

CHARRON VINEYARDS & WINERY Less than 30 minutes from downtown Tucson is a small vineyard producing quality hand crafted Arizona wines. Visit one of the oldest wineries in Arizona where you can sample an array of award-winning wines in the glass enclosed tasting room or on the wine deck surrounded by mature vineyards and breathtaking mountain views. 18585 South Sonoita Highway, Vail 520.762.8585 CharronVineyards.com

DOS CABEZAS WINEWORKS Planted, harvested, and fermented in Arizona! Come try a glass! Our winery tasting room is open Thursday-Sunday 10:30-4:30. Tasting fee of $15 includes a souvenir glass. 3248 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.5141 DosCabezasWineWorks.com

FLYING LEAP VINEYARDS With developed acreage in both Sonoita AVA and Cochise County, Flying Leap offers a diverse portfolio of ultra-premium, carefully crafted wines. Visit the tasting rooms at estate vineyards in Willcox and Sonoita, and tasting rooms in Bisbee and Tucson. 520.954.2935 FlyingLeapVineyards.com

GOLDEN RULE VINEYARDS One part of a family farming operation owned by Jim and Ruth Graham of Cochise, Arizona. The combination of rich alluvial soils, a deep groundwater aquifer, brilliant Arizona sunshine, and a wide spread between daytime and nighttime temperatures creates a high desert terroir that is unique in American vineyards. 3649 North Golden Rule Road, Cochise 520.507.2400

HAMILTON DISTILLERS Whiskey del Bac is handmade by Hamilton Distillers in small batches using a copper pot-still and house-malted, mesquite-smoked barley. Three desert single-malt whiskeys made in Tucson. 2106 North Forbes Blvd #103 520.628.9244 HamiltonDistillers.com

IRON JOHN’S BREWING COMPANY A rotating selection of small batch craft beers all bottled by hand. We produce all our beer at our brewery and have a small retail bottle shop on site. We invite you to stop by and purchase some of the beer you like. 245 South Plumer Avenue 205.737.4766 IronJohnsBrewing.com

OLD BISBEE BREWING COMPANY Come and visit lively, historical Bisbee and taste the premium beer at Old Bisbee Brewing Company in the heart of Brewery Gulch! 200 Review Alley, Old Bisbee 520.432.2739 OldBisbeeBrewingCompany.com

PLAZA LIQUORS A family-owned and independent store, Plaza has been around under the ownership of Mark Thomson for 35 years. Plaza specializes in family-owned wineries, breweries, and distilleries from around the world. The service and selection speaks for itself. 2642 North Campbell Avenue 520.327.0542

SAND-RECKONER VINEYARDS Located on the Willcox Bench at 4,300 feet in elevation, Rob and Sarah Hammelman tend to the vineyards. Our name, Sand-Reckoner, means ‘sand-calculator,’ and references Archimedes’ revolutionary and thought provoking third century B.C. writing. In this text, Archimedes calculates the size of the universe by figuring the number of grains of sand that will fill it. The name alludes to our sandy loam soils, our connection to the cosmos, and the infinite calculations required to create a wine that expresses the very sand into which our vines’ roots grow deep. 303.931.8472 Sand-Reckoner.com

SENTINEL PEAK BREWING COMPANY Located in mid-town Tucson, our nano brewery and tap room provide a constant variety of award-winning, craft beers and great food in a casual setting where families and friends can catch a Wildcats game, enjoy live music, or get a growler to go. 4746 East Grant Road 520.777.9456 SentinelPeakBrewing.com

TAP & BOTTLE A craft beer and wine tasting room in Downtown Tucson featuring hundreds of beverage options to enjoy on site or carry out. Look forward to beer flights, events, and merchandise. 403 North 6th Avenue 520.344.8999 TheTapAndBottle.com

TEN-FIFTY FIVE BREWING Committed to the idea of the local nano-brewer; we are a small batch company using fresh ingredients and open minds to make some great tasting brew. 3810 East 44th Street, Suite 315 520.461.8073 1055Brewing.com

UNPLUGGED We’ve sourced the wine world to find a unique blend of varietals at prices that are right for all occasions. Come downtown for this exceptional experience. We also regularly feature live jazz. 118 East Congress Street 520.884.1800 UnpluggedTucson.com

COFFEE ROASTERS

EXO ROAST COMPANY Exo seeks out the world’s finest coffees, craft roasts them in small batches, and distributes them in limited quantities to ensure unequaled quality. Roastery and café open Monday-Saturday, 7am-7pm, Sunday 7am-3pm. Come by for free twice-weekly tastings. Custom wholesaling for area cafes and restaurants. 403 North Sixth Avenue 520.777.4709 ExoCoffee.com

SAVAYA COFFEE Our goal is to offer superior quality coffees available around the corner from where you brew at home, so the fresh flavors of the Americas, Africa, and Asia are right here for you to enjoy. Several locations in Baja Arizona. SavayaCoffee.com

STELLA JAVA Enjoy delicious espresso drinks made from locally roasted coffee beans at this unique family-owned Tucson café. Mon-Sun 8am-2pm 100 South Avenida del Convento 520.777.1496 StellaJava.com

FARMS, RANCHES, PRODUCE COMPANIES

APPLE ANNIE’S U-PICK FARM A fruit and vegetable U-Pick farm for the whole family and country store next to I-10 in Willcox. Go to website for information on seasons for various crops. AppleAnnies.com

AVALON ORGANIC GARDENS & ECOVILLAGE Avalon Gardens practices traditional permaculture principles and time-honored techniques of organic gardening, as well as new sustainable technologies; they also promote seed-saving and the cultivation of heritage varieties of produce provided to our local area through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Tours available by appointment. 2074 Pendleton Drive, Tumacácori 520.603.9932 AvalonGardens.org

CHIRICAHUA PASTURE RAISED MEATS Home of “Josh’s Foraging Fowls” pasture raised poultry (chicken, eggs, and holiday turkeys). Also high quality grass-finished beef and lamb. All of our livestock are raised on our irrigated pastures near Willcox, AZ. Visit us online or call to order. 520.507.3436 CPRMeats.com

CHIVA RISA We make artisanal, all natural, European-style cheese on an off-grid, sustainable site situated in the upper San Pedro Valley near the Mexican Border. We treat our animals, land, and cheese with the utmost care and respect. Sharing nature’s bounty with our community through finely-crafted cheese is Chiva Risa’s primary goal. 520.901.0429 ChivaRisa.com

DOUBLE CHECK RANCH We are a family business that raises, processes (on-farm), and directly sells hearty, wholesome pasture-raised meats in ways that would be familiar to our grandfathers. For eighteen years we have been reinventing local, small-scale agriculture in a way that respects land, animals, and people. Find at various farmers’ markets. 520.357.6515 DoubleCheckRanch.com

FIORE DI CAPRA Raw Goat Milk, Yogurt, Kefir, Artisanal Farmstead Goat Cheese, and Confections. Healthy, happy goats fed grass, alfalfa, and local browse. Award-winning products can be sampled and purchased at the Heirloom Farmers Market, Sundays. 520.586.2081 GoatMilkAndCheese.com

HARRIS HERITAGE GROWERS Pick it yourself veggies right out of the field. Also a small shop filled with paintings, handcrafted wood items, crafts, handmade jewelry, and much more. 27811 South Sonoita Highway (Highway 83), Sonoita 520.455.9272

HIGH ENERGY AGRICULTURE Based out of Marana, AZ. Family owned and operated, High Energy bring the freshest possible produce for maximum nutrient value picked each morning of the market. Find on Facebook, available at Heirloom Farmers Market.

LARRY’S VEGETABLES We grow according to the seasons and the garden dictates when each crop is ready to go to market. All produce is picked within 24-48 hours prior to market. Larry and Eunice are “getting fresh with your veggies.” 520.250.2655 LarrysVeggies.net

PATAGONIA ORCHARDS An organic grower, packer, and shipper based in Rio Rico, Arizona. We ship premium organic fruits grown in Arizona and Mexico to wholesalers and retailers throughout the U.S. and Canada. We partner with more than 15 organic growers. 520.761.8970 PatagoniaOrchardsLLC.com

REZONATION FARMS A family-scale farm serving two restaurants, the Food Conspiracy Co-op, farmers’ markets, and others. We produce eggs, honey, and vegetables and hold natural beekeeping workshops twice a year. 4526 North Anway Rd, Marana ReZoNationFarm.com

SAN XAVIER CO-OP FARM The San Xavier Cooperative Association envisions a farm committed to sustainable farming practices that support economic development in the community. Visit our farm store. 8100 South Oidak Wog 520.449.3154 SanXavierCoOp.org


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SKY ISLAND BRAND From conception to consumption, you’ve got a friend on the land, SKY ISLAND BRAND! Find us at the Sierra Vista Farmers’ Market (Thurs), Bisbee Farmers’ Market (Sat), Sierra Vista Food Co-op, and Tucson at Food Conspiracy Co-op. 520.642.9368

SLEEPING FROG FARMS Sleeping Frog Farms is an intensive 75-acre farm nestled in the Cascabel corridor of the San Pedro River Valley in Southern Arizona. Our mission is to improve the health of our land and community by growing high quality fruits and vegetables without the use of chemicals. 520.212.3764 SleepingFrogFarm.com

SUNIZONA FAMILY FARMS We are a family-owned, certified organic farm in Willcox, Arizona growing fruits and vegetables with sustainable, veganic practices, and greenhouse technology. CSAs available all over Baja Arizona. 5655 East Gaskill Road Willcox 520.824.3160 SunizonaFamilyFarms.com

VAN HAREN MEAT COMPANY Local lamb & goat meat raised locally in San Manuel. Find at the Heirloom Farmers’ Market on Sunday at Rillito Park. 520.909.0744 email: [email protected]

WALKING J FARM A polyculture farm specializing in grass fed, pasture-raised beef, poultry, and pork, and organically grown vegetables. At Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market on Thurs, Nogales Farmers’ Market on Fridays, and Heirloom Farmers Market on Sun 520.398.9050 WalkingJFarm.com

GROCERS, FARMERS’ MARKETS & CSAS

APPLE ANNIE’S COUNTRY STORE Open year-round offering our famous pies, apple bread, fudge, jarred goods, gifts, and other Apple Annie’s goodies that you love! Visit our U-Pick farm in season. 1510 North Circle I Road, Willcox 520.766.2084 AppleAnnies.com

BISBEE FARMERS’ MARKET Vibrant village market appears magically at Vista Park in the Warren district in Bisbee every Saturday morning. We feature local musicians while you enjoy shopping for healthy local foods and artisan crafts. Choices for Sustainable Living booth features workshops for healthy lifestyle changes. 9am-1pm, Saturdays, BisbeeFarmersMarket.org

BISBEE FOOD COOP Community owned. Natural & Organic. Open for everyone. Serving Bisbee and Cochise County for over 35 years. 72 Erie Street, Bisbee 520.432.4011 BisbeeCOOP.com FOODINROOT We are a small business startup with big dreams. We believe you can change your world through food, and we are dedicated to bringing greater access and knowledge for all things concerning local food. UAMC Farmers’ Market on Friday 10am-2pm. St. Philip’s Farmers’ Market on Saturday & Sunday 8am-1pm FoodInRoot.com 520.261.6982

HEIRLOOM FARMERS MARKETS Four local farmers markets that support our region’s farms by: connecting consumers directly to local food producers, strengthening urban-rural agriculture and small food businesses. Heirloom Farmers’ Markets dedicated to the benefits of local food. 520.882.2157 HeirloomFM.com

HIGH DESERT MARKET Gourmet food, gift market, and cafe. Open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with indoor and outdoor seating. We do all our baking on premises, serve generous gourmet salads and sandwiches, quiches, pizzas, desserts, and more. 203 Tombstone Canyon, Old Bisbee 520.432.6775 HighDesertMarket.com

NATIVE SEEDS/SEARCH RETAIL SHOP In addition to the seed shop, find a mouthwatering variety of Southwestern foods, including native chile powders, savory mole sauces, locally grown beans, and much more. 3061 North Campbell Avenue 520.622.5561 NativeSeeds.org

NOGALES MERCADO Enjoy the border experience at our all-local farmers’ market in the heart of downtown Nogales with Santa Cruz County produce, meat, baked goods, jams/jellies, and much more every Friday afternoon. The Nogales Mercado is part of Cosechando Bienestar, an initiative in Nogales to renew food traditions so that locally-grown food is enjoyed by all for better health. 520.375.6050 Facebook.com/NogalesMercado

RINCON VALLEY FARMERS & ARTISANS MARKET Enjoy the beautiful scenery and discover a one-of-a-kind shopping experience featuring fruit, produce, eggs, and meat from local Arizona farmers, local raw honey, artisan breads, beautiful artwork, crafts, furniture, aprons, and more handcrafted by our Artisans. We are open EVERY Saturday year round from 8am-1pm. 520.591.2276 RVFM.org

RIVER ROAD GARDENS We are a small urban farm, using Biodynamic principles, located on the grounds of the Tucson Waldorf School. CSAs available. 3605 East River Road 520.780.9125 RiverRoadGardens.com

SANTA CRUZ RIVER FARMERS’ MARKET Fresh, sustainably grown foods from local farmers. Arizona fruits and vegetables, free-range meat, eggs, honey, baked goods, and natural plant products! Live music, cooking demonstrations, children’s activities, and free workshops. A great place to get to know your community! Every Thursday from 3-6, on West Congress Street, just west of I-10 at Mercado San Agustin 520.882.3313 CommunityFoodBank.org

SHOPORGANIC.COM An online retailer of carefully selected Organic and Non-GMO products. Local Tucson customers can shop online and pick up at our facility. We offer shelf stable groceries, bulk foods, personal care, household items, gluten free, raw, and more. 520.792.0804 ShopOrganic.com

SIERRA VISTA FOOD CO-OP Our store has a full natural & organic grocery selection as well as frozen, dairy, bulk foods, organic and local produce, specialty & organic cheeses, olives, cruelty-free cosmetics, premium supplements, and more! 96 South Carmichael, Sierra Vista 520.335.6676 SierraVistaMarket.com

SIERRA VISTA FARMERS’ MARKET Open Thursdays at Veterans’ Memorial Park in Sierra Vista, AZ. Meet local growers, ranchers, beekeepers and bakers. Take home some of the bounty of southern Arizona! Grass-fed meats, desert heritage foods, and plants. Contact [email protected] SierraVistafarmersMarket.com

TIME MARKET A neighborhood market since 1919, we bring specialty goods to the table: craft beers, esoteric fine wine, wood-fired pizza, espresso, and artisan organic natural yeast breads. We sell organic produce and use it for our restaurant in sandwiches, salads, and pizzas. We are committed to honest communication about sourcing, and enjoy featuring local farms in our menu. 444 East University Boulevard 520.622.0761

TUCSON CSA Offering weekly boxes of local, organically-grown produce since 2004. We also offer pasture-raised eggs and chickens, grass-fed meats, cheese, and bread (from Barrio Bread). Pickups are Tuesdays or Wednesdays, 4:00-7:00 pm, The Historic Y, 300 East University Boulevard (520) 203-1010 TucsonCSA.org


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AUTOMOTIVE

BLUE + WHITE Specialists Indulge in the best for you and your baby—we offer Tucson’s most accommodating BMW and MINI service plus expert maintenance, precision repair, and concierge amenities. Independent, locally-owned, and proud to exceed our customers’ expectations every time. 5728 East 22nd Street 520.300.4220 BlueandWhiteBMW.com

DENTAL

DR. KRIZMAN INTEGRATIVE DENTISTRY We are an integrative dental clinic that combines the best aspects of general and biological dentistry, and determines the healthiest restorative dental solution for each patient. 1601 North Tucson Boulevard #27 520.326.0082 KrizmanDental.com

DESIGNERS & BUILDING SUPPLIES

ARIZONA DESIGNS KITCHENS & BATHS, LLC Your home should be an extension of things in life you enjoy and value. Our designers have more than 100 years total experience designing kitchens and baths in homes throughout Southern Arizona. Come see us! 2425 East Fort Lowell Road. 520.325.6050 ArizonaDesigns.net

ORIGINATE NATURAL BUILDING MATERIALS SHOWROOM Specializing in environmentally-friendly building materials made from natural, renewable, & recycled resources. We offer innovative and unique materials that rival the aesthetics and performance of more traditional interior finishes. Flooring, countertops, cabinetry, paints, plasters, alternative plywoods, fireplaces, and architectural salvage. 526 North Ninth Avenue 520.792.4207 OriginateNBM.com

RED BARK DESIGN, LLC LANDSCAPE DESIGN + CONSULTATION RedBark Design offers regionally and ecologically appropriate landscape design services for residential, commercial, and consulting projects. Mail: P.O. Box 44128 Tucson, Arizona 85733. 520.247.2456 RedBarkDesign.com

SUNSET INTERIORS & DESIGN STUDIO With over 30 years of experience, the award-winning Dara Davis is known for her unique interpretation of regional design, inspired by the rich heritages of California missions, New Mexico pueblos, and ranches of the southwest. Plaza Colonial at 2890 East Skyline Drive Suite #190 520.825.2297 SunsetInterior.com

WALLS 2.0 Real walls that hold water! Water Harvesting, Thermal mass, passive heating and cooling, etc. 520.940.3177 RethinkTheWall.com

HOUSEWARE & HARDWARE

ACE HARDWARE Locally-owned and managed, we are an affiliate of the Ace Hardware co-operative. Five locations across Tucson, from Downtown on the West to the far Southeast side. We look forward to helping with your next project, no matter how small or large. Our locations listed at 135Hardware.com BUFFALO GALS Three-quarters hardware store, one-quarter gift shop. 3149 Highway 83, Sonoita 520.455.5523 BuffaloGalsOfSonoita.com

HF COORS Lead free, microwave, oven, broiler, freezer, and dishwasher safe. All our scrap and waste is inert or recycled. Our 200 foot long primary kiln is one of the most energy efficient in the world. 1600 S Cherrybell Stravenue 520.903.1010 HFCoors.com

TABLE TALK AT HOME Tucson’s Premier Home Specialty Store! Our goal has always been to help you and all of our shoppers make your home as comfortable, functional, and fun as possible. Furniture, cookware, decorative home accessories 7876 North Oracle Road, Oro Valley 877.828.8255 TableTalk.com

TUMACOOKERY 45 minutes south of Tucson, in Tubac, this well-stocked kitchen shop is a foodie destination for gadgets, appliances, cutlery, gourmet food, and more. Great local products, and knowledgeable, friendly staff, make Tumacookery a regional favorite. Worth the drive to Tubac all by itself! 2221 South Frontage Road, Tubac 520.398.9497 Tumacookery.com

HERBAL MEDICINE

DESERT TORTOISE BOTANICALS We provide handcrafted herbal products from herbs wild-harvested and organically grown within the Sonoran desert bioregion. Owner John Slattery conducts the Sonoran Herbalist Apprenticeship Program, wild foods class, private plant walks, and individual wellness consultation services. 4802 East Montecito Street DeserTortoiseBotanicals.com

TUCSON HERB STORE Located in the Heart of Downtown since 2003. Dedicated to serving a variety of ethically wild-crafted and botanical products of the southwest desert. We carry: bulk herbs, teas, herbal tinctures, beauty care products, soaps, books, incense, and much more! 408 North 4th Avenue 520.903.0038 TucsonHerbstore.com

YARD WOMAN An old-fashioned natural remedy shop specializing in herbs and herbalism in the Western Herbal Tradition. Custom blending, essential oils, homeopathics, handmade soaps and lotions, books, tarot cards, and yard art. All natural. Servicing Baja Arizona since 2004. 6 Camino Otero, Tubac 520.398.9565 YardWoman.com

INNS AND B&BS

BLUE AGAVE BED & BREAKFAST Dramatically situated on one of the Tucson Mountain’s lush cactus covered hilltops, the Blue Agave Bed and Breakfast is perfect for those seeking an elegant yet relaxed Arizona desert experience. With four lovely casitas, The Blue Agave is a great B&B! 455 North Camino de Oeste 520.250.2202 BlueAgave.com

CANYON ROSE SUITES Our turn of the century building is listed on the National Historic Registry and has been lovingly restored to provide every amenity. The rooms are beautifully decorated and include fully furnished kitchens and private baths. From $99 - $195 and we offer AAA and AARP discounts. Please inquire about our corporate and weekly rates. Subway Street & Shearer Avenue, Bisbee (520) 432-5098 CanyonRose.com

Local Products & ServicesNon Food in Baja Arizona

Grow With Us, Naturally!

Your Local Source From Seed to Table Since 1979.

520-825-9785 • 1-800-827-2857 • www.arbico-organics.com

Visit Our Store Today!10831 N. Mavinee Dr. Suite185

Oro Valley, AZ 85737

• Benefi cial Insects & Organisms• Seed Care & Propagation• Fertilizers & Amendments• Easy-To-Use Tools• Weed, Disease & Critter Control


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CAT MOUNTAIN LODGE A bed & breakfast in the desert! Eco-friendly accommodations in a vintage ranch setting with five eclectic spacious rooms. Southwestern comfort—mixed with modern conveniences. Enjoy free full breakfast at Coyote Pause Cafe. Reserve a guided Star Tour at Spencer’s Observatory. 2720 South Kinney Road 520.578.6085 CatMountainLodge.com

COTTAGE B&B AND BAKERY A historic landmark with comfortable, private accommodations: 1 bedroom cottage, 2 bedroom guest house. We serve a delicious full breakfast for two. Relax in our garden surrounded courtyard and enjoy a treat from our bakery. We offer a variety of freshly baked pastries, artisan breads, and organic coffee. Ask about our Saturday bakery deliveries to Tucson’s St. Phillip’s Plaza. CottageBedAndBreakfast.com 1104 South Central Avenue, Safford 928.428.5118

LA POSADA DEL RIO SONORA La Posada del Rio Sonora is a boutique hotel and restaurant on the Plaza Principal of Banámichi. Our 250 year old adobe has 10 rooms and suites, and two apartments. This is the heart of “La Ruta Rio Sonora” with nearby hot springs. 70 Calle Pesqueira, Banámichi, Sonora, Mexico, MexicoEcoResort.com

SUITE ASS BED & BREAKFAST Bitchin’ views, eclectic decor, great rate with a voucher to use in our cafe. 54 Brewery Avenue, Old Bisbee 520.353.4004

TUBAC GOLF RESORT & SPA Set at the base of the Santa Rita Mountains, features 98-Hacienda Style Accommodations, Stables Ranch Grille & Bar, a Destination Spa, a 27-Hole Championship Golf Course, Boutique Shopping, an 18th Century Replica Mission, and More. 1 Otero Road, Tubac 520.398.2211 TubacGolfResort.com

TUBAC POSTON HOUSE INN Located in the historic location of the Tubac village, the Poston House Inn has been occupied since the 1850s. Our Bed & Breakfast Inn has 5 pools, beautiful rooms, a homemade breakfast. Premier lodging in Tubac. 20 Calle Iglesia, Tubac 520.398.3193 TubacPostonHouseInn.com

WHISPERER’S RANCH BED & BREAKFAST 8 easy miles from Sonoita Vineyards. They offer king sized memory foam beds, private bathrooms, a full breakfast, and personal chef services to accommodate your special dietary needs—amenities that are unparalleled in the community. 1490 Highway 83, Elgin 520.455.9246 WhispersRanch.com

LANDSCAPING & PERMACULTURE

AHIMSA LANDSCAPING Ahimsa Landscaping is an ethically-focused, small design + build business specializing in creating sustainable landscapes through the integration of permaculture design principles and water harvesting techniques for the desert environment. Inquiries at [email protected] 520.345.1906 AhimsaLandscaping.com

PRIMAVERA WATER HARVESTING + SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPING Design and installation of earth works, cisterns, or greywater systems for food producing plants or gardens. Free estimates on all projects. 520.882.9668 Primavera.org/WaterHarvesting

WATERSHED MANAGEMENT GROUP Helping you with water harvesting, soil building, edible and native gardens, and watershed restoration. We’re a Tucson-based, non-profit serving the community by sharing our technical expertise and offering hands-on workshops, training programs, custom property consultations, site plans, and project implementation. 520.396.3266 WatershedMG.org

LAWYERS

LAW OFFICES OF NICOLE J. FRANCO, PLC Do you need a social security disability attorney? If you suffer from a serious medical condition preventing you from working, we can help. All consultations are free. 5111 North Scottsdale Road #160, Scottsdale 888.945.0144 NicoleFrancoDisability.com

LITERATURE

ANTIGONE BOOKS Zany, independent (and 100% solar-powered) bookstore. Books for all ages plus large selection of unusual gifts and cards. Regional books on cooking, gardening, sustainability, green living, and more. Voted Tucson’s best independent bookstore. Located in Tucson’s unique Fourth Avenue shopping district. 411 North 4th Avenue 520.792.3715 AntigoneBooks.com

BOOK STOP A Tucson institution for decades (since 1967!), the Book Stop stocks thousands of quality used and out-of-print titles. Monday-Thursday: 10am-7pm, Friday-Saturday: 10am-10pm, Sunday: noon-5pm. 213 N. 4th Avenue, 520.326.6661 BookStopTucson.com

HOZHONI, A GATHERING PLACE The best place for coffee, ice cream, books, art, events, and more. Weekdays: 6:30am-5pm. Weekends: 7am-5pm. 22 Tubac Road, Tubac 520.398.2921 Hozhoni-Tubac.com

MASSAGE, SPAS & SALONS

COYOTE WORE SIDEBURNS A high quality progressive hair salon. Our stylists are well-trained and current. If you would like to speak to a stylist about your hair service prior to making a commitment, consultation appointments are available. New location: 2855 East Grant Road 520.623.7341

CUT, COLOR, POLISH SALON A full service salon surrounded by luxury and relaxation. Specializing in all things beauty. Cut Color Polish welcomes clients to come indulge in the experience while taking care of all hair and nail pampering needs. Whether it’s a quick cut and style on the go or a manicure for a special occasion, Cut Color Polish staff aims to please and make every customer a top priority. 345 East Congress Street 520.777.7419 CutColorPolish.com

ESTUDIO DE PIEL This beautiful skin studio is the perfect place to treat yourself. The professionals at Estudio De Piel provide relaxing massages and clinically effective skin care treatments. 100 South Avenida del Convento 520.882.5050 EstudioPiel.com

GLOW SKIN CARE & LASHES Melinda M. Spreng’s philosophy is ‘beauty from within.’ She uses all natural products and methods to make you look and feel your best! 3101 North Swan Road 520.261.4635 GlowSkinCare-N-Lashes.SkinCareTherapy.net

THE HIVE HAIR STUDIO & GALLERY Conveniently located inside the historic Hotel Congress. We offer premium hair care at a competitive price point, and feature a revolving gallery of local artists. Book your appointment online today. 315 East Congress Street 520.628.4188 TheHiveTucson.com

JEFF ROGERS, AT CRANIOSACRAL & ZEN SHIATSU THERAPIES OF TUCSON The only Upledger Diplomate Certified CranioSacral Therapist in Southern Arizona, treating deeply with a light touch all forms and effects of stress, injury, chronic pain, headache/migraines, PTSD, and much more, since 1990. 439 North 6th Avenue Suite 221, 520.990.5865 CSTZST.comKRIS SCHAEFER ROGERS, AT CRANIOSACRAL & ZEN SHIATSU THERAPIES OF TUCSON Provides in-depth and multi-leveled bodywork skills to touch in at the root of energetic, nervous, immune, and organ function to regulate stress, trauma, and pain, since 1985. 439 North 6th Avenue Suite 221, 520.977.8019 CSTZST.com

ROOTED THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE & BODYWORK A small, locally owned clinic staffed by independent massage therapists located in the heart of Tucson, minutes from downtown and the University of Arizona. Rooted offers a wide range of modalities, including therapeutic, sports, Thai, prenatal massage, Chi Nei Tsang, and Skincare. 1600 North Tucson Boulevard, Suite 120, 520.326.8300 RootedMassageTucson.com

SPA DAZE TUCSON Providing quality pain management, stress relief, & athletic therapy. Therapeutic & Medical Massage, Shiatsu, Ashiatsu, Thai Massage, & More! 6812 North Oracle Road, Suite 100, 520.334.1919 SpaDazeTucson.com

VILLAGE SALON Hair, nails, makeup...a full service salon located in Broadway Village. 120 South Country Club Road 520.795.3929 TheVillageSalonTucson.com

ORGANIZATIONS

AMERIND MUSEUM A nonprofit museum and research center dedicated to Native American cultures and histories. Located in Arizona’s spectacular Texas Canyon. 2100 North Amerind Road, Dragoon 520.586.3666 Amerind.org

BISBEE HUB Are you traveling to Bisbee soon? Find out what’s in store before you travel by visiting BisbeeHub.com and checking out the events calendar. We are also working on a business directory so come back again and again and see why Bisbee is so special! BisbeeHub.com

COSECHANDO BIENESTAR An initiative to renew food traditions in Nogales so that locally-grown food is enjoyed by all for better health. We do this by improving access, building residents’ capacity to grow food, supporting sound policy, and promoting local business. 520.375.6050 Facebook.com/NogalesMercado

DOWNTOWN TUCSON PARTNERSHIP A private nonprofit corporation whose mission is to revitalize Downtown through economic development, community development, public outreach, and events. 100 North Stone, Suite 101 520.268.9030 Downtowntucson.org

ETHERTON GALLERY Founded in 1981, Etherton Gallery specializes in 19th, 20th century, and contemporary fine photography, and features top local and regional artists working in all media. We also manage the Temple Gallery at the Temple of Music and Art. 135 South 6th Avenue 520.624.7370 EthertonGallery.com

HEALTHY YOU NETWORK The mission of Healthy You Network, Inc. is to promote the lifelong health benefits of a whole, plant-based lifestyle to residents of Arizona. 3913 East Pima Street 520.207.7503 HealthyYouNetwork.org

KXCI COMMUNITY RADIO Connecting the communities of Tucson and Southern Arizona to each other and to the world with informative, engaging, and creative community-based radio programming.Tune in at 91.3 KXCI Tucson, or listen online at KXCI.org.

LOCAL FIRST ARIZONA We empower Arizonans to build the life they want in their local community. Together we can create a strong economy, vibrant community, & job opportunities. LocalFirstAZ.com

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART The MOCA inspires new ways of thinking through the cultivation, interpretation, and exhibition of cutting-edge art of our time. 265 South Church Avenue 520.624.5019 Moca-Tucson.org

NATIONAL CENTER FOR INTERPRETATION A research and outreach unit at the University of Arizona charged with social justice for language minorities through cutting-edge research, training, and testing for interpreters and translators while advancing professionalism. 800 East University Blvd Suite 200 520.621.3615 NCI.Arizona.edu

PIMA ASSOCIATION OF GOVERNMENTS A nonprofit metropolitan planning organization with Transportation Planning, Environmental Planning, Energy Planning, and Technical Services divisions. 1 East Broadway Boulevard, Suite 401 520.792.1093 PAGRegion.com


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PRESIDIO SAN AGUSTÍN Located at the center of Washington and Court Streets in downtown Tucson. The Presidio San Agustín del Tucson has living history festivals where visitors can sample Spanish Colonial food, listen to stories of old Tucson, learn period crafts, see the cannon fired, and watch the soldiers drill! Admission is free. Metered parking is available during the week and parking on nearby streets is FREE on weekends. 196 North Court Street, 520.837.8119 TucsonPresidio.com

SANTA CRUZ VALLEY HERITAGE ALLIANCE We connect people to the unique heritage resources of the Santa Cruz River Valley in southern Arizona. 520.882.4405 SantaCruzHeritage.org

SONORAN INSTITUTE Founded in 1990, the Sonoran Institute informs and enables community decisions and public policies that respect the land and people of western North America.44 East Broadway Blvd, Suite 350 520.290.0828 SonoranInstitute.org

SOUTHERN ARIZONA ARTS & CULTURAL ALLIANCE A not-for-profit organization that exists to ensure that, through engagement in arts and culture, our communities produce strong, inspired citizens. 520.797.3959 SAACA.org

TOHONO CHUL PARK One of the “World’s Ten Great Botanical Gardens” according to Travel + Leisure magazine, and the place in Tucson where nature, art, and culture connect. 7366 North Paseo Del Norte 520.742.6455 TohonoChul.org

TUBAC CHAMBER OF COMMERCE A non-profit business league, engaged in all activities relating to the perpetuation, preservation, & promotion of Tubac, and its businesses. Welcome Ctr 12 B Tubac Road, Tubac 928.300.9448 TubacAZ.com

TUCSON CLEAN & BEAUTIFUL A non-profit organization with the intent to preserve and improve our environment, conserve natural resources, and enhance the quality of life in the City of Tucson and eastern Pima County. These goals are achieved through initiating educational and participatory programs implemented with broad-citizen, multicultural support. 520.791.3109 TucsonCleanAndBeautiful.org

TUCSON JAZZ FESTIVAL A 12-day festival of jazz, with locations at the historic Fox Tucson Theatre, The Rialto Theatre, and the Hotel Congress. The Festival also includes a free outdoor event on Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 19, 2015 in downtown Tucson, and festival artists will also hold master classes and educational activities for local schools and academies. TucsonJazzFestival.org

TUCSON MUSEUM OF ART Western, Latin, modern and contemporary, and Asian art fills our historic city block in downtown Tucson for an everlasting experience while traveling exhibits keep the paint and clay fresh for each visit. 140 North Main Avenue 520.624.2333 TucsonMuseumOfArt.org

TUCSON ORIGINALS Since 1999, The Tucson Originals have been the driving force in promoting the value of Tucson’s independent restaurants and supporting Tucson’s culinary diversity. Visit our website for information on restaurant membership, events, and special offers. 520.477.7950 TucsonOriginals.com

YWCA TUCSON The Cafe at the YWCA: Setting the Table for Change. The Galleria Art and Gifts: Gifts with Purpose. Social Enterprises of the YWCA Tucson. Our Mission: Eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all. 525 North Bonita Avenue 520.884.7810 YWCATucson.com

WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH CENTER The WRRC is committed to assisting communities in water management and policy, educating teachers, students, and the public about water, and encouraging scientific research on state and regional water issues. 350 North Campbell Avenue 520.621.2526 WRRC.Arizona.edu

WESTERN NATIONAL PARKS ASSOCIATION Promotes preservation and stewardship of the national park system and its resources and associated public lands by creating greater public appreciation through education, interpretation, and research. 12880 North Vistoso Village Drive, Oro Valley 520.622.6014 WNPA.org

PLANTS, SEEDS & GARDEN SUPPLY

ARBICO ORGANICS Arbico Organics has been providing organic solutions for homeowners, gardeners, farmers and pet, horse, and livestock owners since 1979. Products include beneficial insects and organisms, natural fertilizers, amendments, composting supplies, weed and disease controls, critter control, and more. 800.827.2847 Arbico-Organics.com

ARID LANDS GREENHOUSES We sell the most unusual plants: cacti, succulents, pachycaul trees, pachyforms, terrestrial bromeliads and orchids, and bulbs. Order online or to visit and browse, call ahead. 520.883.8874 AridLands.com

B&B CACTUS FARM A cactus and succulent grower in Tucson, Arizona, B&B has both seasoned landscape specimens and plants for the collector. 11550 East Speedway 520.721.4687 BandBCactus.com

BAMBOO RANCH Providing Desert Grown Bamboo since 1986. Specializing in non-invasive, clumping bamboo suited to harsh conditions. Providing plants, poles, and expert advice on species, growing, and care, for privacy screening and shade. 520.743.9879 [email protected] BambooRanch.net

CIVANO NURSERY We carry a large variety of plants for our unique climate, pottery from around the world in various styles, colors and sizes. Wind chimes that sparkle and herbs and vegetables for your kitchen garden. Fruit trees and shade trees, and flowers for butterflies and bees. 5301 South Houghton Road 520.546.9200 CivanoNursery.com

ECOGRO A recognized resource for aquaponics, sustainable growing methods, unusual and rare plants, education, equipment and supplies so that plant and garden enthusiasts can acquire the tools and knowledge to achieve their goals of growing healthy food, minimizing environmental impacts, enjoying healthy plants and experiencing the pride of achievement. 657 West St. Mary’s Road 520.777.8307 EcoGroHydro.com

GREEN THINGS NURSERY A retail & wholesale plant nursery located in Tucson in the Binghampton Historic District on the banks of the Rillito River. Come visit us for an unbelievable variety of plants, trees, cactus and pottery all at great prices! 3235 East Allen Road 520.299.9471 GreenThingsAZ.com

MESQUITE VALLEY GROWERS NURSERY A destination garden center with 24 acres of plants grown on-site, including desert natives, shade trees, fruit and nut trees, shrubs, roses, cacti and succulents. Also featuring fountains, statuary and garden accessories. Knowledgable staff on hand for planning, learning & diagnosis. 8005 East Speedway Boulevard 520.721.8600

NATIVE SEEDS/SEARCH Revered Tucson nonprofit and world-class seed bank saving and sharing the seeds of the desert Southwest since 1983. Classes, tours, seeds, native crafts and more! 3061 North Campbell Avenue (store) and 3584 East River Road (Center). 520.622.0830 NativeSeeds.org

RILLITO NURSERY & GARDEN CENTER An independent family-owned business that has provided our customers with a diverse inventory of quality plants and products since 1994. Our goal is to provide quality products and excellent service at a fair price. 6303 North La Cholla Boulevard 520.575.0995 RillitoNursery.com

ROMEO TREE SERVICE Certified arborist and tree worker, Angelo Romeo is the author of the DVD Mesquites & Palo Verdes, A Homeowner’s Guide. 520.603.0143 RomeoTreeService.com

Grammy’s

Find us at all Heirloom Farmers’ Markets and the Sierra Vista Farmers’ Market

Always a great place to find Briggs and Eggers organic fruit.

BRING YOUR KIDS BY FOR A FREE APPLE!

ARTISAN JAMS, JELLIES, PICKLES AND MUSTARDS, HEIRLOOM TOMATOES

located in Cochise Arizona

Grammys.AZ


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SILVERBELL NURSERY & COUNTRY STORE We sell bedding, garden and landscape plants, water harvesting supplies and now even pet food. “Our success is yours.” We believe that if we sell you a plant and tell you how to plant it, feed it, water it, harvest it and prune it, and you and the plant are successful, you will be back. 2730 North Silverbell Road 520.622.3894

TANK’S GREEN STUFF Our mission is to create value added products from stuff that was once considered waste. To create jobs and great products that can be used to build a sustainable local economy. Our compost is a naturally made soil amendment, containing no fertilizers or chemical products. 520.290.9313 TanksGreenStuff.biz

REAL ESTATE & PROPERTY MANAGEMENT

BARRIO VIEJO RENTALS Become part of downtown’s historic district. Apartments rent from $650-$900 a month. Offices range from 400 to 6,000 square feet, and leases include off-street parking. Let us welcome you to the neighborhood. 520.623.4091 BarrioViejo.com

HERBERT RESIDENTIAL Offering modern, urban living in downtown Tucson! Come see our newly remodeled studio and one bedroom apartments with breathtaking city views. 520.777.5771 HerbertLiving.com

JILL RICH REALTOR I am dedicated to our Long Realty mission: To create an exceptional real estate services experience that builds long-lasting relationships. “It’s like having your grandma in the real estate business.” 520.349.0174 JillRich.LongRealty.com

TIERRA ANTIGUA HOMES The largest, locally-owned real estate brokerage in Southern Arizona. We are proud to offer four Tierra Antigua offices around Tucson and Sierra Vista. With over 800 agents, we are the largest, locally-owned real estate brokerage in Southern Arizona. We are a high energy, cutting-edge company that continues to put clients and agents first! Downtown office at 216 East Congress Street Call Kent at 520.302.5368 or Emmary 520.314.8078 TierraAntigua.com

RETAIL SHOPS & PLAZAS

ANGEL WINGS THRIFT & GIFT SHOP Offering a “boutique” shopping experience with an ever changing and wide variety of inventory. All proceeds go to Our Lady of the Angels Mission Catholic Church, newly built, in Sonoita. 22 Los Encinos Road, Sonoita.

AVENUE BOUTIQUE One of Tucson’s most unique, fashion-forward women’s clothing boutiques. BRANDS: Gestuz, MinkPink, Plastic Island, Sheila Fajl, Rebecca Minkoff, James Jeans, Blank Denim, Myne, Dolce Vita, Genetic, Garde, Thomas Paul, Hanky Panky. Located in the Broadway Village. 3050 East Broadway Boulevard 520.881.0409 ShopAvenueBoutique.com

BON BOUTIQUE Located in Broadway Village, we offer a collection of well-made, beautiful things… home, garden, clothing, accessories and gifts. The things we seek out are made by skilled craftsmen who are passionate about what they do, whether they are in Tucson or abroad. 3022 East Broadway 520.795.2272 Bon-Boutique.com

BUFFALO EXCHANGE We buy, sell, and trade designer wear, basics, vintage, and one-of-a-kind items. You can receive cash or trade for clothing on the spot! We’re a family operated company that works to sustain the environment by recycling clothing. 2001 East Speedway Blvd. (Campus) 520.795.0508 & 6212 East Speedway Boulevard. (East Side) 520.885.8392 BuffaloExchange.com

BUFFALO TRADING POST New & Recycled Goods. We buy-sell-trade wonderful clothing & unique things! Our ever-changing inventory includes home decor, vintage, furniture, imports, clothing & accessories for women and men. Known as “Buffalo Exchange’s Older Sibling.” Holiday Sale and Fair events in December! 2740 South Kinney Road 520.578.0226 CatMountainStation.com

COPENHAGEN IMPORTS Committed to providing the highest quality service to our customers. Come in and experience our comfortable showroom with exciting displays and sales consultants who are truly interested in your furniture needs. 3660 East Fort Lowell 520.795.0316 CopenhagenLiving.com

COWGIRL FLAIR Sonoita’s local “Gussy’d Up Outfitters” providing locals and tourists a variety of contemporary western wear, boots, jewelry, and home décor with a unique style at 3244 Highway 82 #5 in Sonoita, Arizona Wednesday through Sunday 11am to 5pm. 3244 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.4784 Sonoita CowGirlFlairSonoita.com

CROWE’S NEST Hats, casual fashions, Minnetonka Footwear, unique jewelry & gifts. Year-round Christmas.19 Tubac Road, Tubac 520.398.2727

DARLENE MORRIS ANTIQUES We carry an unusual collection of 18th, 19th, and 20th century items including silver, jewelry, furniture, porcelain, glass, fine art and decorative items brought to the great Southwest from all over the world. Plaza Palomino 2940 North Swan, #128 520.322.9050

DECO, AN ILLUMINATING EXPERIENCE Treasures for you and your home. An eclectic mix of local artistry, recycled glassware, one-of-a-kind artworks, many items made in the USA, plus worldwide accents. 2612 East Broadway Boulevard 520.319.0888 DecoArtTucson.com

DESERT LEGACY GALLERY Offering Southwestern gifts and accessories. We also have a frame shop and an interior design service. If you like beautiful Native American and contemporary Southwest jewelry, saddle up your horse and ride on in! 3266 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.0555

DESERT VINTAGE We’ve come to be known as a great source for excellent, one-of-a-kind vintage pieces of quality and flair. We buy men’s and women’s vintage clothing and accessories seven days a week. Come by and check us out! 636 North 4th Avenue 520.620.1570 ShopDesertVintage.com

DOS CORAZONES Offering Fabulous Furniture, Accessories & Gifts. Our store will have your heart singing! Specialty lines and one of a kind inventory. We can add that special touch or do an entire home! 520.398.3110 DosCorazonesDesign.com

FED BY THREADS Downtown Tucson’s Destination for American-Made Organic Sustainable Clothing that feeds 12 emergency meals to hungry Americans per item sold. Featuring women’s, men’s, baby and toddler apparel made from organic cotton, hemp, bamboo and beyond. 345 East Congress Street 520.396.4304 FedByThreads.com

FLASH IN THE PAST Book a pinup photo shoot! Flash in the Past takes you back to the era of the classic pinup! The perfect treat for yourself! The perfect gift for a lover! Pinup parties available! Aside from pinup photo shoots, Flash in the Past also offers Retro Beauty Classes and vintage shopping. 43 South 6th Avenue 520.304.0691 FlashInThePast.com

FORS SHOP In the heart of the 5C district of downtown Tucson FORS Architecture has created a small gift shop inspired by food, fashion and design. Come chat with us about our architecture and interior design services too, since our office is in the same building. Come and browse! Monday through Friday, 9am-6pm. 245 East Congress Street #135, 520.795.9888 FORSArchitecture.com

GYPSY COWGIRL RESALE BOUTIQUE Unique resale clothing and accessories for women. Consignment by appointment. An upscale, resale boutique for humble snobs. Featuring brands like Lucky Brand, Double D, Johnny Was, 3J Workshop. Boots, jeans, jackets, vests skirts, shirts and more. 6 Camino Otero, Tubac 520.398.3000

HEART OF GOLD Offers real antiques (over 100 yrs old) and consignments from local estates. The owner is a certified appraiser and can help with consignment services, an estate sale, or appraisals of your treasures. P.O. Box 1273, Sonoita 520.394.0199 or cell 520.240.4490

HOW SWEET IT WAS Locally-owned since 1974, we specialize in vintage fashion from the 1880s-1980s. We also buy vintage everyday. No appointment necessary. 419 North 4th Avenue 520.623.9854

JGILBERT FOOTWEAR A luxury footwear, apparel and accessories boutique. We offer exclusive collections from Lucchese Classics & hard-to-find brands like Thierry Rabotin, Arche, Salpy and more. Monday-Saturday 10am-5:30pm Plaza Palomino. 2960 North Swan Road Suite 124, 520.327.1291

KRIKAWA JEWELRY DESIGNS, INC. A family operated business, located in Tucson, Arizona. Krikawa is run by the husband and wife team of John and Lisa Krikawa. With passion and determination, Lisa has built a company dedicated to creating one of a kind masterpieces for a clientele all over the world. 21 East Congress Street 520.322.6090 Krikawa.com

LITTLE BIRD NESTING COMPANY New, Gently-Used, and Locally Handmade Baby and Toddler Clothing, Gear, Toys, and Gifts! AGES Newborn to Age 4. 2924 East Broadway Boulevard 520.203.7372 LittleBirdNestingCo.com

LA CABAÑA Offering an artful collection of furniture and decor including traditional talavera, blending Spanish colonial and classic styles from around the world; antique and contemporary. 120 South Avenida del Convento 520.404.9008

MAGNETIC THREADS Original Designs then constructed into handmade clothing by Meggen Connolley. 2 Copper Queen Plaza, Old Bisbee 917.660.4681 Magnetic-Threads.com

MAST TUCSON A local lifestyle boutique. Specializing in handmade jewelry, leather goods, accessories, home goods & select furnishings. The three co-owners create the lion’s share of the stock, artfully curating an enticing selection from fellow designers and artisans. At Mercado San Agustin, 100 South Avenida Del Convento 520.495.5920 ILoveMast.com

MAYA PALACE Clothing & Gifts From Around the World. Festive fashions including prom dresses, wedding dresses, work fashion, casual and seasonal attire. Plaza Palomino, 2930 North Swan Road #120 520.748.0817 MayaPalaceTucson.com

MERCADO SAN AGUSTIN Tucson’s first and only Public Market hosting several locally-owned shops, eateries and incredible experiences. Our courtyard is home to the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market (every Thursday afternoon) and many other special events. Open seven days a week with Farmers’ Market on Thursdays from 3-6 p.m. 100 South Avenida del Convento 520.461.1110 MercadoSanAgustin.com

MIRAGE & BIRD Working artist studio and retail shop. Faux plants, succulents and individual flower stems. Custom and ready made permanent arrangements. Eclectic cards and gifts. Personal consultations available by appointment. [email protected] Plaza Santa Cruz, 10 Plaza Road, Tubac 520.248.5039 MirageAndBird.com

MONTEREY COURT Studio galleries, cafe, bar, catering, and entertainment venue centrally located in Tucson just west of Oracle Road on historic Miracle Mile. 505 West Miracle Mile 520.207.2429 MontereyCourtAZ.com

PICÁNTE A treasure trove of traditional handmade crafts from Mexico, Guatemala and Latin America. Artisan works include colorful ceramics, tin objects, carved wood santos, and fine silver jewelry. There is an incredible collection of textiles, huipils, fabric by the yard, hand-embroidered blouses and dresses, and oilcloth. 2932 East Broadway Boulevard 520.320.5699 PicanteTucson.com


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PLAZA PALOMINO Distinctly Tucson specialty and boutique shopping & dining. Beautiful courtyards, unique businesses and ample parking. Ready to make your shop or restaurant part of Tucson’s gateway to the Foothills? 2960 North Swan Road PlazaPalomino.com

POP-CYCLE A gift shop devoted to handmade items produced from recycled, reclaimed and sustainable materials. The products are fun and whimsical, with a little something for everyone. Many items are produced locally, some by the store’s owners. 422 North 4th Avenue 520.622.3297 PopCycleShop.com

RUSSELL’S RETRO FURNISHINGS Specializes in mid-century modern furniture, an era gone by when furniture was about architecture and style and built to last. 1132 East Broadway Boulevard 520.882.3885 RussellsRetro.com

RUSTIC CANDLE COMPANY Locally-owned and operated. Our candles are hand-poured on site. All styles, sizes & fragrances. Enjoy a fabulous selection of home decor, gift, incense, soap & much more! 324 North 4th Avenue 520.623.2880 RusticCandle.net

SAN AGUSTIN TRADING COMPANY In addition to handmade moccasins from artisan Jesse Aguiar, this shop showcases fascinating Native American crafts and jewelry. 120 South Avenida del Convento 520.628.1800SanAgustinTradingCompany.com

SUNSET INTERIORS & DESIGN STUDIO With more than 30 years of experience, the award-winning Dara Davis is known for her unique interpretation of regional design, inspired by the rich heritages of California missions, New Mexico pueblos and ranches of the southwest. Plaza Colonial, 2890 East Skyline Drive Suite #190, 520.825.2297 SunsetInterior.com

SUNSET INTERIORS FURNITURE WAREHOUSE One-of-a-kind furniture samples, consignment, and a little vintage thrown in. Treasure hunt in our warehouse Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 11am - 3pm. 75 North Park Avenue Tucson, Arizona 85719. 520.825.2297

STAGECOACH BAGS Handmade, one of a kind, cowboy boot purses made from authentic cowboy boots. Custom orders available. Unique styles for all that love the look of bling and western flair. Located in Cowgirl Country. P.O. Box 393, Sonoita 480.265.5312 StageCoachBags.com

SWEET POPPY A one of a kind store, along with a unique selection of furniture, accessories, and much more.Located in the Mercado de Baca in Tubac next to Shelby’s Bistro. 19 Tubac Road, Tubac 520.398.2805 SweetPoppy.webs.com SWEET RIDE GIFTS & ACCESSORIES We carry a variety of Sonoita tees for men women and kids. Old guys Rule Tees, Hats and gift Items, Beautiful Bling Belts by Nocona and Jewelry for ladies. Also motorcycle related gift items for our biker enthusiasts. Stop in and see Valorie—she will be glad you did. 3244 Highway 82, Sonoita 520.455.4717

TUCSON THRIFT SHOP Tucson’s unique vintage and costume-wear resource for the fun side of life! Established in 1979, we have evolved with the 4th Avenue community into a blend of old and new. A marketplace for street-wear and theme party needs. Hours: M-Th: 10-8, F-Sat: 10-9, Sun: 12-6. 319 N. 4th Avenue 520.623.8736

TUMACACORI MESQUITE SAWMILL A leader in raw and finished mesquite materials. From lumber, slabs, posts, to exotic burls and burl slabs, The Sawmill has an ever changing selection. 2007 E. Frontage Road, Tumacacori 520.398.9356 MesquiteDesign.com

WILDFLOWER JEWELRY & ART We offer affordable and fun arts and crafts classes and has a wide selection of jewelry, drawings, quilts, plants, and more. Find us on Etsy. 27 Subway #4, Old Bisbee 520.234.5528

YIKES TOYS! Quirky Fun for the Curious Mind. Enchanting books, wacky wonders, old-school novelties. Serious science, kooky kitsch, phenomenal fun. Featuring original works by Tucson artists & scientists. Specializing in Gifts for All Ages. 2930 East Broadway Boulevard 520.320.5669 YikesToysOnline.com

ZOCALO MEXICAN IMPORTS A destination for fine Mexican imports. Owners Robert and Karri buy directly from numerous artisans all over Mexico. The 10,000 sq. ft. showroom features an extensive collection of mesquite & alder furnishings, unique decorative pieces by artists featured in the “Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art”, a wide selection of handmade textiles from Mexico and around the world, antiques, artifacts & the finest iron chandeliers available. 3016 East Broadway Boulevard 520.320.1236

SCHOOLS

CITY HIGH SCHOOL An Arizona public charter high school serving grades 9-12 located in downtown Tucson in the historic Cele Peterson building. City High School seeks young people who want to study in a dynamic small school that prepares them for college and connects them with the community in which they live. 48 East Pennington Street 520.623.7223 CityHighSchool.org

GREEN FIELDS COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL Challenge. Inquiry. Balance. The foundations of a Green Fields education. From Kindergarten to Commencement, students are encouraged to develop their interests in Academics, Fine Arts, Sports, and more. Class sizes are small and students receive individual attention. 6000 North Camino de la Tierra 520.297.2288 GreenFields.org

KINO SCHOOL Where students are given the responsibility and freedom that are the essence of a democratic society. Students of all abilities succeed where learning, creativity, respect for others, and community thrives. 6625 North First Avenue 520.297.7278 KinoSchool.org

SKY ISLANDS HIGH SCHOOL A tuition FREE Public High School Now Enrolling Grades 9-12. Our integrated curriculum is guided by layers of this regional ecosystem—its history, cultures, arts, archeologies, & natural patterns—and linked to the larger world. 6000 East 14th Street 520.382.9210 SkyIslands.org

GREGORY SCHOOL Inspired Learning—Beyond strong academics. Gregory School develops inspired students who are encouraged to pursue their individual passion and develop a love for learning. Our students are well-prepared to excel in college and go on to create impactful and fulfilling lives. 3231 North Craycroft Road 520.327.6395 GregorySchool.org

TUCSON WALDORF SCHOOL Tucson Waldorf School is located in the scenic Binghampton Rural Historic Landscape and is home to the River Road Gardens CSA farm. Children from Parent-Child Classes through 8th Grade experience an engaging education that cultivates joy and excellence in learning. The arts are integrated throughout a classical curriculum and hands-on work. Weekly tours available. 3605 East River Road 520.529.1032 TucsonWaldorf.org

SERVICES

CONNECT COWORKING Connect Provides entrepreneurs, small businesses and freelancers more than just a desk, more than just a roof. Connect is a place where cutting-edge minds and innovative technology call home; a place where collaboration breeds success, community and change. And it happens all right here. Right in the heart of Tucson. 33 South 5th Avenue 520.333.5754 ConnectCoworking.com

DNA PERSONAL TRAINING/CROSSFIT Science-Based Fitness and Nutrition - CrossFit - Kettlebells. Wise training for wise people. 930 North Stone Avenue and 3305 North Swan Road 520.327.0600 DNAPersonalTraining.com

RED BARKD E S I G N

RED BARKD E S I G N

[email protected] | 520 247 2456 redbarkdesign.com

Darbi Davis, MLA, ASLA

l a n d s c a p e d e s i g n | c o n s u l t i n gp ro j e c t m a n a g e m e n t | n a t i v e g a rd e n s

surly wench pub

billiards | air hockey | arcade

burlesque | live music

full bar | Fresh kitchen

520-882-0009 www.SurlyWenchPub.com424 n. 4th avenue tucson, arizona

TanlinePrinting.com

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FLASH IN THE PAST Book a pinup photo shoot! Flash in the Past takes you back to the era of the classic pinup! The perfect treat for yourself! The perfect gift for a lover! Pinup parties available! Aside from pinup photo shoots, Flash in the Past also offers Retro Beauty Classes and vintage shopping. 43 South 6th Avenue 520.304.0691 FlashInThePast.com

INPULSE NINE MEDIA If you like the look of Edible, these are the minds behind it! I9M functions like a tiny marketing department, handling small businesses’ marketing so business owners can focus on their business without hiring more staff. Graphic & web design, social media and more. Clients get 10% off Edible ads! 520.777.9551 ImpulseNine.com

ORDINARY BIKE SHOP Servicing bikes of all sorts and selling new and used bikes and parts. “Life is like riding a bicycle—in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”—Albert Einstein. 311 East 7th Street 520.622.6488 OrdinaryBikeShop.com

SCRAPS ON SCRAPS Scraps on Scraps is a residential and commercial food waste and compostable materials pickup. If it can be composted, then we want it! Scraps on Scraps is committed to changing the way that you dispose of your food waste. 520.333.7106 ScrapsOnScraps.com

SAHUARO TROPHY A Family Owned Business serving Tucson and Southern Arizona for more than 30 years. We offer Three Generations of Experience in the Awards Industry, to provide you with quality innovative products. We offer State-of-the-Art Technology in all our Marking Processes, including: Diamond Drag, Rotary, Laser, Photo Etch, Sublimation, Silk Screening and Sandblasting. 2616 East Broadway 520.326.9000 SahuaroTrophy.com

SOLAR ENERGY SERVICES & PRODUCTS

SOUTHWEST SOLAR Providing the highest quality evaporative cooling products, customer service, and passive heating/cooling techniques; while being a model business for environmentally conscious and safe business practices and ethics through our use of renewable and sustainable energy sources and green building technology. 5085 South Melpomene Way 520.885.7925 Southwest-Solar.com

TECHNICIANS FOR SUSTAINABILITY A Tucson based, locally-owned, mission-driven company specializing in renewable energy and sustainable technologies for residential and commercial settings, including solar electric (PV) and solar hot water. 520.740.0736TFSSolar.com

TRAVEL & TOURISM

SILVER CITY Be here for lunch—an easy and scenic three hour drive from Tucson. Nationally recognized cuisine, historic downtown district, arts, Gila National Forest, WNMU University, fresh air, clear skies, mild climate, great festivals, a top-ten destination, quaint and quirky! 575.538.5555 SilverCityTourism.org

VENUES, THEATRES & ENTERTAINMENT

BISBEE ROYALE A cultural and events venue screening new, classic and foreign films & hosting wine tastings, poetry, flamenco concerts & more! 94 Main Street, Old Bisbee 520.432.6750 BisbeeRoyale.com

D&D PINBALL A great place to enjoy the Art and Sport of Pinball in Tucson Arizona. Open Thursday through Sunday. 331 East 7th Street 520.777.4969 DandDPinball.com

FOX TUCSON THEATRE Tucson’s Premiere entertainment venue. A 1,200 seat Southwestern Art Deco movie palace built in 1930 and restored in 2005. 17 West Congress Street 520.547.3040 FoxTucson.com

RIALTO THEATRE Recognized by the Tucson Weekly as the Best Indoor Venue for 10 years running, the nonprofit Rialto Theatre is the best place to see live music in Tucson, bar none. 318 East Congress Street 520.740.1000 RialtoTheatre.com

LOFT CINEMA A local nonprofit cinema dedicated to creating community through film, honoring the vision of filmmakers, promoting the appreciation and understanding of the art of film. 3233 East Speedway Boulevard 520.795.7777 LoftCinema.com

THE MINI TIME MACHINE MUSEUM OF MINIATURES Displaying more than 300 antique and contemporary miniatures in a state-of-the-art building sure to entertain and educate visitors of all ages. 4455 East Camp Lowell Drive 520.881.0606 TheMiniTimeMachine.org

VETERINARY CARE

ENLIGHTENED VETERINARY CARE Provides Holistic house calls for pets. Wellness & healing naturally. Homeopathy, Accupuncture, manipulations, nutriceuticals, hospice/senior nursing, vaccinations, hands-on exam. Concierge service at your home is convenient, comfortable, safe. I love cats! Consult Dr. Jones: [email protected] 520.249.1661 EnlightenedVetCare.com

WELLNESS CONSULTANTS

BOBCAT INTEGRATIVE CONSULTING Bob Harris & Catriona O’Curry. We bring 25+ years experience working with Couples, Families and Small Businesses; Masters in Psychology; Coaching for Individuals and Businesses; 4 Year Diplomas in Energy Healing; Groups for Women & Men; Energy Medicine Classes. 520.822.4982 BobCatIntegrativeConsulting.com

NEW GRATITUDE NUTRITIONAL THERAPY Kariman Pierce is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner and Real Food advocate with a focus on gluten sensitivity, digestion, and blood sugar related issues. She uses Functional Assessment to uncover your body’s bio-individual needs and supports you with customized nutritional protocols based in nutrient-dense whole foods. 520.477.6204 NewGratitudeNutrition.com

BAMBOO RANCH

Desert Grown Bamboo Plantsfor Shade & Screen

Non-Invasive Clumping& Cold Hardy Types

Expert Advice

[email protected]|520-743-9879BambooRanch.net


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My first Mexican restaurant back East was called Viva Zapata’s. It was in a Connecticut town you’d associate more with country clubs than revolutions.

Mostly I remember drinking my first underage margarita there. At least someone was rebelling against something, right?

A few years later I tried huevos rancheros in a café in Hous-ton. I was a teensy-weensy bit hung over (it was the morning after my father’s wedding). The egg dish was extraordinary, possibly even life-saving.

Fast-forward 13 years and I’m in Alexandria, Virginia, sitting in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Old Town with a new love, my soon-to-be husband. We plowed through two or three big baskets of chips in a matter of minutes. If only people still smoked while they were nervous, we’d all be thinner.

When we moved to Tucson, our idea of Mexican food took a serious turn toward nuanced—or at least we thought so, amateur enthusiasts that we were (and still are). The first restaurant we tried, La Parrilla Suiza on Speedway, was Mexico City fare. We’d never even conceived of a love-ly avocado dip like theirs, and we’d never had bacon in our tacos, either. Hello, yum. Goodbye, generic no-tions of Connecticut girl and North Dakota boy.

We knocked back cervezas with new delights: chicken mole at Café Poca Cosa and Sonoran hot dogs at Ruiz Hot Dogs on 22nd Street and chiles rellenos at Mi Nidito (on my birthday I tried prickly pear cactus there, mmm … yeah … no) and the ba-sic bean burrito at Nico’s (open 24 hours). We’ll now jump into the fray with any Tucsonan to defend our favorite restaurants, blindly and wholeheartedly.

I thought of my history with Mexican food last spring when Chipotle Mexican Grill started what seemed like a cool thing, printing very short stories on cups and bags. Fantastic idea, but it rolled out the initiative without any Latino authors, therefore messing with my ability to full on enjoy the literary fun. Seri-ously: the words of Toni Morrison and George Saunders on my ice-tea cup and bag of burritos? But sadly, the sleight remained.

In response, a popular Mexican restaurant in Berkeley began

passing out cups and pens so all their customers could tell their stories. Writer Michele Serros posted a list of possible Mexican and Mexican American authors for Chipotle’s next round on The Huffington Post. Alex Espinoza, an author and associate professor at Fresno State, said: “Take our food, ignore our sto-ries.” Ouch, but yeah.

I love the idea of stories on cups. I love Mexican food. I’m an Anglo.

Embarrassing as it is to admit here, my family has had a tradition of going to Chipotle about once a week since forever. The child was always partial to quesadillas. A few months ago, one of the women who work there told me she remembered when my daughter was a baby. In the corporate Mexican, failed-liter-ary-avant-garde joint, we smiled at each other, mother to mother.

I don’t expect my cultural revo-lutions to start at Chipotle, but it’s worth noting that a cultural revolu-tion is, as per usual, necessary. I have another conviction, which is that the real story isn’t actually printed on the bags and the cups at Chipotle or anywhere.

The food is the story. Or at least it can be.

Let’s take El Charro Café, estab-lished here in Tucson in 1922, our go-to restaurant for years. The food is made with lime and cilantro and chilies, but it’s also infused with the history of Tucson, with the people who built this town and made it what it is. Here in my adopted city, I’m educated by the forkful. I’m a new person. Made, in part, of the memory of my first slice of tres leches cake, and my desire for more tres leches cake (and soon).

If there’s hope for humanity, it begins with a shared meal. ✜

Aurelie Sheehan’s newest collection of stories, Demigods on Speedway, is out this month with the University of Arizona Press. She’s the author of two novels and two story collections. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fence, New England Review, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Sheehan is an associate professor of fiction at the University of Arizona.

LAST BITE

Education by ForkBy Aurelie Sheehan


Each coffee bean holds a unique flavor profile. The Savaya RoastTM processunlocks the original characteristics and subtleties of each organic single-origin batch.

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for the first timeTaste coffee

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Edible Baja Arizona - November/December 2014