Farming in Boulder County (MP3, 7 min)
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Not only is EAT LOCAL! Week a chance to celebrate and explore, but it is also a chance to discover local food sources, to meet local food growers, to become more active in the local food and farming movement, to experience the joys of fresh delicious food, and to feel what it’s like to be connected to the local food and farming system, rediscovering a deep sense of community.

Here are the remaining events:

* “Flat Iron Chef” Local Food Cook-Off (Thursday, Sept. 2, 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.). “Iron Chef” style, local chefs— Eric Skokan (Black Cat), Matthew Jansen (Radda/Mateo), Ayan Rivera (Chef at Large)—are paired with local farmers to produce a feast to benefit the Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center, held at Highland City Club, 885 Arapahoe Ave. (sponsored by Slow Food Boulder, Highland City Club, Transition Colorado, and Everybody Eats!). Advance tickets $20 (www.TransitionColorado.org/events.php), $25 at the door.

* Local Foodshed Commons & Conference (Friday, Sept. 3, 9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.), at University of Colorado’s Union Memorial Center, Glenn Miller Ballroom. Free! (see details below)

* EAT LOCAL! Celebration (Friday, Sept. 3, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.) at the Millennium’s Outdoor Pavilion and Gardens and Thyme on the Creek, featuring local food prepared by local chefs, local music with Mojomama, DU4, and Jeff Brinkman, along with original local art. Admission $20 at the door.

* “Tour de Coops” (Saturday, Sept. 4, 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.). Become familiar with chickens and the variety of their dwellings in Boulder, plus visit beekeepers, goatkeepers and cultivators of special culinary gardens. Free!

Local Foodshed Commons & Conference, Sept. 3

As the centerpiece event of Boulder County’s EAT LOCAL! Week, on Sept. 3, Transition Colorado and CU’s Museum of Natural History are hosting a wellspring of community-supported agriculture, gardens and gardeners, urban farming, new farmer development, reskillings, Permaculture, food products, retailers, and farmers markets. The day begins at the spacious Glenn Miller Ballroom (9:00 – 5:30 p.m.) with the Local Foodshed Commons, featuring a variety of exhibits and demonstrations from local restaurants and chefs, local farmers and growers and their markets, local food retailers and distributors, non-profit organizations and community groups, local independently-owned businesses, Boulder-born-and-bred companies, renewable energy solution providers, sustainability services, green builders and developers, and many more! An open-mike farmyard stage will provide opportunities for brief presentations from exhibitors and enthusiasts, with sprinklings of local (acoustic) music.

In the accompanying Conference, several leading experts will share their knowledge and wisdom in special presentations and workshops. This is a wonderful opportunity to learn from and talk with Fred Kirschenmann, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture (author, Cultivating an Ecological Conscience); Vicki Pozzebon, Santa Fe Alliance; Bruce Milne, New Mexico Foodshed Alliance; and Bob McFarland, California State Grange. These will be held 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Sept. 3, at CU’s University Memorial Center.

The day will conclude at Millennium Harvest House’s famous Outdoor Pavilion and Gardens, with an extraordinary harvest-gathering celebration of those who support local organic food, offering culinary pleasure with awareness and sustainabililty. Here you can enjoy samples from Boulder County’s finest chefs, as local musicians offer their creative talents to bring EAT LOCAL! Week to a stunning conclusion. 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

For more information to to Eat Local Week’s website

Antonio Laudisio making paella on the patio

One word of advice: don’t randomly wander into restaurants downtown. We felt so bad when some visiting friends of ours wandered into, oh, I won’t say the name of the decidedly wrong downtown Mexican restaurant. When it comes to food, we and the spousal unit are fussy.

Here then are our restaurant recommendations, to keep you from making a horrible choice on your own (of which there are potentially many):

• Radex Bistro (formerly Full Belly) — Not downtown but in the Willow Springs strip mall at 28th and Iris. Reliably wonderful food with a French flair, and a place where you want to order about 10 things on the fairly short menu. Outdoor patio.
• Chy Thai — Boulder’s best Thai food, with the same Thai family running the place for years and the same cool, friendly servers. Also an obscure location, on the south side of Canyon a few doors west of 28th St., facing Ead’s News and around the corner from World Market.
• Laudisio — Genuine Italian in a big, big room in the newish 29th Street area, across from the Apple Store. Lots of fun, and the view from the patio on a summer night: ahhhhh.
• Bacco Trattoria — On North Broadway, a new place with reliably authentic Italian. Outdoor patio.

Ooo, you lucky tourists who read Boulder Reporter. You’ll be spared a great number of not-very-nice places. Beyond those four, our list of decent Boulder restaurants gets really iffy. Stick with these four.

Your comments?

And as for you, whether tourist or local, we’d love to hear your experiences at any of these four, your tales of other nice discoveries, or horror stories of wrong choices made. Comment form below (no registration necessary).

[OR: watch on Vimeo]

[OR: watch on video]

Credits
Star: Josh Onysko
Producer, director and editor: Una Morera
Music: Samuel Brewster & AquariumRocks
Special thanks: Whole Foods, Doug Moldawsky & GW Hannaway and Associates

HAVE A SLICE: A recent creation, fresh from a very oven. (Reporter photo)

If you’re still making resolutions for 2010, how about becoming a master of artisanal baking?

The place to start is Mark Bittman’s now-famous recipe, along with his followup comments, of bread created by Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City. It was published in 2006, but it took me two years to start experimenting with it. It is nothing short of incredible and requires only five minutes to mix up.

I’ve added various goodies, such as walnuts, currants, green olives and rosemary, and kalamata olives to this recipe. Stir in whatever you’re planning to add at the very beginning and use plenty of flour in the towel during the final rising stage to prevent the dough from sticking.

What makes this bread so good is the wet dough, long rising time and the way it’s baked –
in a pre-heated, closed container. Based on your preferences, you can add more salt or replace some of the bread flour with whole wheat flour. I plan to experiment with semolina flour, and even a gluten-free flour, at some point. I’ve also discovered that you can start the final rise early, as long as the dough is covered with bubbles.

You can find out more hints and tips from Mark Bittman in another New York Times article. Here’s to fearless bread-baking in 2010. Be creative, and report your experiences and tips in a comment below this article.

Sigh. I may never buy store-bought bread again.

Dolan's: One of the ones we've lost

This all struck home to me the other day with the news that Dolan’s Restaurant, a 15-year Boulder favorite for business lunches, parties and special events, had closed after the state stepped in for the owner’s failure to pay taxes.

Over the years, Dolan’s was a favorite of mine to meet business associates as well as meeting friends for its happy hour, one of the best deals in town. The menu was reliable and good — crab cakes were a favorite — the staff was always friendly and owner Mike Dolan was almost always there, greeting customers by their first names. In CU football season, Dolan’s used to be “the” place.

Businesses weren’t spending

Just before Christmas, however, I met friends for weekday lunch at Dolan’s, and I could clearly see things were a bit slow at the lunch hour. I said hello to Mike and asked him how things were going. “Not so good,” he bluntly told me. Businesses were really cutting back on office parties, his bookings for the private rooms were way down, he said. “Businesses all seem to be doing potluck lunches with their employees,” he bemoaned.

On the reader comments to the Daily Camera story about the closing, one employee said, “Everyone working at the restaurant knew it was in trouble for months, and that closure was imminent. It was every employee’s decision as to whether or not they continued working for Dolan’s.” So apparently the closure did not come as too much of a surprise to those working at the restaurant.

And Dolan’s is certainly not the first locally owned restaurant to fall upon hard times from the recession, nor is it likely to be the last. The list of local restaurant closings keeps growing. Orchid Pavilion, Sunflower, Burnt Toast (although it was sold), the Scotch Corner Pub at One Boulder Plaza, Sobo (converted to Murphy’s South) and Narayan’s Nepal Restaurant.

Many good ones remain

For a relatively small city, Boulder boasts a tremendous variety of incredible restaurants — many recently receiving accolades even from the food writer for The New York Times. The Kitchen downtown is almost always crowded at lunch; next door is Salt, a new entry in the restaurant wars that took over the spot of Boulder’s cheeseburger heaven — Tom’s Tavern. Successful restaurateur Dave Query operates three restaurants in the same block downtown — Jax Fish House, the West End Tavern and Centro. Not far away his newest restaurant is the Happy Noodle House. And, let’s not forget, Boulder chef Hosea Rosenberg won Bravo’s “Top Chef.”

This list of places to eat out is rather endless. There’s enough sushi in Boulder to keep any lover of Asian fare happy. Boulder’s Frasca, where chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson won the prestigious James Beard award, is another receiving national and statewide attention, although it looks like the economy has at least stalled its plans to move closer downtown.

Boulder restaurants epitomize the quote, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens.” Even in the depth of the worst economy to hit the country in decades, entrepreneurial chefs continue opening new restaurants here like Full Belly, Arugula Ristorante and one of the newest soon to open, Pizzeria Basta in the Peloton development on Arapahoe.

Many deals are being offered

Personally I know I do my part in helping support Boulder’s restaurants, but I openly confess to watching for some deals along the way. For a birthday celebration one night over the holidays, three couples chose the “happy hour” at Bacaro in Boulder’s West End. The idea was to go for some reasonably priced glasses of wine, and enjoy the tapas and other appetizers at happy hour prices. Our bill, of course, was considerably less than if we had all gone for a full dinner. This, and the wine, made us happy.

The combination of both consumers and businesses closely watching their bottom line — and, for the consumer, that includes their actual bottoms — translates to a difficult and lean time for restaurants. It’s not just a Boulder trend, of course. Nationally restaurants have had to become extraordinarily innovative to bring out the customers.

So here’s a toast to a much healthier economy in the new decade. One that will get companies out more for business lunches, and even the occasional announcement to their overworked staff: “Beers are on us after work today!” After all, in these lean and tough times, don’t you think your employees — who had to bring potluck for their Christmas party — deserve some special attention?

I drank so much coffee over the past year meeting people to talk about how lousy the economy was that I’ve switched to tea. I still love Boulder’s thriving coffeehouse scene, but it sure would be nice in 2010 if instead of “Let’s meet for coffee,” the invite was “Let me buy you lunch!”

(This article also appeared in Jerry Lewis’s blog, Boulder Report.)

Binx Selby in the kitchen

So what does he advocate?

Selby advocates a one-time cash incentive from the government for overweight people to lose weight, and then an annual bonus for people who keep down their weight. In other words, he wants the government to pay obese people to do the right thing. To help make this happen, he is working toward giving away his revolutionary, anti-inflammation diet for free.

Why is it revolutionary? Because it is a grain and sugar free diet that rapidly reduces cholesterol without drugs. Inflammation in the body is caused by grains, says Selby, and is the starting point of most age-related disease such as heart disease.

Selby discovered this personally, when he showed up for an annual physical three years ago and learned from his doctor that his heart calcium level looked dangerously high. He was told that he must begin taking drugs to reduce his cholesterol as a precaution, and see a cardiologist right away.

He was stunned. “What heart condition?” he asked. “I lead a healthy life. I just finished a 40-mile bike ride. I meditate for an hour every day. I’m eating a Mediterranean diet. I think I’m doing everything right.” He decided that the only thing that might be wrong was his diet. He asked his doctor for a two week reprieve.

In ten days he was back at his doctor’s office. “I couldn’t wait for two weeks. I was anxious to find out if what I was doing was right.” Selby’s tests went from very bad to very good in only ten days. Selby’s tests showed his “bad” LDL cholesterol dropping 42 points and his “good” HDL cholesterol going up 19 points in just over a week. They’re still at that healthy level three years later. The only thing he changed in his life was his diet.

Heart disease is optional, he now says. In the right environment, the body can heal itself. As proof, he and his wife Linda Fong are writing a book called BalancePoint: The 2-week cholesterol and inflammation reduction diet that takes readers step by step through the recipes and science that make up what he calls “a lifestyle protocol.”

As for members of his café latte congregation, Selby has given everyone who took part in his initial trials one share of stock in his new company.

(This article also appeared in Alexia Park’s blog on Huffington Post.)

BUON GUSTO. Antonio Laudisio lovingly creates paella on a recent Friday night.

Friday nights get extremely yummy along about six when Antonio Laudisio has been hovering over a hot paella pan outside his restaurant (Laudisio’s, on 29th Street, near the Apple store).

The paella (a complex intermingling of shellfish, chicken, rice, seasoning, etc.) comes in two sizes – an appetizer or a bigger dish. You can enjoy Antonio’s paella – with an Italian white wine, perhaps? – outside on the patio, or inside in the bar or dining area.

And the thing about Antonio’s cooking, and that of his restaurant, is simple: flavor! On a warm summer night, is there really some place you’d rather be. We didn’t think so. See you there!

Above: Beckie Hemmerling of The Organic Dish communing with avocados on a typical work day.

Just popped into The Organic Dish, nestled amid mostly-Latino stores along Bluff St. just east of 28th St. within a kids-squeal distance from Rallysport’s outdoor swimming pool. There, for going on two years, Beckie and Toby Hemmerling have been preparing “easy-to-cook organic meals” available for the grabbing from a handy cooler at the front of the store.
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Cute idea, and the choice of complete meals looked enticing. You pick them up frozen, then refrigerate them for use in the next few days or keep them frozen for later. And, yes, they deliver. The whole package – they call it a “meal kit” – is on one convenient container. Warning to the ultra-lazy: there’s a wee bit of cooking involved. Explains Beckie: “We don’t like microwaves.”
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Local chefs’ recipes are even featured, the August offering being polenta designed by Antonio Laudisio of our favorite Italian restaurant of the same name.
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Sample their recipes, learn about pricing and delivery, and more, at their utterly darling website, www.theorganicdish.com.
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There ya go. For easy identification, their storefront. The address is 2690 28th St. but they’re really around the corner, a few doors east of 28th on Bluff.

An (All-Organic) Midsummers Eve Party Outside Boulder from Bob Wells on Vimeo.