Asked a couple of years ago to name his favorite kitchen utensil, the popular teaching chef Jacques Pépin declared, “My hands are the most useful tool in my kitchen.” Obviously, you might think, and yet, amid the rapid rise of automation and AI, not to mention the internet’s bottomless appetite for best-of lists and newfangled kitchen tools, one might almost forget that the human hand is an unparalleled marvel of design. Then again, a general sense of detachment from the production of what we eat and drink might be precisely what pulls so many people to seek out not only homegrown and handmade products but the experience of making them.
This Early Summer issue of edible New Mexico is all about that experience. In one feature, a writer raised on mostly processed food attends a trio of local cooking classes, seeking to triumph over blandness and find more ease—and more flavor—in her home kitchen. Reporting from a class in bread baking, a writer new to sourdough revels in the sensory immersion required to turn out loaves and keep the starter alive. There’s a sampling of local opportunities for wine education from a burgeoning wine nerd, and a few words of caution from a small-scale farmer about how to keep chickens.
In the spirit of the season, we also offer a dash of vacation via perfect-for-summer recipes culled from edible New Mexico’s 2025 visit to Oaxaca. For those who can’t make it to Italy, trusted forager Ellen Zachos suggests an antidote: harvesting local walnuts to make inky-black nocino. Covering a less-traveled stretch of old Route 66, Ungelbah Dávila samples the fare at two independent-spirited venues; a similar spirit presides in a travel dispatch from Wyoming and Montana. Not least, we share Denise Chávez’s meditation on that most sacred of New Mexico rituals: the procurement and processing of roasted green chile, preferably straight from the farmers who raise it and oversee its harvest.
To do something with your own hands—with the help of experts or through the proven method of trying, failing, and trying again—can bring an inimitable form of satisfaction. Whether you travel or stay home this summer, we challenge you to brave new territory in your exploration of food, and thus, inevitably, deepen your knowledge of both yourself and your foodshed.
Lunch can be a summer garden party; it can be an hours-long affair involving margaritas and many plates and dynamic conversation among friends. It can be a sweet scrap of a lunch break spent with a life partner or a grandmother, or a simple sandwich seasoned with aspen views. Often as not, though, lunch is a burrito wolfed down between errands, a few mindless bites eaten quickly in front of a screen, or nothing at all.
In this issue of edible New Mexico, we celebrate lunch. To start, we zero in on the lunch spots that, fairly or not, have among the worst reputations in the nation: school cafeterias. Investigating the rollout of New Mexico’s universal school meals program, Sarah Wentzel-Fisher finds that it’s about a lot more than free lunch, with ripple effects that reach beyond meeting the immediate—and not insignificant—need of filling empty stomachs. In another feature, Sarah Mock visits with high school and college students working with a statewide University of New Mexico project to inventory and repurpose food that would otherwise go from trash to landfill. Visiting Valencia County, we learn about a partnership between a high school culinary program and a unique residential campus for seniors.
Given the season, we’re also including a few stories to inspire lunch outdoors. Santa Fe–based naturalist Priyanka Kumar writes of how her love for apples and orchards and wildlife has drawn her to steward patches of nature that she calls microwilds. There’s a recipe for mugolio made from foraged green pine cones, which first calls for getting to know the interwoven lives of the Southwest’s juniper-piñon forests. And, drawn as much by the spirit of France’s century-plus-old ban on dining at work as by the baguettes, we visit a certain bakery and café in Santa Fe where, holding true to French tradition, you’re invited to let lunch last.
In gathering these stories, we’ve been pushed to rediscover lunch, to give ourselves permission for midday pleasures. In that spirit, the sixth edition of Savor the Mother Road highlights places to lunch on some of the most storied blocks of Route 66. But we are realists, too, so we also offer a set of recipes to help you pull together knockout salads that can serve just as well for a solitary noon break as for a luncheon. Wherever you eat lunch and however much time you can take on it, we hope that it nourishes you—and that these stories do, too.
No Results Found
The posts you requested could not be found. Try changing your module settings or create some new posts.
