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Foodies

by Lisa Barlow

Oysters It’s Valentine’s Day and while you may be content to buy your love a pretty box of chocolates, there are a host of other foods that can convey your message more effectively.

Since ancient times clever cooks have concocted seductive recipes to tempt their paramours and the list of edible aphrodisiacs they have come up with is long and varied. Some foods merely look suggestive. Others have been clinically proven to help get the job done.

In the first category, bananas top the list. Mae West’s famous query says it all: Is that a banana in your pocket …or are you happy to see me? Asparagus and carrots, like figs and cherries, also arouse some fertile imaginations. But then just about anything can excite some folks. In her book Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses, Author Isabel Allende says she tested her recipes on friends over 40 “since even a cup of chamomile turns on the young.”

13 February, 2011 /

by Lisa Barlow

Bean Chili use Hey Super Bowl fans, what are you planning to eat during the Big Game? Mac ‘n Cheese Jalapeno Poppers? Mile High Nachos? Grilled BBQ Potato Skins? Smokin’ Hot Buffalo Wings?

Football and food seem to go together so inextricably that even a fair weather fan like myself knows that I need get my game on in the kitchen this Sunday. And there is plenty of inspiration out there to help me plan my menu. Every celebrity chef with a TV show seems to have weighed in with his or her variation of a classic gridiron favorite. 

The statisticians are busy thinking about Super Bowl fare as well. But their numbers have often been a little wonky. It is probably closer to 8 million pounds of avocados used to make guacamole this weekend than the 80 million that is often reported. That’s still an awful lot of chip dip.

05 February, 2011 /

by Lisa Barlow

Melting potatoes I’ve been getting a lot of diet advice lately. Who hasn’t? It’s January and if you turn on the television, pick up a magazine in a doctor’s room, click open your email or drive past a billboard, you’re a target.  “Hey Fatty” one publication taunts, “those Iced Oreo Balls we told you to make for your office party last month, now you’re wearing them!” There’s penance to pay for holiday fun and everyone from Britney to Dr. Oz want to tell us how to reclaim our inner Skinny Bitches so we can fit into our new pajama jean britches.

Thus prompted by the media, this year I have begun my own reformation with the same dedication and rigor with which I begin every new year.  Each morning I drink a slimming protein shake laden with green powder, flax seeds and a series of unpronounceable berry extracts that are cultivated in the Himalayas, the Hunzu Valley of Pakistan and the Costa Rican rainforest. And I feel great!

18 January, 2011 /

Wayne, booth MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, CO, January 7, 2011 -- The Telluride Mountain Village Owners Association (TMVOA), sponsors and organizers of the Telluride Festival of the Arts (TFA) announced today the dates for 2011, which will take place Friday, Aug. 12 through Sunday, Aug. 14. The TFA celebrates the visual and culinary arts and will play host to over 5,000 local, regional and national visitors. Highlights of the event include nationally juried professional visual artists and the signature “Grand Tasting” event showcasing renowned culinary establishments, spirits and wineries.

Visual artists are invited to go online now and apply to be one of the exhibitors at the 2011 TFA. Prospectus and application are available at http://www.Zapplication.org, where artists create an online artist profile, prepare and upload images, and complete the online application. The deadline for application is midnight (MST) on Tuesday, February 22, 2011. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival, one of the nation’s most respected and competitive juried arts festivals, produces the show. The exhibition experience for the visual artists is like none other and includes breathtaking mountain views in a European-style resort town with a year-round population of second and third homeowners that embrace the visual arts. The artists' success and exhibition experience are the core values and measurements of success for the Telluride Festival of the Arts.

15 January, 2011 /

 Three years ago, the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities, an arts advocacy organization which opened for business in the 1970s, had a light bulb moment: produce an Art Walk that would underline the vibrancy of Telluride's fine art scene. And, while they were at it, why not support Telluride's retail scene, which works hand in glove with our town's cultural life?  Man cannot live by paintings, etc. alone....

05 January, 2011 /

by Lisa Barlow

Happy New Year There are myriad superstitions involving food that I ignore. But a few I hold fast to for no other reason than they are habit, and to question the ridiculousness of them would be living life a little too seriously.

If the wishbone makes it intact after carving a roast chicken, I grab my end, dream big and twist. At friends’ weddings, I throw rice or seeds like all the other guests, blessing the bride and groom with a fruitful union and messy hair. When salt is spilled in the kitchen, I throw a pinch over my left shoulder to stave off bad luck, if not the annoyance of the sprinkled person behind me.

And I always eat black-eyed peas on New Years day. The dish is called Hoppin’ John and there are lots of theories why some people eat it for good luck, with a slew of others as to how it got its name.

30 December, 2010 /

by Lisa Barlow

Tamales_1 Growing up, I thought it was just my family that had skewed tradition a little on Christmas day. The morning always began straight out of a storybook with a delicious slice of homemade Stollen bread, a mug of steaming hot chocolate and the frenzied unwrapping of Santa’s bounty. But for Christmas dinner, while the other families in our New York City apartment building were sitting down to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, we were tucking in to a pot full of spicy pork tamales.

It turns out we were just borrowing from another culture, and from my mother’s past. She had grown up in San Antonio, Texas, a beautiful city whose architecture and cuisine is influenced by its southern neighbor, the country it once belonged to. The population of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in San Antonio still outnumbers everyone else, and the Mexican-influenced food is some of the best in the country.

 

24 December, 2010 /

Telluride3
Roger Mason painting

In the beginning there was Telluride's The New Sheridan Hotel. At least for us.

Twenty-five years ago, Clint Viebrock rode into Telluride on his metal horse, a Yamaha, on his way to no place in particular. One night at The New Sheridan Bar and The Sheridan Hotel was all the convincing he needed: Clint had found home.

Friday night, December 17, Telluride Inside... and Out returned to a vastly different New Sheridan under vastly different circumstances. We were there as a couple at the invitation of general manager Ray Farnsworth to experience the hotel in all the glory of its latest incarnation following the 2008 renovation, which cost about $7 million – and Ray, who lovingly shepherded the process, more gray hairs.

A date night at The New Sheridan? Twist my arm.

20 December, 2010 /

Unknown Dr. Susanna Hoffman wears many hats: anthropologist, chef and food writer. (In fact, she is a regular contributor to Telluride Inside... and Out.)

In October 2011, Hoffman is the featured chef (along with Jane Lee Winter, executive chef and president of the Gourmet Travel Club) on board the Seven Seas Voyager for a 10-night luxury cruise from Athens to Istambul.

Hoffman has lived and worked in Greece and other Mediterranean regions. She is the author of The Olive and The Caper: Adventures in Greek Cooking and a regular contributor to  Saveur, Fine Cooking, Bon Appetit, Gastronomia and Greek Gourmet Traveler as well as numerous other food publications. Hoffman has appeared on cooking shows from coast to coast, including Good Morning America, The Food Network, Oprah, Discovery, CNN, and PBS.

13 December, 2010 /


by Lisa Barlow

Times clippings72 You don’t have to be a New Yorker to have accumulated a thick file of favorite recipes clipped from The New York Times over the years. My grandmother, who lived in Texas, kept tear sheets with recipes from the Sunday New York Times Magazine tucked into the cookbooks in her kitchen.

If the New York Times motto is “All the News that’s Fit to Print”, you could say that I was raised on “All the Food that’s Fit to Eat”. My mother, an avid cook, eagerly followed every recipe written by Craig Claiborne, the paper’s inspired food columnist during the years I was growing up. She kept her recipes for the hearty stroganoffs, ratatouilles, pistous, and even the sad soy burger, an outlier among the richly flavored favorites, in a drawer next to the grocery money in the kitchen. 

In her new magnificent compendium, The Essential New York Times Cook Book, Classic Recipes for a New Century, Amanda Hesser, a longtime food writer and staff member at the Times, gives new life to many of the fragile yellowing scraps of paper in my own file. Not only have I reconnected with the staples of my childhood: the David Eyre pancake and Welsh Rarebit, she has introduced me to the intriguingly named “Epigram of Lamb”, which first ran in the paper in 1879, and to the myriad delights of recent recipes published while I wasn’t paying attention.

 

13 December, 2010 /