Is it the year of the rabbit, or the year of the wolf? This week’s newsletter considers the canine—literally, and M. F. K. Fisherly. Also bread, dinner events, the state smell, and opportunities to grow mushrooms.

A few weeks ago, while researching artichokes, we read that “Artichokes remained popular until the fall of the Roman empire.” This appeared on a USDA fact sheet, so we know it’s guaranteed to be true. Reading that sentence made us wonder if, at some point in the...

Mushrooms are not the only forest food thriving lately. Over the past few weeks, our forays into the Sandias and Sangre de Cristos have sparkled with all kinds of blooms, from fireweed and asters and dazzling towers of thistle to fields of lupine and mountain...

A few years ago, someone working in the packaging industry informed us that beer bottled in plastic was right around the corner. Naturally, we recoiled in horror. Drink a chilled craft lager out of a squishy plastic bottle? Feel the beer warming and sloshing and...

Berry season in New Mexico can mean the divinely sweet burst of juice that pops in your mouth after kneeling to pick a wild strawberry from the mountain floor, or tasting the fleeting and complex floral notes of fresh blackberries in your nose as you pick them from...

Years ago, hiking through the hillsides of western North Carolina, we came across some rare red berries that we knew better than to pick. Not because they were poisonous but because they were too precious. They grew from one of the most endangered medicinal plants...

Hot, long days mean picnics at the swimming pool, naps with cucumbers positioned delicately on our eyelids, and increasingly obsessive relationships with ice cubes. They also mean ample opportunity for sun-cooked meals. Maybe this means using a solar oven, such...

Plans: Sometimes they pan out. And other times you go to turn on the grill, all your guests milling around in anticipation of the steaks, and realize you forgot to refill the gas. Or you drive all the way to Big Bend or Joshua Tree only to find that every last...

We just want to take a moment to acknowledge Jim Wilson’s 1979 record, which stands to this day, for catching the biggest fish on record from New Mexico’s vast and mighty waters. The behemoth flathead catfish Wilson caught tipped the scales at no less than...

​Yesterday was the worm moon, as the full moon of March is known. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, this last full moon of winter gets its name either from earthworms coming to life in the warming soils or beetle larvae doing the same in the bark of trees....

It’s been over a century since the American eel made its once-routine migration from the Gulf of Mexico to the Rio Grande Gorge in Taos. The New Mexico sunflower has eluded botanists since 1851 and the Luna County globemallow, which once grew to nine feet, now only...

For months, we’d been craving kimchi jjigae—and not just any, but the one at A-Ri-Rang Oriental Market in Albuquerque’s far Northeast Heights. So when we found ourselves in the neighborhood just before the dinner hour, we pulled into their unassuming parking lot...

For a long time, in the centuries before widespread refrigeration, freezing, and canning, the question of red or green was largely a seasonal one. Eating a meaty chunk of roasted green chile was a fall treat, and otherwise the chile was as red as the dried red pods...

Autumn is here and sorghum, that least mentioned of crops, is the star of the show at next weekend’s Rio Grande Community Farm Maize Maze in Albuquerque, which is, in fact, a sorghum maze. Only the oldest among us might remember firsthand that we once made our own...