Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
- This Raised My PulseHey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]
- Time for a Turnaround
- Edgy Veggie
Winter Bike to Work Day: Great Success
Did you read that title in your best Borat impersonation? Because that’s how I wrote it. If not, here’s the man himself.
So Winter Bike to Work Day was in fact, a great success. You see, people like to bike. They also like free food.
Michael White, 15, bikes to school each day with his dad, Mark. But the free food offered throughout Boulder on the city’s third annual Winter Bike to Work Day today added an extra incentive to commute on two wheels.
“Why can’t you guys do this every day?” Michael, a New Vista High School student, said as he ate a tamale from a food stall outside the Pedal to Properties real estate firm on Boulder’s Pearl Street. “Then I can stop having cold cereal in the morning.”
Check out “the rest of the story,” (that was supposed to be your attempt at Paul Harvey) at Hundreds participate in Boulder’s third Winter Bike to Work Day.
How to make a solar cooker at home
Solar cooker baking zucchini bread | flickr user davidsilver
A solar cooker is a simple way to use and understand a resource Boulder has in abundance: sunlight. Simple cookers require such basic household items as Elmer’s glue, cardboard, aluminum foil and a glass jar, and can be assembled in as little as two to three hours.
The Boulder company Willow Way, run by Zia Parker, offers a solar oven construction class taught by Jeff Graef.
“One thing that’s good about it is it’s a slow cooker,” Graef said. “You basically don’t have to watch it. You can throw in the food, go out and do some errands, come back and it will be cooked.”
“You can cook a pretty good variety of things, but things that take a long time to cook are more challenging,” he said. “The easiest things to cook are fruits and vegetables.
While a solar cooker might not be able to produce enough heat to cook everything on the dinner table, it could be a fun and energy efficient way to gain more understanding of the power of the sun.
Read more about how to make a solar cooker at the Camera.
-Mikaila Altenbern
How to start seeds
Carol O’Meara gives you a shopping list for seedlings that you can get started very soon in your own home. What to buy for starting seeds:
Here’s Carol’s shopping list: Read more
The urban farming challenge — why New York can’t be all that green
There are plenty of reasons why I love urban culture. For one, I can close my eyes and do the same thing that urban planners do — imagine a really wonderfully efficient world in which I live, work and play within about a two- or three-mile radius. In fact, this is mostly accurate in my own life right now, but I’m guilty of things (like occasional travel by air) that negate the heck out of that.
There’s also the idea of urban farming. I love green roofs. I love the perseverance of people doing things like cultivating potatoes on their porches or bees in Brooklyn. I love it.
But I have a hard time when someone goes out of their way to write a whole book and make the claim that the greenest place you can live is a city like New York. Read more
Sunflower Farmers Market to open in old Lafayette Albertsons location
Sunflower Farmers Market will bring their crunchy-feel-good groceries to an additional location soon. The Lafayette City Council approved an incentive package to allow a Sunflower Farmers Market to open in a vacant Albertsons building.
City administrators hope this new addition will be the first of many in the partially abandoned area on South Boulder Road.
A Sunflower Farmers Market is opening in Lafayette. | Camera File Photo
Sunflower Farmers Market, a Boulder-based discount natural grocer, will open in the vacant Albertsons building sometime this year under a deal approved by city officials Tuesday night. Read more
Homely fruit for cheap!
It’s another installment in the “Save Money, Save Planet” series, with second-string fruit. But this is no secret — Boulder’s all over it. At the Boulder County Farmer’s Market, people line up to buy ever leftover not-so-pretty peach on offer. Why? Well, because it’d be a waste not to and because it’s cheap!
Heather Burtness gives a customer a look at a box of seconds peaches at the Morton's Orchards booth at the Boulder County Farmer's Market last Wednesday. Photo by Paul Aiken
Salad and pre-carpentry
Today the biggest part of my salad saga was not the salad I ate — Colorado pears, local greens, blue cheese with a Dijon-white wine vinaigrette. Rather, it was acquiring lumber to make three cold frames in the backyard. My summer procrastination meant that I didn’t get these built in time to plant some greens in July for winter-long eating. The stuff I’ll be putting outside now will mean that I’ll get a few leaves in the fall, but more in the very early spring. Although I like to believe that living in the moment is the best thing — so very intentional and all — I’m already wishing myself into the future to eat those greens. In the meantime, I’ll also be attempting to raise spring mix inside under the flourescent lights I generally use to start seeds of warm weather vegetables. Read more
I have seen the future, and it is salad
I believe in the power of salad.
This week, I had lunch with my sixth-grader at Broomfield Heights Middle School.
As I dished up my own lunch of fresh, local greens, peppers, celery and carrots, middle schoolers were lining up at the salad bar, piling salad in paper bowls and grabbing apples and peaches. The creamy, garlicky dressing I chose was cleverly packaged in a squeeze bottle with a small opening, making it impossible to get ladles full of dressing without spending a couple of precious lunch period minutes squeezing.
My husband and I sat down with our son and three other sixth-grade boys, all of whom had side salads and all of whom were eating them. A glance around the lunchroom revealed that sixth-graders eating salad is now the norm at this Boulder Valley school.
The norm.
Parents, need I say this is something of an earth-shattering development? Those of you who have been donating to Boulder’s new school lunch program and seeing your tax dollars pay for a portion of it, should take some time to appreciate what a big shift it is to have fresh food in a school lunch every day.
Salad is the norm. Read more
Local Colorado hops, local Colorado beer, happy Colorado locals
If you’ve ever had a wet-hop beer, you know why it’s exciting that some of Colorado’s homebrew enthusiasts and microbreweries are experimenting with locally-grown hops.
Hops on a vine | deege@fermentarium.com
Hops are the little flowers/cones/mystery pods that give beer some of its most distinct flavors. They’re typically dried out before the brewing process, so most folks don’t know about the wild and woolly world of wet-hopped beer. The first time I ever had a beer brewed with hops grown by someone whose face I’d seen, it was in Brooklyn, N.Y., at a beer store situated dangerously close to where I lived.
Now it looks like I need to get up to Longmont for some of what Left Hand is cookin’:
Left Hand Brewing in Longmont last week brewed a wet-hopped IPA called Warrior. While the brewery generally make a wet-hopped beer at harvest time, this was the first time it used Colorado hops in its brew. When the hops were ready for harvest, Lefthand employees drove over the Divide to Paonia to fetch a couple of vans full of hops.
Chris Lennert, vice president of operations at Left Hand, says the brewery used about 500 pounds of hops for its five batches with about 25 pounds of hops from its own brewery property in Longmont.
Lennert say he loves the flavor of wet-hopped beer.
“It’s an amazing floral citrus aroma … from the wet hops,” he says. Lennert uses fresh basil vs. dried to compare the difference between fresh and dried hops.
Yow. Who’s driving? Read more about Colorado hops at the Camera.
“Here We Grow” by Boulder filmmaker hits Whole Foods this week
Craig King, left, and his son Elijah King, 12, pick tomatoes for dinner in their garden in North Boulder. ( Mara Auster/Camera )
Craig King has a vision of a better way to eat. The former personal chef from Boulder has made a film, “Here We Grow,” that plows fertile ground with its indictment of America’s industrial food supply. But, refreshingly, he wants to more than just preach to the locavores of the world. He hopes to use proceeds from he movie to put together a pilot project to bring healthy foods to people who can’t get them easily.
“As a chef who’s enthused about nourishing people, I saw there was a huge gap in the underserved community,” King says. “Even if (residents) walked miles, there’s no clean, healthy food.”
See the film at Whole Foods on a demo table on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday this week in Boulder or buy it from the store.
Read more about “Here We Grow” at the Camera.
