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

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s Carol’s shopping list:

• Table or shelf space for seed trays.
• Lights, either grow lights or a combination of cool blue florescent and incandescent bulbs.
• Chains, ropes, or cords to raise or lower lights during plant growth.
• Trays with small soil cells for holding seeds and soil.
• Sterile seed starting soil (called media).
• Seeds.
• Labels.
• Timer for lights — optional.

If you’re not into video, get the text at the Camera.

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.

Like, say, David Owen. Here’s a quick excerpt from a Washington Post review of his book, Green Metropolis:

A former resident of Manhattan who has lived for many years in a rather remote Connecticut town, Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of “extreme compactness,” New York “is the greenest community in the United States.” The “average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s,” and “eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot,” which is “ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County.” It all derives from being a very crowded place.

Cute. But here’s just one of the many flaws in such an argument: Manhattan could never grow its own food. It would need 150 times the land space of Manhattan. Via GOOD and WorldChanging:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In fact, Boulder couldn’t even grow all of its own food if it tried. Nope. Turns out we need the ol’ breadbasket of America.

I’m all about compactness and bikes and public transportation. I love that. And, for the record, I loved living in New York. I’m just saying that waving a magic wand and turning the country into a bunch of Manhattans (to borrow a phrase from the review) would actually be a terrible idea.

(I know I’m late to the party on this one — other folks have addressed the book plenty of times. The video just made me think back to it.)

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

From the Daily Camera:

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.

The Albertsons grocery store, at 555 South Boulder Road, closed in October to the dismay of residents and city officials. The closure, which company officials blamed on poor performance, added to the vacancy rate on South Boulder Road, where there’s also an empty Walmart building, a vacant Ace Hardware building and several smaller vacant spots.

At the 50,000-square-foot Albertsons site, the developer plans to remodel about 28,000 square feet for Sunflower. The remaining space would be available to other retailers.

The city has agreed to waive building permit and other construction fees, rebate remodeling use taxes and provide an $800,000 sales tax rebate over five years.

Lafayette Community Development Director Phillip Patterson said the developer expects the new market to generate at least $460,000 in sales tax revenue a year. Albertsons generated about $300,000 a year, he said — the same net amount the city expects to collect from Sunflower after the rebate. Plus, he said, the shopping center needs an anchor.

The Lafayette Sunflower Farmers Market is expected to open this year but in the meantime, find out more about how Sunflower Farmers Market operates its own farm.

–Lindsay Gulisano

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

“We have growers who sell seconds at the market,” said Cheryl Namowicz, manager of the Boulder Farmer’s Market. “People come to the market 45 minutes early and start lines, waiting for seconds because they see the value in a visually imperfect product that tastes the same.”

“They’ve got dimples in them, they’ve got branch rub (a slight scarring on the skin which occurs when the fruit grows around a branch), or they’re overripe,” said Dave Morton, who runs the orchards in Palisade, about the seconds. “There’s something that keeps them from being a No. 1 peach.

“But people love ‘em.”

Morton sold his seconds for a dollar a pound this summer.

Read more about the Boulder County Farmer’s Market and second-string fruit at the Camera.

Back to my cold-frame adventure. I made my Rube Goldberg plan for these frames. (I should state here that my secret dream of being a suburban homesteader is very much hampered by my extreme lack of carpentry skills.)  I bought the lumber and got all the horizontal cuts made at point of  purchase. But they wouldn’t make the diagonal cuts necessary to angle the top of my cold frame. I made a deal with a neighbor who has a circular saw (a homemade family dinner for a few cuts), but his saw wasn’t powerful enough. Now  I must approach another neighbor who I don’t know so well.  And now I’m thinking I should make dinner for both. What will my own family eat?  Salad, probably, maybe with a cheese souffle.

Speaking of which, that pear salad with blue cheese is one that I tasted at the Whole Foods in Superior.  I’ve had that combo before, but I really liked the vinaigrette — with slightly different ratios than the classic ones of 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil.

Dijon White Wine Vinaigrette

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste.

Whisk mustard and vinegar and whisk vigorously while adding oil in a drizzle.

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.

Before this year, a typical menu might be processed chicken patties and canned fruit. Sometimes there were carrot sticks. School lunches certainly met federal guidelines, and staff did the best they could.  But, like virtually every school system in the country, ours had let convenience and the high fructose corn syrup middle man come between our children and real food.

Yes, that food was a lot cheaper. But our decision to choose real food means that we teach our children an important lesson about what we value: food that when possible comes right out of the dirt here in Boulder County or from some well-tended dirt elsewhere, and most importantly, our kids’ health. It also shows what we don’t value: chemically formulated, focus-grouped “products,”  kept “fresh with preservatives and dumbed down with salt, sweeteners and artificial flavorings. Everyone knows that’s the only kind of food  kids will eat anyway, right?

Tell that to the sixth graders I saw.

Experts say a child may need as many as 20 exposures to a new food to try it and like it. If  fruit and salad greens are something you’ve had trouble pushing at home, wrap your minds around this: From first through eighth grades — when students can’t  get another lunch unless they bring  it — your child will have by conservative estimate, 1,200 opportunities to eat fresh greens and fruit.  That’s also 1,200 bites at the non-apple supplied by food processors that your child won’t have.

As the lunch monitor came to the table to tell us it was three minutes until the lunch period was over,  I had the distinct pleasure of seeing 11-year-old boys hurriedly shoveling salad into their mouths.

Now that’s change I can believe in.  It’s also a change I’d like to see in communites less affluent than Boulder is.  Boulder Valley administrators say they hope our program can be a model for the nation. It hasn’t been cheap. Local folks have opened their wallets to make it happen.  As our kids thrive on better food, let us look for ways to reach out to other communities with fewer resources than ours — adopting a school cafeteria, perhaps, or offering expertise. You shouldn’t have to be well off to eat lettuce.

Salad Days: Can salad save the Earth?  No, but it’s a way to look at the ways that food and environment intersect. I’m eating a salad as main meal every day for a year and writing about it. Here’s to green eating  – often literally.

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.

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.

Camera food editor Cindy Sutter serves up some great choices for carnivorous and vegiforous* tailgaters :

Such a local game deserves a local menu. How fortunate for us that the obvious menu choices for Buffalo vs. Ram are two foods that have long Colorado associations, not to mention extreme tailgating well-suitedness: bison (a.k.a. buffalo) and lamb.

If you’re into something a little more decadent, there’s always the bison hot dog, served Mexican style. What’s that, you might ask? It should be wrapped in bacon (Longs Farm, please) and served with cheese, and roasted jalapenos or green chiles. Now that’s a tailgating mouthful.

For those of you who like to stick with the basics, go for a bison burger. Just offer plenty of fixings. Several cheeses, jalapenos, caramelized onions, mushrooms. All local, and all delicious.

You may never party the same way again once you’ve checked out Cindy’s buffalo tacos, lamb skewers and grilled eggplant recipes. And don’t forget to have some local brews — plenty of choices there, too!

*No, this is not a real word.