“In every corner of Paris I was reminded: the city is old; it stays the same. People will try to tell you how different it is, how it has evolved: the food scene is different; the construction is killing that neighborhood; the tourists are getting more obnoxious. But for me, those changes barely register. Paris is essentially the same. That’s the whole point of it.”
For a site called Finding Quiet Farm, we don’t actually write that much about finding Quiet Farm. This isn’t because we’re not looking, but because we haven’t found much worth sharing. Farmland in the U.S. is bulldozed and paved over for housing developments and shopping malls at a staggering rate of forty acres per hour, and the land that is available tends to be just a touch out of our price range. We spent a month in Oregon this fall, volunteering on farms and looking for our own place, but ultimately decided that Oregon wasn’t our home. We drove back to Denver through Colorado’s Western Slope, and decided to give that part of the state – previously ignored – a closer look in the new year.
The first week of 2018 saw us westbound from Denver crossing the high mountain passes, which was easy instead of treacherous because winter in Colorado was canceled this year. We visited Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose, Olathe, Hotchkiss and Paonia, areas famous for peaches and sweet corn and cherries and the center of Colorado’s nascent wine industry, too.
Our trusty road trip car. (Just kidding.)
Over the course of three long, intense days, we saw maybe a dozen properties. Most, of course, were discarded immediately: rickety house in need of extensive, costly renovation, sketchy neighbors, too much infrastructure devoted to horses, odd adobe construction, property too close to busy roads. But there were two in particular that caught our attention: one forty-acre parcel just outside of Grand Junction, a reasonably major population center, and one in a tiny apple-growing area just up the Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world.
Apple trees with protective winter coverings ready for use…if winter ever appears.
Well, hello there! How is 2018 treating you thus far? We over here at FQF are currently swanning our way through France and Germany, and we’ll be sending you some delightful travel missives in the not-too-distant future. But until then, we’d like to talk about box meal kits, because they’ve been a popular topic of conversation lately on both our professional and personal circuits.
What are box meal kits, you might ask? They’re basically recipes and ingredients shipped to you on a regular or on-demand basis, from which you craft (hopefully) delicious, quick(ish) meals. You don’t need to shop or plan; all you need to do is decide which meals you want and how often you want them. And there are many, many companies from which to choose. HelloFresh is probably the most well-known, but there is also Blue Apron, Green Chef, Purple Carrot, Plated, Sun Basket and many others. Plus, Amazon recently bought Whole Foods, so they’re expected to enter the ring any day now, and Wal-Mart is jumping in, too.
Thanks to our good friends over at Epicurean Butter, we received two HelloFresh meals to test: Prosciutto-Wrapped Chicken with Mushroom Risotto and Kale Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Tomato Soup. Although HelloFresh offers a number of different plans to choose from, these two meals were each designed to serve two people and they cost about $20 each, or $10 per serving.
Each meal arrives much as you see above: a shopping bag contains the ingredients, plus a photo recipe card and nutritional info; the shopping bags are then all tucked into an insulated box with packing material and ice packs. Typically, you receive three different meals in a box, but again, this varies according to your plan and the company. Cooking oils, salt and pepper are not included, but everything else you need should be.
Despite the fact that I find following recipes very similar to being put in a choke collar, I wanted to honor the spirit of this experiment and pretend that I was a standard HelloFresh customer, rather than a professional chef. So I laid out all of my ingredients, checked them carefully against the recipe card, and followed the directions to the letter. N even read out the instructions to me while I was at the stove; this resulted in much hilarity as my natural instinct was to do everything my way – he had to correct me frequently, and of course I argued. My goal, obviously, was to see how close I could get to the presentation in the photo as well as the preparation time indicated.
Howdy, pardner! Are you one of the over twelve hundred people who relocated to Colorado last month (just like every month for the past three years or so, which makes us one of the fastest-growing states in the country)? If you’re new here, you might not know that January means only one thing in our town, and that’s the National Western Stock Show. Never been? Get your boots on and let’s go.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please remove your hats and stand for our national anthem.”
For a long time, Denver was embarrassed about its cowtown reputation. We were embarrassed that we weren’t seen as elegant and sophisticated, like New York or Los Angeles. We were embarrassed that we didn’t have fancy restaurants but instead had an abundance of steakhouses, particularly classy joints where they’d cut your necktie off. We were embarrassed that we wore blue jeans (pressed) and boots (clean) to just about every gathering, formal or not.
I may not love Thanksgiving, but I do love everything about January. I love the quiet after the holidays, the fresh start, the clean slate. And of course, this is the time of year when so many of us promise to do better. When we promise to eat right, drink less, stop going out to restaurants so often, quit smoking, save our money, exercise more and all the rest.
I don’t subscribe to the negativity often associated with New Year’s resolutions. (By mid-January, over a quarter of all New Year’s resolutions have been discarded, and only a scant 10% are actually followed through to the end of the year. Those are some pretty bleak statistics.) Changing habits is hard enough; I’d much rather start off on a positive note. I make a list of goals, not resolutions.
And with that positivity in mind, how about a quick primer on eating better in 2018? This isn’t designed to be an exhaustive list, nor a restrictive diet plan, merely a few simple tips to get your head in the right place for making healthy changes in your daily eating. Diets don’t work, but changing your mindset does.
Finding Quiet Farm 