Celebrate Mountain Harvest Festival in Paonia

Visit Paonia’s Town Park and celebrate the 10th annual Mountain Harvest Festival, taking place Thursday through Sunday, September 23–26. Enjoy live music, local wine, food and arts. Through workshops and activities, Mountain Harvest Festival promotes education in agriculture and the arts in Western Colorado.

“The overriding goal of the event is to more closely unite our community,” says marketing coordinator Anne Nelson. There will be tours of local farms and agricultural classes, as well as vendors selling local products. This popular weekend of diverse and local festivities draws approximately 2,000 people, and most events are free. For more information including a full schedule, list of events, times and prices, visit www.mountainharvestfestival.  com, or call events coordinator, Brian Cambria at 970.640.3721.

Books on our radar this fall

Did you know that 2010 is the 175th anniversary of Mark Twain’s birth and the 100th anniversary of his death?

Even if you are not a fan of Twain, there is a remarkable book recently published called Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Foodsteps of Samuel Clemens by food writer and anthropologist Andrew Beahrs (Penguin Press, 2010), which will surely pique your interest. In the book, Beahrs sets out to discover what has happened to eight of the forgotten regional specialties from the fantasy menu of American dishes Mark Twain composed on a tour of Europe in 1879. Twain’s menu, it turns out, is not only a list of favorite dishes, but also a memoir and a map of a life that leads Beahrs from the dwindling prairie of rural Illinois—home to the prairie chicken—to a 600- pound coon supper in Arkansas to the biggest native oyster reef in San Francisco Bay. Twain’s Feast takes the reader on a journey across America, imparting a sense of excitement about American food, both past and present. www.andrewbeahrs.com

Another food journey takes us to Italy and to the book, Barolo, by Matthew Gavin Frank. After a childhood of microwaved meat and saturated fat, Matthew Gavin Frank got serious about food. His “research” ultimately led him to Barolo, Italy, where, living out of a tent in the garden of a local farmhouse, he resolved to learn about Italian food from the ground up. Barolo is Frank’s account of those six months. Upon arrival, Frank began picking wine grapes for famed vintner Luciano Sandrone. He tells how, between lessons in the art of the grape harvest, he discovered, explored and savored the gustatory riches of Piemontese, Italy. Along the way we meet the region’s families and the many eccentric vintners, butchers, bakers and restaurateurs who call Barolo home. Rich with details of real Italian small-town life, local foodstuffs, strange markets and a circus-like atmosphere, Frank’s story also offers a wealth of historical and culinary information, moments of flamboyance and musings on foreign travel (and its many alien seductions), all filtered through food and wine. www.matthewgfrank.com

Ramped up restaurant scene

The Roaring Fork Valley has seen a number of new restaurants opening in recent months. Pitkin County Tavern & Steakhouse opens in Aspen at the former Steak Pit location. Home-cooked quality is abuzz at Bee’s Bistro in Willits Town Center, while across the highway, in El Jebel, friendly Italian cooking finds a home at Downvalley Tavern and the Fine Line Bar and Grill offers a family-friendly restaurant by day and sports bar by night. Taking over the former Basalt Bistro space in downtown Basalt is Fatbelly Eats, by the owners of Fatbelly Burgers in Carbondale. And opening in October is Carbondale Beer Works on Main Street, where guests can enjoy gourmet hot dogs with six different beers brewed on-site.

Personalized coaching on food, wine

Ever find yourself in the kitchen, planning a dinner party or at the grocery store and wishing you knew a chef or sommelier to call? The Kitchen Hotline, an interactive website with info on food, wine and entertaining, also provides members with the opportunity to have real-time conversations with professional chefs and sommeliers via live online chats or on the phone to answer cooking or wine-related questions.

Established by local Mawa McQueen, memberships to The Kitchen Hotline also include weekly menus with recipes, shopping lists and consultations with a nutritionist. Soon she will add online wine and nutritional webinars. For more information visit www.thekitchenhotline.  com or call 877.773.8485.

Sponsor a Farmer!

Here’s a chance to plant a seed that will yield delicious benefits for years to come: For $50, you can sponsor a local farmer to attend the first day of the weekendlong Farming and Feeding of the Minds workshop at Divide Creek Farm in Silt on Oct. 16 and 17. The Saturday presentation features hands-on demonstrations and discussions with two of the world’s leading experts on year-round cold-weather farming and livestock rotational grazing techniques, Eliot Coleman and Joel Salatin.

Coleman, father of Divide Creek owner Clara Coleman, is a Maine-based organic farming pioneer and author of The New Organic Grower. Salatin, owner of Polyface farm in Virginia, is one of the heroes in Michael Pollan’s best-selling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the movie Food Inc. Their practical and inspiring demonstrations should motivate everyone to expand year-round food production all over the Western Slope. For more information, contact the event co-sponsor, Slow Food Roaring Fork, at 970.963.0205 or [email protected].