SantaFe.com

ORALE SANTA FE: The other day while I was wearing down the batteries on the remote control, I came across a series of television programs on public television that featured some aging rock stars performing live before an equally aging but highly adoring audience.

I couldn't help but notice that some of the apparent baby boomers in the crowd were a-rockin' and a-groovin' just as intensely as they undoubtedly did when the graying, balding, paunchy, crackly voiced rockers performed the same songs in their prime decades ago. Right then I realized that we've now officially entered into a new...

Monday, December 10, 2007
by Arnold Vigil • Journal Santa Fe

I can tell you exactly when I conceived a desire to talk to the author of A Garlic Testament. It was Thanksgiving six and a half years ago, when a bad tooth kept me from driving up to Dutchess County in rural New York to share turkey with an old friend’s huge Russian Jewish family. Claimed by a sweet lassitude induced by fever, I curled up in my favorite chair under a blanket and spent the whole day reading a book I’d discovered on the shelves of our local library. From the moment I read the epigraph taken from Edith Wharton, I knew something was up. Sipping tea in the wan light of a...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Patricia Klindienst • localflavor magazine

In the low shadow of the Ortiz Mountains along Highway 14, huddled into the nook of a shallow valley, lies the tiny village of Madrid. Few trees survive here on this rocky, parched land. In fact, besides the piñons and junipers dotting surrounding hillsides and the spindly-armed cholla growing everywhere, the landscape is virtually barren. Once a mining town, Madrid’s soil has been severely degraded for over a century. Piles of mining tailings towering at one end of the greenbelt attest to that. Grazing and flash flood erosion have also taken their toll. In the unrelenting glare of...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Between the hubbub of Albuquerque’s big-city attitude and the enthusiastic growth of Rio Rancho’s sprawl, sits a rural oasis. In Corrales, abundant cottonwoods arch over bands of green and follow cattail-lined acequias. Horses flick their tails against buzzing flies in yards that seem to go on forever. Million-dollar mansions with intricate landscaping abut mobile homes where chickens cluck and peck–unaware of the pressures of development.

Corrales’s pastoral beauty and its unobstructed views of the Sandia mountains are threatened. Its very essence depends on a mix of farmland, open space...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Pari Noskin Taichert • localflavor magazine

Celebrated native son, lanky Alex Maryol, at 26, enjoys region-wide popularity as a rocker and blues man. With that and his foodie-family background, the soulful singer, by Santa Fe standards, has got every finger that’s not plucking a guitar string plugged into our town’s preeminent cultural sockets.

The self-effacing local success story, who draws crowds with his accomplished guitar riffs, songwriting skill, sincere smile, and long golden locks, actually thought I wanted to interview him about his family’s lauded restaurants, which include Tia Sophia’s, Tomasita’s, Diego’s, and at one...

Thursday, February 1, 2007
by Katie Mehrer • localflavor magazine

IN a war-torn, Orwellian world going mad, a world where globalization and corporate greed are putting the earth and its inhabitants in dire peril, when we are approaching what may be our darkest hour and plummeting towards despair with no moral ground under our feet, there is a beacon in the darkness. And that light comes from the Lannan Foundation. Since this family foundation relocated to Santa Fe in 1997, we have witnessed its visionary work throughout our community and the world. The foundation, under the creative leadership of Patrick Lannan, is making a difference—passionately and...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Susanna Carlisle • THE magazine

My Grandma, she always had a pot of beans going. If one pot got towards the bottom, she had another one started. Marcella Abeyta

Marcella Abeyta has rolled out fresh tortillas for most of her life. In fact, some of her first memories are in the kitchen working with her sister, where their duties started much earlier than most due to their mother’s illness. “Let me tell you, I can remember standing on a stool, because I couldn’t reach the stove without it,” she says.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that she stood in my own kitchen, patiently passing on this wonderful heritage to me, her...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Lisa Abeyta • localflavor magazine

Eleven years ago, Santa Fe music teacher and artist Valdez Abeyta y Valdez discovered three flats of adobes at her front door. They’d been left by her father, salvaged from a wall her grandfather had built over 100 years ago. The decision to build an horno with the adobes did not come lightly.

“I’d never built a horno before and got really nervous about placing the last brick. It’s like the keystone of a Roman arch, holding all the other bricks together,” she says.

Abeyta y Valdez replasters the oven each fall in mid to late October with earth she gathers from around the state. This year,...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Kelly Koepke • localflavor magazine

Here we go, into that darkest, deepest cold winter stillness again, when bone chilling winds and frozen bare landscapes drive us into hibernation, hugging ourselves for warmth. Our kitchens become a warm, comforting refuge, the throbbing heart of our homes, as our priorities hone down to a simple need to connect with something resembling hope, something that kindles our faith that the turning point will in fact come, the balance will shift again, subtly at first, just the tiniest pinprick of light. This is when the membrane between realities is so thin a flame from a single candle can...

Tuesday, November 1, 2005
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

You couldn’t imagine a more perfect summer morning in Albuquerque’s North Valley: blue skies, a cool breeze ruffling the air, and a temperature not yet threatening in its heat, but rather, soothing and near-restorative, like a short tenure in the sauna after a day spent shivering in air-conditioned interiors.

And you couldn’t imagine a more perfect North Valley location: Casa Rondeña Winery, with its elegant architecture, lush lawns, and sparkling ponds and fountains.

At the helm, John Calvin, North Valley born and raised, internationally educated, and culturally reflective. Calvin has...

Monday, August 1, 2005
by Rena Distasio • localflavor magazine