What The???
The other day I got a text from Claudia at Pastaficio with something about Food & Wine magazine and bread and Colorado in the note. After some googling I discovered that Moxie and our soul sister bakery Reunion in Denver were listed as the "Best Bread in The State". You know that feeling when you finish hiking a 14'er and you are so dang thirty and you think you might just faint, and you know you are out of water...but then you see the frozen Nalgene you'd forgotten at the bottom of your pack is just perfectly melted with a little ice sliver still bobbing in there....and you raise that to your lips and guzzle it? Well...not that we needed a pick me up, but shit.....this was quite the pick me up for our team. We have all been working so hard through this pandemic and the fire and everything else that has been going on, so all I can say is Food & Wine, thank you for the high five. You should read the whole list of bakeries across the US that they've listed. There is a beautiful common thread across the country which is local food, identity preserved wheat, in house milling, community engagement and health and nutrition. All of that wrapped in deliciousness. Check out the article HERE.
Last week we had an amazing experience with a not so amazing outcome. Does anyone know Isabel Farm over in Lafayette? I bet you do. They are one of our favorite farms that we have partnered with over the years to provide bread to their CSA. Sadly Natalie and Jason the owners decided to wrap it up at their Baseline location and focus on their other two farm properties. The City of Lafayette in their brilliance had created this 14 acre farm property as a gift to the citizens of their town as City Open Space. There are bylaws that exist to keep this property as a certified organic farm for eternity. It is flanked by Waneka Lake to the south and a Wildlife Preserve on the West (amazing birds of prey).
Moxie saw this opportunity as a once in a lifetime chance to actually do our farming on site and we applied for the lease. When I say "we" I am referring to a very specific dream team. Does anyone know Anne Cure of Cure Organic Farms? Anne agreed to join our team as the Farmer Partner to create phenomenal fields of vegetables down here in East County the way she does up in Boulder. But wait...there's more....our favorite flower girl Raquel Hink who has been growing acres of local flowers for the Moxie flower CSA and Boulder Farmer's Market joined the team as our "Flower Boss" to plant 2 acres of dahlias, ranunculus and more. And you've already seen too many photos of hisself Andy and sons on tractors all over the county, but I would have been the Wheat Dude.
These two Wonder Women and I stayed up late dreaming scheming a master plan for what that Lafayette farm would look like including on site baking, best in class local mercantile, maker space for some of our amazing friends, vegetable production, flowers, community events, music, education opportunities for children to get their hands, hearts and souls into soil and wheat, wheat test plots (to try to conserve water during these drought years we had suggested 8 acres of dryland wheat trials), and more.
I am not sure if Lafayette is ready for that sort of thing, but we got pretty excited about what we might offer the community. In the end it appears as though we are not the right fit for them at this time, but it has energized some really beautiful concepts among our leadership group at Moxie and Anne and Raquel. Stay tuned for more on our Little Red Hen ideas....
To honor this moment of recognition of our team, I want to thank all of our bread bakers for working so hard to put up with our crazy Moxie thing. We used to grind the wheat every day right next to our oven and mixer in our teeny little kitchen, and Sandra and Joan used to start the day at 4 AM by lifting 50 pounds of wheat into our little stone mill and cranking it up, only to head over to start dividing dough by themselves on the old wooden bench. When wheat deliveries would come, the whole team and often customers would hoist bags of wheat and corn right of a trailer on Main Street up a flight of stairs to our store room. It was a heavy lift and always really fun and exhausting. Nowadays we have our rock star Hillary aka Millary up in Boulder at our very own flour mill grind wheat each day and send it down. Yesterday I was leaving the bakery and watching Maurizio drive away in his car all covered in flour after baking. I smiled right out loud as I thought about having worked side by side with Maurizio since I was 18 years old, and now to be working along side him again at Moxie. There is no man alive more dedicated to bread than he. Once he asked me what that oath that doctors take was....The Hippocratic Oath? He said, " I have taken that with the bread ".
For today's tune....I found this record in my father's collection in high school when I was transitioning out of Public Enemy and BDP into more folk music. Hard to believe that during my rap and reggae era that this sounded good to me...but it does and remains one of my favorites to this day. Apparently these guys started out as an all dulcimer band in the mountians of North Carolina.
Trapezoid- The Lakes Of Ponchatrain