Amid the nourishing chaos of city life, we urban dwellers find ourselves brain-deep in startling juxtapositions. Mid-morning one Tuesday, a formation of squawking geese sweeps its shadow across a used-bookstore window, dimming the dog-eared covers of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. An instant later,…
Even the most devoted cook appreciates time away from his passions. I learned this years ago, when my father bought my mother her first microwave oven. I can still see Mom bawling as she unwrapped her gift. “Mrs. Widmer got diamonds for Christmas,” she sobbed, “and I get something to…
Like a lot of kids in the ’70s, Erik Amundson collected and traded beer cans. And like his fellow collectors, he eventually lost interest and moved his cans to the attic. But unlike most kids, Amundson had a mother who didn’t trash his collection after it fell out of fashion…
Most of us can picture the embattled alcoholic, staring down at a tempting glass of vodka and calling a fellow abstainer late at night: “I’m craving a drink and need your help.” But a person having the same struggles over a glazed doughnut? That’s a much harder image to swallow…
If you’re going to drink alcohol, do it before noon.” Ordinarily, receiving this medical advice from your doctor would be a dream come true, like having your dentist tell you to work half days and eat rock candy to save your teeth. But not now. In suggesting the cocktail brunch,…
Call it a honey of a drinking festival: The International Mead Festival — Honey Wines of the World features the globe’s best brands of mead. A heady elixir that fueled the fun of early man, the Vikings and Chaucer, the potion still works its magic on a growing segment of…
Fruitcake vendors swear by Christmas, and turkey sellers depend on Thanksgiving. But Phil Kellogg lives for Halloween, which is also National Caramel Apple Day. Phil and his mom, Linda Kellogg, are the folks behind the Daffy Apple, a caramel-coated fruit that’s tickled local fancies every fall for fifty years. But…
Mishka Shubaly is staggering home. The singer-songwriter wrote his first tunes while living in a Colorado basement, where his blissfully black sense of humor helped him handle a hard-knock life and the stigma of clothes that smelled like pickles. (He kept his duds in pickle jars from his job at…
If you’re remotely familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous, you know that Jake Schroeder isn’t the first out-of-control drinker to trade alcohol for coffee. (There are more java-dependent people at an AA meeting than there are at a Starbucks employee convention.) But few reformed tipplers have taken addiction transferral as far as…
Beekeepers get a lot of things from the bees they raise: beeswax, honey, money. But Tom Theobald gets all that and more. “Life,” he says. “I get to participate in a unique natural system that really gives me a window into the workings of the whole natural world. And in…
There’s a reason Dwight Yoakam’s recordings are the lone country albums in many a rocker’s collection. For nearly twenty years, he’s been the lone country artist making intelligent, rebellious twang that appeals to rock-and-roll sensibilities. He takes the dumb completely out of country, with music that bleeds the heart and…
Smoking is good for Jim Barsness’s health. For thirty years, his family has run House of Smoke, a Fort Lupton company that specializes in smoked meats and game. Originally a father-and-sons outfit with a converted refrigerator as its only smoker, House of Smoke now boasts four state-of-the-art smokers and 28…
For those who crave blues from the old school — Muddy, Little Walter, Otis Rush, Little Milton, et al. — most modern blues recordings hold little appeal. The majority of them are too slickly produced, too heavy on the rock and roll, and too far removed from the heartache, joy…
SAT, 7/19 There’s something that everyone from gearheads and grease monkeys to Snoop Dogg and Ice-T can agree on: The hottest way to blaze around town is chillin’ in a lowrider. So cruise on over to Six Flags Elitch Gardens today for the 2003 Lowrider Invitational. “These are the top…
Pioneers relied on the covered wagon to help them start new lives in the West. A century and a half later, Randy and Rita Sorenson identify with those early settlers. The couple used a covered wagon — and an equally vintage method of cooking meat over mesquite wood — to…
For Buddy Schmalz, the buzz about John Hickenlooper going from brewpub owner to mayor-elect is old news. Schmalz has been there, done that. The brewer at the Schmalz-family-owned Dostal Alley Brewpub & Casino in Central City, he was sworn in as mayor of that mountain town in January. Like Hickenlooper,…
A camping trip without fire is as pointless as non-alcohol beer and Boca burgers. Howard Oliver learned that hard lesson back in 1996, when a fire ban at a Colorado campground extinguished his family’s plans for campfire cooking. To ensure that no one else finds such a damper put on…
Sure, Canada has at least one “mad” cow. But what American beef eaters don’t know is that the United States has millions of cows that, if not yet mad, are certainly uncomfortable. “They appear to be happy walking up to a full bunk of grain every morning,” Dale Lasater says,…
Mike Mitchell learned to be adaptable at an early age. When he was in the seventh grade, his schoolteacher mom pulled up the family tree in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and replanted it in the Wind River Indian reservation in central Wyoming. “She saw one too many episodes of Little House on…
Carol Fenster was raised on wheat produced on her family’s Nebraska farm by her father, an internationally acclaimed wheat grower. For forty years, she, like most Americans, ate a diet heavy in wheat flour. But she also endured four decades of recurring sinus infections, colds and poor health, even though…
For many people who work in Denver’s City & County Building, the basement cafeteria is a feared, last-resort stop. But Jacques Yang, the cafeteria’s new chef, is out to change that. He sees it as the perfect spot for a homestyle meal, one that can sustain a person through a…
Pinetop Perkins, who appears Wednesday, May 14, at the Soiled Dove, is a human time capsule of American music history. Now ninety, Perkins once picked cotton for a living, played guitar and piano during the juke-joint heyday of the Mississippi Delta and gave Ike Turner his first piano lessons. After…
