Goodies we picked dup at the Louisville, CO farmers' market.

We were finally in town this weekend so decided to stop by our own little home town’s farmers’ market.  Our town of Lousiville, only has 20,000 people, and has a little old fashion downtown that has been there since it was founded as a mining town in 1877.  Last year we went to the farmers’ market on the first day it opened and they only had one farm with vegetables, and a couple of other booths selling odds and ends, so we hadn’t been back since then.  Instead we have been frequenting the Boulder’s farmers’ market which has many more vendors but is more expensive.

Our friend’s Jeff and Kelly who lived in Louisville until a few weeks ago (congrats on the new house guys!), had told us that they had recently been to the market and there were more vendors now.  This morning Jake got us up at 7AM thanks to his back molars that are coming in, so we decided to head over to check it out and give it another chance.  We were very pleasantly surprised that there are now many vendors, ranging from fruit, vegetables, goat cheese, fresh bread, breakfast goodies, tamales, pasta, dog treats, kettle corn, homemade rootbeer, and more (they keep their blog site up to date with what will be there currently).

The best part about the farmers’ market is that it is way more affordable than the Boulder farmers’ market, and way less crowded.  We wound up buying two bags of freshly roasted aneheim peppers, two pounds of potatoes, lemon pepper goat cheese, a loaf of fresh asiago cheese bread, a pound of asparagus, some frozen pasta, a small bag of roasted pinion pine nuts, and two pounds of apricots all for $45, which seemed like a steal to us.  It was much cheaper than the $9 asapargus we bought early in the season.

If you live in the Boulder area, it is definitely worth a stop to downtown Louisville to check out the farmers’ market from 9AM-2PM on Saturdays until October 17th at the intersection of Walnut and Front St.  They may not have quite the selection of the Boulder farmers’ market, but I think it will be our favorite farmers’ market from now on.

Chipotle burrito photo by Michelle

I was in Edmond, OK this past week visiting my parents and in-laws for the 4th of July. While I was here my mom turned on the nightly news and we happened to see a clip on Chipotle. I just caught the very end of it and then my mom said, “oh you might be interested in that, it was about how Chipotle is getting their meat from ‘happy pigs’ and they get some of it from some famous farmer… I think they said Joel Salatin was his name?”

You might remember, Jeremy read a book by Joel Salatin called You Can Farm, and wrote a review on it recently, and he is the owner of PolyFace Farm which is the subject of one of the three parts in Omnivore’s Dilemma. I got online to look up what the report was about, and apparently Chipotle uses only non-CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) meat for it’s pork and chicken. It’s beef is about 50% non-CAFO, but they are working on increasing that to 100%. The other interesting thing is that they are trying to get their meat from local farmers. So, Joel Salatin supplies pork to the Chipotles in the Charlottesville, NC area, but they have other similar farmers supplying chicken and pork to restaurants in your area.

Chipotle started in Denver by a chef, Steve Ells, who had graduated from culinary school and was using his burritos to make money until he could open a real restaurant. In 2001 Chipotle started moving away from non-CAFO meats as much as they could, but didn’t publicize it until they had a model in place so they knew they could make it work for their restaurants.

Jeremy and I have been trying as best we can, to only eat meat if it is local and non-CAFO, which makes it hard to eat fast food. Our only options up until now have been to find something vegetarian on the menu, so we are very excited that we can now feel good about eating pork or chicken from Chipotle.