Regular readers of The Fork are no doubt familiar with our thorough and VERY SERIOUS history lessons wherein we find some food topic (cherries, yogurt, cheese, whatever) and break down it origins, fun facts and so on. These lessons are in no way jokey and, we think, provide a lot of super-interesting information about the food we eat.
This week, however, we’ve hit a bit of a wall. The summer has been hot. The days have been long. The brain has been...not...braining...good. So we need your help. We love researching tidbits of info and sharing them with the class, and we wanted to loop in our dear readers on what the next one might be (more on how it’ll work in a sec).
It’s not like we’re coming to the table with zero ideas. Thus far we’ve got a little list going that we think might be interesting. Check it out:
-History of Creamed Corn
We read someplace that while the Midwest likes to claim this stuff, it might have origins in Native America. Given how people love stealing shit from Indigenous people, we wouldn’t doubt it. We bet there’s more. We bet we could find an historian who knows for sure.
-History of the Steakhouse
With Santa Fe playing home to a few notable steak-forward boites (and recent news that Market Steer will take over a new space that formerly housed tapas joint El Mesón), we thought this could be an interesting thing to dig in and learn about.
-History of Pita Bread
For our intern’s last piece with SFR, he reminded us all that Pyramid Café in Santa Fe is totally good. This made us realize we know next to nothing about pita bread and we could stand to learn more.
-History of Food in Popular Culture
From music and movies to video games, television, writing, etc., food is omnipresent in our entertainment. We find this interesting for a number of reasons, not least of which because food is the one thing everyone everywhere absolutely shares (like, there are people who don’t care about art and music; wild, right?).
We’re also open to your ideas, though, so here’s what we’re gonna do: We’re gonna open this up to y’all, and the person who helps us the hardest will get a special prize via mail (a gift certificate to the Chocolate Maven, which, if you’ll recall, we recently said has a killer brunch). There are two ways to enter, as it were: You can either prove to us you read this thing by voting for one of the topics above and telling us why you did that, or you can suggest your own topic. There can only be one winner, but we’ll pick them from the pool of people who prove they’ve read this far. Got it? Good!
Email us at thefork@sfreporter.com to enter. Please note that there shan’t be a Fork next week on Aug. 17, so you’ve got a little extra time...still, we’d get on it asap. And we’ll announce the winner when we’re damn good and ready.
If you search for “history song,” this is what comes up. Weird.
Snack Corner
Over at our favorite coffee shop in town (being Ohori’s in case we haven’t mentioned that, like, 50 times), we’ve recently become enamored with this gluten-free apple cinnamon muffin. You should see if you can get one, because they don’t always have them. But when they do....oooowwwwwweeeeee!
Also
-Popular vegetarian Moroccan joint Tajine and BODY of Santa Fe appear to have parted ways. A number of readers report having stopped by to find Tajine gone and we’re checking it out. SFR’s love of the place was well-documented back when they first opened shop and we sure hope they find a new home soon.
-The Bite newsletter (being a lesser Fork in every way outside of how they have the wherewithal to report stuff instead of just talking shit all the time) has a pretty sweet rundown of New Mexico beers that work well for summer in its latest edition. We won’t spoil the list, but we will say a certain Santa Fe taproom made the cut.
-We hear a number of readers attended the SFR Best of Santa Fe party a couple weeks back and asked about who we are, where we were and so on. Look, y’all, we appreciate how hard you love us, but ain’t no one ever gonna tell you. Even so, you could buy yourself a Best of Santa Fe shirt (designed by our illustrious art director Anson Stevens-Bollen) if you follow this link. That oughta soften the blow of never meeting us.
-Gruet Winery has announced its wine of the month for August, and its a 2018 Blanc de Blancs (that’s the blancest blanc of all the blancs around! Get more info (and maybe order you one or two bottles) here.
-Those who like to plan ahead might like to know the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market has unveiled its fall Ag Bags (that’s short for “Agriculture Bag,” and not, like we thought, “Agaean Bagels”) for this fall, and they look pretty alllllllright with bread and eggs and veggies and stuff. Learn more here because it’ll be fall before you know it.
-This is an Albuquerque thing, but we won’t hold that against ‘em: Seems the team at ABQ bar Happy Accidents was recently awarded best in the nation by the Spirited Awards—basically the Oscars of booze stuff. Rad!
Our favorite cover of a song about history.
More Tidbits
-Holy. Freaking. Shit. There’s a new type of avocado out there and we wanna eat it! Dubbed the “Luna” avocado, the new variety comes to the people of Earth courtesy of UC Riverside’s College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Did you know that the UCRCNAS, or Euchre-Can-Ass as the locals call it (jay kay, no one calls it that) is responsible for numerous avocado types that have flared into existence since its founding in 1950-something? Well it has! Anyway, the new Luna type reportedly requires much less water and room to grow. Neat!
-It has obviously been hotter than heck all over the place, which is why we enjoyed the recent piece on Delish-dot-com about how much water you’re supposed to consume when it’s heatwave time. We like to drink all kinds of water, which is a New Mexico-specific unit of measurement that lands someplace between “a little bit” and “all hard.”
-Eater-dot-com gets into the collegiate spirit this week with an ode to dining halls and off-campus eats for college-aged nerds. Now, we love eating a bowl of cornflakes with warm milk in our sweatpants as much as the next amorphous gas being, but we were skeptical. Turns out there’s a whole world of improving food conditions on campuses all over the freaking place.
-Campbell’s, being the makers of the worst/most bland fucking soups you’ve ever had in your life, only you suck it up because they’re still only about 79 cents (we don’t know if that’s true, we’re just saying the soup is cheap and tastes cheap), recently acquired food company Sovos Brands, which makes a sauce called Rao’s. Now, we don’t know this sauce, we’ve never had this sauce, we bet it’s a very nice sauce, but fans, at least according to the Associated Press, are freaking out a little bit about whether it’ll still be the same sauce they know and love. Learn more by clicking here.
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
This week in the print edition of SFR, we sent intern Noah Hale out into the world all over again, this time to sample Pyramid Café. He loved it.
Number of Letters Received
34
*That’s better!
Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)
“You’re pretty.”
*Not actually a tip, but we appreciate it, Sue K.!
Actually Helpful Tip(s)
It’s a good one, but we’re not ready to tell you just yet.
*We’ll let you know if it pans out!
Historically fictional,
The Fork
