The weather feels like summer this week even though it’s barely spring, so it’s not surprising that the local food event calendar is already filling in.
• More then 300 metro restaurants are participating in Dining Out For Life on April 26 including Aurora eateries such as Bent Fork American Grill, Bent Noodle Italian Restaurant, La Cueva, LuBo’s NY Pizza, Masalaa, and Sam’s No. 3. All you have to do is just go out to eat. Fully 25 percent of proceeds benefits Project Angel Heart which delivers free meals weekly to 800 men, women, and children in Colorado battling serious illness. Information: diningoutforlife.com/denver/restaurants.
• The fourth annual DrinkLocalWine conference April 28 at Metro State includes seminars on Colorado wine, lunch featuring a blind tasting between Colorado and California wines, and a Colorado Twitter Taste-Off. Tickets: drinklocalwine.com.
• The Slow Food Denver organization is hosting summer lunch tours at Front Range farms including Flying B Bar Ranch in Strasburg. Tickets: slowfooddenver.org
• If your summer travels take you to food-ified Boulder County, check out Yellow Scene Magazine’s recent Best of the West awards for some guidance. Suggestions include Louisville’s top-notch Spice China as the Best Spot to Get Sushi at a Chinese Restaurant, and Longmont’s Georgia Boys barbecue joint as the Best Take-Out. More at yellowscene.com.
• The cool and rustic Gold Hill Inn nestled in the foothills west of Boulder opens for its 50th dining season on May 4.
• Vista TV’s show “Grill vs. Grill” is seeking local contestants for a summer of head-to-head grill-offs. The reality TV show really wants “female grillers.” Is that really such an oddity any more, especially in Colorado? Information: vistatvdenver.com/grill-vs-grill-registration.
COLORADO FOOD NEWS
Homegrown Frontier Airlines is polling passengers about which Colorado-brewed beer will be featured onboard flights in June. The candidates are: Dale’s Pale Ale, Upslope Pale Ale, Colorado Native and Crabtree Oatmeal Stout. Voting ends May 15. My vote went to Upslope Pale Ale. Vote at facebook.com/frontierairlines. … Whole Foods Markets including those in Colorado stopped selling non-sustainable seafood on Earth Day, April 22. Among the species no longer available are gray sole, Alaskan halibut, octopus, tuna and swordfish. … I did a double-take when I saw packaged fresh Colorado mushrooms touting high vitamin D content. Apparently, mushroom growers now expose mushrooms to a few seconds of UV light, causing the fungi to produce about 100 percent of the daily recommended vitamin D intake. … Smashburger and five other Colorado restaurant chains are on FastCasual.com’s 2012 list of the nation’s “Movers and Shakers.” Smashburger is No. 1 with Chipotle coming in at No. 6. Other locals making the list are Qdoba Mexican Grill, Mad Greens, Noodles & Company and Garbanzo Mediterranean Grill.
READER MAIL
Last week’s trip down roast beef memory lane prompted a number of reader comments. One chided me for not waxing poetic about the overcooked vegetables that always accompanied the overcooked Sunday roast. Another confirmed my suspicion that the hard-boiled egg sauce my mom made was from my dad’s native Austria. It’s traditionally served with boiled beef or ham.
Send your comments to jlehndorff@aurorasentinel.com
FOOD TATTOO DEPT.
After gaping at an eye-catching collection of food-related tattoos at flickr.com/groups/foodtatts/pool, I actually thought about getting one for a few minutes. I decided that IF I ever got a tattoo, it would be of a steaming, lattice-crusted wild blueberry pie a la moded with vanilla bean gelato on my … arm. However, the steam and lattice crust sound like they would be too painful.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“There is no chiropractic treatment, no yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.” – M.F.K. Fisher, “The Art of Eating”
Listen to John Lehndorff’s Radio Nibbles at 8:25 a.m. Thursdays on KGNU, 88.5 FM, 1390 AM, and kgnu.org.