Avalanche Cheese and Peak Spirits won the 2012 Good Food Awards in the Cheese and Spirits categories, respectively.  The award ceremony was held in San Francisco on Jan 13.

The Good Food Awards celebrate the kind of food we all want to eat: tasty, authentic and responsibly produced. The Good Food Awards people grant awards to outstanding American food producers and the farmers who provide their ingredients. They host an annual Awards Ceremony and Marketplace at the iconic Ferry Building in San Francisco to honor the Good Food Award recipients who push their industries towards craftsmanship and sustainability while enhancing our agricultural landscape and building strong communities.

Congratulations to Avalache's Wendy Mitchell and Peak Spirits' Lance Hanson!

Found a nice surprise in our mailbox the other day - it was a thank you note from Paonia Junior High regarding the Escoffier-Boulder culinary students' demo of making fresh salsa.  This Farm to School activity featured ingredients from Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss.

Take a look at the note and watch the video of the demo (it's a little lengthy - over 8 minutes).

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Wink Davis and Max Eisele of Mesa Winds Farm needed help to clear out  apple and peach tree trimmings in their orchard.  So, the call was put out requesting volunteers to help them out with the offering of 10 pounds of gala apples in September.

Ken, Lisa, Elaine, Julia and yours truly pitched in.  I would call us a mini-mob. We had to pull out the tree tops from the rows so that Wink could pick up them up and then rake up the smaller trimmings.

We put in a good 3 hours work, and Max and Wink were extremely grateful.  Afterwards, we enjoyed beer, wine and chili made from local ingredients - excellent reward for the work we put in.  We each got a card to remind us to pick up some apples in September.