Alchemy in the Kitchen, Fire on the Land
Durango, Colorado · By Rachel Turiel Hinds
In Durango, Colorado, a small revolution is taking place. It simmers quietly in the backyards of people who harvest dandelions, amaranth, and other wild weeds for
dinner salads. It gathers steam in a historic district alley where up to one hundred people each month eat wild, locally harvested, raw-food lunches. And it extends to the nearby woods, where people pick and use the wild berries of summer – choke-cherries, serviceberries, hawthorn. This revolution is on fire.
Katrina Blair, Durango native and the founder and visionary of Turtle Lake Refuge, is the living root of this revolution. Since 1998, Turtle Lake Refuge has been teaching people the benefits of eating wild-harvested, locally grown, and “living” (uncooked) foods, all of which, Refuge workers believe, decrease stress on our bodies and the Earth.
Katrina’s work, life, and passions are so intertwined that it is impossible to tell where work ends and the rest of life starts. A fall workday includes climbing an apple tree and picking bushels of apples for Turtle Lake benefit lunches, served twice a week. In spring, tender dandelion leaves are plucked from mountain meadows and backyard weed patches for pesto, salad, or “Wild Mint Magic” bars. Katrina loves to harvest food. Just the sight of her freezer’s contents – gallon jars full of chokecherries, fresh-pressed apple juice, serviceberries, and a small, coveted bag of buffaloberries, all harvested locally – make her swoon.
The mission of Turtle Lake Refuge is to celebrate the connection between personal health and wild lands. The nonprofit aims to create a more sustainable community by linking the value of a healthy internal environment – our bodies, with a healthy external environment – the Earth. All the profits from its varied fundraising activities go toward promoting sustainable living practices and preserving open space.
Why local, wild, and raw? “Locally grown foods minimize the resources required for transporting our food from faraway,” Katrina explains. “This can mean buying from local farmers, picking a neighbor’s unwanted apples, or growing food in our own backyards. Wild foods connect us to the land we inhabit and provide one of the highest mineral sources available. At our lunches we include something wild every day: a wild weed salad, hawthorn berry pie, or yucca fruit salsa, for example.”
Her mother, Pat Blair, who was diagnosed with arthritis at age seventeen, introduced Katrina to raw food. The family would eat entirely raw one day each week to take the strain off their digestive systems and promote general health. Doctors said Pat would be in a wheelchair by forty. Instead she is free of arthritis. Today many people come to the Refuge because of chronic health issues, including poor digestion and fatigue.
Like the swankest big-city restaurants, Turtle Lake Refuge has no menu, simply one special of the day. The lunch clientele is as eclectic as the food. Young, pierced, patched, and dreadlocked twenty-somethings break flax-seed crackers with businesswomen and grandfathers. Topics among the patrons range from college classes to menopause.
This Friday, Sissy Mueller serves up veggie burgers, sweet potato fries, onion rings, green salad, and a slice of apple pie for dessert. It’s all raw, and thoroughly delicious. “It’s the All-American meal ‘cept good for you,” Sissy laughs as she sets meals on a table. She and the other chefs are generous with their recipes. There is no secret sauce, though exact proportions are vague and directions often dictate “a pinch of this” or “a bunch of that.”
Lunch is determined by what’s in season. When wild watercress shoots up in spring, it becomes the cornerstone of the daily green salad. In fall, expect local apples, plum, grapes, and pears. At the peak of summer’s richness, anything is possible. Turtle Lake Refuge draws from many local gardens in the summer, and from wild land as well. In the colder seasons salads come almost exclusively from local greenhouses. The five employees and three interns (who receive college credit) spend much of the summer harvesting wild foods and preserving them for the winter. Berries are frozen, juiced, or dried into fruit leather – foods frozen or dehydrated at less than 120 degrees retain their living enzymes. Large quantities of dandelion, amaranth, and mallow – a bane of gardeners, but highly nutritious – are dried, powdered, and added to the popular “Wild Mint Magic” bars.
The latest in this evolving vision of many creative minds is the Dandelion Brigade, a pool of laborers who visit homes and dig up dandelions, roots and all, for less than it costs to spray a lawn with pesticides. Not only will the lawn be free of chemicals and immediately safe for children, dogs, and bare feet, but the Dandelion Brigade will teach you how to use dandelions for food and medicine. They will bring a bicycle-powered juicer to make fresh dandelion juice as they pick; for an extra charge they will make dandelion wine or beer from the flower heads and bring the homeowner the finished product.
Katrina’s skin is sun-kissed and her body shaped by the work that is simply her life. Strong, ropy hands chop apples. Sinewy legs that have climbed many mountains dart from kitchen to pantry gathering up supplies for chokecherry macaroons. For the past
four years Katrina has been teaching a four-week class called “Chi Foods.” Students learn to sprout seeds at home and create delicious, gourmet meals out of living foods. In summer, Katrina puts a twist on it and offers “Chi Foods – on the Wild Side,” in which people learn to identify and prepare edible wild plants in the field. Does she fear that exposing so many people to wild foods will result in their depletion? “No,” she says, explaining that 90 percent of the plants she uses are wild weeds that are in no danger of being over-harvested.
“What happens in agriculture today is a farmer plants one crop after spraying the land with herbicide to remove all competing plants,” Katrina says. “Not only does this deplete nutrients and life from the soil, but it decreases food for wild animals and pollinators. When we plant our backyard gardens and farms organically, we can harvest the weeds that grow without additional water, fertilizer, or care, as well as our cultivated crops. Plus, wild foods have the highest nutrients so you don’t need to eat as much. I think the more we teach people about wild foods the more we can sustain them and achieve a higher quality for life for everyone.”
After getting a batch of chokecherry macaroons in the dehydrator, Katrina discovers that someone soaked a gallon of oat groats thinking they were wheat berries, which need to be sprouted for wheatgrass. “Oat groats don’t sprout, so I guess we won’t have wheatgrass for tomorrow – but we could make cookies out of these,” Katrina suggests. Another employee offers, “How about carob hawthorn berry cookies?” “Yeah, with fresh mint,” someone else suggests. And a new recipe is born.
This is how life works at Turtle Lake Refuge: when the floor drain overflows with water, it’s a reminder to mop the floor; when a basket of cookies is jostled at the farmers market and each one breaks, you have samples to share. When your life, work, and passions are all the same, and you have a burning desire to share them all, people pay attention. Word spreads, enthusiasm swells, and a small revolution grows.
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