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Whether it’s sliced fruit mixed with Greek yogurt, or your mother’s homemade green-chile cheese enchiladas, recipes for great dishes are meant to be shared.
UNM’s Lobo Growers Market held a recipe swap Wednesday, encouraging students and vendors to share their favorite recipes. The recipe swap was part of the six-week market series featuring fresh food and produce. Student market manager Kimberly Barnett said the event tries to help students eat healthier.
“I think that people see here that they have food that they have access to now, and they don’t quite know what to do with it,” Barnett said. “You might walk past an eggplant and ask ‘What am I going to do with an eggplant?’”
Barnett shared a recipe for apple crisp, a dish her mother used to make for her when she was younger.
Produce vender Casey Coty shared a poblano-pepper enchilada dish as an alternative to the traditional corn-tortilla dish. Coty said he roasts and peels the peppers before stuffing them with queso blanco and sour cream.
Coty works alongside farmer Loren Gomez at Feed the Hood Farms, a project that focuses on teaching families and volunteers from the Southeast Heights how to garden. Gomez said it’s important for the farming community to reach out to those who live in the city.
“It’s like a desert; there’s nowhere, almost a mile radius before they can get fresh food,” Gomez said.
While some of Gomez’s favorite dishes are “unhealthy” New Mexican dishes, he said one could easily find healthy alternatives, like Coty’s pepper-and-cheese enchilada.
“Start that process of going back and eating healthy food again.
It starts here when you’re young, it starts now,” he said. “By the time you’re my age, say 35 or 40, you start to feel that sluggishness where you’re eating McDonald’s and fast food.”
Food vendor Richard Moore shared his green-chile cheese moussaka, a New Mexican alternative to the baked Greek dish. Moore, who was selling fresh produce from his family’s farm, Moore Family Farms, said that cooking organically has helped him uncover why he loves certain foods.
“If you cook from scratch, you can find your own tastes a little bit more,” Moore said. “You can tweak recipes, and you end up learning, ‘oh, it’s because of this spice that I really like this dish.’ By understanding the raw ingredients more, I found it’s easier to like and work with food.”
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Kimberly Barnett’s mother’s apple crisp
4 cups of apples, peeled and sliced
½ cup of water
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
¾ cup of flour
½ cup of brown sugar
1 cup of oatmeal
1 stick of butter or margarine
Place apples and water in 8-inch buttered baking dish. Mix remaining ingredients in another bowl until clumpy, and pour over the apples. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-45 minutes until crust is brown and apples are tender. Serve hot with cream or ice cream.
