Taste and Imagine with eaters from Denver, Boulder and greater Colorado. Our food philosophy is to eat fresh food, as local as possible, prepared in a simple way designed to give pleasure.
When we say ‘simple’ we mean the slow food concept of good, clean and fair taken to perfection: prepare food to the benefit of all ingredients, including what you’ll drink with the finished product. And this process will naturally lead to the most benefit of the eaters. Foods that satisfy deeply will satisfy without overdoing. Eaters feel satisfied and nourished and don’t need another piece. Meeting this ‘simple’ aim is by no means easy and requires a lot of tasting and imagining, as well as thinking and care.
‘Fresh’ is a requirement that also pushes good and clean. We design recipes that use core foods. Avoid all things packaged, processed and plasticized. We’ve been looking into grinding our own wheat, for example, but the type of wheat for baking isn’t grown in Colorado. So we have to make the next best choice.
Yes, there are occasions when we really want the terrific Castelvetrano Italian olives, so we frequent the neighborhood deli. Quality is important and we use an awesome goat cheese from Ft. Collins, Colorado, potatoes from the San Luis Valley or beef from our friends’ ranch in Wyoming when we can, but sometimes something international is much better. When something travels far, we treat it as something precious and don’t assume we should have it everyday. We expect to pay for this importation, and we are perplexed by the low cost of foods shipped from multiple time-zones away. It should be that food grown near me should be the cheapest and most available to me. It doesn’t make sense that transporting food, particularly perishable stuffs, should be cheaper. If it is just quantity — more squash in Mexico than grown here – it seems a waste of world food resources. If someone is growing too much of something, we need to set our globalists to the project of better planning for agriculture worldwide. This would be simple supply and demand views of quantity, but there is also the concept of economies of scale, which means that it is cheaper to do something if you do a lot of it. This however doesn’t account for a food processor that does something to the food – it makes no sense that this kind of food should be cheaper than the raw material. Fresh tomatoes should be cheaper than canned. Starting with this simple logic I think we need to think further about why: quality is less, much lower; something cheaper has been added; laws overlay this food capitalism that unfairly make it cheaper to process foods. I’m sure there are more possible explanations but it isn’t good for us, eaters.
‘Pleasure’ is what results if the fresh food is critically selected for quality and the simple plan works. Find some of our best results in the Recipes section.
And when we go out. We look for what chefs do best, making notes for ourselves so we can remember what seems to fit our vision of what food should be, and what we should order next time. These restaurant notes are not the main focus of TasteImagine, and are removed when they become old, but can be find under menus (comparisions) when we have some. If you bump into these in your search they might help you more than a yelp review.
This collection of recipes, holiday or festival menus, and food routines are practiced, written and photographed primarily by the site’s founders Steuart Bremner and Terry Talty. Family and friends contribute the balance.