Celebrate Earth Day!

Among the many things to embrace about Earth Day, here is a good one — it is international. What began in the United States in 1970 as a plea among worried people to treat the world with more care has blossomed into a movement in 192 countries, making it the largest secular holiday in the world. More than a billion people celebrate the planet’s special day.

That includes all of us here at Fresh Thymes Eatery World Headquarters, of course. In fact, we try hard to mark Eath Day every day, through how we run our restaurant.

It is not always simple. From Boulder to Buenos Aires to Bangkok, the restaurant business is notoriously wasteful. At most restaurants, an awful lot of what ends up on a plate is packaged up and shipped from far away. Scraps — so very many scraps — get tossed, destined for landfills. Recycling does not happen. The celery in the soup sprouted from a poison-drenched field, and the bacon in the burger came from a pig pumped with antibiotics and other drugs, and confined in appallingly tight quarters.

None of this is exactly earth-friendly.

How do we run a restaurant while toiling to honor Mother Earth?

There are the scraps — or the lack thereof. We use every part of every vegetable. What doesn’t become part of a salad, or a slaw, or a burger garnish gets used to make vegetable stock. Carrot ends become ingredients in pot pies. Bones? They are treasure! We break-down whole chickens, and reserve the backs for bone broth. You won’t find us tossing bones into trash cans. Anything that just can’t become part of a dish is turned into compost. Scraps at Fresh Thymes? Not so much.

We recycle everything that can be recycled, and only use napkins and take-out containers, among other things, that can be recycled. We even recycle our customer's drinking water, using 5 gallon buckets. When they are full, we water the plants around our Steelyards neighborhood. On average, we are recycling 8 gallons of water a day!

We look beyond our neighborhood, too. We think pesticide-driven agriculture is unfortunate, and in addition to broadcasting far too many poisons into soil and water, contributes to waste. So we strive for organic produce — most of what we sell is organic. And we shrink from the sprawl of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) across America, animal-raising businesses that harm animals by holding them in extremely close, and unsanitary, conditions, as well as using antibiotics and other drugs to sustain them through the inhumane conditions. We are picky about our meat. All of it comes from small farms in Colorado.

In addition, precious little that we cook and serve is shipped from beyond the state borders. Yes, our lemons and our olive oil, our caraway and black pepper and mangoes grow in places far from Colorado. But most of what you eat — the lamb, lettuce, chile pepper, peach and so on — comes from our breathtaking state.

We are always hunting for ways to lighten our footprint upon this glorious, miraculous planet. If you have ideas to help us along, please speak up! Your comments are gifts.

Happy Earth Day!

For the love of Honey

We fully embrace both health and taste at Fresh Thymes, and so we view honey as the ideal sweetener. It provides complex flavors rooted in different places and seasons, while simultaneously delivering a host of health benefits. The gift from precious bees is enormous — honey is anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal. Over time, it helps our bodies wrestle with seasonal allergies. It does not spoil, due in part to the scarcity of water in its make-up — the bees flap their wings to dry the nectar (thank you, bees!) — as well as its high level of acidity.

And humans have been eating it for a long time — stains found in 5,500-year-old jars in the Republic of Georgia are from honey.

Our affection for honey hinges on more than flavor and human health, though. As the world’s principal pollinators, honey bees give us our almonds and our onions, our grapes and peaches and raspberries, our cardamom, squash, cucumber, fennel, coffee, buckwheat, coconut and chili pepper. The list goes on and on. It is possible for humans to pollinate plants, but entirely impractical and exceedingly expensive. Without the bees, much of what we take for granted today for our meals would simply vanish.

And with colony collapse — that is, bee colonies dying en masse — occurring with disturbing frequency during the past decade, we need to work hard to make sure our bees are thriving. One solution, according to recent scientific reports, might rest with how we take care of our gardens and farms. A group of pesticides called neonicotinoids might be one factor contributing to colony collapse. Since the findings were published last year, more and more nurseries have committed to raising plants without neonicotinoids. Let's hope the trend continues through our vast agricultural system.

How much do we adore honey at Fresh Thymes? Six-gallons-a-week worth of passion, that’s how much. We use it in all of our desserts, and honey provides balance in many of our savory preparations, too. The only other sweetener we use, sparingly, is coconut sugar.

Andre on the farm

We have such a crush on bees that we are throwing a big party for the little guys, on Saturday, April 25. Come to Fresh Thymes all day for honey-happy events. Andre, a bee enthusiast from Jacob Springs Farm, will be on hand from 12-2pm to talk about home beekeeping, local bee-related projects and a global project with which he is involved. He will bring along an Open Source Beehive hive, and we will discuss Fresh Thymes' involvement with Open Source Beehive, an innovative Colorado nonprofit that helps spread beehives the way the bees themselves distribute pollen — with much hard work and success!

Tim from Highland Honey!

In addition, Tim from Highland Honey and Mead Master Mark from Medovina will swing by Fresh Thymes between 3 and 4 to sample honey and mead, which is honey wine (and which is spectacular).

Never been inside of a hive? Come to Fresh Thymes on April 25 and live the dream — between the home bee-keeping enthusiasts, the professionals and the lovers of all-things-honey, it’s going to be awfully buzzy!

Stay tuned for our full line-up of honey loving professionals!