If you’re looking for more places to get ready-to-eat food and you’re willing to leave your house before noon on a Saturday, the Durango Farmers Market has returned.
Obviously, it’s more well known as the place where you go to get local meat and produce, but there are also several vendors who sell baked goods, beverages, and meal-sized conglomerations of cooked food.
We forced ourselves out of bed and dropped by the market on its opening day, May 9, to see what was available. For obvious reasons, the market looks a bit different this year. The community-gathering-place element has been stripped away, including the live music and entertainment (but also the massive throng of onlookers, hungry introverts). The booths are spaced further apart, and everyone is wearing a mask.
Dropping by about halfway through the market — it’s open from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturdays — we counted five places that were selling cooked food that you can shove in your face as soon as you leave the market (everything is to-go for the time being):
• Serious Delights Bakery
• Thomas KettleCorn
• Durango Coffee Co.
• The Living Tree (breakfast bowls, sausage muffins, kombucha, hemp coffee, and bone broth)
• Zia Tortilla Factory (tamales, tortillas, chips, and the like)
According to Melanie McKinney-Gonzales, the market manager at DFM, there will be significantly more food vendors in the weeks to come, including Fired Up Pizza, Mariana’s Authentic Cuisine, Bread, Thimbleberry Smoothie, Durango Artisan Foods (with breakfast burritos), LuvBox (tempeh and bento boxes), Honeyville, and several new places — Ritual Bread, BaBs (run by the former executive chef of Mahogany Grille), and Wright Natural Bakery.
In the meantime, we picked up a breakfast bowl and a kombucha from The Living Tree and a cinnamon roll and a ham and cheese croissant from Serious Delights.
[image:2]The Living Tree was out of potatoes for the bowl, but they compensated for it with sausage, so they were forgiven. The bowl otherwise consisted of roasted root vegetables, white beans with green chile, scrambled eggs, fermented salsa, and sour cream. It had begun to cool by the time we could take it home, but it was still good, particularly the salsa, which we assume is the same one they make for the taco salad they serve at the restaurant.
The standout from that particular booth, though, was the kombucha. The flavor they had that week tasted of strawberries and vanilla, and we made it just beyond the edge of the market before we broke it open and drank the whole thing.
We saved the baked goods for later in the day, and the more memorable of the two ended up being the cinnamon roll. It was more densely packed and less wide than a lot of the others you’ll find around town, but it was still packed with the eponymous spice and had a pleasant cream cheese icing that wasn’t just sugar.
The croissant was also a bit different from what you see at other bakeries in that the ham and cheese were not cooked into the middle of it. Rather, it was cut lengthwise, sandwich-style, and they were inserted that way. We think this might have made the croissant, like the roll, a bit denser than average. Whatever the case, it was also pretty decent.
There are a lot of other things we’d prefer to be doing on a Saturday morning (e.g. sleeping, watching cartoons), but if and when the farmers market rolls out the breakfast burritos, we’ll probably be back.
Nick GonzalesEditor’s note: DGO Staff Writer Nick Gonzales and DFM Market Manager Melanie McKinney-Gonzales are related.
