The charms of the Western desert are so overwhelming that even a girl like me can forget to eat.
At least, that’s what I was telling myself early in the pandemic as I camped here and there in my car and occasionally — in nearly a full hazmat suit — at national-park sites and house rentals that provided deep cleaning and safety. In that murky time, I was desperate to be in nature, to find some reprieve from the world at large. My clothes needed a good laundering, and I was out of the cheap road snacks and expensive hiking nuggets that were supposed to keep me full (they never did).
Recipe: BiscochitosI needed a home-cooked meal and some comfort. But with nothing open, I found myself finding joy where I could. I was thrilled to find a simple-looking cookie — a very good one that — at a gas station somewhere in New Mexico. On its handmade packaging, it told me that it was the state cookie, a “biscochito.” For a woman who loves a gas station and cottage-industry products made by locals, this was the jackpot and, I decided, as close as I was going to get in my search for something made by an actual person’s hand, pandemic be damned.
Just a year earlier, like so many good, middle-aged women on the verge of going through “a thing” — in my case, publishing my first book — I took my first long sojourn out West. It was a freer time.
I bounced from canyon to canyon, letting myself be invisible for as long as life would allow it but eating well all along the way. I drove north from Santa Fe, N.M. Then, after a detour to Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio (and her remarkable home), I beelined my way to Tiwa Kitchen, in Taos. There, where the Sandoval family, led by Ben White Buffalo and Debbie Moonlight Flowers, has been pulling some of the most thoughtful Pueblo and family recipes from a hand-built clay oven for the past 30 years, I feasted on fresh trout, a blue-corn-and-squash succotash and bison raised on the pasture.
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