At Blanchard's Table

Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

Pete and Barb have exactly one sport they care about -- and it's not football. Instead, they're obsessed with skiing, and they just got back from Vail, where they cooked, as they usually do, for hungry friends. "It was a beautiful blue sky-day with fresh snow -- the kind of weather that just begged for soup," says Barb, who made a coconut curried chicken soup. "It's delicious, it's easy, it has coconut -- what could be better? -- and it's spicy." If you want to ramp up the heat, just add more curry paste.

See also:
- Denver Yelp reviews: Pete Marczyk reads Marczyk Fine Foods' strangest on video
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: Super Bowl baked butter beans with bacon
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: Preserved plum and goat cheese pissaladière

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Mark Manger

TAG's "One Night in Bangkok" veggie burger. For more photos, see "Behind the scenes at TAG Burger Bar."

As an omnivore, I'm happy with pretty much anything you can shelter inside a bun. But as I wrote in this week's review of TAG Burger Bar, Troy Guard's vegetarian patty, a springy mash-up of soybeans, chickpeas and herbs, left me a few inches short of satisfied. So earlier this week for dinner, when I still couldn't get veggie burgers out of my head, I decided to put the craving to rest.

See also:
- Troy Guard's latest gives people what they want: fun on a bun
- Behind the Scenes at TAG Burger Bar
- They may not be French, but TAG Burger Bar's duck-fat fries are definitely decadent

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Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

Family recipes run in the Marczyk family, including this baked butter beans and bacon recipe, courtesy of Barb's sister-in-law. "It's beans, sour cream, brown sugar and bacon, and oddly enough, when I first saw the recipe, I thought yuck, what a mess," admits Barb. But then she ate it and changed her mind. "It's really, really good, and if you're having friends over for the Super Bowl, I encourage you to make a big vat of this to go along with the dips and chips, burgers and brats." She suggests making it one day in advance and allowing the flavors to meld in the refrigerator overnight.

See also:
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: Preserved plum and goat cheese pissaladière
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: Coq au vin

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Christopher Weir

Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

Christopher Weir, the grocery buyer at Marczyk Fine Foods, gets a glimpse of everything that comes through the door at the market (what a great job that must be!). "He doesn't miss anything, and he's always scheming some new crazy dish to go with all the different things he buys for Marczyk's," says Barb. And that includes a lot of unique specialty products, like Against the Grain Gourmet gluten-free, all-natural pizza crust, which is what Weir uses in this recipe -- a pissaladière that's a rift on the popular Provencal onion tart. And the result, he says, will satisfy just about everyone -- even those who swear by traditional dough.

See also:
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: Stifado
- Old Spice Contest at Marczyk rubs salt in old wound

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Mark Manger

Ace serves drinks and ping pong.

At Ace, Randy Layman knows how to serve drinks...and ping pong.Whether it's a night at the Nutcracker, a performance of Handel's Messiah, or old-time caroling with friends, we all have our favorite holiday traditions. For Randy Layman, bartender at Ace, which I review this week, Christmas Eve wouldn't be the same without the Italian cookies known as pizzelles. "Every year my grandma Patty makes pizzelle cookies for us to snack on while we wait for dinner to be ready," he shared. "My twin brother, Ryan, and I would eat our fair share and then some, stuffing ourselves before the real meal began. Thirty-two-yearsold and I still haven't learned my lesson -- Grandma Patty's pizzelles are the first thing I look for when I get to their house!"

See also:
- Ace scores with action, drinks and decor; food is a tie game
- Photos: Behind the scenes at Ace
- Behind the Bar with Randy Layman at Avenue Grill (and now Ace)

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Barb Macfarlane

Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

"People, people, people: When I tell you this is one of the most delicious stews I've ever made, you must believe me," implores Barb, who found the recipe for her soulful stifado, a Greek stew, made with onions and, traditionally, lamb, in Cold-Weather Cooking, originally published in 1990 by Sarah Leah Chase. "I was looking through the cookbook, and there were so many different stew choices, but when I saw this recipe, which calls for cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, brown sugar and balsamic, I knew that's the one I wanted to make," says Barb, noting that while the original recipe uses lamb, she cooks her stifado with beef. "It's deep, rich and wonderful, and it's our holiday gift to you and your houseful of guests."

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Lori Midson

Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

When it comes to prunes, there are two camps of thought: loathe and love. Barb considers herself a member of the latter, and while she admits that not everyone shares in her enthusiasm, she insists that this recipe -- brisket with prunes and merlot -- is a keeper. "A lot of people find that prunes are too sweet, but don't worry: this recipe isn't too sweet -- just incredibly rich and delicious," she says. The dish, which Barb tweaked from a Bon Appetit recipe, gets an extra boost, she notes, when served over buttered noodles -- and more merlot. The brisket is currently $7.99 a pound at Marczyk's, and for the merlot, she suggests a bottle of Domaine d'Astros Rouge, priced at $9.99.

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Lori Midson

It's incredibly difficult to do justice to the thousands of remarkable cookbooks published in 2012, but after spending days -- weeks -- roaming through the recipes and lush food porn of hundreds of them, I've picked out my favorites. These are the cookbooks that stock my selves at home, and the cookbooks that are on my holiday shopping list for my favorite foodniks. My syllabus of top picks represents just about every kind of cook, from the meat junkie to root vegetable fiends. I've split the list into three parts, the second and third of which will run later this week.

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Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market's choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast.

"In the days that followed Thanksgiving," admits Barb, "I knew dinner had to be ABT: anything but turkey." Even her son, she says, balked when Barb tried, unsuccessfully, to give him a turkey sandwich for lunch. "He cried that he'd had turkey every day -- and he was right."

She hauled out her cookbooks and cooking magazines, started leafing through recipes that had nothing whatsoever to do with giblets or legs, and came across an old issue of Martha Stewart Living. "I went all the way back to 2000 -- I know, kinda geeky -- but I found an awesome recipe for veggies and pasta," says Barb, noting that the recipe was bereft of fresh herbs, so she added some fresh thyme. "It would be really great with Marczyk's mild Italian sausage, too," she adds. She recommends drinking a mellow Italian red with the pasta, like La Famiglia Petite Sirah, which is made by the Guadagni family, the oldest wine producing family in Tuscany.

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Courtesy of Hyatt Regency Denver

The view from Peaks Lounge

When you gaze out those big picture windows of the Peaks Lounge, on the 27th floor of the Hyatt Regency Denver, you may not spot much snow on the mountains -- but inside the bar, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Particularly if you try one of the holiday drinks that the Peaks introduced this month.

See also:
- Five amazing fast-food holiday treats for 2012
- Guess where I'm drinking Barracuda Punch?
- Best view outside a restaurant: Peaks Lounge

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