Good morning! While you'll still find the menu if you scroll down below, we're doing something different this week with the newsletter. We've been working on a side project to raise awareness of local food businesses, and it's now available on the Lafayette Farmers Market website (and will soon be on the City Park Farmers Market website). Read on below to learn more.

But before that, a note on breads this week: looking at the forecast, we may be getting some precipitation this weekend. We're bringing back a couple of "cozy breads" if you want to lean into the cold weather: Cinnamon Pecan and Sage Einkorn. (Sage Einkorn makes a great grilled cheese sandwich or soup companion, and you can never go wrong with the aromas of cinnamon and pecan from the toaster.)

Have a great week!

- Ashley & Paul

When we started Daily Grains in 2022, we mostly thought about flour and fermentation. We milled our grain, baked our bread, and started figuring out who was growing what along Colorado's Front Range. But somewhere between sourcing ancient and heritage wheat and learning the names behind the farms, we started mapping something bigger than our own supply chain.

We're loosely calling the idea FindSlowFood. It's not a product or a brand, just shorthand for an idea we keep coming back to: What if the local food system had better connective tissue?

The farmers, ranchers, bakers, and makers we've gotten to know, first through our Colorado Grain Chain work, then at the Lafayette Farmers Market, are doing remarkable things. A fourth-generation organic farm out in Kersey. A refugee family growing Afghan vegetables in Denver. A mother-daughter flower farm in Arvada. A worker-owned pizza cooperative. But most of this work is invisible beyond the market booths. These stories live in person, passed along through conversations in and around the market tents.

We think they deserve a place to live between market seasons.

The Grain Exchange platform started a few years ago as part of our partnership with the Colorado Grain Chain, a tool to map and connect the people rebuilding Colorado's regional grain economy. Over time, we kept adding to it: vendor profiles, business directories, interactive maps, news aggregation. It became something more flexible than we'd originally planned.

Last year, we joined the Lafayette Farmers Market and got to know Peter and Margo Wanberg, who run the market. A few weeks ago, we started building out vendor profile pages for the Lafayette Farmers Market on the platform (https://vendors.lafayettefm.com), a place where each vendor can have a proper online presence with their story, location, products, and social links. It also includes interactive market maps, category browsing, a vendor search, and a way for vendors to request updates to their own listings.

From there, Peter and Margo asked if we could do the same for their other market, City Park Farmers Market in Denver. City Park is one of the city's signature markets with over 100 vendors. We built it as its own site while matching their main website's identity. A vendor who sells at both markets shows up on both sites, and their information stays consistent.

It's not a formal project. It's more like an ongoing experiment in whether this kind of infrastructure is useful, whether a shared, structured, searchable home for local food producers is something worth building and maintaining.

We believe the local food system deserves better tools. Not another social media account that disappears in an algorithm, but a real, searchable directory of the people who grow, raise, bake, ferment, roast, and roll the food our communities eat.

Farmers markets are the rare places where you can engage with the people who grew or made your food. The FindSlowFood idea is our attempt to extend that connection beyond the market grounds, to help someone discover a new vendor before they visit, to help a small farm without a website still have an online presence, and to give market organizers like Peter and Margo a tool that makes their work a little easier.

We're still baking bread, still milling grain, and still showing up on Sundays. But we're also quietly building something we think matters, even if we're still figuring out exactly what it becomes.

Good food takes time. So do good ideas.

Bread
Cinnamon Pecan Sourdough Bread
Einkorn Sourdough Bread
Kamut Sesame Sourdough Bread
Sage Einkorn Sourdough Bread
Spelt Sourdough Bread

Cookies
Brown Butter Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie
Brownie Cookie
Oatmeal Raisin Cookie
Spiced Molasses Cookie

Specialty Flours
Einkorn Wheat Flour
Kamut® Wheat Flour
Ryman Rye Flour
Spelt Wheat Flour
Turkey Red Wheat Flour

Rolls & Muffins
Spelt English Muffins
Thaw-and-Bake Hot Rolls

Mixes
Cinnamon & Oat Pancake Mix
Einkorn Pancake Mix

Granola
Sourdough Granola