By: HeidiTown.com
Part One: Chile Festival
I believe chiles make the world go round. So Pueblo Chile & Frijole Festival has been on my list for almost as long as the festival has been running. This year, their 25th anniversary, I finally made to the fest, and believe it or not, it was my first time in Pueblo.
I am going to write about our amazing farm tour with Frontier Pathways Scenic Byways in the future. It’s not timely as harvest season is drawing to a close, so I will wait until leaf-peeping is over, the snow is gone and we’re all longing for green growing things again. However, know that Frontier Pathways does a number of Heritage Tours throughout the year including Cowboys to Castles, a Pueblo Legacy Tour and more.
Pueblo is along the Arkansas River, a river that once was the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Today, Pueblo is the Gateway to the Southwest and rightly so. It has a distinctly southwestern flair, although I would say it has a vibe all its own.
Part Two: Eating Around
I want to tell you about the places we ate in Pueblo, although we definitely want to go back with eating as a priority. You see, this is an diverse town when it comes to food. There was a lot of Italian immigration here in the 1800s and these Italians brought with them great food culture. In fact, most of the farms we visited during our farm tour were owned by Italian families.
In Pueblo, the Italian mixed with local Hispanic influences and you get a Croatian twist. Yes, all three ethnicities are here, and over time, this has made the cuisine of Pueblo particularly unique.
We could see this food eccentricity at the chile festival. For instance, one Mexican food vendor was serving a sausage in a tortilla. This is something I had never seen before and although I could be wrong, it seemed to be a Pueblo-thing.
