Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D.

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Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D.

Lois Ellen Frank is a Growing Native advisory committee member & the owner of Red Mesa Cuisine

Job Title: 
Growing Native advisory committee member
Tribal Affiliation: 
Kiowa/Sephardic
Link to other Blog: 
Lois Ellen Frank on NPR
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Recent posts: 

Tesuque Pueblo Farm Tour

Blog Series:

Author: 
Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D.

It's harvest time here in New Mexico and the abundance of traditionally grown foods are everywhere. I recently brought out a visiting scholar and artist Ron Bull from the Maori Tribe in New Zealand to visit the Tesuque Pueblo Farm. We were given a tour of the farm by Emigdio Ballon (Quechua) who is the head of the agricultural initiative at the farm. We watched local school children pick ripe apples, sampled blackberries and raspberries on their vines, saw the abundance of crops ready to be harvested from medicinal plants to traditional corn.

Growing Native: Corn Chicos, an ancestral food

Blog Series:

Author: 
Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D.

The corn is almost ready to harvest now and Northern New Mexican families are busy making the corn into chicos. Chicos are a traditional dried corn. They are made from field corn that is harvested, tied into ristras (strings), and hung to dry. Some Native American and Hispano families (that settled in this region hundreds of years ago) make chicos by roasting the corn in the horno adobe (earthen) oven overnight and then hang them to air-dry. After the corn is dried, the kernels are rubbed off by hand and then stored to be used throughout the winter.

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