An interview with Chef Russell Goodman of the Elkstone Farm in Steamboat Springs. As featured on Season 5 | Episode 66 of the Stoned Appetit podcast.

Excerpt About the Elkstone Farm…

The Elkstone Farm itself is on a 700-acre property in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We farm from only a couple acres and we pasture cows in the fields for part of it. Some of it is forest and there’s water that runs through it.

It’s a gorgeous property. It’s definitely a “picture says a thousand words” kind of thing. And I know you’ll have some media available that shows a little bit of the visual aspect of the environment. But first and foremost, we’re an organic permaculture farm that practices regenerative agriculture.

And so, we grow fruits and vegetables and we, in doing so, seek to return health to the land. We engage in a number of practices, from biochar to composting. This enables us to return nutrients to the soil. The Elkstone Farm is in an area of Steamboat known as Strawberry Park, so named because it was once the nation’s leading producer of strawberries.

And through the monocultural practices of growing the same thing over and over again, eventually the strawberries stopped producing. And so we’re sort of rejuvenating the agricultural identity of this piece of property and while we do grow strawberries, we grow a lot of other things too. We see the land getting healthier and healthier from year to year because of the way that we farm.

Excerpt About the dinner…

We write the menus within a few days of each dinner. And to do that I communicate with our head grower. We use spreadsheets to go back and forth and she tells me what’s available.

I order as if it was online ordering, except that I’m ordering from, you know, a few hundred feet away. And then I think about those products and I think about my audience; what they’re looking for and what they’re going to enjoy. And then we create a menu. So when it comes to the cannabis dinner, you know, I think about what’s going to pair well with the cannabis products being served.

To avoid any confusion, we don’t infuse the food, we just serve the food and people get to enjoy cannabis while consuming the food. And so each course was paired with a different cannabis modality and means of consumption.

There were joints served tableside, there were edibles, and Billo had this crazy gravity bong that was popular as can be. That was pretty crazy. Tableside Stundenglass! Shout out to the folks at Billo. There flower was on point. And represented too was Dialed In…, our friends over at Green Dot Labs, and Keef brands was serving up mocktails.

You know, it’s a lot of fun to put on an event like that. We used to do stuff like that in college in a very rustic and unrefined way. And there was still something special about it. And so to be able to cook for guests who are adults and who know what they like, who are able to come and enjoy this kind of experience is a unique opportunity as a chef.

I really feel a lot of positive energy around this kind of thing. And working with the folks at Billo is terrific. They’re real professionals, no doubt about that. And collaborating with them to develop a menu and offer Steamboat this event was seamless and a real pleasure.