Green Drinks at Mauka in Santa Fe

Green Drinks is a monthly cocktail/networking for green minded people and businesses. Here's the 411 on their event tomorrow, September 24th.

Green Drinks, Santa Fe Alliance and Mauka invite you to a special dinner gathering to highlight the Farm to Restaurant Project, which encourages farmers, food producers and chefs to work directly with each other to build partnerships resulting in a stronger and healthier local economy.

Wednesday, September 24th, at 6:30 pm, Chef Joel Coleman will regale us with a selection of farm fresh menu items with a special Green Drinks price. He garners his meats from Shepherd’s Lamb, Pollo Real Chicken and Pecos Valley Beef; his veggies from Gemini Farms, Jacona Farms, and Romero Farms; and those delicious mushrooms from Desert Fungi. As a matter of fact, he works with so many food producers in the area that it’s too numerous to mention all of them here. Mauka’s general menu offers both starters and entrees that showcase a variety of local products from growers you probably have met at the Farmers Market.

Joel makes sustainability and community a priority for the restaurant by recycling, offering recycled to-go boxes and using a restaurant-wide purified water system from Santa Fe by Design rather than offering bottled water. He will graciously close the restaurant to the public for this special Green Drinks community event, so please do us the honor by responding to this e-mail if you are planning to attend.

Come out and support your local community by attending this Green Drinks harvest bounty at Mauka!

WHAT: Green Drinks, www.greendrinks.org
WHEN: Wednesday, September 24th, 6:30 pm
WHERE: Mauka, 544 B Agua Fria, www.maukarestaurant.com
COST: Special Green Drinks dinner menu prices
RSVP: bookchambers@earthlink.net

The Taos Mountain Film Festival! October 9-12

Great things this week in the world of New Mexico Film Festivals - Here some news from the folks at the Taos Mountain Film Festival. Awesome event. (For a calendar of New Mexico Film Festivals, click here.)

The 8th Annual Taos Mountain Film Festival, the festival for mountaineers, mountain lovers and mountain characters, will feature films, guests and slideshows from the Tibetan Plateau, the planet’s most spectacular terrain known as the Roof of the World. This region has been shrouded in mystery and myth for millennia. For centuries it was closed to foreigners and the recent opening has, of course, been tainted by oppression and violence.

The festival will show a wide array of documentaries covering the history, culture and topography of the high plateau, which extends beyond Tibet itself into still comparatively unvisited lands such as Ladakh, Mustang and Western China. Selected films include the 1964 BBC classic Raid into Tibet, which follows a force of Tibetan resistance fighters making an incursion across the border to battle the occupying Chinese forces; The Fate of the Lhapas documents the attempts of the Tibetan shamans to preserve their old ways in exile; other films feature the teachings of the Dalai Lama, and a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain of Kailash.

This year’s guest artists include:

DAVE HAHN
Ten times to 29,035, the highest point in the planet, is an accomplishment for any climber. Not content with this achievement Dave Hahn challenged himself to hold his nerve on one of the steepest continuous walls in the world, the Pacific Ocean Wall on El Capitan. Dave will show some fabulous photos of his harrowing ascent.

JON BOWERMASTER
An accomplished sea kayaker, Jon Bowermaster, makes wonderful films of his adventures for National Geographic. He will present two films from his acclaimed Oceans 8 series, Antarctica and descending the Dragon.

SIR CHRIS BONINGTON
One of the best-known mountaineers in the world, Sir Chris Bonington, has agreed to join the Taos Mountain Film Festival Board. His ascents of the South West Face of Everest, The Ogre and many other notable climbs in the world’s great ranges has made him a household name. He will bring enormous status to the festival.

The Taos Mountain Film Festival runs from October 9th through 12th. The festival program is available on line at www.mountainfilm.net. Passes and information are available online . For more information on the festival, contact Jonathan Slator at js@mountainfilm.net.

Here's the Video Trailer!