Shift to Natural and Organic Cafeteria Fare at All Vail Resorts

Mountain eateries use organic and natural ingredients for tasty meals.

Yesterday, five of us enjoyed a glorious day of snow and sunshine at Keystone, stopping for lunch at the self-service restaurant in The Outpost, the summit lodge atop North Peak. Like many ski area cafeterias, it is designed on as "scramble system" facility, meaning that specialized food stations are ranged around the room instead of one line, so that people can go straight for what they want to eat without sliding a tray along an entire stainless-steel track from soup to cashier.

Since the Pacific Rim station was closed (as it had been a week earlier), my second choice was the salad bar. Choice of ingredients. Choice of dressings. Easy. My husband got a chicken Caesar salad, curiously, from the pizza and pasta station rather than from the salad area. Cathy dug into the chili, which she had really enjoyed when she, I and another friend skied at Keystone last week. Glenn had an individual pizza with its crust jauntily turned up at the rim. Shelley ordered a Coleman Ranch burger on a Kaiser roll. The fries must have been good too, because while she says that she "never" eats fries, she are all of those. In fact, all five of us joined the clean-plate club yesterday.

Going way back to its early days as an independently owned ski resort, and continuing through its time as a Ralston-Purina subsidiary and as part of mammoth Vail Resorts Inc., Keystone has been ahead of the food curve. Even just about every ski area in the country, large or small, was putting out commercially canned soups, institutional burgers on cold buns, greasy fries, white-bread sandwiches in cellophane wraps and other uninspired cafeteria foods, Keystone hired chefs to develop recipes and made a real effort present better lunch choices.

Keystone and its four sister resorts are well into the Appetite for Life program, announced at the beginning of the 2007-08 ski season. Vail Resorts, Inc., has shifted natural, hormone-free meats and poultry. This means they are buying such brands as Coleman Natural Foods meats and Horizon certified organic dairy products for all 40 on-mountain restaurants all five mountain resorts (Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Vail, all here in Colorado, and Heavenly, CA) this season. The choice of Coleman and Horizon is also part of the company's Good Food Partnership with Colorado-based purveyors. This has become the largest program to serve natural meats and organic dairy products in the travel industry.

The first step at the very beginning of the ski season was to introduce Coleman hormone-free natural beef patties, chicken breasts, breaded chicken breasts, chicken nuggets, beef franks, bacon, roast beef, oven-roasted turkey breast and Black Forest ham and Horizon organic chocolate milk, 2 percent milk, strawberry milk and mixed berry yogurt. Next came hormone-free natural ground beef, chicken wings, honey maple ham, smoked turkey breast, pork stew and natural beef brisket to its on-mountain restaurant options, as well as resort-specific offerings such as St. Louis-style beef brisket. Organic butter, cottage cheese, several flavors of creamers, plain and flavored yogurts, more types of milk, sour cream, soy plain and vanilla milk, heavy whipping cream, half and half and whipped cream. By the busy Christmas-New Year holidays, Keystone and the rest were making on-mountain meals with such organic cheeses as cheddar jack, Monterey jack, mozzarella, blended pizza cheese, sharp cheddar and pepper jack.

I usually write about food in general and food I've cooked or eaten on my Culinary Colorado blog, but since everybody who skis -- whether day-trippers as we were or vacationers -- needs to stop for lunch, this seems like an appropriate site for the topic of on-mountain fare.