This past weekend I flew to Denver to spend the weekend with my wife's family and enjoy the rockies. Lets just say that the mountains weren't the only thing rocky in Colorado. Saturday morning my wife, daughter and I found ourselves in need of a getaway so we took off to find out what Denver had to offer on a saturday morning.
We drove down to the Cherry Creek shopping center to walk around and maybe find a cup of coffee and were pleasantly surprised to find the Denver farmers market set up outside the mall. We walked through the market and I was overwhelmed with the variety of stands that were set up. Every type of fresh locally grown produce you could possible imagine. Plus different stands selling locally raised lamb, beef, bison and chicken. I was pleasantly surprised to find fresh made Empanada's and my wife and I tried several, peach filled, papaya and goat cheese and my personal favorite nutella and banana. We washed those down with a large glass of Horchata and moved on to the sausage vendor. He had every type of sausage I could ever want so I picked up some Polish sausage and an Italian sausage to bring to a barbecue later that afternoon. We also picked up three beautiful Ribeye steaks for the grill as well. One of the vendors was selling different tapenades and cheese spreads so we sampled several and talked with him for a few minutes and he sold us on the asiago and black truffle spread. My wife noted immediately that we would not be taking that to the barbecue and would be saving that for us.
After exploring the farmers market we decided to go find a burger joint we had read about in the latest issue of Bon Appetit. They had recommended several different burger joints and being that we were in Denver we figured we would give it a try.
Park Burger is located on a corner in a nice little neighbor hood next to a children's toy store. It seemed very quaint for a burger joint mentioned in Bon Appetit. We went in and promptly ordered a vanilla malt, that my daughter loved, and two burgers with a basket of sweet potato fries. I had the Croque burger which was a 1/3 pound burger patty topped with thin sliced ham, swiss cheese and a fried egg served with the always appropriate lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle
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My wife ordered the Frenchy which was a 1/3 pound burger with thin sliced ham and brie cheese, again served with the lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle.
We were both impressed with our burgers as was our 1 year old daughter who thought the malt and sweet potato fries were fabulous. On a morning when we were both in need of a get away from all that was going on we found a bit of sanctuary in a burger and a farmers market. It was just the recharge we needed to get us through the last few days of our trip.
