ARVADA, Colo. — Walking through her home garden, Chef Andrea Condes points out the plants she most enjoys cooking with – fruits and vegetables indigenous to the Americas.
“This is abuela, our grandmother cactus,” she said, showing off the prickly pear cactus she’s nurturing in her front yard. The fruit, known as tuna, is not only edible and delicious, but also connected to a rich food culture.
Chef Condes grows and cooks with indigenous ingredients to understand her heritage and share it with others.
Her ancestors are from the Andean Mountain range in South America. But she was adopted as a baby from a Venezuelan orphanage and grew up in the midwestern United States.
“I just didn't see a lot of South American representation,” Condes said. As a professionally trained chef, she set out to learn and share as much as she could about the ingredients and techniques of her Indigenous roots.
“I've discovered so much about myself,” Condes said. “It was very much a personal journey that I was on, and it turned into a business plan.”
From her home in Arvada, Condes runs Four Directions Cuisine, a small business she uses to share food and education.
Four Directions is named after the Chakana cross, an Andean symbol tracing back to pre-Inca societies.
“It represents many things. Literal directions, north, south, east, west,” Condes said. “But it also symbolizes morals.”
Condes said “as native, Indigenous folks, we have a relationship with the natural world. It's a full circle relationship and all encompassing.”
The belief is that if we take care of the land, the land will take care of us, providing food and medicine.
That’s why Condes grows many of the ingredients she cooks with in her own garden, or sources food locally and indigenously.
She hopes introducing others to Native foods will encourage respect for the land and spark deeper understandings of what it means to eat indigenously.
Many of the foods we enjoy — like beans, squash, potatoes and tomatoes — are indigenous to the Americas. And for Condes, it was corn that kicked off her fascination with Indigenous cuisine.
"It's one of the most important crops,” she said. For many tribes, creation stories center around “Corn Mother” who generously sacrificed herself to nourish others.
She uses blue and yellow corn meal produced by the Ute Mountain Ute tribe to bake cookies that are tender, cakey and complex in flavor. Condes will start taking orders on her website in December for packs of her blue corn, pumpkin spice and cacao cookies.
“I enjoy working with food and creating things and nourishing people in a multitude of ways, heart, body, spirit, all of it,” she said.
That’s why Four Directions is offering many ways for the community to enjoy her cooking, with a side of education and healing.
Condes and her partner Alejandra Tobar Alatriz are also launching a weekend retreat in Pueblo known as Ancestral Harmony. From an historic home, they’ll provide meals and meditation. The goal is “exploring both ancient traditions and modern approaches to wellness.”
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And for Condes, there's a lot left to learn by “taking our lessons from the plants themselves.”
In her garden, diverse plants grow alongside each other through companion planting. Marigold flowers keep bugs away from juicy tomatoes. Chiles, basil and sage deter animals from eating the strawberries. She also grows some "sacrificial plants" intended for wildlife to eat.
Condes hopes her approach to growing and sharing Indigenous food will inspire others.
“Everyone has an Indigenous culture from their homelands. It's just a matter of learning what it is, and engaging with it and learning about it, and seeing the connections that we all have, that we all share. And one of those biggest necessities in connection is food,” she said.
