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Saturday, July 26, 2008
Ice's Tea Room Delights
By Polly Summar
Journal Staff Writer
When the bustle and stress of traffic, work and too much fast food get you down, there's an answer nearby: Ice's Tea Room.
Eight miles north of Española, tucked in next to Los Luceros Winery, sits a small organic farm and lunchtime refuge owned by Gayle and Ron Ice. Once a pear orchard, the land now yields enough produce for the Ices to sell at the Los Alamos and Santa Fe Farmers Markets and to supply lunch for a small tea room that Gayle operates Tuesday through Thursday with her friend and former coworker, Loyola Trujillo.
"We are both retired from the Pojoaque Schools," said Gayle. "I was the librarian and she was my aide."
"I'm still her aide," said Loyola. But the two, both grandmothers, say they have no plans for retiring from the tea room. "This is still a working farm," said Gayle. "Yesterday, we made mint jelly."
The two have their jelly-making system down pat — Gayle does the preparation work, Loyola does the stirring and the pouring.
On Wednesday, the two women, clad in the standard catering attire of black pants and white shirts, were hosting the day's visitors in the adjacent tea room, a glassed-in portal that used to be the Ices' back porch. The room seats 12 to 14, at tables from two to six, with views of hummingbirds feeding just outside and barrels of petunias and mint.
"I thought we moved here to retire," said Ron, a retired archeologist with the National Park Service.
And so it seemed, initially. The first year, the Ices merely planted a garden. "But we put in too big a garden and we decided to go to farmers market," Ron said.
The next year, the two deliberately planted a larger garden because they found they enjoyed selling at the farmers market. Then the Ices built a commercial kitchen onto the garage and started making jams and jellies. It wasn't long after that that Gayle started thinking of adding a tea room.
"I've always loved tea rooms," said Gayle, adding that she tries to visit different ones whenever the couple can get away to travel. But she didn't have to look far to figure out where to put the tea room or how to furnish it.
"I was sitting here on my porch one day," she said, and it just all fell together. She uses her own silver and some of her mother's and different patterns of Royal Doulton china she's put together from her own stash, her mother's and what she's been able to buy from friends.
And for good measure, she even uses a piece of an old tree limb that had been her mother's rolling pin to break up the bags of ice for the iced tea.
During the winter, Gayle pores over magazines and recipe books, deciding what the menu will be for the summer, but it always changes with the growing season. The farm is currently yielding sugar snap peas, beets, radishes, carrots, basil, chives, strawberries, apples, pears, plums and "gobs of herbs," said Gayle.
Wednesday's menu included such favorites as homemade potato chips with Gayle's "dilly dip," a tossed salad with Gayle's herb-infused vinegar, a palate cleanser of four types of sorbet — lemon verbena, lime mint, orange mint and crab-apple – and four types of sandwiches – chicken salad, cucumber, bruschetta and egg salad.
And for dessert? "Everyone told me you can't have a tea room without hummingbird cake," said Gayle, who grew up in Louisiana. So the southern favorite with bananas, nuts and pineapple was on the day's menu, along with homemade vanilla ice cream and mulberries, also from the farm.
As the guests arrived, Ron started them off with a tour of the farm and his honest assessment of how the crops were doing. "The lavender patch is looking pretty good right now," he said. "Two winters ago, it was so dry, we lost most of it. This last winter, it was so cold it froze, and we lost most of it. So we're pretty happy it's looking this good. "
He pointed out the 350 tomato plants and a patch of corn. "That's my forth or fifth planting," he said. "It's red corn to make jelly with. She (Gayle) takes the kernels off and boils the cobs to make corn cob jelly."
Throughout the farm, flowers like snapdragons, zinnias, black-eyed susans, pansies, violets and petunias dot the landscape, and many of their petals find their way into tea room dishes.
Beth Kniss of Los Alamos, who had come to lunch with five lady friends, said, "It's very relaxed. It's so nice because we spend several hours here — it's not like McDonald's."
Four friends sat at another table, all from Santa Fe. Helen Pynn said she went to an event catered by Gayle and Loyola five or six years ago and "they said they were going to open a tea room."
"It's such fun to bring people here for the first time," Pynn said. "I love the variety of food — it's all fresh. And Gayle and Loyola have become friends."
argo Taylor, who teaches cooking classes at Las Cosas Kitchen Shoppe, was there with her friend Leslie Upsher. "I came to a Slow Food event here maybe three years ago, and I just loved it," said Taylor. "It's a very special place."
The property used to be part of Los Luceros Ranch, which was recently purchased by the state of New Mexico with plans to use it as a retreat center, among other things.
"In 1954, Mary Wheelwright sold it to her assistant," said Ron, of the land where the Ices' farm sits. It went through several hands before the Ices began acquiring their acreage.
Ron would still like to retire someday and finds himself a bit surprised to have such a hardworking wife.
"I told him I have to be busy," said Gayle.
But he usually gets her to stop in the evenings. "We go out for dinner," on said, "usually to Española. My favorite is probably Los Arcos."
If you're hungry