Try locally made honey, bean-to-bar chocolate and small-batch bone broth.
By Marilyn Hawkes | Photos: Angelina Aragon
Farmed Honey
On Saturdays, owners Tim and Connie Moore open Honey Hive Farms to the public so folks can taste an assortment of their raw local honey ($10 a bottle). Depending on the season, the Peoria-based, 800-bee-strong farm offers up to six different varieties, including favorites such as Orange Blossom, Local Cactus and Suicide Honey, a mix of local honeys ($18). To capture different varieties of raw honey, Tim takes the bees to locations around the Valley and “waits for [them] to do their job,” which can sometimes take a couple of weeks. Many repeat customers consume local honey for allergies, while others use it for culinary purposes, Tim says. “Suicide Honey is my best seller. We mix wildflower [honey, from four Valley locations] with every honey we sell. It really opens up the tastebuds.” Connie, a master beekeeper, teaches hands-on beekeeping classes with a chance to “suit up as a beekeeper” to inspect the hives.
Bean-to-Bar Chocolate
Making bean-to-bar chocolate was a new culinary skill for chef Tandy Peterson, who spent several years working at The Phoenician resort and other top Valley kitchens. In 2021, she founded Embers Chocolate and began pushing the boundaries of chocolate, creating bars ($10) with unique ingredients, like Spiced Cherry Cheesecake (white chocolate with tart cherries, smoky chiles and fennel seed) and Elote (white chocolate with freeze-dried corn). Her orthodox offerings are great, too, including Wild Bolivia, a single-origin dark chocolate bar that took home gold in the 2024 Craft Chocolat Challenge. Peterson draws inspiration from traveling and tasting other chefs’ dishes. “I like seeing the capability of a single ingredient and how it can be changed or morphed, and then take it and run with it.” The process of making chocolate bars takes about a week from start to finish – sorting, roasting, winnowing, grinding, molding and packaging – Peterson says. “I love whimsical cooking, so chocolate is a perfect fit because each bean has its own flavor and unique nuances.”
Small-Batch Bone Broth
Dottie Kelley-McPeek started making nutrient-rich bone broth after learning how it alleviated the digestive issues of a friend’s son. “My mom lived with us, and she took medicine for her aching knees. I gave her bone broth, and she stopped complaining about her knees. That was a game-changer,” says Kelley-McPeek, who, along with her husband, Chris McPeek, founded The Broth Bar in 2020. Today, they churn out 10 varieties of small-batch artisanal broths ($11.99), including traditional chicken and turkey broths; a “Power Punch” made from beef liver, beef and chicken; and Broffee, a broth/coffee hybrid made with local Press Coffee. “It tastes like delicious black coffee. You’d have no idea it was made with chicken broth,” she says. The duo makes every collagen-loaded and organic batch by hand with a mix of common ingredients that includes onions, celery, carrots and pink Himalayan salt. “We don’t use preservatives and never skimp on quality,” she says.
