Once Upon a Vine….Supporting Non-profits Case by Case

A generous wine donation given to District 5110! 

Michelle Corradetti, Rotary Club of Medford

Once upon a vine…. there were grapes to fill 2,196 bottles of wine. Imagine my surprise when I received a call from fellow Rotarian, Mary Warrick, co-owner of Wooldridge Creek Winery asking me if our Rotary District would like some wine, AND the minimum allotment was 150 cases!

That is where this amazing opportunity began! But before I continue with more to the story, I would like to share that Mary has been a Rotarian in the Rotary Club of Medford for over 33 years and has been very generous in donating her wine and venue for several Rotary events. During my year as Club President in 2019-20, she brought a bottle of wine every week to give to our presenter as a “thank you”!

Now back to the wine opportunity! After several weeks of deliberations, our District graciously accepted this offer from Case by Case, which is an Oregon-based non-profit founded in 2025 to support the charitable work of other organizations. For many organizations, purchasing wine for events can be a significant expense, taking away funds from their core mission. Case by Case partners with the southern Oregon wine community to source large quantities of award-winning wines, which are then donated to charitable organizations. Our Rotary District was chosen to be a recipient of 183 cases of wine – 61 cases of Rose’, 61 cases of Chardonnay, and 61 cases of Pinot Noir. Many thanks go out to Case by Case for their generous gift to Rotary District 5110!

I would also like to thank Laurel Briggs of Creative Marketing and Design out of Jacksonville for bringing my label vision to reality! I would also like to thank D5110 EAG, Bruce Reece, along with the entire AG corps in helping deliver wine allotments to each club in their area. And, a big thank you to Rotarian Mary Warrick and her husband, Ted, for presenting this opportunity to our District!

This wine can be used for your presenter gifts, fundraising efforts, and even your fellowship events. Be creative!

Cheers!
Michelle Corradetti, DGN and wine lover!

Thanks again, DG Chris, last Saturday, in Grants Pass, I handed off the two cases of wine to eClub Rotarian Bruce … Bill (PDG Bill)

Thanks to eClub President Jackie for suggesting this article.

WHO INVENTED THE GAME CANDYLAND? 

Eleanor Abbott designed the game in 1948, while she was recovering from polio in San Diego, California. The game was made for and tested by the children in the same wards on the hospital. The children suggested that Abbott submit the game to Milton Bradley Company. The game was bought by Milton Bradley and first published in 1949 as a temporary fill-in for their then main product line, school supplies. Candy Land became Milton Bradley's best-selling game, surpassing its previous top seller, Uncle Wiggily, and put the company in the same league as its main competitor, Parker Brothers.

In 1984, Hasbro purchased Milton Bradley. Landmark Entertainment Group revamped the game with new art that same year, adding characters and a storyline.

Hasbro produces several versions of the game and treats it as a brand. For example, it markets Candy Land puzzles, a travel version, a personal computer game, and a handheld electronic version.

Candy Land was involved in one of the first disputes over Internet domain names in 1996. An adult web content provider registered candyland.com, and Hasbro objected. Hasbro obtained an injunction against the use.

In 2012, Hasbro announced a film, which triggered a lawsuit by Landmark Entertainment Group over ownership and royalties owed for the characters and storyline introduced in the 1984 edition. There was another film in 2005, called Candy Land: The Great Lollipop Adventure.

At least four versions of the Candy Land board game were made. The first dates from 1949. This version, and other early versions, had only locations (Molasses Swamp, Gumdrop Mountains, etc.) and no characters. A board copyrighted in 1962 shows a track layout different from the more recent versions.

In the first edition, the pawns were wooden, but they were changed in the 1967 version to plastic gingerbread men.

The 1984 edition introduced a storyline and characters such as Mr. Mint and Gramma Nutt. It has the modern track layout and ends with a purple square.

Some of the characters and place names were changed in 2002. Queen Frostine became "Princess" Frostine, the classic Molasses Swamp was changed to Chocolate Swamp; Princess Lolly was changed to Lolly, and the character Plumpy was removed entirely.

How Amaranth Influenced Indigenous Culture and Cooking in the American Southwest

Michael Shaikh Explores the History and Legacy of Pueblo Cuisine in New Mexico

By Michael Shaikh

The first time I remember tasting amaranth was in Ray’s tortillas at the Indian Pueblo Kitchen in downtown Albuquerque in the summer of 2021. Ray was the executive chef then, and he had used a combination of amaranth and corn flour to make me a stack of floppy, round tortillas, each the size of a large sand dollar, to eat with a plate of bison ribs he had braised in juniper. Dusty and faintly golden, they were heavier than their size suggested and tore perfectly with just the right amount of resistance without leaving a frayed edge. When I bit into one, the tortilla momentarily hugged my teeth in a warm embrace before giving up its nutty, malty, and subtly sweet flavor.

Ray Naranjo is a Native American chef from Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico. He’s a big, affable man with a wide, warm smile, built more for a football field than his food truck, Manko. After leaving the Indian Pueblo Kitchen a few years ago, Ray opened Manko, a food truck and catering business serving a fusion of Native American cuisine—mostly from his Pueblo traditions—and New Mexican and Western food. A regular fixture of festivals and food events across the state, Manko is arguably New Mexico’s most beloved food truck. “When Ray was a boy, we didn’t have much money most days,” his mother, Marian Naranjo, a famous potter and Indigenous activist, told me. “Once in a while, the kids had to fend for themselves.
(Photo- By Kurt Stüber [1] - caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/mavica/index.html part of www.biolib.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7405)

They were all responsible for the house and each other when I was working,” she recalled. Ray, she said, hated to clean, so he cooked. The second youngest of her four children, Ray was her most sensitive but also her most curious child. “Ray would just walk around Santa Clara, sometimes eating from trees, using old knowledge,” she told me at her home on the Santa Clara reservation outside Española, New Mexico. “Learning to eat well from the earth.”

At the heart of its culinary philosophy is the belief that people are within and part of their ecosystem, not separate from it.

Ray was around ten years old when he first thought of becoming a chef. “When I was a little kid, instead of going on a hunting trip with the elders, I stayed home and cooked Thanksgiving dinner. My mom was a hunter because we were part of the hunter clan, and when they came home, I had cooked a pretty big dinner. I am pretty sure I knew I wanted to be a chef then,” Ray told me. “I used to watch cooking shows on TV as a kid. There’s no way we could afford the ingredients on those shows. But I would kinda get creative with what we had back then and try to re-create versions of what I saw on TV, like stuffed burgers.”

Today, Ray is in his mid-forties and has been a professional chef for most of his adult life. After culinary school, like many other Indigenous chefs of his generation in the United States, Ray cooked in the kitchens of reservation casinos before focusing on his own Pueblo cuisine and working his way into the top job at the Indian Pueblo Kitchen at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque. Then, in May 2022, Ray set off on his own to start Manko. In Tewa, Ray’s ancestral language, manko means “come and eat.”

Ray’s home, Santa Clara Pueblo, sits in the shadow of Los Alamos, on the banks of the Rio Grande. In Tewa, Santa Clara Pueblo is called Kha’Po Owingeh (Singing Water Village). There are nineteen Pueblo tribes in New Mexico today; each is a sovereign nation on a federally recognized reservation with its own government. The Pueblo tribes share a common history, as well as aspects of culture, but remain diverse peoples, speaking several different languages and dialects. Hundreds of years ago, the Pueblo homeland reached from its heartland in New Mexico into Colorado and Arizona, but today, most Pueblo reservations are located, like Santa Clara, along the upper reaches of the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

Over the past few years, Ray has patiently introduced me to Pueblo cuisine. Traditional, pre-European Pueblo food follows the seasons and is deeply rooted in the land of the nineteen nations. At the heart of its culinary philosophy is the belief that people are within and part of their ecosystem, not separate from it. Pueblo cooks use corn, beans, and squash, as well as wild onions, mushrooms, purslane, and juniper. Piñon nuts and pumpkin seeds add texture to dishes. Bison, elk, deer, fish, and regional birds are important animals. Honey and berries like currants, chokeberries, and blueberries add sweetness. Dishes are flavored with epazote, sage, mint, cota, and wild parsley and seasoned with native chilies and, most important, salt that the Pueblo people traditionally harvested from the Zuni Salt Lake and the Estancia Valley, both in New Mexico.

Wheat, dairy, beef, pork, chicken, and spices like black pepper are not part of heritage Pueblo cooking, as most of these were introduced by Europeans. But Ray, like other Pueblo chefs, often incorporates them into his contemporary fusion cooking. Ray also cooks with amaranth, another ancient precolonial ingredient often used in Pueblo cuisine. In one form or another, amaranth is usually on the menu at Manko, as in the Native Berries and Bird Seed Salad—a colorful and gratifying bowl of spinach tossed with quinoa, heirloom tomatoes, feta, and sunflower and pumpkin seeds, dressed in vinaigrette made with local berries, and then topped with popped amaranth to add a malty crunch.

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Amaranth is sometimes referred to as the Fourth Sister to the sacred Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—which are at the heart of not only Pueblo cuisine but also the cooking of many Native American nations. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, talks about the grammar of animacy among Indigenous languages to address the nonhuman living world, like plants and animals, as well as objects, places, and landscapes imbued with sacred meaning: “Imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron, then saying of her, ‘Look, it’s making soup. It has gray hair.’” She points out that in English, we never refer to anyone, especially not a family member, as “it.” That would, of course, be deeply disrespectful. “It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing.” In most Indigenous languages, she says, “we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”

Amaranth is not my family in that sense. But I have spent so much time with her, and with people for whom she is family, that I can’t help but show her that same grammatical respect. She has many varieties, but I am most familiar with Amaranthus cruentus (red amaranth). She is an endearingly beautiful plant with a tall, slender, but sturdy red stem decorated with wide, flat, fluttering mint-green leaves that taper toward the top, giving way to bundles of soft, finger-like flowers the color of plums or an old brick path soaked by rain. These flowers always seem to lean in your direction, seeking your attention, wanting to gently stroke your head as you walk by.

The human relationship with amaranth is ancient. Grown all over the world but native to the Americas, amaranth was first cultivated by the Olmec and the Maya some eight thousand years ago, not only because of the plant’s beautiful plumes but also because of what they contained within. Each of her bright, floppy crimson fingers contains thousands of highly nutritious pinhead-sized seeds. Her nutrient-dense, peppery leaves can be eaten like spinach. Friends with roots in Tamil Nadu in South India often make pooriyal, a stir-fry of fresh amaranth leaves, chilies, and coconut. Gardeners adore amaranth for her ornamental flowers, which remain bright long after they’re dried. The plant’s name is derived from a Greek word meaning “unfading” or “immortal.”

Health food enthusiasts proclaim her yet another “superfood,” and as they did avocados, quinoa, and goji berries, they have turned amaranth into a billion-dollar industry. Climate activists also evangelize the plant as a food for the future because she resists drought, grows fast, and tolerates tough soils. In fact, amaranth is right at home in a high New Mexico desert, in a crack in a New York City sidewalk, or even in space, where NASA grew some in the 1980s. Big Ag fears varieties of amaranth as an existential threat to industrial crops, since the plants are unperturbed by the industry’s arsenal of weed killers.

The heroic persistence of the Pueblo people to remain, now and forever, in their world proves beyond all doubt that saving a food culture is the same thing as saving lives.

Like her relative quinoa, amaranth is technically a pseudocereal and is naturally gluten-free. The seeds contain all nine essential amino acids, making amaranth among the most protein-dense edible plants on earth. The seeds are also rich in lysine, an amino acid lacking in corn. So when Ray toasts and grinds amaranth seeds into a flour, or masa, and mixes it with a corn masa, the result is not only a delicious tortilla but also a far more nutritionally balanced food.

Braised bison with amaranth tortillas is a dish Ray is particularly proud of—one that displays the diversity of Native cuisines in North America: bison meat, a staple of Great Plains nations like the Arapaho, Crow, and Sioux; juniper, a common ingredient in Pueblo and Diné (Navajo) cooking; and amaranth and corn tortillas, a tradition dating back thousands of years to the ancient Maya. The Ancestral Puebloans, Ray’s ancestors, who lived across the northern Southwest until the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, also had a tradition of eating amaranth and corn tortillas. The Ancestral Puebloans had grown corn for thousands of years, but amaranth is a relatively recent addition to Pueblo food, something they started growing only about eight hundred years ago.

Like corn, amaranth was venerated in Indigenous societies in the Americas before the European invasions. Colonial Spanish Catholics outlawed amaranth five hundred years ago across their “New World” colonies. Believing it was sacrilegious, they attempted to decimate it throughout the Americas with a myopic crusading zeal akin to today’s drug war to eradicate the coca leaf. “Amaranth was embedded deeply into our ancestral culture. It was an important part of our cuisine that also connected us to our Creator. But the Spanish took it from us, and then the United States came and changed things even more,” Ray explained during one of our first conversations, referring to the back-to-back colonialisms the Pueblo people have endured since the late 1500s. “It’s only really in the past few years that we’ve been able to really bring amaranth back now,” he said, with a sense of pride.

The Pueblo people point out that New Mexico is the oldest colony in what is today the United States. Since the late fifteenth century, their nations, as well as other Indigenous nations, have had their land occupied almost continuously, first by Spain, then briefly by Mexico, and finally by the United States. Although the Pueblos’ experience with each colonial power was distinct, the common element is that they all intentionally divided Indigenous people not just from one another but also from their cultures.

Much like the people who first grew amaranth on the continent, the plant itself endured centuries of violence and erasure. Perhaps what’s most important about this story is that the heroic persistence of the Pueblo people to remain, now and forever, in their world proves beyond all doubt that saving a food culture is the same thing as saving lives.

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From The Last Sweet Bite: Stories and Recipes of Culinary Heritage Lost and Found by Michael Shaikh. Copyright © 2025. Available from Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.