I know so many of you took the exhortations in April to be a local family to heart, and you all are wrapping up a second month in the locavore life. I bet you find yourself, like this Local Family, busy. So, a big pot of Tomato Mountain spinach cooked up, Tunisian style, with brisket and calves neck (yes!), should be enough to last you the whole week.
Like Mama Meichulim before her, my new best friend Tamar Adler knows that being busy once is a lot easier than being busy all the time. Of course, Ms. Adler, like all the local families these days, busies herself a lot more with vegetables than I’m sure Mama M ever did. Tamar’s great advice for the CSA box or market haul: cook it now.
Tamar strides ahead each week by buying:
whole bunches of the leafiest, stemmiest vegetables I can find. Then, I scrub off their dirt, trim off their leaves, cut off their stems, peel what needs peeling, and cook them all at once.
Tamar’s advice follows two key bits of wisdom she expounds in Everlasting Meal. Firstly, she tells us to eat our vegetables at room temperature. She knows they taste better this way, but she also knows that this frees us up from having to prepare at the moment of each meal. Second, she knows that a vegetable once cooked, can wear many different flavors. Tonight’s platter of roasted vegetables is tomorrow’s vegetable salad with the addition of a little dressing. In other words, there is great value in having your vegetables done ahead.
You don’t have to buy it all each week. You can have it come by subscription. That’s Week 6, or at least a bit of week 6, of our Tomato Mountain CSA*, a very leafy box. Our opportunities for roasted vegetables, followed by a roasted vegetable salad seem limited. We have greens: swiss chard and kale and red rain (a mustard green). Tamar’s shopping “always includes a few bunches of dark, leafy greens,” and she notes that once they are cooked with garlic and a good amount of olive oil, “they lose their moral urgency and become one of the most likable ingredients in your kitchen.”
So, the other day, my wife got her everlasting meal a-goin’. She separated stem from leaf when it came to this week’s kale and chard. She sauteed, from heartiest, to most tender, the kale, chard and red rain in this week’s box. Using another favored Tamar method, she boiled the asparagus. Tamar says add balance with big helpings of rice or polenta, or in this week’s case, some wheatberries taking up room in the fridge. And Tamar says to have your eggs fly, a trick my wife already knows (nobody boils an egg better than her). At the end of this rush of business, there was a big bowl of cooked down greens, asparagus ready to us; lots of grain, and a dozen of the best boiled eggs to use as the week went on. Or, as shown above, all combined for dinner one night.
Yes, it’s busy to be a local family, but with advice from Mama Meichulim and Tamar Adler, it’s all very doable. The pleasures of sharing the table with your local family make all that work not seem that much either.
*My wife works for Tomato Mountain Farm.
That’s Week 4 of our Tomato Mountain CSA*
Attempt at artistry aside, notice much difference in Week 5?
Last weekend I saw Robin Schirmer of Tomato Mountain Farm. I told her how great the vegetables have been all Spring, but seasonal as I am, I was getting a bit shy of seeing more green in the box.
“Swiss chard”
Swiss chard? According to Robin, the spread of green had been interrupted by Swiss chard in our boxes for weeks four and five. Now, did Tomato Mountain really give me something not green?
Actually, they have. In the form of white Chinese cabbage that my wife cooked up to great success with bacon and canned beans–recipe and pictures hopefully for a future post. There have been white Japanese turnips and white, with a wisp of red, Japanese long radishes. It was my desire to capture some of the non-green as well as my desire to be my most Tamar Adler-thrifty, that I decided to do something.
All those greens with the radishes seemed too good to waste, even if they were green.
As they say in Portland. Pickle it.
That’s my batch brewing. It’s supposed to be ready in 3 days. I essentially used the recipe for Middle-Eastern style pickles from Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby’s Quick Pickles. My pickles in process stem from chard stems, radish leaves and a few hidden away salad onions from last summer. As with most pickles, it’s not so much a recipe but a ratio to create enough brine to cover the vegetables you have.
3 Cups – Red wine vinegar
3 Cups – Water
1 and 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 long dried local red pepper, crumbled
Combine the water and vinegar, dissolve the salt, and add the pepper. Pour over the vegetables in a non-reactive bowl. Let sit in a cool place for three days; then put in a jar and refrigerate. They say it should last around a month. I have a feeling we’ll have eaten them by then.
*My wife works for Tomato Mountain. She’ll be selling stuff at the Oak Park Farmer’s Market this Saturday. Come and buy!
I told you April was the time to join me as a local family. Then, I spent most of the rest of the month arguing just why you should be a local family. Advice. There was some, like get a CSA. Mostly, it was talk of the pleasures of a year in the eat local life. I figure, commit to eating local, and the rest will follow. And buy the book.
There are a lot of great books out there to help you with your quest to be a local family. (Believe me, this Local Family has about all of them.) We did not have the one my Mother was reading a few weeks ago on her Kindle. And when she started telling us about it–put an egg on it; make a crust; yesterday’s pasta is today’s pancake; pickle it–it sounded not like an episode of Portlandia, but like all the Local Family posts I had been meaning to write. After all, we say in this Local Family, about Mom, she can take any batch of leftovers, fry and egg, and call it dinner. She was saying it too. What was such book, filled with wisdom. An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler, my Mother told us. Soon we had our own copy.
Not since I read Mama Meichulim had I read a book more apt for the locavore life. Unlike the growing library of eat local tomes, Ms. Adler’s book contains not one picture of rolling farm fields or happy content animals. There are no arrays of farmer’s markets produce; no shots of grizzled farmers; not one close-up of dirty fingernails. There are, hard to believe in this day, no pictures at all. There are few recipes either, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Adler makes the case for eating local without once ever going there. At best, I could find this passage:
By the end of the week you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having began with good raw materials only once. You will also have a number of satisfying conversations. You have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You will have tasted a particular soft, cold vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make beet soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjunctions, brushing up.
If that does not describe a CSA subscriber or farmer’s market devotee, it will surely drive you to be one.
An Everlasting Meal will drive you to cook and eat and want to be a locavore to have those dozen vegetables to boil and roast and make into good salads. Ms. Adler only gives you the occasional recipe for making your local food. She teaches that it is not recipes, however, that make for good eating. It is an understanding of the meal. That a wedge of good cheese, which you can have from your farmer’s market, will provide as good a dinner as anything, especially if you open up a good bottle, beer wine or cider (which I’m not sure she mentioned). That there should be bread and ample supplies of rice or polenta or some other base, perhaps even home cooked sauerkraut. It is how to approach things. Mostly that the best approaches are usually the simplest and the ones we might not even think about any more. Boil your meat and vegetables is the first thing she teaches. I’ll come back to the much good advice inside Everlasting Meal in subsequent posts. I’m telling you today, you’ve committed to being a local family. Buy the book.
This is the time to commit to being a local family. It is also the time to eat green. A local family eats within the season. Each season tastes and looks different.
So, that’s a rough outline of how you’ll eat as a local family. What does it actually look like in late April and early May.
That’s Week 2 of our Tomato Mountain Spring CSA*
Here’s week 3.
Notice a lot of difference? You can go back to week 1 and chart the changes (not). Like I say, in the Spring, a local family eats green. I will say that by the second week of our CSA, we did have many off-white Japanese salad turnips (hakurei). Now, all this Spring green is certainly good for your body, but it does tax the repertoire. This Local Family has already had about seven variations of sauteed greens. There are other ways to handle your Spring. This guy combined his Tomato Mountain bok choy and red kale together with the one ingredient known to bind all, bacon.
Here’s a couple of ways we’ve tackled Spring.
Tired of looking at green, you loose a lot of the color of lettuce when you braise it. You also lose most of the bitterness. You also gain the knowledge that lettuce can be cooked. Braising means cooking vegetables in a small amount of liquid at a tempature below boil. You impart flavor by your choice of liquid. Stock and white wine were both selections from my wife’s books. We had neither handy, so used vermouth, which gave a pleasant herbal tang to the dish. Believe me, it tasted better than it looked.
A lot of our Spring greens are brassica’s or members of the cabbage family. And what’s one of the best ways to make cabbage. Slaw. That’s bok choy slaw. What I did was salt it heavily for about an hour. This loosens things up and mellows out the flavor. I then rinsed it well and dressed it with cabbage friendly ingredients like Local Folks whole grain mustard. A little splash of sesame oil played to its Asian-ness.
It may be a lot of green in the season, but that’s what the earth provides. It is also part of the seasonal cycle of local eating and part of what you get now that you’re a local family.
*My wife works for Tomato Mountain.
April was the month to commit to being a local family. As I told you,
You need to start. You do not need to finish once you start, but you need to start and you need to think past the start. Now is a good time to start for a few reasons. Most importantly, it only makes sense to start when you can readily find local foods. The other main reason I want you to start eating local now is to get you attune to the pleasures of seasonal eating.
I should have also added that in April, we can start putting away food for later eating.
Towards being a local family, I told you what your year would look like. I provided a little side motivation (it’s green!). I ran through a lot of the kinds of foods you would find on an eat local diet. What I have not done much of yet, is give directions on finding your local food. Sure, I suggested a CSA or Community Supported Agriculture subscription, but what about the items not in your box? What do you have to do to eat local.
I guess I’ve been hyping up the local for a while because I don’t always like the practicalities. I mean I don’t like the difficulties still in eating local, so I don’t like talking about it with you. It’s like, hey, taste that tomato?
OK, tomatoes are an easy thing to discuss. Grow your own. Find some from your local farmer’s market. Hell, even my neighborhood grocery, Caputo’s, at the peak of summer, has local, quality, tomatoes. Other times, use what you’ve put up. And if you have not put any tomatoes, you have outstanding local options like my wife’s employer, Tomato Mountain. What besides tomatoes?
We can look at getting local foods two ways. We can speak of the places that sell local foods, and thats a good place to start. I’ll give a list in a second. Yet, I have to warn you that there is no single source, still, for all your local food needs. And that first source, farmer’s markets, vary greatly. So, if you live (or travel to) the Oak Park Farmer’s Market, you can get local meat and local eggs. If you shop at another farmer’s market, you may not find these things. Even in the world of fruit and veg, the variety between markets can be huge. Like I say, as good as a local tomato can be, we want to eat a bit more. Summing it up, the list below tells you generally where to get local food, but it won’t tell you where to find all the specific things we were listing the other day.
We’re not shy where we buy our local food. Obviously, we like to buy it from farmers because we like farmers, and we like the opportunity to find out about our purchases. Still, what we are looking for is local food. If it’s onions at Aldi’s, so what. It’s local. We like it. Now, getting back to those specifics, anything you cannot find, and think you can find, let us know, and we’ll tell you where we think you can get it.
April is the month we’ve been telling you to join us as a local family. When we last discussed your journey, I provided a little background motivation, getting greener by being local. Today, let’s get back to some practicalities. For instance, what does the local diet look like. It surely can include some steaks (those came from a cow raised by our pal Farmer Vicki Westerhoff).
Canadians Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon helped bring the idea of eating local to the world with a series of blog posts on their “100 mile diet.” The compiled those posts into a book called Plenty. Youc an read how they set a very strict requirement for their eating. What they had on hand when they started, or within 100 miles would be their diet. So, a lot of their story is about all the work they had to do to get food within their 100 miles. They were especially vexed in getting grains, and when things were bad they made sandwiches with turnips as the “bread”. Don’t do that.
No one committing to becoming a local family has to have peanutbutter and jelly on turnips, nor does one have to seperate the mouse droppings from the wheat, in another memorable part of their local grain quest. The first thing I always tell people about eating local is “don’t make yourself nuts trying to eat local.” The second thing I might tell them is a quote I picked up a few years back from Illinois farmer, Stan Schutte. ”Local is as far as it takes you to get what you want.” In other words, get your oranges or your bananas, sea salt and pepper. It won’t ruin your locavore experience.
I say all that because I want the pressure off. Relax. Don’t make yourself nuts.
Now, go and eat as much as you can from nearby.
Local.
Does local have to be within a magic 100 mile boundary. I do not think so. Certainly not if you live in an area that is highly urban for one thing, and bordered on a great lake for another, your 100 mile limit would exclude a lot of the farms that sell in area markets. I tend to say my “foodshed”, my zone I use for my local food, is the Big Ten Conference. Those states around the Great Lakes from Ohio to Minnesota. Although, aside from wild rice, I’m not really looking at the states furthest from Illinois.
What can I get within my foodshed. In this post, I’ll cover what’s out there. In my next post, I’ll cover what you have to do to get it or where you have to go to find local food.
Let’s start with the raw materials. You can find dairy including milk, cheese, kefir, butter, yogurt, and sour cream; eggs, including duck eggs; meats, pretty much all kinds of meat, even a goose if I want; and when we want fish, we can choose one from our lakes; fruits and vegetables, our climate produces a huge bounty and only in dark winter and early spring do we need to get a mango or such. The availability of local grains has greatly increased in recent years, and one can find items ranging from wheatberries to oats. We have excellent local cornmeal. Don’t go nuts, but you can find local nuts including black walnuts and hickory nuts. What about sunflower seeds.
Let’s look at some decisions you may or may not want to make. Sugar. There’s locally grown beet sugar, but there may be GMO issues associated with that. You can use local honey to sweeten or local maple syrup. This Local Family does not swear off of cane sugar, but uses other stuff too. Your fat of choice, as Mario Battali always puts it, is? Again, you can stay local and use lard, butter or locally produced vegetable oils. Personally, we don’t hold to this, using olive oil mostly. Flavorings, we make our own chili powder from locally grown peppers, and we dry herbs, but we keep a wide spice drawer. I’ll say, not sure where this fits in, that we use some locally produced vinegars, but we use plenty that aren’t, and we use lemons and limes too.
We make as big an effort as possible to use prepared foods from our region. We never buy anything but local beer, and why not, we have so many choices. We almost never buy local wine, although we think there’s a great case made by Wendy for getting more Michigan wines. We’re lucky that our local Caputo’s grocery carries the deli turkey from Michigan’s Legacy. We love Nueske for ham and bacon. We splurge when we can on Milk and Honey granola. Really, we don’t have one big list of local foods. Something specific, ask us. What we do is just look for the local. Fresh pasta, we look and find a brand like RP from Madison, Wisconsin. That kind of thing happens all the time. We just find local. We believe a local family eats more than fruits and vegetables because we do.
This is the time of year to commit to being a local family because you can start buying freshly grown foods at the markets. This is the time to commit to becoming a local family because your first CSA boxes will arrive. Still, as you enjoy your local asparagus and your local sorrel, don’t forget your local meat and your local eggs. You don’t have to get everything from around here, but commit to getting as much as you can from around here.
The earth celebrated Earth Day the other day, and all around the earth events took place to highlight our precious state and encourage greater care. Did you think about changing the way you eat? We’ve been telling you all April that now is the time to become a local family. We told you that this Local Family began its local food journey after many trips to the Oak Park Farmer’s Market, where we constantly found ourselves wowed by the offerings. We bought like crazy. And if we kept on buying food like crazy, we had to do something with it. Yet, at some point in the year, the market stopped. We kept on being a Local Family. It helps to have a little motivation.
One of the things that motivated us towards being a Local Family was the impact, tiny as it may be, on the earth, by eating local. This Local Family firmly believes that when we eat local food, we eat food that tastes a lot better, but we also eat food that tastes a lot better for the environment. The first thing a lot of people think when they think enviromental impacts of eating local is the idea of “food miles”, the distance it takes for food to get to your table. Google food miles, however, and you will see the notion rife for debate. In fact, I bet you’ll find it easier to find articles “debunking” food miles than you will find articles supporting food miles. Go see for yourself. I will tell you that, personally, I don’t find the arguments against food miles persuasive. And if you start scratching the surface of the anti-food mile arguments, you’ll find a lot of questions too. We do think we make an impact by eating local.
Still, as most eat local fans will tell you, it’s not just about food miles. In other words, we do not simply care about how long it takes to get our food. Eating local essentially means removing yourself from the ordinary ways of food. When we remove ourselves from the ordinary ways of food we make the most impact on the earth. You can analyze many environmental issues related to food, like the Leopold Center at Iowa State University does. What goes into food production. How long does it take to get to you. How is it packaged. What does it consist of. When you eat local you can approach all of these factors. You gain the ability to make better decisions. You do not always have to make the best decision. For instance, we know that meat consumption makes a huge environmental impact. Can we go with out a steak (and this sauce). We like steak. Now, when we source a local steak, we can learn how the animal was raised, the practices of the rancher. Does it meet what we we want in our meat. Eating local allows us to do that as much as possible. We know only the most ardent, fanatic 100 miler could do that with everything they ate, but some commitment to eating local lets you do it to a lot of what you eat. The process of eating local allows you to address many environmental issues with food.
April is the time to commit to eating local. It is the time to commit to Earth Day. Commit by seeking to understand more about your food. Find farmers that grow food the way you think it should be grown. Find farmers that do not use mass quantities of oil drenched fertilizers. Find farmers that use modern methods to maximize their grazing fields. Find food that is not all shrink wrapped, individually packaged and partnered with the one number most difficult to recycle. A lot of people think that eating local limits your choices. The non-locavore has a whole supermarket to peruse. We have a farmer’s market, a CSA and a few specialists. Yet, the supermarket shopper gets the food given to them. They really have little choice in how it is made. We do. We do and we can. We can by eating local.
That’s the first box of our early season CSA from Tomato Mountain Farm.* Very green. All green. The box contained green spinach, the green in the bottom right corner; green “Vitamin D” (yea, that’s what’s it’s called), the broader leaves in the back right; green Tokyo bekana, the green leaves in the back left, and green “red rain” (yea, that’s what it’s called), barely visible in the left front. What you dom’t see, a jar of their delicious strawberry jam. Jam? Tomato Mountain does not usually supply any of their high quality jarred goods in their CSA boxes, but they felt guilty this week. See, it was too hot. Tomato Mountain’s early season crops come from their hoop-houses, and the global warming made it so hot that it screwed with crop schedules and cool weather lovin’ crops like turnips and lettuce are behind schedule. The jam made a nice make-do, but there was still plenty to use. All green.
Do you have a box of all green to use right now. Now is the time to join me as a local family. Should not you have your CSA box too. The other day I showed you what your year as a local family would look like. I mentioned that around January, you should be planning for your CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, box for the year. Maybe you waited until late February to find your box. After all, our big list of CSAs did not come out until February 27. OK, you know what to do next year. Still, you can find plenty of CSA options for 2012. Look at our list.
You do not need a CSA to eat local this year, but having a CSA surely helps you eat local this year. This Local Family gets a CSA box because one of the Local Family works for a CSA farmer. Just because it’s a perk does not mean we don’t love it. We love a having a CSA for several reasons.
Hey, we love market shopping too (we’ll get to that in a post soon), and we understand that a CSA is not for everyone. Having one, though, sure helps. It sure helps this time of year when there are less markets.
So far, this week, we’ve tackled some of the bekana, some of the Vitamin D, and some of the Red Rain.
This was a little saute of rain and D, flavored at the table with Mike Bancroft’s Co-op’s sauces. Tender spring greens like these need nothing more than a few minutes in a medium pan with olive oil, a smidgen of garlic and some salt.
Tokyo bekana is one of those things you learn to know by dint of being in a CSA. Dare we say, you would only know Tokyo bekana if you were in a CSA. Curious, I did a bit of google last night, and I think the answer is that bekana grows easily. It’s very much a cold weather crop, yet also one that can live into hotter days (unlike most lettuces). It’s a member of the cabbage family, but does look like lettuce. And Chris Covelli of Tomato Mountain said, why not eat it like lettuce. And we did. Although I don’t expect you to have the cornbread croutons around the house like we did (or at least the cornbread around the house to make cornbread croutons).
Commit to being a local family now. One way that may help you in your commitment is to sign up for a CSA. You still have time to find one. Hope seeing week 1 of ours helps.
*My wife works for Tomato Mountain.
A couple of weeks ago, I urged you to make the decision to become a local family now. I meant to start giving you tips and pointers on becoming a local family but instead got distracted by rotting food and an interesting forthcoming dinner at Dirk’s with Slow Food Chicago (where at least I invoked the need to eat local fish). Today, let’s get back to the process of becoming a local family, and where I want to start is tell you how it’ll end. I mean not end eating local. Don’t ever stop eating local. I mean once you start eating local in April, what will it be like eating local by next March? What does a year of eating local look like?
April – The tastes of Spring – This is a great year to start eating local in April, but ordinarily, around here, April brings a limited but sharp taste to the table. This year, we are seeing much asparagus already in April. Ordinarily, we get asparagus around here in May and even into June. Instead, April mostly brings the first onions, and their related kin like the ready for backlash, ramps, and leeks. With storage onions mostly gone by April, we cook now with leeks and scallions, and it gives Spring it’s characteristic, unique, taste. Your preservation goals for April: a lot of people love to pickle ramps to have them around for the rest of the year.
May – More farmer’s markets open in May around the Chicago area, and several CSA farms are in the middle of their early seasons. May brings two types of crops. First, you get an array of indoor grown, hoop-house, produce. Typical crops include rocket, lettuces, chard and spinach. In addition, a lot of the first to market will be the same things you’ve been eating in the winter, roots like beets and turnips. The other group of May crops are all those shoots and leaves and stems first leaping towards the warming sun. Usually, you’ll find asparagus now. You’ll also find plants only edible in this early stage like ferns and nettles. An example of an edible stem is a vegetable more thought of as a fruit, rhubarb. Your preservation goals for May: Your new set of roots will last several weeks in your fridge, so don’t feel the need to use them at once. On the other hand, asparagus needs to be eaten or put-away as soon as possible. They make a nice snack or accessory, pickled. Frozen, they work fine in dishes where texture does not matter like soups and pasta. As rhubarb is always eaten cooked, freezing hardly effects things, so put some away this month.
June – The calendar turns to summer in June, but the Local Calendar very much says “Spring” this time of year, or at least what we’ve been educated over the years to think of as Spring food. You should be able to find peas and sugar snaps a lot. You should also be able to find the first fruit to eat out of hand, strawberries. Your preservation goals for June: Peas, like asparagus, don’t wait around for you. Eat them soon or freeze them soon. Since the passing of my grandfather, no one likes canned peas. On the other hand, who does not like strawberry jam.
July – We eat cherry pie on the fourth of July because that’s the time of year we have cherries to eat, right. We are fortunate to be in a part of the country with access to excellent cherries. In fact, those cold months we detest lead to these cherries we love. At the farmer’s market you can find sweet cherries and the tart cherries pictured above. Enjoy. At the farmer’s market, because by July, all the Chicago area farmer’s markets will be open and ample. Enjoy. The locavore gets, in July, the last of Spring, still plenty of cool weather crops like a run of broccoli, and the first of summer as tomatoes, especially smaller tomatoes, will sneak in. Your preservation goals for the July: take advantage of the limited cherry season. Like rhubarb, tart cherries are always cooked, so freeze just fine. They make all sorts of fine canned goods too, and be like the French and put some away in brandy for your winter drinking needs.
August – Who is not a locavore now. The markets are awash with fruits and vegetables. It is also the era of accessible and affordable. You will find local food in many neighborhood grocery stores. Look to your weekly supplements for reports of local. Get it because nothing beats the taste of local, like the taste of real tomatoes. I’m pretty convinced nothing beats the taste of our local fruits like Michigan peaches either. You will find it all now, from cukes to zukes. In the peak of summer, you will also, start to see the later crops, but note that summer apples, summer (sweet) onions, and summer (newly grown) potatoes, are a treat special to market shoppers. Your preservation goals for August: Put away as much as you can! Pickle patty pan squash. Put extra corn away in your freezer. Yes, it’s another one of those eat now or get away things. Do not, however, think to root cellar anything yet. It’s not cool enough, and the summer crops are not right for storage. Summer apples do make great sauce.
September – It looks mostly like August, with so much to eat. Like, you saw some apples in August, you will see more varieties of apples in September. All those fruits of the summer sun, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, will be joined by the beginning of fall foods like roots, and the cabbage family. Your preservation goals for September: Continue to put away as you can. This time of year brings the best tomatoes for sauce and the best peaches for jam. I love to get as much fresh oregano as I can to dry. You can also start stocking up a bit, your cold storage with squash, onions, garlic, and potatoes for the long haul.
October – October usually brings a mix of brutal and pleasant weather in this area. It can snow! Still, the markets look a lot more like summer than some might think as tomatoes, sweet corn, and such will be in ample supplies. While we know many chefs who will start throwing all sorts of squash and Brussels sprouts and celery root on their menu, we strongly encourage you in October to revel in the eggplants, zucchini, etc. still around. Your preservation notes for October: Get your root cellar stocked. Apples, root veg like carrots, potatoes. Think especially the kinds of apples and potatoes you won’t find later. Also, think things like garlic that you need to last. You may have more tomatoes to put away.
November – By November, a lot of the Chicago area farmer’s markets have wrapped up. The markets open, however, will have plenty of cold weather crops. You may also find a round of hoop-house fare. The November markets usually bring the best deals of the year. We often find in November, heirloom squash for a $1 per. This time of year, gets you green tomatoes, the last picked before hard frost. They make great pickles, but they also make great dishes featuring their piquant flavor. We like them in pasta sauce. We put our harvest festival, Thanksgiving, pretty much after the harvest, yet you can make your dinner from what’s around. Thanksgiving, though, is also the time to start opening your pickles and preserves. Your preservation goals for November look a lot like the month before, but with the added bonus of the cheaper produce. Besides pickling green tomatoes, they make great additions to relishes for canning.
December – What’s left? At the markets open, you will find the last crops of the year. You will find apples and potatoes. If the weather cooperates, farmers can also bring in from their fields, leeks, spinach, kale. These frost kissed vegetables are at their best this time of year. Use as much as you can from the markets. Some CSAs will still be dropping off through December. You will, however, also be cooking from the stores. Your preservation goals for December: As long as you find stuff, you can store stuff. Overall, your root cellar should be net positive in December.
January – Here’s where your work will start paying off. There are winter markets, but you’ll never know what you’ll find. Maybe some hoop-house lettuce this week. Maybe a farmer has some surplus carrots next week. You can rely on all the materials in cold storage, in the freezer and in the canning room. In addition, the winter diet turns much more to meats, to beans. You don’t have to give in to the tyranny of the fresh because you know local products, put away with care are better than the flown in food out there for others. This is the time of year to get your CSA. Your preservation goals for January: We don’t expect you to be putting away. Use what you have and supplement from what you may find.
February – The taste of winter remains a mix of the spinach find and the storage box. Who knows what you’ll bring home from the winter market. At home, get rid of your least hardy stored crops. Find your cabbage recipes, your greens recipes. Those potatoes, apples, sunchokes, they’ll last a bit longer. You start to think of sprouts and mushrooms as delicious additions to meals. Your preservation goals for February are to manage what’s there. One bad apple does spoil the bunch, so watch for them.
March – Here’s where things get tricky. As you read about Alice Waters serving green things to her customers you will be scrounging for anything left. Onions become not just an accessory but an entree. This is truly the hungry season, but with good planning and a bit of diligence, you can make it. By the end of the month, it is typical for watercress to be growing! Your preservation goals for March will be a combination of getting to the end and cleaning up what did not make it. As the weather warms, you may need to re-figure your cold storage spots.
Throughout the year, you can compare your fate to this Local Family. I would not be surprised if you do some things better. And when things look a bit stale, we hope we can provide a bit of inspiration. Your resources for the year, they can come from all the pages of the Local Beet. Use our Local Calendar to find events, our Market Locator to know where to go. We’ll have recipes and tips all year long from how to freeze asparagus to making your own root cellar. We strongly believe that the reasons to eat local don’t go away when the markets close. We believe you can eat local each month of the year.
Have a great local year!
UPDATE: We recently heard from someone very expert in the ways of the fishing industry, and he gave us some more information on local fish. See below.
Last week I exhorted that the time to start eating local was now. I promised that I would assist you on your journey by covering some basics on how to be a local family. And really, I have all sorts of things planned out for this series. Not the least, I have in mind a post (or posts) running through what to expect over a year of being a local family. Then, I had to stop, not just stop my lessons on being a local family, but my work on producing our Passover Sedar, to make a report on the remains of our local food inventory. I’m back. Back to give lessons on eating local. Yet, because of events on hand, I’m staying from the plan.
There’s probably a lot more important issues to cover in terms of eating local than local fish, but on the other hand, you should, for sure, include fish in your eat local diet. The Chicago area locavore has several options for fish, and for the sake of this post, let’s not assume you do your own fishing too. Your local fish comes from nearby freshwaters, primarily the Great Lakes, and it comes from nearby fish farms, including farmed tilapia and farmed rainbow trout.
Common fish found in the Chicago area*, at commercial outlets**:
What to do with your freshwater fish? Start by attending a dinner on April 24 being put on in a few weeks by Slow Food Chicago and local fishmonger, Dirk Fucik. Dirk and his wife Terry will convince you to eat local fish with a dinner of distinctive regional fare, including that invader, the Asian carp. The family-style dinner includes eight course that were caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways: smoked rainbow trout wraps, smoked whitefish spread, panko fried smelt, walleye sandwiches, Asian carp croquettes, plank-smoked lake trout, Tempura perch, and Dirk’s “Cook County” fish boil. To read more about the dinner and get tickets, go here.
Local fish, like a lot of things, goes well with bacon. We call it in the Bungalow, fish in a sweater.
Find a fresh, whole Great Lakes whitefish. Notice the bloody gills in this shot indicating freshness! Wrap in bacon. Roast in an oven pre-heated to 400 for about 15 minutes, or until bacon looks done. Enjoy.
UPDATE: We heard from local fish local fish maven, Carl Galvan, on the current state of our local fish. He write, “Over all, fishing is good on the Great Lakes!” He also notes that “perch harvests remains very stable” and “with the addition of the staples of whitefish, walleye & local trout.” Finally, he adds, “we are also expecting limited landings of Pumkinseed Sunfish, Batchawaka Bay Crappie & hopefully some Canadian Barbot [sic[]“.
*Other freshwater fish may be available in different parts of the Great Lakes region. For instance if you go to Washington Island, in Door County, you can find the king of Great Lakes fish, burbot, or “lawyers”.
**Even more freshwater fish available to those that catch their own, especially coho salmon. Do make friends with someone with a boat for this prize.
UPDATE: See below, for some new information on our inventory of local food.
I don’t really have time today to blog about being the Local Family, and the time I had to blog today about being the Local Family, I meant to continue my bloggy thoughts from the other day on you becoming an eat local follower. That was until I played my part in getting ready for tomorrow’s Passover Sedar at the Bungalow. Get the vegetables, a/k/a go through the crap. It’s the least I could do. And the least I can do now, now that I’ve gone through all the crap, is tell you about it.
As you know, the Local Family puts away a bunch of food to enable local eating in the winter. Some of the food is canned, some frozen, but the bulk of the food set aside is just set aside. We rely on an un-heated attic, an un-heated “mudroom”, even the garage. See, all you need to keep a lot of food around for several months is cold, dark, and a little moisture. We managed. To get an idea of what we had in the middle of winter, see this post. To get an idea of what was left today, read below.
At this point in the storage cycle, we have some usable food, and a lot of food we had to tank. Honestly, a bunch of the food tanked today was the kid’s fault. Yes, like any good parent, I know who to blame. We mostly relied on the younger members of the local family to move the stuff out of the attic as it warmed. The problem, we did not pay enough attention to where they put it, and they thought the basement “canning” room would make due. It mostly did not.
What We Tanked
What We Salvaged
What Was Fine Anyways
We’ve already gotten fresh, local, kale and fresh, local, lettuce to supplement what’s left. In only a week or so, our Tomato Mountain CSA starts*. I think we’re reckoning just fine.
Update – Used for Passover
Update – What We Added to Inventory at the Beginning of April
*My wife works for Tomato Mountain
A scene once from an Oak Park Farmer’s Market
I wish I can pin-point the exact date my family became a Local Family. I know from being a participant in Jen Maiser’s inaugural Eat Local Challenge that it was some time in the summer of 2005. About that first eat local challenge, I could probably dig around and find the links for this, but I know around then I was saying something like, “don’t ask me about the challenges of eating local in the summer, ask me later.” And we met the challenge of being a Local Family that summer, and we kept on going. We ate local in the Fall, not that hard. We kept doing it in the Winter, a bit harder. Ask me later, I kept on saying. In other words, I could not tell you if I could meet the challenge of eating locally until I met the challenge of eating locally. Now, about seven years later, I can safely say that it is no challenge. We eat local. Now is the time for you all to become local family’s too. Now as in this week or this month.
Like I say, I could not tell you if I could do it until I did it. I mean, I could tell you how I was eating local when it was summer. I went to a very fine farmer’s market in my community. The market had local fruits, local vegetables, local eggs, even local meat for my food needs. I could not tell you what I would do once the market closed. I could not tell you what I would do when it snowed and the ground turned hard. I knew I could put away food. I did not know, however, what it would be like putting away food for the winter. I did not know how much we would need. I did not know how much of it would last. I did not know what I would find if we used up all our put away food. I cannot say we did it exactly right that first year, nor can I say we did it too wrong either. We’ve learned a lot about how to eat local all the time. Not just how to put away for dark times, but how to source local food year round. What I’m getting at, is you just cannot say you are going to eat local.
You need to start. You do not need to finish once you start, but you need to start and you need to think past the start. Think about eating local food this week. Next week. Think about eating local food when the farmer’s markets are complete, and think about eating local food when there are not many farmer’s markets. I’m telling you to start now.
Now is a good time to start for a few reasons. Most importantly, it only makes sense to start when you can readily find local foods. If you had not put away food, and you wanted to start eating local in January, you probably would have had an odd diet of apples and potatoes. This year, with climate change, the start of April brings enough to our markets to get you going as a locavore. The other main reason I want you to start eating local now is to get you attune to the pleasures of seasonal eating. Our markets may hardly contain the Spring Bounty of Alice Waters, but we have stuff. The earliest nettles and Spring greens help cleanse the body from winters heavy foods. Gorge on the real taste of asparagus because it you cannot have that in a few months. You will soon taste the best strawberries you ever had, and about when they are gone, there will be sweet and tart cherries, the other berries. Midwest orchards will eventually supply you with juicy peaches and nectarines. Each in their time will taste best because you will be tasting it as nature intended.
I convinced my family to be a Local Family because I love-loved my Oak Park Farmer’s Market. I loved shopping there weekly. I loved finding all the products not found in the supermarkets. The many colors of tomatoes, the names of apples I never knew. I loved talking with the Nichols, Farmer Vicki, Dennis and Emily Wettstein. I wanted to buy all my food from them. Buy my food from them, the farmer’s market, was how we decided to eat local. Eating local, of course, required more than what I could find at the Oak Park Farmer’s Market. We managed to do that. We also managed to find all sorts of other reasons to eat local. I always offer up this paraphrase of Upton Sinclair when talking about eating local. I say, we came for the stomach, and ended up realizing in our heads, all the reasons to eat local. Find your own reasons to eat local, although if you need some help, there is this list.
Later in the week, I will cover some of the basics on how to be a local family. For now, the best thing you could do is don’t make yourself nuts trying to eat local. This Local Family has never believed in 100 mile or 200 mile or any hundred mile limits. We don’t think we cannot eat it, if we can not source it. Hey, I just took a sip of coffee. I wrapped up my lunch today with a small piece of dark chocolate (what I’ve taken to calling anti-oxidants). We dressed our local beans last night with Greek olive oil. We don’t advocate for purity. We do advocate for two principles. First, if we can get it locally, then we get it locally. Second, we prefer the local. So, the former means when faced at Caputo’s with apple choices, we get the Michigan apples; the latter means that although we’ll eat plenty of oranges and bananas we try to eat even more apples and pears. It also means that even thought the world is filled with wonderful products, we mostly stick with the wonderful products close at hand. That’s how we keep to being a Local Family. Figure out how you want to be a local family. Now is the time to do it.
If you think the that Chicago area locavores thought the deepest, darkest, coldest, cruelest time of year was winter, you would be wrong. If you thought we eat localers griped the most during January and February you would be wrong. We gripe the most in March and April. I summarized some of the gripes last week. I complained about too many otherwise locally focused chefs jumping ahead this time of year. I feel too many look to what is in season elsewhere, not what is in season here-where. Today, I get on to the more serious gripe, that our best intentions for Spring get stymied by the lack of outlets for Spring produce in the Chicago area.
To battle our Springs issues, it helps mostly to understand what is in season in April and May in our part of the world. Hint: it’s not peas, artichokes and fava beans. Maybe not this year, but nearly any other year, it’s not asparagus either. It is not, as I griped about last week, the stuff that fills too many menus of the restaurants “tired of winter”. What we can eat in the Spring are three types of things. First, we can have a robust harvest of hoop-house crops. This includes hearty greens and small roots. Second, farmers can start wringing from their fields, rhubarb, green garlic, leeks and other early onions. Third, we can eat the first shoots and leaves that burst fourth as the globe slowly tilts us closer to the sun. For instance, watercress can start sprouting even when there is snow on the ground. Look around. My lawn is already fully in-bloom with dandelions. A forager could find stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, ramps, and various other edible plants all around. The problem remains, not what is in season, it’s where to find it.
Ten or so years ago, Mike Gebert raved about the multiple courses of “hillbilly food”, a/k/a ramps, served by the then, VERY avant garde, Grant Achatz, at Trio [the link to MikeG's Chowhound post appears lost, but this other Trio thread mentions the hillbilly reference.] Now, sometime Beet reporter Mark Smrecek, claims there is a ramp backlash. Between then and now, ramps have become the signature plant for chef’s looking to show their committment to Spring. To me though, ramps also epitomize the inability of every day eat local eaters to get their hands on Spring. Ask yourself every time you see a reference to ramps on a Spring menu, where did they get that ramp?
The potential to get your Spring ramps does get easier in 2012. For the first time (I believe), there will be key farmer’s markets in Evanston and Green City Market during March and April. Other farmer’s markets are getting a-goin’ earlier too. We used to have no farmer’s markets to shop this time of year. We now have some farmer’s markets to shop this time of year. Yet, the larger question remains, will be able to find ramps at these markets?
It’s not just outlets. The problem with Spring is that a lot of the produce is not cultivated. I mean does a farmer grow nettles? So, to get this fruits of Spring, one needs to forage. Now, one of the great things about running an organic farm like Marty Travis of Spence Farms, is that anything that touches your fields, assuming the lack natural poisons, can be eaten. So, some farmers roam their fields for the cress coming up near the creek, the wild onions rampant. That helps. Those farmers may be good enough for a chef or two, us? What about a freelance forager, can they supply us?
As far as I know, or can tell, our area farmer’s markets have no vehicle for letting seasonal foragers in for a few weeks. This is different in Madison. If you go to the Dane County Farmer’s Market in April, when it first hits the streets for the season, you find guys and gals who come just to sell the morels they gather. The bottom line, you will find a lot to buy there in Spring. Here, what you can buy mostly looks like what you can buy months earlier. You know, canned salsa, eggs, good cheese…soap. And those other crops of spring, the hoop-house turnips and bunches of leeks, they’re fine for keeping us from starving, but they’re not what makes us excited. We want to eat what’s new too.
I gripe when area chefs cheat Spring by using produce not around at all in this area. I gripe even more though when area chefs use products that are around that I have a hard time getting. I have a big gripe over local eating in the Chicago area over the ability for consumers to get their hands on ramps, morels and than other items they see on good menus.
Would not you want to eat those now?
It’s pretty common in Chicago to go straight from Winter to Summer but usually that happens around June. This year we seemed to have hit summer a week before the calendar said Spring. Besides rarely getting great Spring weather around here, we rarely get great Spring produce around here. Clearly, some of the gripes of Spring come from our northernly zone. When they’re harvesting their asparagus in California, our grounds may still be frozen rock hard, or if they are no longer frozen, they’re big pits of mud and incapable of providing food. Still, there’s stuff of Spring that we could get better. Our inability to have more local food this time of year has me griping. Today, I’ll gripe about the fact that too many otherwise locally focused chefs jump ahead when it comes to Spring. In a future post, I’ll talk about the bigger gripe, the lack of outlets, locally, for Spring produce.
Imagination draws to pictures of Spring foods. First, there’s the pastoral lamb, ready just in time to break the fast. Second, there’s all those early risers, shoots and leaves and tiny bulbs. Our stacks and stacks of Mediterranean cookbooks tell us that Spring brings us peas and tiny carrots; fava beans and the artichoke crop. Asparagus should have been around for a while by mid-March. There is no better source for what a Spring menu looks like than Alice Water’s always changing offerings at Chez Pannisse. It’s all there this week, the peas, the asparagus, the favas; wild mushrooms and spring greens. Man it sounds good.
Too good for Chicago area chef’s to pass. Listen, I’m not going to name names here. There are too many chefs that I wholly respect. Too many chefs that do so much already for our eat local scene. I’m not going to blame anyone specifically. Still, there’s too many folks out there who work so hard to rely on locally-focused menus, even in Winter, that just cheat this time of year. Even something like ramps, they’ll jump ahead and get from some other part of the country. You hear how they’re tired of root vegetables. You hear that they’re just anxious to throw something new on the menu. You might even hear that “Antinious” defense, that eating artichokes and favas this time of year is a measure of cultural pride, the same way one eats a cream filled donut on St. Joseph’s Day. I hear all of those arguments, and I find them all very good arguments.
Let us, however, not give in to good arguments. After all, don’t we also have a good argument: eat local! Now, you ask, “Rob, does not the Local Family eat plenty of oranges and such in the winter, and don’t you drink too much coffee anyways, since when were you such a stickler.” Right, I’m not a stickler, and I see nothing wrong with eating in-season citrus. Yet, we find a distinct difference between something that is never in season locally, a tangerine, and something that will be in season locally, like asparagus. Moreover, when we’re going for the citrus shelf, we really have no other choices. Spring time, the locavore does have choices. Maybe the choice is to stick it out with storage crops a bit longer. Maybe it’s time to finally dig into the stash of sunchokes in the back of the fridge. It is very possible to eat local in the Chicago area in March and April, and if it’s possible to eat local, than we should be eating local.
At the end of the day, the greatest thing about eating local, I think, is to have a true taste of Chicago, a cuisine of Chicago. Too much still, Chicago area chefs look to the tastes of elsewhere, especially to the Med, Spain and Italy, for their tastes. Yet, the most interesting restaurants in the world, I mean the very, very, most toppest restaurant in the world, Noma, is one known for its obsession for creating a taste of place. The most sophisticated eaters of the world realize that eating local matters. Part of the taste of Chicago is how it tastes in March and April. That taste will arrive when the leaders of our cuisine use what’s available in March and April. What if, however, the available of March and April mostly consists of imported peas and asparagus.
We hear that gripe too, and we realize it’s hard to make Spring food when there’s not a lot of places to get Spring food. Well, this year, we have to gripe a little less because there will be thriving Spring farmer’s markets at Green City and Evanston as well as a few other area markets. Gripe less we will, but stay tuned for Part 2 of the Gripes of Spring.
A winter of eating local sure ended early this season for the Local Family. As in the past several seasons, we made it through the darkest days on local food. We did this primarily by stocking away a good portion of food obtained in our late season Tomato Mountain CSA*–you can see what our food looked like in January here. We also made key purchases at area farmer’s markets in November and December; we got a lot in a run to South Bend where we also purchased a Thanksgiving turkey. Finally, we supplemented over the winter. When Caputo’s put Illinois grown beets on sale, we grabbed. We added a bushel of Hillside Orchard apples. At the Evanston Winter Farmer’s Market we picked up onions and celery root from Nichol’s. There always seemed to be Tomato Mountain hoop-house, frost kissed, spinach when we needed it. Of course we ate seasonal citrus and the always in season banana, but we maintained, again, our locavore lifestyle.
The other day we began the migration. Winter, the benefit of cold weather, went away way too soon. To keep our local food around we relied on an un-heated “mudroom” outside our kitchen and an un-heated attic over our living room. Both of these environments stay, during the winter, in a good preservation range, between freezing and fifty (although the mudroom did get too cold at times). We kept root vegetables, apples, spinach, leeks and potatoes as well as onions and winter squash. For instance, many a-day, the Local Kids went off to school with some slices of root cellar turnips as the veg component of their lunch. It aint cold now, and whatever cold returns, it aint gonna be food preservation cold. We needed the food out.
Over the last few days, we’ve–I mean, they’ve since I busted up my foot real bad playing basketball, I get to opt out of the migration–lugged food out of the attic and cleaned out the mudroom. A lot of what’s left, we’re keeping. Apples, eat apples, we push the remaining apples on the kids. There’s a ton of potatoes we have now in the cooler basement. There’s a bushel filled with assorted local onions. That’s just now in the kitchen. The roots that looked fine went in the basement fridge, but we culled out a lot of turnips for compost. A Cinderella squash still decorates a room.
Ordinarily, the period of migration commences the hardest period for locavoring. What to do between the root cellar and the new roots? After all, our next CSA does not start until mid-April. This was a period where we relied on the heartiest crops, sunchokes and celery root, and we made much use of onions as vegetables. Still, the early migration this year also portends a very early (I strongly believe) arrival of new food. At the Spring markets like Evanston and Green City, I expect to see, very soon, lettuces, rocket, radishes. I expect soon after that, the first crops of baby turnips and baby beets. The big irony of local eating around here is that after months of root crops and hearty greeens, the first things to arrive are root crops and hearty greens. We don’t mind because we like being the Local Family. And we always seem to have local food to eat where ever in the house we keep it.
*One member of the Local Family is employed by Tomato Mountain Farm
