A Swing and a Miss
Or the Perils of Straying

What a price I pay for being non-local. And I am not talking about the $15 for a chunk of fresh mozzarella. We went to Caputo’s Cheese Market in Melrose Park intending to eat local. Asparagus purchased that day at Chicago’s Green City Market, steamed; topped with a farm egg, fried in local butter. All we needed to accent, the smallest portion of imported Parmesan Regianno. We could have used local, heck Kraft is based in the Chicago area, but we are snobs. We had to have the real thing.

There are days when you do not feel like shopping, and there are days when the money’s burning a hole in your pocket. We went to Green City in a shopping mood. We expected to get all the foods to enhance our Eat Local efforts that have been hard to get of late. Local meat, local eggs, and especially, local grains. Surely, because it took me an hour to go from Damen and North to actually shopping at the market, having to fork over $4 to boot for a parking space, I was not predisposed towards liking the market. We found our grain guy, Wilmont Milling, who stone grinds in Indiana, missing. (He would be there on Saturdays.) Some of our favorite meat guys, like Land Connection/Wettstein and Milwaukee’s Growing Power (for their chickens) were not there. All of a sudden, the prices seemed high, the selections not what we wanted. We got the barest of necessities: winterized parsnips, chives with flower, and the harbinger, asparagus; also some delicious apple butter from Seedlings, equally delicious goat cheese from Prairie Fruits Farm and equally equally delicious cheeses (butterkase and cheddar) from Prairie Pure Cheese. Plus, the littlest of meat purchases, chicken livers and ham hocks from Twin Oaks Meat.

Our quench to buy exploded at Caputo’s. It started local, a giant (and I mean giant) torpedo of Wisconsin Provolone beckoned. We grabbed a chunk. Then a chunk of this, a chunk of that. So many cheeses at these prices, mostly $5/lb (or less), shrink wrapped for time, we got local and not local. Then, we got to the fresh mozza. Caputo’s makes their own, and they have won the blue ribbon several times at the Illinois State Fair. What were we thinking when we saw giant balls of imported mozzarella di buffalo. Well, I was thinking, how fresh could it be? They told me it had come in just today. Could that be true? I took them on their word. Go for it. Splurge.

We re-wrote the menu. Out the Lombard style asparagus (scroll down for the recipe). In, a deli style dinner focused on our imported mozzarella. We assumed that this one outstanding ingredient would dominate the meal. To accent, we got a few slices of Parma ham, some eggplant salad and some weird spinach pancakes that would be our hot course. We had good crusty bread, pickled vegetables and olives at home. It seemed like a good meal, and only later did I realize I was subconsciously imitating Johnny Apple from earlier in the day (reg. required).

It started with the mozzarella. It just did not blow me away. There was a complexity to it. It tasted a bit more like goat cheese. Still, the flavors were muted. There was no epiphany. It drove the whole meal down. It did not help that the spinach pancakes were awful, the eggplant salad dry. I liked the ham a lot but it was a losing battle. Some times you have an idea and it does not work. Every time I drag my family to some new restaurant that sucks, I say, you have to kiss some frogs to find your prince. Not a restaurant per se but a frog nonetheless. And what happens, I suppose when we go non-local.