Eat Local Eggs

Some Help

On this blog I've tried to encourage the eating of local mostly by showing that it can be done, and also showing how pleasurable it can be. What I want to do more, in 2008, is be a bit more specific.

I linked to Hat Hammond's post the other day on local eggs because of the way it glorified the product (and not the least the nice pics and nice prose). I realized afterwards that readers would not want just to be tempted, to get a vicarious thrill. They'd want local eggs too. In the thread, Hammond mentions that Marion Street Cheese in Oak Park had local, farm eggs. I mention a few other egg options.

During the farmer's market season, it's possible to find eggs, at least in some markets--I know it's possible at Green City, Oak Park and Evanston. What about now. Well, you can try this site, which has a listing of egg producers in Illinois. Terragusta, on Addison, used to sell eggs from Country Cottage, a farm in Illinois; I'm not sure that they do now as I have not been there in ages. The Country Cottage web site lists one store in Chicago that sells their eggs.

The Wettstein's bring stuff to Oak Park's Buzz Cafe about once a month, and they usually bring eggs. Ann Fisher usually posts when they will show on LTHForum.

Has anyone been to the Geneva Winter Market (today and all Thursdays)? I imagine they have an egg vendor. Information on other winter markets can be found here.

What's Local (about Now) in Michigan

Prelude

Here's an eat local conundrum. If a Chicagoan, running low of local foods, jets off to Los Angeles to hit the Santa Monica Farmers Market, considered one of the best markets in the USA, and one in full bloom now as in summer, buys a bunch of stuff, is he eating local?

To eat local in the winter, in a northern zone like Chicago, one must rely on stored food or farmers that take extraordinary means to coax food. Our stored food dwindles; we can only get so much from Farmer Vicki. With the kidz off of school for two days, we hit the trail looking for local. We did not get as far as Santa Monica. What made more sense, we'd go to Michigan.

Most of Michigan is more than 100 miles from my bungalow, but the family and I do not limit our localness to 100 miles. We count the whole state of Michigan from its tartest cherries at the tip to the abundance of Zingerman goat cheeses at the other end of the mitt as part of our local. Like Wisconsin, who we also include in its entirety, Michigan is a state with an abundant local food culture. I guess when the key food crop of your home state is high fructose corn syrup it helps to look afield. Our plan included the Ann Arbor Farmers Market, the above mentioned Zingerman's, and Detroit's Eastern Market. On the way to Michigan, we hoped to finally hit the American Countryside Farmer's Market in Elkhart.

We really hoped to find some roots, especially rutabaga, which we have none, as well as more beets, more carrots are always useful, perhaps some celery root; we'd be even happy with more turnips. Stored, winter cabbage would be especially cool. After four days on the road, we found none of that. We did come back with some local foods (and had quite a few good meals too).

What's Local in Martha's Vineyard

NYTimes On the Case - "On Martha’s Vineyard, Using Scallops as Currency"

Even in January, her hours in the kitchen have a purpose. Sitting in the bright oak post-and-beam room built by her husband, Richard Osnoss, a carpenter, Ms. Buhrman explained that she tries to eat only food raised on Martha’s Vineyard and to go down island to the grocery store in Vineyard Haven as little as possible...“You can buy heirloom tomatoes in the winter from God knows where and they don’t taste anything like the ones from Caitlin’s farm on Middle Road in Chilmark.” The contrast between summer produce at its peak and what is available off season drives Ms. Buhrman to find new ways of putting up summer fruits and vegetables. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

It's a good article (link, but reg. req.) with a couple of good winter recipes--although I quibble that a recipe includes Vidalia or sweet onions, a VERY NOT winter product. What I don't quite quibble about the article, but what makes me quibbly [ed. quibbly?] is the whole ruralness of the scene. What I mean is that I greatly admire and appreciate stories like this, but there is a distinct difference between eating local as part of a farming community and eating local in a suburban community like Oak Park. I'm not jealous per se, not frustrated per se, just, well, quibbley.

Eat Local Eggs

David the Hat Hammond Testifies

I can do no worse on this blog than to crib from pieces like this, Hammond's excellent tribute to local, farm eggs he is getting from Farmer Vicki's Genesis Growers. Needless to say, in a hopeless act of me-tooism, we get our eggs also from Farmer Vicki.

Drink Local Vodka

DiVine


From Gaper's Block:

DiVine Vodka Reception @ Brasserie Jo
Head to Brasserie Jo tonight from 5-8pm for an hors d'oeuvres reception sponsored by DiVine vodka, a Michigan-based distiller. Cost is $25 for food (which will be made with DiVine vodka) and cocktails; call 312-595-0800 to reserve your spot.

I like eating local. Sure, I want to reduce my food miles; I like keeping money in the (relatively) local economy, and I like the fact I can actually visit the factory. But mostly, I'm parochial about my food. I root for my team. Maybe not all local vodkas taste good. I know of three: DiVine, North Shore Distillery and Death's Door. I've only tried the first two. Needless to say, I like drinking local. Don't just believe me, see what Chicago Mag has to say (pdf). DiVine is made from grapes, and yes there is a grapiness to the vodka (in a good way).

I cannot make the event tomorrow. I will enjoy some DiVine vodka.

Blog Updates

I've finally gotten around to updating my blog roll, adding some good eat local resources as well as a few of my favorite places. In addition, I've added a section for background information. This section is for those who have picked up the quest to eat local in the middle of the adventure.

The Inventory

Lettuce + Potatoes + Apples = Happy Localvore

Updated 2/11/08
I recorded our inventory of local foods on December 20, 2007. Since that date, we have tried to eat all our meals at home using solely our local ingredients (but for our standard exceptions such as olive oil, spices, etc.). The moderating force against our inventory is that we eat out a lot still. My wife and I will go out for some lunches, and at least a few times each weekend, the family visits some restaurant. Plus, we took a winter holiday and a just completed a road trip to Michigan--to be reported as I have time. We eat local, but we are not totally local.

I have copied what I reported back in December. Changes made before today are in CAPS. New changes are in italics.

Meat and egg supplies remain strong, we have increased our supply of locally grown dry beans, increased our supplies of locally grown grains, and increased our supply of locally produced cheeses.

Cranberries - about twelve packages - HAVE NOT TOUCHED, HOPEFULLY THE CRANBERRIES REMAIN EDIBLE - fingers crossed
Pie pumpkins - maybe 4 - STILL VIABLE - NO CHANGE - fingers crossed
Celery - 2 bunches - SEVERAL STALKS, BUT IT'S GETTING SOFT - really soft
Herbs - ROSEMARY AND SORREL - NO CHANGE/SEE BELOW - have used some rosemary
Winter squash - plenty including acorn, delicata, turban and butternut - MEDIUM STOCK - NO CHANGE - No change
Keeper onions - GOOD STOCK - NO CHANGE - See below/obtained 3 lbs
Sweet potatoes - GOOD STOCK - NO CHANGE - Low stock, had to toss several moldy
Garlic - about 25 heads - VERY GOOD STOCK - NO CHANGE - No change
Cabbage 1 whole/1 half - WHOLE HEAD REMAINS, SOME BROWNING - SEE BELOW
Sunchokes - UNCHANGED - No Change
Carrots - LOW STOCK - NO CHANGE - Dwindling
Parsnips LOW STOCK - NO CHANGE - No change
Beets - LOW STOCK - TOSSED SOME - No change
Turnips - MEDIUM STOCK - NO CHANGE - No change
Potatoes - SOME CONSUMED, SOME TOSSED - OBTAINED 1 LB OF RED; OBTAINED 10 LB OF RED - VERY GOOD STOCK - SEE BELOW - See below/obtained 5 lbs
Apples - SOME CONSUMED - OBTAINED 20+ POUNDS INCLUDING GRANNY SMITH, IDA RED; VERY GOOD STOCK - SEE BELOW - See below/Obtained 3 lbs

ADDITIONS SINCE 1/24/08
Lettuce - 3 bags of romaine - 1 remaining
Cabbage - 2 heads - No change
Herbs - parsley, cilantro - No change
Microgreens - 1/2 left
Peashoots - No change
Potatoes - 10lbs, red - No change/obtained 5 lbs (used some of the newest)
Apples - red delicious, fuji - Consumed many/obtained 3 lbs
Mushrooms - baby portobello, mixed oyster/shitake - Consumed all/obtained 1 lb shitake & 1 lb oyster (cultivated)

Other Additions since 2/9/08
Lettuce - 5 bags mixed greens
Grains - hard wheat, soft wheat, wheat berries (consumed some)
Celery root - 2 lbs

OTHER SUBTRACTIONS
From the freezer: broccoli, cauliflower, peas, ASPARAGUS, greens - freezer stocks remain good

Food is Not Forever

Strike from the inventory, a very (very) moldy delicata squash found this morning in the attic as well as two sweet potatoes with at least enough mold to trash. With all our Local as We Wanna Be meals of late, the supplies are dwindling. We are off today to explore Indiana and then over the weekend, Michigan. We hope to return with some precious winter produce.

Shop the Green City Market (Kinda)

Chicago's Green City Market has gone into hibernation. Via their newsletter, here's a link where you can shop some of the vendors who regularly market at Green City.

Vie Menu Posted

About Time!

Not my last visit to Vie, but some time last fall, I was chatting with Vie Chef and Owner, Paul Virant at the bar. Somewhere or another the Internet menu thing came up. To my chagrin, Chef Virant confessed that updating the menu on the Vie web site was about his lowest priority each day. Still, I barely get to my middle priorities, every once in a while, Paul even gets to his lowest priorities. In other words, after days of pumping up his site's numbers, I found myself with a new menu. See how Vie's coping with the winter.

You Know You Are a Localvore When

Mashed Turnips

Eating local did not end with the shipment of the first peach in January. I've been poking away, a bit at Ann Vileisis's intriguing new book, Kitchen Literacy. She discusses the rise of modern food sensibility, away from eating local. Speaking of the rise of Del Monte canned goods in the 1920's:

The message was unequivocal: In earlier times, Mother Nature had merited the reputation of providing over and over again. Her unending abundance was considered miraculous in its own right. But in the modern order, it was no longer dazzling enough to merely to provide a yearly harvest. Annihilating distance, merging seasons, and accumulating all harvests, it was technology of the human can that now deserved reverence and awe.

She goes on to show how Del Monte lured eaters with promises of abundant farms in California, Oregon and Hawaii. The can made consumers want their food, that food, not the food grown nearby.

Their food seemed sexier, more glamorous. Why, because our food, Northern food, northern food, winter food, consisted of beets and rutabagas and turnips. Depression food. If you could, you'd rather a nice can of food. There was a time when the finest restaurants would not think twice about serving those canned peas. Famous French dishes were built around the canned peach. Yet, now, in the modern era, we take our mashed turnips and we like it.

I cannot tell you how happy it made me last night when I saw my peeling away at some turnips. First of all, she was doing some wise culling, finding the most sprouting thing in the basement fridge. Second, she was making mashed turnips. Am I a lucky guy. She did balance the bite of the turnips with Yukon Gold potatoes. I cannot give you the rest of the recipe because she banished me from the kitchen before the actual mashing process (for whatever reason she's not keen on me publishing her recipes, she would not let me know all the spicing on her cholent the other day to keep me from posting its recipe). There was obviously butter and cream and salt, and all I can say is it was not just me who liked it. The kidz had two portions.

Eat Local Foods

In a lucid moment where I thought I was working, I ran across this Wikipedia entry on local foods of the Midwest. I cannot speak to its full accuracy or otherwise endorse it, but as a reference check, it's pretty useful.

Riddle Me This: What's Neither Green nor Stew

Lunch Out Flo

Answer: green chile stew at Flo (1434 W. Chicago). Actually, I generally like the New Mexico-ish food at Flo, but yesterday's red soup with three, count 'em three pieces of chicken did not hit the spot. Still, I blog not to trash Flo, but to praise them. See, toward the end of the meal, after we had received our bill, I mentioned the riddle of the day to our server. With hardly a second to think about it, he gave the best answer possible to the problem. He offered to take the stew off my bill. No prompting. Like I say, I've generally liked what I've had at Flo, and as much as I did not enjoy what I ordered yesterday, I left with a good taste in my mouth.

Of course I should stop here, but I cannot help but compare to an experience at Burger Bar in Las Vegas about a month ago. This was really fool me once, OK, fool me twice, I'm the fool, kinda place. I had a mediocre experience there last year, but had convinced myself it could have been an aberration. Anyways, yada-yada, there was a turkey burger, and yada-yada, it sucked. Greasy fowl-flavored liver on a bun I think my wife called it. As we were sharing, we each tried, resulting in a burger with only two bites taken. The unfinished burger sat on our table all during dinner. No comment. Finally at check time, when I got the obligatory how were things (I mean if you don't wanna know, don't ask...). I said this turkey burger tastes like fowl-flavored liver, explaining the pun. See that's fowl as in poultry. No I did not say anything quite like that, but I did say we thought the turkey burger sucked. Nicely, I said it nicer. And the waiter was like. Cool, dude, never heard that before. Picked up the charge card and ran the full amount.

Local's Where You Find It

What's Local at the Restaurant Supply House

My wife and I have an in that allows us to shop at the restaurant supply house. Unfortunately you cannot walk in and buy the local stuff we found today. Still, if it's at the wholesaler, it may show up somewhere by you. Look. Local IS where you find it (I mean the other day we had a blast finding local at the River Forest Jewel, including Michigan oatmeal, I just did not take good notes to post on it.)

Local at the supply house: incredibly vivid bass from the Great Lakes. They wisely angled the fish to show its magenta gills; not pretty but key for those in the know. Other freshwater fish today included lake trout fillets, lake smelts, rainbow trout, whitefish and carp. There were ten pound and fifty pound bags of Wisconsin potatoes and three pound bags of Michigan apples.

Local as I Wanna Be

Monday Through Friday - Winter



Day 1



Baked local winter squash from storage, Wisconsin maple syrup; chicken and dumplings: hen from John's Live Poultry (5955 W. Fullerton, Chicago), local carrots and parsnips from storage, local peas from freezer, dumplings made with local corn meal.





Day 2



Wisconsin farmed raised rainbow trout from Whole Foods (see here) with local red potatoes from storage.



Day 3


Imported salumi, imported olives, indeterminate packaged artichokes, imported prosciutto, Wisconsin provolone, house-made, hand made mozzarella from Caputo's Cheese Market; imported pasta with local broccoli--broccoli recently harvested from Illinois hoop house--imported Parmesan cheese, local garlic from storage.


Day 4



Mixed greens recently harvested from Illinois hoop house, imported feta cheese; imported pasta with jarred pasta sauce from Tomato Mountain--locally grown, locally produced.






Day 5



That's roasted vegetable, before and after. The veg, all from storage: sweet potato, parsnips, turnips, delicata squash and carrot.

The core of the meal, Jewish cassoulet or cholent. Rumor has it that both cassoulet and the Spanish bean and meat dish, cocido ARE based on cholent, the dish meant to stew while the ovens cannot be re-lit. Not keeping kosher, nor sticking around for a Saturday lunch, we have our cholent for Shabbat dinner.

Michigan dried beans, storage local onions, storage local potatoes, local beef, local eggs. Both the eggs and the meat comes from Farmer Vicki's Genesis Growers (as does a lot of the other stuff we ate this week.)

Day 6

Pancakes made with local flour and local, frozen blueberries. Maple syrup, local.

Considering the Celery

A happy arrival of celery in Farmer Vicki's box got me thinking. And writing my long over-due contribution to the EatlocalChallenge blog. Link

How to Eat Local

Cheater's Paradise

Not that I've conducted a comprehensive survey or anything, but the feeling seems to be, you cannot eat local all the time in Chicago. After all, our growing season is just too limited. Farmer's markets do not get rolling until late May and close up shop come October. Cannot be done. Maybe, if you cheat.

What if you have a super-secret source that grows vegetables for you during the dead of winter. She also parcels out crops kept well stored including giant onions and red apples. Is it cheating because she only sells her wares to a few?

Don't care. I'm damn lucky to be friends with Farmer Vicki of Genesis Growers, and I'm damn glad she trucks out to Oak Park even in January. The picture is of the haul. Head lettuce, mesculun, turnips, carrots, celery, rosemary and broccoli all grown in her greenhouses; plus an onion and apples from storage. I cannot be that pissed that she cut but forgot the parsley. It was so nice to sit down the other day, in a the bungalow well insulated from the cold, to a nice, locally grown, just picked, green salad.

Eating local year round in Chicago is not easy. It is possible. It helps, of course, to cheat.

Culling the Heard

Strike these from the inventory: about five shriveled parsnips that had somehow escaped bagging in the basement fridge; a beet or two likewise on the lam; cabbage sprouts that I never knew quite what to do with anyways and some broccoli that I did not even realize we had. On the other hand, we did find usable broccoli that we also did not know we had.

The inventory did grow this week, but that's for another post.

PS
I did find the 50 # bag of Wisconsin russets off to the side in the attic. No sign yet if this weeks warm-up is harming things.

First Impressions, Fine

MenuPages Fallout Fallout

I respect, admire, and appreciate what Adam Peltz does with his blog, MenuPages.com/Chicago; in some ways his aggregation and comments of reviews was what I originally had in mind for this blog. He does it a lot better than I could have done, and I'm happy to have the Eat Local beat. Anyways, Adam takes a little umbrage with the early reviews of Lao Beijing on LTHForum

Yes, editorkid, we agree with you. Newly opened restaurants should get a chance to get settled before they're reviewed, and the more influence a reviewer has, the more he or she should abide by this code of conduct. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to put the genie back into the bottle. LTHForum could establish a policy of not allowing reviews for restaurants less than a month old, say, but this is both unlikely to happen and almost beside the point, anyway. The rabid foodies of the Internet cannot be made to follow rules in the quest for information (and to be first).

Nope. Count me as one who does not agree, nor with his commentor, editorkid who first raised the issue. It is basic. Commerce, if you charge for a meal, you should expect the customer to be satisfied. And you should be aware that someone is going to talk about it, online or off.

I'm all for cutting a restaurant some slack in its opening, to the extent that it needs slack, but I also do not believe the slack should stay hidden. With some places, as in the restaurant in question here, Lao Beijing, early eaters may be able to put the experience in context against the track record of the owner. So, for instance, G Wiv, who has eaten at other places owned by the owner of Lao Beijing expects things to improve. Perhaps. On the other hand, how can a restaurant improve if they do not get critical feedback. Also, first impressions, even mixed experiences, can drive traffic to a place. There's not much experience in Chicago with Northern or Beijing style Chinese food. Just hearing about meals at Lao Beijing will raise interest in this style of food and get people to try for themselves. Besides, foodies are gonna talk about their experiences whether they post it or not. Would not the restaurant, besides the public, be better that this chat take place in the open?

I surely concede that there can be problems if the reviewer does not inform the reader that the place is new, assuming, of course (and it's not always obvious) that they know it's a new place. Without such information, the reader cannot put the experience in the right context. Yet, the failure of some reviewers (and this is not the case cited) to best disclose does not mean that any and all first peek reviews should stop. Once a place is taking your money, they are fair game as far as I can see.

Eat Local, A Trend

Jealous Too

Via Ramon's LinkTH's, I found my way to this web site spotting trends. First, they tell us about a store in Sussex, the United Kingdom, that only sells food produced within 50 miles of the store. Then, they point out this store in Brooklyn that will primarily sell food and dry goods produced less than 100 miles from Brooklyn.