Harvesting and Processing; Final Fall activities

One of the last garden chores
was digging potatoes.

Finally, time to put my feet up for a couple of minutes, and post. Our CSA has had it's last delivery, the gardens are put to sleep. Any "putting up" for winter is done. Bags of beans, peppers, sliced apples, cubed pumpkin, and more were put into bags and frozen. I hot-water canned jars of apple butter, pickles and peach chutney. I have in no way processed everything we'd need until asparagus, lettuce and spinach starts popping up, but I did what I could in between a busy work and family schedule and other chores. As much as I'd like to claim local self-sufficiency, it won't be this year.

Our fall CSA shares were full of squashes, turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables that keep well in cool conditions. I loaded a couple of largestorage bins with veggies, punched a few holes for ventilation, and put them in the crawl space under our mud room in a make-shift root-cellar. I've noticed already that leafy greens and apples keep much, much better this way than in the refrigerator.

The first weekend in November was auspicious as that was the last day the horses were at the farm. They get boarded out to a couple of friends for the winter. That meant my husband needed to take action on the goat. He had purchased a billy goat in the spring. The timing was that the goat would be a companion for Mack, our older horse, when he was alone on our property. But Doug's intention was always to fatten up the goat to butcher at the end of the year. Well, the end of the year had arrived, and it was time for that task. One of the local hunters put Doug in touch with a farmer who processed his deer. The farmer came out, butchered the goat right on the property. Doug went back with him and helped him process the goat. Being a yogi, there's constant discussion about the ethics of eating meat. My family does eat meat, and it's important to me that the meat be raised and butchered humanely. I can testify that this goat had a very cushy life, and according to Doug, was completely unaware of his fate as his head was deep in a bucket of grain in his final moment. We've already had a stew and some breakfast sausage from this little guy.

That brings me to the final step in the harvesting and preserving process. The four day Thanksgiving weekend gave me a chunk of time to organize. After a big Thanksgiving dinner featuring a 23 pound, locally raised turkey, Doug and I loaded all the produce, meat and bread from my freezer into coolers and pulled the plug. Several hours later, I wiped the last of the defrosted ice off the shelves and started carefully cataloging and arranging the food back on the shelves. I was thrilled not to find very many "mystery" packages, and only a couple that I think had reached their first birthday. A well-organized freezer is a thing of beauty. I feel good about our efforts this season.

Greetings from the end of summer...

Our project has gone fairly smoothly, if not totally as planned. My work at the studio has, for some

Grandma and Eva picking peaches

inexplicable reason, been far, far more busy this summer than I anticipated. Because of our CSA, frequent farm trips, and just the abundance of local food in the summer, we've been able to keep up with our local eating pretty well. While many "supporting" ingredients we use (balsamic vinegar, oils, white flour, etc) are not local, the main ingredients in our diet are.
However, I know that our goal was to explore this for a full year. And, if we really want to eat locally, that means freezing, canning and drying produce now for winter.

So, how are we doing on that? I give us a "C".  We've canned pickles, dried tomatoes, frozen bags upon bags of apples, green beans, strawberries and blueberries. But I know for sure that if we were relying on those things while snowed in for any length of time, we'd be up a creek without snowshoes.

So, efforts need to pick up around here a bit. For produce, we are relying on three means of "putting up":

Canning  The Pros We don't take up valuable freezer space, food stays edible for a long time, no worries about mid-winter power outages.

The Cons? Ever see the kids who play percussion during the band concerts?
The way they run from the cymbals to the xylophone to the drums? That's how I feel trying to boil jars to sterilize, simmer the brine, prepare the veggies, and time the jars in the canner. Until you are practiced, this requires 8 hands. Or 8 friends and a couple of bottles of wine. Or, one big glass to sip once the job is complete, 4 hours later, while admiring your 8 precious pints of pickles. Labor intensive.

Freezing  The Pros Not sure what you want to do with those apples? Do they want to be butter? Sauce? Pie? No need to decide now! do the prep work and decide later. Positive procrastination/low commitment.

Also, by doing the cleaning, slicing and dicing up front, you have the ultimate in fast food. Whether it's green beans on the side, or veggies for soup, it's all cleaned and prepped.

Ben and Sylvia helped pick apples and freeze. It's nice having a tree
right by a building!

The Cons Frozen food quality can be iffy, and freezer space is limited. My husband and I are already bickering over this. Electricity is required to store, not necessarily super-green.

Drying  The Pros About as labor intensive as freezing. Food is prepped, dried on a rack, and then can

I love using Italian plum tomatoes for drying
and using later for salads and pasta.

be stored in any airtight container you like. Real pretty displayed in ball jars on distressed shelves, if you like that Country Living kind of look.

The Cons  The food can end up looking and tasting nothing like the original form. This can be a good thing, I suppose, but it can also make it less versatile. However, it can lead to rousing Local Eating games during long winter days, like the "What fruit/vegetable is in this jar?" a fun family guessing game. I can't decide if this should go under the pros or the cons.

Frank and the Honeybees

As I'm moving a bit deeper into this project, I'm amazed and gratified to find more kindred spirits.

Frank, Klas and honey.

Recently, a friend put me in touch with Frank Saballus. Frank lives in Brookfield and is the owner of Klas Restaurant on Cermak Road in Cicero. (An aside, Klas has the most amazingly authentic Czech interior I've ever seen. If you want to feel like you are vacationing in eastern Europe for a meal, this is your destination. Check out a photo here.)

Anyhoo, while I'm sure Frank can, and will, give us interesting leads on local, slow food in Chicago, the topic of our first conversation was...honey.

"I was invited to be part of a Slow Food event about 5-6 years ago, put together by the Chicago Honey Bee Co-op. After the event I was talking to some of the members. They took me on a tour of an apiary, and I loved it. I started beekeeping myself. I even for a while tended the hives at the Morton Arboretum. But that became overwhelming with the other projects I was involved with, so I no longer do that," Frank told me.

Frank bottles his own;
raw, unpasteurized, small batch.

However, Frank hasn't given up beekeeping. Instead of one large apiary, Frank has been spotting his hives in backyards and other locations in the Chicago suburbs, from West Chicago to Cicero. He is currently managing about seven different locations, tending the hives and processing honey.

"Bees will overwinter, but I lose about half of the bees each winter, so I need to replenish the hives each year. I do things a little differently than a lot of beekeepers. I won't use any antibiotics, fungicides or any other treatments in my hives. I might lose more bees each year, but my honey is is chemical free, local and raw," Frank explained to me.

Now, about local. There is some discussion that for allergy sufferers, eating honey produced in their locality can help alleviate their symptoms. Some people I've spoken to swear that taking a small amount, such as a teaspoon a day, over the winter helps them build a resistance to the offensive pollen when allergy season arrives. I did a little internet research, and found that science does not support this claim. I will not try telling that to those that feel they've had success, however. What works for you, works for you. End of story.

However, it is clear that "local' is key in that theory. Eating honey produced in France, for example, will not affect your sniffling at all. Even honey produced in southern Illinois won't be so helpful. Local means as close to the area in which you are suffering as possible. That's where Frank comes in to many of his local customers.

"I sell honey at Klas, at Tischler's Supermarket in Brookfield, and at a few boutique grocers and deli's in Chicago. Also, some people buy the propolis that the bees produce. The bees use propolis to seal their hives in the winter, and when harvested it's used as a tonic for skin irritations and wounds. It's very anti-bacterial."

Frank also feels that the honey produced in a city environment is superior to honey produced near vast fields of corn and soybeans because those areas have much more pesticide and herbicide exposure, affecting the plants that the bees are pollinating. As long as your neighbors aren't spraying their gardens, the bees and the honey produced in our neighborhood is not affected by these chemicals.

Even if you don't eat honey, you do eat something. Chances are super strong that something you ate today is dependent on the honeybee for it's existence. But the existence of the honeybee is now on shaky ground. Whether it's a virus, pesticide exposure, or loss of flowers and wild spaces as we continue to plow up native land for factory fields of monoculture crops, honeybees all over the world are dying. Small beekeepers such as Frank are fighting to keep the critters that pollinate our apples, asparagus, broccoli, blueberries, onions, cherrries, cucumbers, watermelons, etc. etc. alive and among us. And many small beekeepers have folded under the stress of the battle.

But Frank is committed to his hives and his contribution to our local ecosystem. I hope to have Frank into the Focus Yoga studio soon to bring in jars of his honey and talk a bit more. If you'd like to read up-to-date theories on what is causing the honeybee loss, and why you should even care at all, Time magazine has made a cover feature of the story, and you can read it on line here.

Sweet Corn Season

See the hay rack? On top of that are mounds of picked ears
of corn. The field can be seen right behind the sign. The
shorter rows in from are sweet corn. The taller rows behind
are the feed or seed corn.

My attention to our Local Eating Project really took a back seat to opening the Juice Cafe at my yoga studio this past month. Finally, weeks of planning, scraping, painting, cleaning and shopping paid off and we opened the doors! I'm thrilled to have found the most exciting local juice purveyor, Akin from Earth's Healing Cafe, to stock our fridge.

However, this season is hands-down the easiest time to eat locally; if I couldn't keep up with the blog, I certainly could still keep up with the project. While the peas have died down, I'm picking cucumbers and raspberries from the garden. My CSA box is filled with small zucchini, blueberries,  small new potatoes, cherries, onions and greens.

One of the fun things about driving through the country this time of year are the impromptu farm stands on the side of the road. I was heading back to the farm from Dixon and passed this little one on Inlet Road. I did a quick 3-pointer in the pick-up and headed back where a boy and his grandmother

Mom cutting kernals of corn off the
ears right into a plastic bag.

were selling corn, as you see, 13 ears for $4. I bought 39 ears. The boy carried three full plastic bags to my truck and plopped them into the bed and off I went.

My mom and I had a nice hour outside in the breeze cutting the ears off into plastic bags for freezing. However, the ears were small and we netted, unbelievably, about a one gallon bag from all that shucking and slicing. If I pass another on the way back to the city today, I'll pick up more. Corn freezes amazingly well with no special prep like blanching, regardless what the books say.

Summer in a pan

The extra work put into freezing for less abundant months
is made up with being able to cook quickly in the summer. Sure, you do need to clean and trim; but after that it's so easy to pop it all in a pan with a little oil, saute with some herbs, add meat if you aren't vegetarian...voila! Summer in a pan! How can you help but feel healthier?

By the way, bargain hunters, zucchini is apparently a bumper crop this year (again). Jokes about zucchini are prolific (as is the plant). I generally don't plant it, because typically it seems farmers put these on blue-light special from about this time of year on. At the farmer's market in Rock Falls this weekend, Heather from Hollyhock Hill's Farm was selling these critters at 4 for $1. I took a picture of one of the eight I bought next to my head for scale, and titled the resulting art photo "Zucchini Head". Heather assured me that these mothers are the best for baking. I'll report back.

Strawberries and Peas

Eva with our 47 pounds.

Finally. Strawberry season is in full swing. May was tough, with no fresh fruit in season. Strawberry season was a little late this year, but opening weekend, Eva and I hit the u-pick fields. We got up at about 6:00am to beat the crowds at Plow Creek Farm in Tiswila, IL, a U-pick that raises their strawberries organically. Our goal was to beat our friends, the Freskes, who are usually there right at the 7:00am opening time. Lucky for us, they had picked their 90 pounds the Wednesday before.

As far quantity and quality, it was a great morning to pick. Production was high, and we ended up filling four flats at almost 12 pounds each.  Weather was not as good, and it rained on us quite a bit of the time. I brought raincoats, but it still wasn’t fun.

I was talking to a Mennonite lady next to me (at least I think she was) and she said she and her

daughter were out a few days earlier and picked about 90 pounds. Like us, they clean and freeze them. I asked her how they use them in the winter and she said they just pull them out of the freezer and eat as fruit. She hadn’t discovered smoothies yet...my favorite way to use frozen fruit in the winter.

Cleaning and freezing strawberries can be tedious, especially rinsing them, which you really want to do after seeing them in the fields, in dirt and sometimes with slugs gliding on them. But, once they are rinsed, trimming the tops off, slicing and layering on a pan for a quick freeze can be a social event. A little family bonding. Eva and I watched “Under the Tuscan Sun” together while slicing about half the haul. The next day, my son Ben (visiting from LA) and I sliced up the other half. While I don’t think he was excited about it at first, I think he succumbed to the charms of sitting and chatting while doing mindless work, something that, with so much automation, we don’t do much anymore.

In the garden first snow peas came due, and we’ve gotten a couple good pickings since. We don’t have a real big garden at home, so it’s meant more for daily needs than large production. In my experience, snow peas don’t freeze real well, getting really droopy when cooked later.

First peas

In our CSA delivery this week, we had some sugar snap peas. We tossed them in a stir fry last night with our grass-raised beef and they were amazing! Still crunchy and poppy after being cooked...next year my garden space is going to sugar snaps.

A lot of my local energy these past weeks has been going to the cafe area we are opening at the yoga studio very soon. We have a commercial fridge we want to stock with some locally-produced beverages. Trying to find the right fit of small-batch, local, organic, healthy, and unique from a vendor with the right experience, quality and vision has been a challenge. And, on top if it, we are working hard on the physical space. Trying to do all this without succumbing to convenience food has been tough. However, that’s the point, isn’t it? In so many families, both adults are working full time. Is it possible to manage a busy schedule and still make eating food produced within your local area an option? Or, does it require a colossal amount of pre-planning, organization, and time in the kitchen? With the limitations in produce availability, is it even healthier? These are the things I plan to explore this year, and time will tell.

Eggs

This blog I'm devoting to the subject of eggs.

My friend Toni's eggs

It's usually pretty easy to find local eggs, at least during the summer months. My friend Toni often will bless me with a dozen eggs from her chickens. The beauty of these is not only are they inarguably the healthiest, as her chickens have free range of her yard by day, and a amazingly well-kept coop (compete with electricity) by night, but they have deep, orange yolks, and come in shades of cream, green and blue. Gorgeous.

The Taj Mahal of chicken coops, at Toni's farm

Eggs are easily found in farmer's markets. There is a popular guy, known as Swing Belly, that does the Brookfield Farmer's Market. That's all I'm going to say about his name. He's a local favorite. Lately he's been bringing a box of bananas to the market. When you go to buy your eggs, he holds a banana end to his forehead and asks you to guess what number he is thinking of, between one and ten. Amazingly, Doug and I have both guessed right the past couple of weeks! That scores us a  banana. I don't think Swing Belly knows just what that banana means to us. We haven't purchased any since we started eating local, and we love them. I'm saving our this week for smoothies. Doug says he's going to ask Swing Belly to switch the prize to limes, so we can have some for gin and tonics this summer.

In the winter, local eggs can be more difficult to come by. Regardless of the health benefits of local vs. factory farmed, I do solidly believe that the cramped and wretched living conditions for chickens in factory egg facilities is not what I want to promote with my almighty dollar. So, I try to find better sources.

One local source Doug found is Vesuvio Bakery in North Riverside. This is on 22nd Street, close to Target, Home Depot, etc. The owners have a farm not far away and raise chickens. They usually have a cooler stocked with their eggs.

Sylvia and Giblet

 

My poultry farmer, Joe Reaver, raises ethically treated chicken for meat and eggs. I'll do more on him later, but I'm trying to get regular deliveries of his chickens and eggs going at the studio. I've been to his farm and knows he is the real thing.

Lastly, I do know of some folks who are raising chickens in their backyards. In some towns, this is legit. In others, like mine, these folks are definitely operating under the radar. If I weren't dividing my time between two homes from spring to fall, I would be right there with them. One season I raised chickens at the farm and I can vouch for the fact that they are far less obtrusive, dangerous, noisy, and smelly than dogs, which are perfectly legal. (I have a dog, too.) As long as the chickens are contained and maintained, a responsible chicken owner should have no reason to have to hide the fact that they have feathered pets and are raising their own food. And, I'm not sure if that is all I'll have to say about that.

Testing on Others...

Doug making beet pasta. Using local beets,
of course.

Moving into mid-month brought house guests.

Wanting to show off our local eating thing, Doug and I conferred on the menu for dinner the night his sister Nancy would be visiting from the east coast.

Nancy is an ex-VP from the CIA (Culinary Institute of America), so the bar was set pretty high.

We settled on homemade pasta. Doug had purchased a pasta machine a few weeks earlier, and we had some local flour. I knew a pretty good butternut sauce, and decided to experiment with the nettles he bought at Green City Market.

Results: kinda average. Barely. We’re still struggling with the flour. I have had great luck with the flour I purchased from Breslin Farms, but any effort to get a larger quantity to save some $$ was not working. They only seem to mill smaller batches, and I’m too disorganized right now to order well ahead. Organization is key when eating local.

So, I had some flour from another local source, but it seems to be milled coarser, and the results with bread, cookies, and ultimately pasta, are disappointing. The pasta was a little heavy and gummy.

The butternut squash I used for one sauce was obviously so last fall. Still fresh, but it seems the flavor had matured in storage, and had a stronger squashy taste - not the milder taste I really loved.

A hit! and the lettuce is local, too!

The nettle sauce was ok. I think I get points for using nettles. They’re supposedly amazingly healthy, but the sauce was not amazingly tasty.

Nancy was polite, but probably eager to get to some not-so-local eating at her meeting downtown the next day.

Now, Doug’s mother came in Thursday, and that was a different story. We had just received our first CSA order from Majestic Farms, and had fresh mushrooms. Lot’s of them.

I found a recipe for a Hungarian Mushroom Soup from Allrecipes.com. (click here for the recipe). Our CSA farmers, Randy and Gayle, had also put a package of local corn meal in our order. Local corn meal + local flour + local honey + local eggs = local corn muffins! We were crankin’!

I have to say, this meal was a success. The soup was pure comfort food. I used stock I made from chicken raised locally, and the soup was rich and super tasty. That's what I love about this local eating deal: I never would have purchased all those mushrooms on my own, and attempted to find this recipe.

My mother joined us, and she was still talking about this meal two days later. This is high praise from my Polish mom.

First Full Week...

Doug's haul from Green City Market.

The first week of eating locally wasn’t a total bust, but I’m not beating my chest, either. It had it’s high points, and low points.

After receiving a low local score from Doug on one of the meals I prepared (Doug is enthusiastically applying a scoring system to rate the locality of our meals, a system I think we both now agree is best applied to our own efforts, instead of someone else's), I decided to send the hunter out to track down and bring home some local food.

The beginning of May is tough, especially the first year of eating local; nothing preserved, nothing fresh. The farmer’s markets in Brookfield and LaGrange hadn’t opened yet. The closest way I knew to get some good vittles was at the Green City Market at Peggy Notebart.

Doug make the very valid point that driving into Chicago wasn’t improving our carbon footprint, but unless we wanted nothing but meat and canned things from our pantry for the next week, this was our choice.

Following is a transcript of Doug’s texts to me while he was hunting and I was working.

Doug - “$%@* this!

Judi - What’s wrong?

Doug - No parking anywhere. They moved to an outdoor spot. City is having some event

Judi - Sucks. Like me and Sylvia at the outlet mall.

Doug - 45 minutes after getting to Peggy Notebart - finally in!

Judi - good job, my hunter of local food!

Doug (later) - We are about a hundred bucks poorer. But we can eat dinner tonight. But only tonight.

Judi - You are so funny

Doug - I wish I was joking.

I came home from work that afternoon expecting to see a measly haul, but I was amazed! Oats, black beans, squash, spinach, mushrooms, carrots, asparagus, cabbage, even nettles (?)! One meal my arse!

Still, as we approach the middle of our first month, there have been many times I’ve appreciated the stuff remaining in our pantry from our “pre-local” days. For example, there is literally no fruit to be had this time of year. If it wasn’t for the canned pineapple and dried mango and apricots I had leftover, my girls wouldn’t have any plant-based item in their school lunches at all this month. (not big into carrot sticks). However, that stuff is getting depleted. A lot less waste, a lot less trips to the supermarket, and a bit more creativity is the trend this month.

Doug's Take

A year of eating locally is Judi's idea.  But those of you who know us probably figured that out.  Don't get me wrong - I fully support the concept of shopping from local Mom & Pop merchants and farmers, I fully support eating healthy and I understand the benefits of organics and the dangers of genetically modified foods.  It just isn't the way I tend to live my life.  I am more inclined to go to the nearby large grocery chain than drive 30 minutes in order to pay 30% more at Whole Foods.  Am I too cheap?  Too lazy?  Probably a good dose of both.

So when Judi first broached the idea to me, my first couple of thoughts weren't exactly supportive.  But if I have learned anything after 15 years of marriage, it is to ask questions first, speak your mind later.  And for once, I did it! We talked about how we could go about this and the effect it would have on us.  She shared some thoughts on what we would learn, as well as our kids.  I realized how much of what we eat is already "local" - this shouldn't be much of a challenge at all [update:  today is Day 11 and I NOW realize the reason some of our food wasn't "local" is because it simply doesn't exist locally - but I already agreed...].  Then we agreed to make April a trial month before we commit to this in May [update: the next thing I need to work on is to be more involved during the trial periods...] and Judi agreed that I get to author The Rules and keep score [sadly, I love rules and tracking performance].



Judi's last crazy idea - a trip to India

And the truth is, Judi's ideas usually work out pretty well.  We still laugh about stories from the summer she and the girls moved to the farm to raise chickens and milk goats.  I thought her idea of a three week family trip to India was crazy [my first ten thoughts, which I voiced before asking], and that turned out fantastic.

For me, this is an adventure, not a spiritual journey.  Tracking down local foods will take time and cost more money.  We will need to change the way we eat (rice, citrus - in Illinois?).  This will be an investment.  But an investment in family memories is an easy investment to make.  So what the hell, let's go for it.  I'm all in!

May is just the beginning...

So here we are, May 1. Or, Day 1 our first month of the “Local Eating Project”.

What does “Local Eating” mean, exactly? It means our family - Doug, Eva, Sylvia and I - has taken a

Sylvia and Judi doing research in Elburn, IL

pledge of sorts, to scrutinize our food choices, research the local options, and find the farmers, dairies, beekeepers, and small business-people who are passionate about creating healthy food for their customers; food that works with our natural environment here in the rich soil of the midwest. Over the next 12 months, we will be shifting our food choices to those grown or produced within 100 miles of either of our homes (farm or city).

But why? Anyone who knows me either in my hometown of Riverside, or at my yoga studio in Brookfield, knows I am passionate about my farm in the country. I’ve been heading 80 miles west of Chicago for weekends and summers since I was 4, and have developed a connection with the farm area, and local farmers. For the last 10 years, more and more of our food comes directly from people we know. I’ve purchased milk from a good friend who squeezed those teats by hand. The chicken my family eats comes from Joe at the Tri-City Market. We’ve raised our own steer. I’ve maintained two gardens. My studio organized a CSA with Randy, and I swam in fresh veggies (thankfully, since my gardens have been hit-or-miss lately.) And, buddies at the farm have generously shared their over-abundance of produce and fresh eggs with me (and I never say no!).

So, I’ve developed a real love for people who have a real love for what I eat. People who really care. These are folks who may complain about no rain, or too much rain, worry about government regulations that make their job tougher (and their product not necessarily safer), leave a party early to put in chickens or get ready for an early morning, and just simply make sacrifices to produce food that is healthy and produced in a kind, conscious way. But I never hear them say they hate their job.

A few years ago I hosted a CSA on my porch for neighbors. The woman who delivered the boxes,

One of the perks of doing research is coming across
beautiful finds, like this barn in the country.

Mary Anne, was a friend. She brought food from about 4 different farmers. She’d often sit on the porch and visit during the drop off.

At the end of the season, Mary Ann told me they no longer wanted to deliver to us. Why? I asked. We’ve loved the food! Not enough people? Too far out of the way?

No, she said. We just miss talking to the customers about the food. At the farmer’s market, we can chat and visit, find out what they like, and help them use the food. Here, we never see our customers. We miss the connection.

Wow. People who will give up business in favor of making a connection.

Anyway...these are the people we feel can feed this family the best. And over the next year, we plan to find them and share them with you. Some will be individuals, some will be small companies. And all of them will be local.