Let Your City Kids Taste Farm Life

We've all heard the sad stories about when an adult asks a city (or suburban, for that matter) kid, "Where does our food come from?", and the child answers, "From the store." What do yours say when you ask them? Mine four year old answered, "I don't know. Here?" (we were at a restaurant when I asked). Well, whether yours are well educated on the subject of farm to fork or don't know the difference between a farm and a food store, chances are they have never had the chance to milk a goat...but now they can!

Angelic Organics is my favorite farm ever because they have been supplying our seasonal vegetables since before my children were ever a thought. They also have a wonderful non-profit on the farm called the Angelic Organics Learning Center (AOLC) who has some really amazing and completely affordable children's programming. Located in Caledonia, IL, AOLC is just under 2 hours away from Chicago. Just close enough for a day trip. Their next event for ages 3-5, Preschoolers! Fresh Food From the Farm is coming up on Sept 9th and includes picking "fresh carrots, gathering eggs from the chickens and trying their hand at milking a goat!" can also try hardboiled eggs from the farm and make a salad snack straight from the field. Now not many preschoolers I know like to eat salad, but most do like to try things that they have a hand in making, and in this case not only will they make it, but they likely get to harvest it and see the ingredients while they are still connected to the soil. How cool is that? I'll bet that increases the chances of their eating salad, right? Your children will learn and expand their palette without even realizing it's happening.

To see a farm in action is an amazingly rich learning experience. For children and people of all ages who have ever wondered how food gets to their plates, nothing is as awe-inspiring as seeing rows upon rows of carrots, lettuces, kale, radishes, etc. This is the food that should be feeding America. It makes me so proud to eat the produce that comes straight from a farm here in IL. It tastes so fresh, flavorful and delicious! So register to take your kids up to Caledonia and visit AOLC this weekend (space is limited), or click here to see if there's another event that better fits your calendar.

(This photo to the right is of hundreds of onion seedlings on a flatbed trailer at AO. The farm now offers extra seedlings free to shareholders on a first-come, first- served basis.)

Scrambled Eggs: Report Spotlights "Systemic" Abuses in Organic Egg Production

Here's another report on how the label on your "organic" eggs means no more than that the chickens that laid them were fed organic feed. The way these big-ag businesses treat living chickens like a blatant commodity and disregard our health and safety is just unbelievable. The little pictures of barns and silos on the packages are misleading visuals since the vast majority of eggs (conventional and organic) are all laid by hens stuffed wall to wall, and in some cases floor to ceiling, in industrial henhouses. These dark, overcrowded buildings with air that reeks of ammonia, floors that are covered with feces, and next to no access to the outdoors (a stipulation for organic labeling that these big egg companies skirt, taking advantage of the semantics instead of adhering to the values and idea of ORGANIC) are the norm.

Scrambled Eggs: Report Spotlights "Systemic" Abuses in Organic Egg Production

I can attest to the fact that the eggs I receive from my "meat share" CSA (Cedar Valley Farms) are far superior to the "organic, omega-3, free-range" eggs I buy at the grocery in between deliveries. The yolks are a much more vibrant yellow-orange, the whites are more viscous, they cook up fluffier, and in general taste better! I'm always reminded of this when I crack the first "mainstream organic" egg from the carton and see the pallor of it's light-yellow yolk and the watery white spread way out onto the pan. "Oh," I think to myself, "these aren't from the farm." Well, they aren't from a farm that lets the birds walk around pecking at insects and seeds on the grass and soil in the sun. That's for sure.

Yet another reminder of why it's important to buy eggs at from a CSA or at your local farmers' market! These eggs taste better, are actually fresh and they come from hens that live like hens are supposed to. In the process you're supporting your local economy, keeping family farms in business, keeping your family healthy and well-fed, and you're voting with your dollars. And every dollar counts.

Shopping and Cooking, Chef-Style!

Every week, many of us grocery shop and then come home and over the next few days or so, cook or otherwise prepare and eat the food we bought. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But last week I did just that and it was great fun with a delicious outcome and lots learned in the process. What was different? Well, I did it all with fabulous zero-waste chef and food guru, Greg Christian.

Christian is well known in the culinary world for his pioneering initiative in sustainability as it pertains to food. He is a nationally recognized for developing the Organic School Project whose focus is to get healthy food choices into schools and help educate children on related topics. I'm personally very interested in the OSP, and you should be too! Greg also ran a zero-waste catering company for several years and is now doing consulting work for restaurants who want to learn how to practice sustainability or move toward zero-waste goals.

Zero-waste means that Zullo's, where Greg is currently consulting, doesn't have garbage service. They don't throw anything away. Everything is either cooked, composted, recycled, or otherwise reused. Imagine the impact on our landfills and out world if we all followed these practices! Other than being very careful about their inputs (not buying things with any or excess packaging for starters) they use re-purposed containers to hold re-useable items like rubberbands. It seems so obvious once you see it yourself, but it's really quite ingenious.

What was originally planned to be a trip to Zullo's kitchen to watch him cook, turned into a shopping trip to buy our ingredients on Wednesday and then making a wonderful soup for my family under his direction on Friday. We headed out to Chicago's famed Green City Market Wednesday morning to get our veggies, and as we walked through the grass, Greg invited me to try something new. Instead of having a list in mind and shopping with that agenda, he said you can learn how to ask what it is you need. Not what you want, or what a certain recipe calls for, but to just look and relax and see if anything jumps out at you. You might even want to hold it to see how it feels. It's the way that he shops and knowing what people need is a gift that he has, but Greg says you can hone that sense and your body and mind will benefit from it.

So I walked around looking at beautiful stacks of colorful, fresh organic produce with that in mind. I'm sure I don't have this gift, or have not yet discovered it if it's there, but what jumped out at me first were these unbelievably sweet, sparkling-red, juicy strawberries. They were so ready to eat their heady aroma hit me before I even reached the table! They were grown by Dave at Leaning Shed Farm, and he was a joy to talk with and get to know. Greg got some too, and boy did my whole family gobble them up...so was that something we needed? hmmm, guess so!

Along the way, Greg introduced me to several of the farmers and friends working the market booths. It was fun to talk to them and hear their stories...of surviving the latest tornado, retiring from a 9-5 gig just to work even longer hours doing what they love, and how they have found such benefit from connecting with the earth and eating such fresh fare. Here's a little video clip of our wheat grass shots being juiced (Thanks again, Greg!). What a great way to start a day. Pow!

At the same farm booth where we got our wheat grass, some dark purple leaves seemed to be calling my name. Maybe I needed them? What were they? Amaranth, I was told. They looked interesting and after we stood with them for a few seconds, Greg got an idea...why not make some soup with the amaranth for my family? How cool! Yes, let's do that! So I bought some amaranth, 2 kinds of young onions, baby swiss chard and some rainbow chard. Add to that black beans Greg gets from a fantastic farm and my chicken broth, and we had the makings of the tasty soup Greg would teach me to make on Friday morning...more on that later.

Our time at Green City Market ended at Zullo's tent, where I ate the most delicious lamb hand pie. It just melted in my mouth, and the pastry was light and tasty. They also offer up pizzas and focaccia, perfect for a hearty snack or a light lunch, and easy to walk around with. And of course good for any time of day, you must try their Zeppole - Zullo's version of apple cider doughnuts that simply are amazing. Served in a paper and newspaper cone, they are easy to pop into your mouth as you walk the market (and then you can recycle the cone!). Maybe a little TOO easy! Yum! You can find the up-to-date list of Zullo's markets here. My family likes to frequent them at the Logan Square Farmer's Mkt. Definitely check them out!

Fast forward 2 days...I met Greg at Zullo's kitchen super early
(as in, I was there at the early time that I usually unwillingly roll out of bed to tend to one of my small children. These guys don't sleep in!) and ready to work. I was set up at the sink and I washed all my produce and laid it out to await instruction. Doesn't that look beautiful? The dark purple leaves at the top right are the amaranth. Onions (white and "red") on the left and the rainbow and swiss chard on the right. Greg showed me how to cut and chop my bounty as we warmed up the chicken broth with the black beans. The cooking experience included a knife sharpening lesson and lots of info from how to make marinara to how to dry herbs, and the time flew by. I went home with enough delicious soup to feed my family 2 dinners and still had some left over for a lunch!. Here it is served up at home with some crusty homemade olive oil bread. I highly recommend you try it! The flavors are surprisingly complex for being made with such simple ingredients, and it's chock-full of healthy vitamins and minerals. I'll activate this link when my in-depth article covering as much of Greg's knowledge as I could absorb is published on Chicagonista.com, including the recipe for our soup: "Black Bean Soup with Stuff"! Don't forget to check it out (it will probably run by the end of the month). You can substitute ingredients depending on what you find at the market, and depending on what you feel YOU NEED. Now get cookin'!

What Are Your Kids Eating?

There has been a lot of buzz recently in regard to school lunches. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution series highlighted the issue in one town and its region (Huntington, WV), but what's the story at your kid's school? Do you know? Do you care?

My son is only 3, and he's all set to start attending public preschool here in Chicago this Fall. I am counting myself lucky so far that his 2.5 hrs of class per day will not include a school lunch. The school he'll be attending is progressive in many ways, but as far as I know, they still serve the same type of crap for lunch that most schools in the States are re-heating. So, I figure I have 2 years to incite some real change before my child lines up with his friends to get his servings of surplus processed meat, fruit-flvored gelatin, and chocolate milk...where should I start!?

If you are not aware of the big issues surrounding school lunches, here's a guest post from a great blog on the topic.

Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project The woman who writes the main blog, Mrs. Q, is an Illinois school teacher who has taken it upon herself to eat the school lunch every day and report on the contents and her experience to draw attention to the big problems and issues. Namely, they are: over processed foods, lack of fresh or properly cooked fruits and vegetables, an overabundance of packaging and waste, massive amounts of sugar, and general poor overall quality. She's even having blood tests done 6 months apart, so I'm really interested to see how the results come back... These lunch options directly reflect much of the convenience food that's on the grocery shelves today, so you have to figure many of the kids are eating this way all the time and many (maybe even most?) parents don't see a problem. But kids these days are in trouble. Obesity reigns, diabetes is an epidemic, and I suspect many other health problems are a direct result of all the preservatives and chemicals that are in the food America feeds its children.

I wonder if there's any way to start a city-wide "food revolution" of our own, or if I should just start with my own child's school and take baby steps. This will more than likely turn into something I'll need to devote quite a bit of my own time and energy to in order to see real results in 2 years, but I know deep in my heart it will be worth the effort. I have worked hard here at home to nourish my children as best I can from making their babyfood, feeding them organic dairy, grains, meat and produce whenever possible, and offering them a wide variety of tastes and textures. If you ask my kid what color bread/noodles/rice is, he'll say "brown", and I'd love to keep it that way. He can recognize herbs by smell and by sight and knows how to strip a sprig of thyme. It's pretty funny that my son is virtually a self-made vegetarian and the three things I've always had trouble getting him to eat in almost any form have been meat, eggs, and potatoes (the un-vegetable). Yes, even fries! He'll eat sweet potato fries, and now once in a while I've seen him munch a couple of regular fries down if someone puts them on his plate, but for the first 2.5 years of his life, he wouldn't even try one (not that I was trying very hard to change that!). A friend got him to bite into one at a restaurant once and he spit it out! Hahaha. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that if offered chicken nuggets, nachos, hot dogs and pizzas on a regular basis, both my children would easily succumb to the new diet and happily munch away on the garbage next to their friends. But that's the whole problem and the bottom line is that that's not OK with me. Especially not 5 days a week!

So the deadline looms ahead of me and I'm starting to gather resources and gear up for this hurdle...but I'll wait until the 2010-2011 school year begins before I call the principal's office and ask for a meeting, and permission to spend a day in the cafeteria.

I welcome any ideas and comments!

Photo by bookgrl

A Local Breakfast! Opting Out.

This is a picture of a breakfast my husband made for us this past November. He was/we were proud that the the whole meal was organic, local, and delicious! We had just started getting a meat share from a local CSA and this was our first meal made with the organic, grass-fed bacon. Can I just say, um, "YUM"? There was a definite difference in taste between this and store-bought bacon, and in such a taste-test, the bacon from Cedar Valley Farms would be the clear winner. The hash was made from sweet potatoes, onions and thyme, all fresh, organic and local as well from our produce CSA, Angelic Organics. And then the egg...which was amazing...was courtesy of a good friend of ours. She lives less than 2 miles from us, and so do her organically-fed, free range chickens! Besides offering my son endless entertainment, these chickens lay 4 eggs a day and this time we were lucky enough to be the recipients. Creamy, rich and delicious, this over-easy egg was awesome!

I wish we could eat like this 100% of the time! If that were the case, we would be able to completely "opt-out" of the mass-produced food system in this country. We grew a bunch of produce on our balcony this year, I've started baking a lot of our own bread, and never buy cake mix anymore. In addition to our 2 csa's (meat and produce), I shop at the local co-op and the farmers' market, went berry picking this summer and froze the bounty. But I do still feel the need to grocery shop at places like Trader Joe's, and in a pinch, you might find me looking for the organic stuff at Jewel. Part of this is for convenience, and another is lower prices. But wherever we can afford to, we are opting out more and more these days. After watching documentaries like King Corn, Food Inc. and reading books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, I just can't bring myself to eat many of the things I never gave much thought to before. Let alone serve them to my family. Deciding to make what we put on the table for ourselves and our kids as local, organic, and unprocessed as possible just makes sense. I guess it's true that ignorance is bliss, but in the case of food, ignorance can lead to obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease, and more. And I'm not even talking about how the mass-produced food in the US harms us socially, economically, or envionmentally. (I'll save that food for thought for another post - or 10!) If you have haven't seen these films yet and have the time or interest, put them on your Netflix queue. And hopefully they will change the way you view food and the supermarket aisles. Then you'll be on your way to eating totally local meals once in a while too (and if you already do, great job!!).

The Dill Pickle Food Co-op...Thinking About How We Shop

Recently, the Dill Pickle Food Coop opened within walking distance of our home. I have been eagerly awaiting the co-op coming to fruition for over a year, and shopped there twice in the first week!

photo Jason Guthartz

What is a food co-op? It's a member-owned non-profit grocery store, where many of the jobs are preformed by member volunteers. This one happens to also focus on shelving products and produce that are local, sustainable, organic or a combination of these. Simply awesome. The prices are still comparable to the big corporate stores since the new co-op doesn't have the same buying power yet, but the difference is that the money you spend at Dill Pickle all flows right back into the local economy...to the farms and local companies that grow, raise or produce the offerings, as well as to the local people and businesses contracted to do probable jobs such as bookkeeping, web design, or accounting. No big CEO is getting fat on the big profits here, and little to nothing is touched by China. The fact that produce is not coming from Chile or Argentina also means that the food is more fresh, better tasting and leaves a far smaller carbon footprint on our earth. Generally speaking, I like the fact that the people that run the store are my neighbors and peers. There's something to be said for the feeling of community that a co-op provides. A feeling that's sorely lacking in most of our daily lives and shopping experiences!

The Dill Pickle is a small storefront operation, but within this small space, not much seems to be missing from the shelves. They offer fresh organic produce, organic meats, eggs and dairy, brand name boxed goods like Annie's Cheddar Bunnies and EnviroKidz Cereals.

photo Jason Guthartz

Along the right aisle they have a large selection of loose leaf teas and coffees (heavenly!) that you can buy in bulk, as well as an unbelievable bulk section with rices, lentils, beans, spices and more. Solely because of this, I have made 2 risotto dishes in the past 2 weeks. I just can't walk past the bulk rice without craving some arborio!

If you live in the vicinity of Logan Square, please make a stop at Dill Pickle to pick up some groceries and check it out. Or better yet, become a member and support the local effort to "opt-out" of the mass-produced food chain. It's good for you, the local community, and the earth!