Love apples? No green thumb? Rent a tree

Urban gardening is all the rage these days. So is urban farming. I think the difference between the two is that urban farming legally requires chickens or bees, but I could be wrong. But as cool as it all sounds (people in Brooklyn do it!), I’m just not cut out to be an urban farmer. I don’t have the yard space, the green thumb or the bib overalls for it. Well, or the inclination, for that matter.

For people like me, there are places like Earth First Farms. They’ll rent you an apple tree in their orchard, do all the work and ship you the fruits of their labor. Continue reading “Love apples? No green thumb? Rent a tree” →

Just like somebody’s grandma used to make: Braised Lamb with Juniper Berries, Fennel, Sage

Adapted from an Italian grandmother’s recipe, slow oven braising allows many flavors—onions, garlic, celery, wine, sage, juniper berries, fennel seed, bay leaves—to melt together in this soul-satisfying, fork tender lamb dish. Recipe below.

One of the perks of doing Blue Kitchen is that we’re occasionally asked to review cookbooks. It’s also one of the drawbacks. Writing, thinking, reading and talking about food on a daily basis means that we’re almost always at least a little bit hungry—kind of a low grade infection that never clears up unless you are actually actively engaged in consuming a substantial meal at the moment. And when a gorgeous cookbook like Jessica Theroux’s Cooking with Italian Grandmothers: Recipes and Stories from Tuscany to Sicily comes along, whole hams can’t quite stay your hunger.

To write Cooking with Italian Grandmothers, Theroux spent a year in Italy talking, cooking and often staying with a dozen Continue reading “Just like somebody’s grandma used to make: Braised Lamb with Juniper Berries, Fennel, Sage” →

Long distance locavore: Linguine with foraged chanterelles from Seattle, cooked in Chicago

Mushrooms, shallots, sage, cream and Parmesan combine to make a rich, satisfyingly “meaty” vegetarian meal. Recipe for Sautéed Chanterelles with Cream and Linguine Fini below.

The day before Marion cooked these chanterelles in our Chicago kitchen, they were in a stall in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Not much more before that, they had been in a nearby forest. We were in the market on the last morning of our first visit to the Pacific Northwest. Our luggage was already overstuffed with food purchases, many in glass containers padded with laundry in the hope they would survive the flight home. But when we saw these mushrooms, we knew we had to squeeze some into our carry-on bags. I’ll turn the kitchen over to Marion now and let her tell you what she did with them.

In another earlier life, I used to gather chanterelles in the wild all summer. It was such an everyday thing that I took it totally for granted. It was part of the season, like swimsuits and the beach. Continue reading “Long distance locavore: Linguine with foraged chanterelles from Seattle, cooked in Chicago” →

A bicycle built for treats and getting hammered in America’s Heartland

Fruity freezer pops sold from a bicycle in LA and silky smooth vodka in Indiana, both made with local ingredients, are the subjects of my latest posts on the USA Character Approved Blog.

These days, it seems everything is getting a gourmet makeover. Burgers, cupcakes, s’mores… One of the biggest hits this year is reimagined Popsicles, the iconic brightly colored and flavored summer treat for countless generations (and a fiercely guarded registered trademark of Unilever, as some hapless artisanal frozen treat makers have discovered). And perhaps no one is remaking them as deliciously or selling them as charmingly as Michelle Sallah and John Cassidy.

Together, they are Popcycle Treats. Sarah makes the inventively flavored freezer pops from seasonal produce and some interesting surprises. Continue reading “A bicycle built for treats and getting hammered in America’s Heartland” →

Want healthier meat and dairy? You’ll find it at “Home on the Range”

Pasture raising the animals we count on for meat and dairy products is healthier for everyone. A website that helps you find grass-fed food locally is the subject of my latest post on the USA Character Approved Blog.

The picture above, of cattle grazing in an open pasture, used to be how all farming was done. Livestock fed in pastures—or in the case of ranches, out on the range. No feedlots, no penning animals in and fattening them with corn. It’s not that farmers and ranchers were more humane back then. They just had a lot of common sense. Cattle (and goats and sheep) ate readily available grasses and supplied the, um, fertilizer that helped more grasses grow. There was no need for chemical fertilizers or the fossil fuel to make them and spread them. And there were no truckloads of manure to be gotten rid of.

Jo Robinson thinks we need to be doing more farming that way again. To help consumers find farmers who are raising grass-fed animals, she writes a website called Eatwild. The name comes from studies Continue reading “Want healthier meat and dairy? You’ll find it at “Home on the Range”” →

Biking across America in search of local food

On April 24, two friends set out on bicycles from Hardwick, Vermont, to explore the local food movement. As they approach their final destination—Portland, Oregon—my post on the USA Character Approved Blog shares some of what they found.

To our grandparents and great-grandparents, local food was just food, something grown by them, their neighbors or maybe a farmer a few miles away. Anything that had to be shipped from someplace more distant—an orange, for instance—was deemed exotic, something to be reserved for a holiday gift.

Fast forward to today, though, and local is the new exotic. Increasingly, “locally sourced” is the new mantra for restaurant chefs, home cooks, community activists, environmentalists… But what does local food really mean, to those who produce it and those who consume it? Friends Aaron Zueck and Robert DuBois decided the best way to study local was to go national, biking across America, hosting potluck dinners along the way and talking to people about food, over food. They named their epic project Bikeloc. Continue reading “Biking across America in search of local food” →

Green .000367 Acres: Farming in Manhattan on a very, very small scale

The urge to grow your own food can strike in even the most urban environments. My post on the USA Character Approved Blog this week shows how one person answers that urge in the wilds of Manhattan.

Peter Bazeli and his wife Lisa Nathan live the big city dream—certainly my big city dream. Their apartment on the Upper West Side faces New York’s green jewel, Central Park. But old habits die hard. Peter grew up helping his parents in their large family garden in the Midwest. Gradually, he took it over and even put in a fish pond. Moving to the big city did nothing to stifle his desire to dig in the dirt. So he rents a tiny plot in a Manhattan community garden, where he and Lisa raise heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, eggplants, lettuce and spinach.

“Farming” a four-foot by four-foot garden plot in the heart of New York City is not without its challenges. Continue reading “Green .000367 Acres: Farming in Manhattan on a very, very small scale” →

In season now: “Wild leeks” star in simple, silky Ramps with Linguine and Fried Egg

In season for just a few weeks each spring, mild, oniony/garlicky ramps need little more than olive oil, butter, Parmesan cheese, pasta and a fried egg to make a satisfying vegetarian dinner. If you can’t find ramps, you can substitute leeks. Recipe below.

The other day, Marion called excitedly from her office, saying she would be bringing home some ramps. I knew I would be turning the kitchen over to her for this week’s post.

Last week when my friend Karin and I were talking about stuff we’d recently eaten, she told me she’d just made spaghetti with ramps, and I was immediately excited. She’d found the ramps at the Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand market. Immediately I called the market and began pestering the cheerful, cordial souls there for fresh ramps.

A few days later, the market got an e-mail—someone was going out to hunt for ramps right then. By the end of the workday, they had arrived—fresh and beautiful. Where did these come from? I asked. The answer was hazy, deliberately so. The Farmstand market shrouds its source in mystery, to prevent the general public from knowing where to find these trendy onions. But, I was assured, the ramps had been foraged by an organization devoted to sustainable harvest practices. This was conveyed to me with such gentle insistence that the first thing I did when I got home was Google ramps and sustainability. Continue reading “In season now: “Wild leeks” star in simple, silky Ramps with Linguine and Fried Egg” →

Logan Square Kitchen serves up fixes for the Chicago locavore sweet tooth

I‘m often kvetching about the lack of food trucks in Chicago, thanks to draconian local health regulations. Well, last weekend Logan Square Kitchen reminded me of the wealth of delicious locally produced foods—and the wealth of local culinary talent—with a pre-Valentine’s Day Pastry Market.

Logan Square Kitchen is itself an outcome of an increased interest in local, artisanal foods. Created by longtime Logan Square residents Zina and Nick Murray, it houses a shared-use commercial, two-galley kitchen that chefs, pastry chefs and entrepreneurs armed with secret family recipes can rent to produce their creations. Unlike home kitchens, it is up to health department code, so users of the space can legally market their wares.

The front half of Logan Square Kitchen is an event space. And that’s where we found a number of delights last Saturday, all locally produced. Continue reading “Logan Square Kitchen serves up fixes for the Chicago locavore sweet tooth” →

Extreme locavores: In Brooklyn, “truck farm” is taken literally, Chicago restaurant farms its roof

The Brooklyn filmmakers who gave us the Peabody Award-winning feature documentary King Corn turn an old pickup truck into a farm and a film. And Chicago’s first certified organic farm is on a restaurant rooftop.

truck-farm

How do you grow your own food in the big city if you ain’t got any land?” That was the central question behind Truck Farm—both the tiny farm and the film. Filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney set out to prove that fresh vegetables can be grown just about anywhere. Even in the bed of a 1986 Dodge Ram pickup.

To do so, they combined “green roof technology, organic compost and heirloom seeds to create a living, mobile garden on the streets of Brooklyn, NY.” They’re using green techniques to film the project too, outfitting the truck with a solar-powered camera to provide a time lapse record of the farm’s progress.

Following the lead of other small farms, they’ve even started their own CSA. Your $20 subscription will get you Continue reading “Extreme locavores: In Brooklyn, “truck farm” is taken literally, Chicago restaurant farms its roof” →