Entries associated with the tag "Prairie Fruits Farm":

friday21

The downtown Chicago Marriott celebrates the unveiling of its 20-foot-long gingerbread castle with ice-carving demos and interesting pairings of New Belgium beers with desserts--including mini chocolate Belgian waffles with Dragon's Milk Ale syrup, beer malts made with Night Tripper stout, and oatmeal raisin cookies served with Poet Oatmeal stout. 4:30-7 PM, 540 N. Michigan, 312-836-0100, free.

The annual FamilyFarmed Expo tonight features a screening of the documentary King Corn (5:30 PM) and a “Localicious Party” with regionally produced food and drink (7 PM, $50-$60). There are daytime events Friday as well, open to the public, but most are aimed at the trade. Saturday and Sunday bring tastings, workshops and panels, and cooking demos by chefs Gale Gand, Michael Altenberg, Paul Kahan, and others. Panel topics include low-carbon diets, local booze, the Illinois Food, Farms, and Jobs Act, and how to eat organic on the cheap. On Sunday David Blume leads workshops on the principles of permaculture (10:30 AM, $35-$45) and how to make alcohol fuel and convert engines to run on it (1:30 PM, $75-$95). There’s also a farmers’ market with more than 100 vendors, featuring turkeys and other meats, pastries, cheeses, and locally made farm products in addition to fruits and vegetables. Kids’ activities include arts and crafts, face painting, and “an explanation of label reading.” Fri-Sat 10 AM-7 PM, Sun 10 AM-6 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph, 708-763-9920, $15 per day in advance, $20 at the door (included in the price of either Blume workshop).

David Tanis, chef at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, signs and discusses his cookbook A Platter of Figs at a five-course dinner with wine pairings by Carrie and Michael Nahabedian. Naha, 500 N. Clark, 847-571-1499, $89.

saturday22

Culinary historian and cookbook collector Penelope Bingham lectures on Thanksgiving: The Great American Holiday in a Chicago Foodways Roundtable program. She'll discuss the food and traditions of Thanksgiving, exploring how American cultural ideals manifest themselves in the holiday rites. 10 AM, Kendall College, 900 N. North Branch, chicago.foodways.roundtable@gmail.com, $2.

Leslie Cooperband of Prairie Fruits Farm visits Whole Foods in Lakeview to sample out her farmstead cheeses, including Moonglo, a pungent raw-milk goat cheese. 2-4 PM, 3300 N. Ashland, 773-244-4200, free. 

sunday23

Roots and Culture hosts its first-ever Pie Bake-Off and Chili Cook-Off, featuring recipes by "the Chicago art world's most reputable gourmands" and a panel of celebrity judges (including Mike Sula). 4 PM, judging at 5, 1034 N. Milwaukee, 773-235-8874, $5-10 (sliding scale based on appetite)

wednesday26

Lush Wine and Spirits on Roscoe hosts a vertical tasting of Bourbon Country Stout--current and past vintages--with Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall. 6-9 PM, 2232 W. Roscoe, 773-281-8888, free.

"I don't think there's a cheese out there that at least somebody doesn't like."
 --Marcel Gravel, Cabot Creamery

That was the plant manager from Vermont's largest cheese maker on Friday during a panel discussion on the economics of affinage at the American Cheese Society conference. I knew there had to be some explanation for the existence of inconceivable crimes against nature such as smoked salmon cheddar and strawberry-chardonnay cheddar, both ribbon winners in their respective categories in ACS's annual cheese competition.

At Saturday's Festival of Cheese those and over a thousand other competition entries from cheese makers all over the U.S. and Canada were cut and laid out in the Chicago Hilton's grand ballroom. Fish cheese aside, an impossible number of these were very fine indeed, including two second-place red ribbon winners from our old pal Willi Lehner. It was a challenge to sample thoughtfully among all this cheesy splendor--about the only spot in the room that wasn't mobbed with turophiles was the deserted low-fat, low-salt cheese table.

Some of my favorites: Vermont Butter & Cheese Company's cultured butter with sea salt, Utah's Beehive Cheese Company's espresso-lavender-rubbed cheddar, and Virginia's Meadow Creek Dairy farmstead Grayson, which I had the great good fortune to try earlier in the week melted on a pizza created by the talented Mark Bello. 

The big local angle here is that Wisconsin cheese makers took away a whopping 91 ribbons in the competition, a third of all the prizes. Sid Cook of Carr Valley Cheese Company won 18 of them, including Best in Show for his Snow White Goat Cheddar, and third runner-up for Cave Aged Marisa. Other local winners: downstate Prairie Fruits Farm took third in soft ripened goat's milk cheeses for their Little Bloom on the Prairie, and Indiana's Capriole took first in flavored goat cheeses for perennial favorite O'Banon. Both are available at the Green City Market.

Many winning cheeses were absent from Sunday's clearance sale at Kendall College, but if you were quick and ruthless you could get some fantastic deals. I scored a four-pound chunk of Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar for ten bucks. I shudder to think of what this red-ribbon-winning hunk of raw milk wonder would have cost at retail.

I want nothing more today than a bucketful of raw cabbage.

Locavores unite: Pastoral’s summer culinary road trip leaves bright and early at 7:30 AM this Saturday, rain or shine. Breakfast will be served en route to the Urbana-Champaign area, where stops will include a farmer's market, lunch at Champaign's Cafe Luna, and Prairie Fruits Farm, Illinois's only farmstead goat dairy--which means its cheeses are made from milk from the farm's own herd. On the return trip wine and cheese will be served, the latter presumably selected by Daniel Sirko, Pastoral's fromager, who will be leading the trip. Tickets are $100 per person and must be purchased online in advance.

Shedd Aquarium's Right Bite program to encourage sustainable seafood choices features a dinner at 6 PM this Monday at Shaw's Crab House. In addition to sustainable seafood dishes, the evening will include talks from Shedd specialists. Tickets are $75 per person ($60 if you sign up for more than three dinners); ages 21 and over only.

Monday is the deadline to buy early-bird tickets to Chefs and the City, a tasting event on August 3 featuring 20 celebrity chefs. The event aims to raise $100,000 to support low-income people affected by HIV and AIDS. Early-bird tickets are $175; VIP tickets are $250 (after July 9 they go up to $200 and $275, respectively).

The annual Green City Market Summer BBQ Festival runs Thursday from 6-8 PM at the south end of Lincoln Park (Green City Market's regular home). It will include offerings from more than 50 Chicago chefs, including Paul Kahan (Blackbird), Stephanie Izard (Scylla), and Paul Virant (Vie), plus wine, beer, and live music. Tickets are $50 in advance, $60 at the gate. 

On Sunday afternoon Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini had just finished a lunch of rare wholesomeness at a long, sun-dappled table behind a log farmhouse just outside of Champaign, and was expanding in Italian upon the themes of his new book, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. Craig Svozil, a young chef from Vie, sidled up to to his interpreter and asked if the august gastronome had tried the lamb prosciutto. “I made it,” he whispered.

Petrini took in the news and his eyes widened. “Eccellente!' Complementi!" "In Italy they call it a violin," he continued through his translator. "They hold it like a violin when they cut it.”     

The visit to Prairie Fruits Farm, which took place the day after Petrini's speech before more than 500 at Northwestern Law School, was arranged by Slow Food Chicago, and a set designer couldn't have manufactured a more perfect pastorality for the Illinois stop of his book tour. Four baby goats frolicked on the lawn, while on the other side of the table a plump speckled Sussex hen clucked and pecked in grass. In attendance were some of the local celebrity farmers championed by the group. There were John and Connie Caveny, Monticello producers of Bourbon Red turkeys and Rouen ducks. Henry Brockman, a fixture at the Evanston farmers' market was there, and Stan Schutte--named 2006 Farmer of the Year by the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service--was grilling brats with his son on a giant rig beside the driveway. Hosts Leslie Cooperband and Wes Jarrell make the only farmstead cheese in Illinois, which means it is made on the premises with milk from their own goats. These farmers were the real deal. One had arrived with an ugly purple lump on his lower lip, the result of a kick from one of his sheep.     

Petrini was accompanied by a small entourage of young organization staffers, including Erika Lesser, director of  Slow Food USA. The day before she sat with her hands folded, translating, while Petrini wandered the Northwestern stage, addressing the audience as much with his hands as with his words. An Italian woman later described his oratory, heavily inflected with the idiom of his Piedmont hometown of Bra, as like that of an politician from the 70s, colorful and a little old fashioned. “Cursed be those that reduce gastronomy to the spoon and pot!” he declaimed, meaning those who imagine gastronomy as a narrow focus on recipes and cookbooks rather than the multidisciplinary science he proposes will save the world from itself.    

The farm visit was the sort of exercise in “taste education”--going out to meet the people and visit the places that produce good food--in which Petrini thinks everyone should be taking part. Before lunch Leslie Cooperband led the group through the the farm's cheesemaking operation, housed in a converted machine shed. Before entering the cheese cave (a walk-in cooler), a woman broke off from the group, poised her nose next to a bale of hay, and inhaled. “I love the smell of hay,” she sighed. Petrini posed for pictures standing next to Cooperband and Jarrell with a plastic container full of aging blue. Then it was time to meet the goats, who obligingly proffered their heads for scratching.    

Petrini's visit to the United States hasn't all been baby goats and heritage turkey enchiladas. A book signing at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market was scotched when vendors there objected to a section in Slow Food Nation relating an earlier visit, and the scuffle blew up on the blogosphere. In what could have been just an undiplomatically translated bit of soul searching, Petrini addressed a common criticism of the local, organic, and sustainable products he celebrates: they can be be prohibitively expensive to the eater of average means, let alone for the poor. In it he described a farmer at Ferry Plaza who claimed he earned enough from selling high priced squash in two monthly trips to the city that he could support his family and spend hours surfing. Petrini went on to liken the market's customers  to “actresses, [who] went home clutching their peppers, marrows and apples, showing them off like jewels, status symbols.”    

At lunch Petrini, who had visited our own boutique Green City Market, said he wasn't trying to be critical. “He is not against the fact that it is expensive,” said Carlo Bogliotti, the Slow Food staffer who translated. “For him, when the farmer earns money it is always right. The problem in the the U.S. is not that you have expensive foods in farmers' markets. The problem is that food is too inexpensive. The food is too cheap and cannot be quality.”     

Petrini believes that taste education will bring quality to the mainstream. Once people know what is good and are willing to pay fairly for it, he argued Sunday, a host of small farmers will respond and a host of small local economies will develop to meet the demand.

Still, critics of the Slow Food movement, wonder how a dismantling of the agro-industrial complex capable of producing lots of cheap, low-quality food will feed the world. As befits the name of his organization he's not in much of a hurry. All of this will happen slowly, he said, at a manageable scale. He's not advocating a Pol Pot-style agrarian revolution--these are market-driven solutions, after all--though some of his rhetoric contains a revolutionary whiff of the late-60s Italian left from whence he came. “We need to increase the number of farmers,” he pronounced. “This is how we will prevail over the capitalist-industrial system!”     

After the meal he stood and praised the food produced by the farmers and the chefs in the group. “I was really curious to see how these goats were being raised,” he said. “I've decided if I get to have another life I want to come back as a goat here.” He then posed for a group photo, kissed the women goodbye, and headed back out on the road.