feeding from the fall market

alicia was out of town this past weekend, so after waking to a cold and empty house, i worked my way over to the wicker park farmers' market for the first time in a long time. turned out to be a very, very good thing.

it was late summer when i was last at the market, and peaches and tomatoes and melons were still in peak season. this past weekend, it was all about the gourds and root vegetables.

i've been wanting to cook with celery root for a while now, and nichols farm was selling it at four bucks a pop. the vegetable is a variation of celery, with similar smell and taste, but is ugly and dirty and for someone who doesn't know the thing, easily intimidating.

i'd also nabbed some celery stocks from nichols, which like the root above, still had its greens attached—one major advantage of buying from the farmers. before starting on the soup, i tossed the greens from both vegetables in a pot of water with some fresh herbs and lemon and cooked it all down, creating a broth that i went on to use for the soup before i puréed it all together—something i'd never done before. i was skeptical, but in the end the soup was layered with the root itself and the dairy i'd used to smooth it out and there, beneath the punch of the lemon i'd added to brighten the flavors, was the earthy undertones of the broth, a complete book-end to the process of planting the seeds and pulling the root by hand, emanating with the smells and tastes of fresh turned soil.

and on monday night, i attempted another first. boeuf bourguignon.

as soon as i saw that the market's small beef purveyor, robinson beef, was selling chuck at five bucks a pound, i knew i was gonna do it. we bought our le creuset dutch oven months ago, and what better dish to break in the thing with than boeuf bourguignon, right? well, that never happened, and i've been itching to get at it still all this time. so in my bag went the beef, and so too some onions, mushrooms, and carrots, all from nichols.

the thing of it is, i'm a sucker for fruit. walking out of the market with my twenty pound bag of stuff, i was sucked in to the tasting table of seedling farm's fresh pressed ciders, especially when i saw the words "bosc pear cider" written on their board. i poured a taste and knew right there, my boeuf bourguignon was not gonna be so much of a bourguignon anymore.

so in the end i wound up braising the beef in a mix of both the bosc cider and red wine. since i was going cider, i cut up some apples and tossed them in with the veggies, and so too tossed in a few handfuls of pomegranate seeds. yeah. bad idea. with the pomegranate i was a) looking to keep with the season and b) wanting to extract the sweetness of the juice, while at the same time changing things up with the contrasting texture of the seed. here's the thing with seeds. they don't tenderize like, say, everything else in a boeuf bourguignon.

but those apples did tenderize. they really worked, bouncing the savory and sweet factor nicely in a dish so void of anything predominantly sweet. it was simple and rustic and yeah, damn good.

i don't consider myself a hippie. i'm not a tree hugger. but i do care a hell of a lot about where my food is coming from, and think you should, too. so much time having passed since buying from a farmers' market, and having since eaten for three days what i brought home, i'm feeling damn good now. the difference can really be felt when eating stuff so fresh and local.

and i haven't even touched the bag of peppers sitting on the kitchen table.

millions of peaches, peaches for me

labor day. the end of summer. and for alicia and johnny, a first trip to the lake michigan shore.

it was a fog heavy morning, and after first trying out the beach my dad used to spend his high school summers at in winnetka, only to turn away with our tails between our legs because the fog was so thick, the air so cold, we wound up in evanston, walking something like a half mile, cooler and beach bag in tow, only to be turned away at the entrance because we didn't have a) a season pass or b) sixteen bucks cash. so, we picnicked on the grass, behind the iron curtain of a wooden fence that kept the likes of us ragamuffins from the patrons of the beach, for free.

(after finishing this post, alicia told me she'd used the same all-telling picture. well, on the risk of being slapped with an infringement lawsuit by my girlfriend, i'm keeping it. but here's her post, too...)

i popped open a bottle of a white spanish blend and we drank from red solo cups, which somehow was fittingly perfect; we noshed on a baguette and tore pieces of prosciutto from the deli packaging; sliced away at a hunk of smoked gouda and plucked crackers from a box that we slabbed the cheese on; popped open tupperware lids and dipped our forks into a chopped caprese salad with sweet 100 tomatoes from nichols farm, basil, and mozzerella and so too juicy red raspberries from another container, also from nichols farm; and licked our fingers clean of the melted peanut butter that covered the pretzels we bought from olivia's. and to top it all off, alicia and i slipped on our mits and tossed a ball around for the very first time. we even had a couple stop on their bikes and sit at a picnic table to watch us—and by that, i mean get a kick out of the twenty-something, backward hat wearing kid in glasses try to teach the twenty-something, pink skirt wearing girlfriend how to catch a baseball.

and then came dinner, which meant my first return to the grill since dad nearly s'mored my arm over the thing.

though i jumped away like a school girl everytime i dropped a match over the coals, i had a good fire going. and for dinner, just the two of us, i grilled the one foodstuff i've eaten more of than anything else: cheeseburgers. and i served them with peaches.


we came home sunday with gorgeous peaches from seedling farm and like always, while at the market, my demented mind thought of what was at home that i could throw on the burger. it's a pretty barren kitchen right now so naturally, when the only thing that really came to mind was the brown bag full of peaches that was on our butcher block, i said yeah, that's the stuff!

and so, along with thick cut red onion, i sliced up a peach and charred the summer fruit over the grill, drizzling oil over the coals, giddy and bouncing like a kid when the fire leapt up and engulfed the onion and peach in flames. since i wanted the char, i went with a smoked gruyere from the market to kick the smoky factor from the grill up another rung, and spooned bbq sauce over the buns.

and grilled peach? on a burger? in all seriousness, it might just've been the best thing i've ever tasted on a patty, sandwiched between two buns.