Yesterday I went to the Green City Market for the first time. Yes, despite living a short bus ride away for several years, I’d never taken the trip to the most renowned farmers market in Chicago. Call it a slave to convenience (my Jewel is two blocks away) or call it resistance to trying new things, but I never took the time to explore the market even though I was perennially curious about it. While there, I took the opportunity to view screening of Lunch Line, a documentary about school lunches that was both heartening in its championing of a turn away from nutrient-based meals to food-based meals and disheartening in the amount of bureaucracy tied up with something as simple as lunch. It was a well done film, following a group of Tilden Academy students on their journey to Cooking up Change in Washington, D.C., discussing the history and development of the school lunch program, and talking to people who were trying to enact change in the way we think about food and nutrition. If you’re at all piqued by the upcoming second season of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, you should also take a look at this film.
The market is still in its indoor phase, but it offered a nice array of cheeses, jams and preserves, apples, breads, and some fresh meats. The offerings weren’t quite to my tastes – I wasn’t looking for pre-made items and I don’t really enjoy apples unless they’re baked in something and I didn’t have a craving for that at the time – so I just picked up some potatoes, which I decide to mash up with a couple turnips and eat with some turkey meatloaf. The meatloaf was good, as usual (I always use Cinnamon's recipe), but the mashed potatoes and turnips weren’t the best thing I ever made. I love the texture I get from using my potato ricer, but the cooked turnips wouldn’t go through the holes. All that happened when I squeezed the handle was some watery juices squirted out and I was left with a hardened, fibrous mass at the bottom of the cup. The taste wasn’t spectacular either, so I don’t think I’ll be trying that one again anytime soon.
I was a little disappointed with the lack of bounty I’d brought home as earlier in the week I had perused my copy of Joy of Cooking and spied a recipe for homemade vanilla pudding that I thought would be great topped with a fresh berry sauce. (I ended up making the vanilla pudding anyway, using some berries I remembered I had stashed away in my freezer.) I’d like to say that my Joy of Cooking is an old, worn, tomato-stained copy passed down through the female generations of my family, but the truth is that it’s something I happened to pick up one day at Borders when I had a coupon that I needed to use. I don’t recall ever seeing the book in my mother’s kitchen (an entire Time Life series is another story), but it has, however, become one of the most important cookbooks in my own kitchen. Along with Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, it’s the book that I immediately go to when I want to find the basics of any recipe or learn about any vegetable, fruit, cut of meat, or type of dough. I have a plethora of post-its marking pages of recipes that I plan to try one day, but, sadly, few of them have actually been tried. The Joy’s pancakes are my go-to recipe, I’ve made a wonderful Pasta Puttanesca, and I recently turned out a fabulous crunchy, buttery, sweet cornbread, but what about the Individual Molten Chocolate Cakes and the Stuffed Bell Peppers and the Fig Compote with Lemon and Ginger? When will those be made?
In starting this blog, what I really wanted to do was give myself some incentive to cook at least one new recipe a week and discuss its merits or shortcomings. I quickly realized, though, that a good number of the recipes would end up coming from the Joy and the blog would seem nothing more than an endorsement of the tome. Then I thought, why not? Why not take this opportunity to explore one of the mothers of all cookbooks? I could learn a hell of a lot and, if things go well, eat some really tasty food. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an attempt to cook through the entire book in any specified amount of time – that would be 4500 recipes and that is just insane for (most nights) single, solitary me. But, in doing this I do hope to broaden my culinary horizons, from Basic White Bread to Spicy Seafood Stew to Baked Stuffed Heart (okay, maybe not that last one), and become both a better cook and a better eater. Plus, having just finished grad school, I'm itching for a completely new project. I definitely plan to return to the Green City Market when it heads outside in early May and I can’t wait to flip through the Joy as I try to figure out what to do with my new finds.
So here I am, like so many of you: a 9-to-5’er, over-educated, under-stimulated, and hungry. Here’s to trying new things and finding what truly satisfies our appetites.
I'll let you know how that vanilla pudding turned out.
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