Explorations in Food

Chicago's a great city for food. You can pretty much assume that any restaurant that's been around for more than 6 months is good, since otherwise nobody would eat there and it would go out of business. Kraig and I have continued to find restaurants in our neighborhood that we like, but the most exciting food thing we've been doing lately actually has more to do with the food that we're making at home.

An organic foods store down the street offers half and full farm shares each week that includes vegetables and fruit (there's an optional expanded fruit share). They also do a meat share, but we haven't tried that yet. For the past few weeks, we've been getting shares (mostly half, for the two of us, but a full one if we're having company) and the result is that we constantly have tons of really good produce in the house. We're basically forced to cook at home most nights, since otherwise we wouldn't even be able to eat a half-share quickly enough to keep the food from going bad. We're also eating a larger variety of foods since what we get varies from week to week and we don't fall into the trap of going food shopping on auto-pilot.

What we get from week to week varies a lot, so it's hard to give you an idea of what we're getting. Generally, though, we get a head of lettuce and possibly also cabbage or kale (kale chips=AMAZING snack) along with some potatoes (russet or red), a few apples and carrots. They might throw in a few bananas or grapefruits. We've been getting various squashes and small pumpkins lately along with a zucchini or two, as well as beets, turnips (surprisingly yummy), green beans, and a few tomatoes and possibly shallots or onions. We got a huge clump of cilantro the first week that we did not make it all the way through, and some basil the week after that that I think ended up in a stew.

We pick up the half or whole share from the store on Friday evenings (it's about 3 blocks away), but this week, since Thanksgiving is a big food day, they're having people pick them up on Wednesday instead. Doesn't that make so much sense? Amazing. I just hope that there are more green beans and some sweet potatoes. ::crosses fingers::