Harvest time: Farmers share their favorite Thanksgiving recipes
Holiday tastes brighter when you showcase season's bounty
Thanksgiving is all about the meal. What better time, then, to connect with what is on our plate?
Farmers do this better than the rest of us.
(John H. White/Sun-Times)
More links to help you master the Thanksgiving meal:
• Making pie crusts from scratch
• Creative local recipes
• Recipes from farmers
• Making classic potatoes
• Beyond green bean casserole
• The right wine
• Beaujolais in Chicago
• Loving leftovers
• Surviving Turkey Day disasters
• Holiday tuber tutorial
• Next-day sandwiches and more
• Sweet potato pudding
• Buy extra pumpkin (if you can)
• Numbers you need
Videos: Carving the turkey & more
More at CenterstageChicago.com
• Find perfect ingredients
• Turkey roasting 101
• Pumpkin pie please
• Eating out for T-Day
Of course, they have an advantage. They know exactly where their food comes from.
Chefs may get the glory for their artfully plated $32 entrees, but even they will admit, they’re only as good as their ingredients. And more often, their ingredients are coming straight from the farm.
Farmers are our rock stars.
Their fingers have raked soil and pulled roots in the withering heat and, now, the chapped skin-cold, bringing to market the fruits — and vegetables, loads of vegetables — of their labor.
Do we appreciate their efforts as we furiously mound our plates with turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce, as if the food is going somewhere?
Maybe not enough.
Sure, the supermarket deals you’ve come to expect this time of year — two-for-one canned pumpkin, California-grown green beans and brussels sprouts — are hard to pass up.
But try and get your hands on just one gnarly-looking squash or a clutch of apples grown closer to home. And then, do as these farmers do, and take things slower and simpler.
When you cook with the season’s best, the meal just tastes better.
This time of year, Vicki Westerhoff can’t throw a stone on her 20-acre St. Anne farm without hitting a squash.
Butternut, Jarrahdale, Red Kabocha and Long Island Cheese are among the varieties she is growing now, along with various root vegetables. She has lettuce and chard going in a hoophouse.
“My niche is being diverse,” Westerhoff says. “I try to grow what our forebears would have grown to feed their family.”
Westerhoff lives much like our forebears. She eats what she grows and rarely, if ever, goes to the grocery store (“maybe a couple of times a year”).
It wasn’t always this way.
Ten years ago, Westerhoff was working as a manager in a medical office, struggling with the effects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Epstein-Barr Virus.
Her home remedy: to convert one acre of land her family owned into a vegetable garden. After three months of eating what she grew, she says, her health started to improve.
What struck Westerhoff most about the land, which for years was rented out to farmers using conventional methods, was the total absence of toads, earthworms and birds.
“I thought, if the land isn’t healthy enough to support these things, it’s probably not healthy enough to support good food, either,” she says. “And maybe that’s why so many of us are ill.”
Westerhoff took over the remaining acres and six years ago, quit her office job to farm full-time. Her farm is called Genesis Growers.
Westerhoff is finishing the outdoor harvest right around Thanksgiving, so she is too busy to host the holiday meal.
She’ll go to one of her sisters’ homes in St. Anne instead. And as always, she’ll bring a stuffed squash.
Westerhoff plays around with the stuffing, shifting from sweet to savory. A recent favorite was chorizo, white Cheddar, onion, garlic and cracker crumbs baked into mini-butternuts.
“I really don’t get tired of squash,” she says. “And when they’re gone . . . .” She pauses. “Like peaches. Peaches are now done. I won’t have another fresh peach until they come back in season next year. And I’m perfectly happy with that.”
This has been the worst season David Cleverdon has seen in the 15 years he has been farming.
His Kinnikinnick Farm in Caledonia, about 80 miles northwest of Chicago, is known among Chicago’s culinary elite for its arugula and hard-to-find greens, which get their start from seeds Cleverdon imports from Italy.
But no thanks to a string of frosty early autumn nights, “almost every leaf on every plant was beyond damaged,” Cleverdon says. “Generally, we have greens deep into November.”
And usually, Cleverdon cooks up a big batch of greens at Thanksgiving.
“You can use any kind of greens. It’s just that these Italian greens are so goddamn good,” he says.
Such is life on the farm. Mother Nature cooperates, or doesn’t. The farmer figures out how to live with her fickle ways.
Cleverdon’s path to Kinnikinnick went like this: New Yorker goes to graduate school at the University of Chicago, gets involved into politics and the civil rights movement, goes to work for the Board of Trade, keeps a weekend house with his wife, Susan, in the Caledonia area.
“And our garden just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” he says.
The 30-acre farm grows a great deal of tomatoes in the summer, as well as those greens, which are snapped up by restaurants like Spiaggia and Naha. Autumn brings beets, squash, radishes, mini-lettuces about the size of your palm.
Cleverdon is constantly diversifying. He partnered with Chicago chef Mary Ellen Diaz to produce a line of pestos, some of the proceeds of which go to Diaz’s nonprofit First Slice, which feeds impoverished Chicagoans. He started raising chickens this year and will add hogs in the spring.
On Thanksgiving, Cleverdon’s large extended family will gather at the farm. “We’re sort of all existential cooks,” Cleverdon says. “So whatever we’ve got, we do.”
That includes chicken, rather than turkey, and squash rolls, a family recipe that Cleverdon has enjoyed since childhood.
Stuffing is “an argument that’s ongoing here,” he says. “And we’re a big pie family — apple, mincemeat, pumpkin.”
In other words, just like the rest of us.
Time snuck up on Tracey Vowell and led her to the land.
For 17 years, Vowell was a chef at Rick Bayless’ acclaimed Frontera Grill.
“I was busy all the time, and I was getting tired,” Vowell says. “I started realizing that my whole existence was being devoted to cooking, and as wonderful as cooking was and is, it seemed like there were so many things that were getting by me.”
Growing up in southern Louisiana, Vowell wanted nothing to do with her mother’s garden. After leaving the restaurant a decade ago, that’s all she wanted to do.
But, Vowell says, she wanted to do it the right way.
“Being a chef in the city that bought so much from different farmers, I didn’t want to go into this business and put myself in head-to-head competition with all these farmers I’d worked for so many years to make stronger,” she says.
With her partner, Kathe Roybal, Vowell has found her niche in the 15-acre Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee. The name and mission of the farm reflects the Native American technique of growing corn, beans and squash.
The funkiest of her offerings — and what sets her apart — is huitlacoche, which, in a nutshell, is corn smut.
Cultivating the fungus is “painful, it’s hard to grow, it’s messy and it’s very labor-intensive,” Vowell says. “It’s a really, really odd thing that’s in super high demand.”
The stuff keeps Vowell firmly planted in the restaurant world — Bayless goes nuts for it, as do shoppers at Green City Market on the rare occasions when Vowell brings it. (This is her first year selling at the market. In August, a bunch of chefs held a fund-raising dinner to help her buy a van that would make it easier to transport her goods.)
Needless to say, huitlacoche won’t be on her Thanksgiving table, not when she can get $24 a pound for it, she laughs. Butternut squash gratin, cornmeal, greens and a turkey from a nearby farmer are more like it.
“It’s much simpler now because I don’t feel such a big need to perform,” she says. But one thing hasn’t changed: she’ll be the one cooking.
“Nobody wants to feed a chef,” she says.
Marty Travis is always out to find the next It crop, or as he likes to say, the “oldest latest and greatest.”
He and his wife, Kris, reserve about 10 acres on the family’s 160-acre Spence Farm in Fairbury to growing “weird squashes” and squash blossoms, nettles and all sorts of heirloom tomatoes, peppers and beans.
He is known (revered is more the word) by Chicago chefs for his ramps, which initially he had harvested on his cousin’s property nearby, at his cousin’s request, because they were crowding out the native wildflowers.
For the past three years, Travis has grown the rare Iroquois white corn.
Chef Rick Bayless had turned to Travis for help in procuring the corn, which was on the verge of disappearing after the tribe’s chief died.
Travis found the one seed company in North America that had the seed and snagged the last five pounds of it. The first year’s crop produced 75 pounds of cornmeal; this year’s net will be close to 4,000 pounds.
Leave it to Travis to stay on the cutting edge. He harvested some of the corn early in the year; the Chicago restaurants on the receiving end of the baby corn pickled it or served it raw in salads.
But as is also Travis’ way, he has shared some of the Iroquois corn seed with other small family farms and is working to get it back to New York, where the corn originated. This is the first year the public can buy the farm’s Iroquois cornmeal (you can order it at thespencefarm.com ).
The fall harvest is still in under way at Spence Farm. Potatoes, carrots and buckwheat have to come out and garlic has to go in. But life is slowing down to a tempo Travis prefers — despite his shock at hearing Christmas music last week while in a store in town.
Naturally, cornbread is a staple of the Travises’ Thanksgiving dinner. It’s made with their own eggs and whole wheat flour and butter from a nearby dairy, and drizzled with maple syrup made by the Travises’ son, Will.
As for the rest of the meal? “Maybe grilled quail or turkey or Cornish hens. Maybe a carrot salad or a carrot casserole. We have lots of apples, so we’ll do a spiced cider,” Travis says.
“We’re just trying to make use of the bounty of what we’re able to do, and that’s what Thanksgiving is all about,” Travis says. “That’s as close as it’s gonna get.”
Vicki Westerhoff of Genesis Growers sells year-round at Chicago’s Green City Market and at the Oak Park Farmers Market during the summer. She offers spring, summer and fall CSA shares, with drop-off points in the city and suburbs.
(815) 953-1512; genesis-growers.com
David Cleverdon of Kinnikinnick Farm sells year-round at the Green City Market and at the Evanston Farmers Market during the summer.
(815) 292-3288; kinnikinnickfarm.com.
Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters Garden is at the Green City Market on Saturdays. You also can follow her on Facebook.
(312) 399-5585.
Marty and Kris Travis of Spence Farm sell directly to restaurants and do not participate in Chicago area farmers markets. The farm welcomes visitors for tours and is offering its Iroquois white cornmeal for sale at thespencefarm.com. It’s $15 a pound (includes shipping). (815) 692-3336.
Green City Market operates indoors from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays through April at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon.
chicagogreencitymarket.org.
The 61st Street Farmers Market will be held indoors at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and Nov. 21, Dec. 5, 12 and 19.
experimentalstation.org
The Logan Square Farmers Market runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays through March 28 in the lobby of the Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee.
(773) 489-3222; logansquarefarmersmarket.org
You can also find locally grown produce, cheese, honey and prepared foods at Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand, 66 E. Randolph.
(312) 742-8419; chicagofarmstand.com.