best of the best: Green City Market

Nothing signals summer for me like the return of the farmer’s markets—and this summer I needed that signal, since it still hasn’t really been warm enough to bust out the flip flops yet.

Okay, now I don’t mean downplay the rest of the city’s wonderful markets (you can find them all here), but I have to say the Green City Market is the one I most look forward to. They have a commitment to sustainable agriculture that goes above and beyond the usual standards, meaning that in addition to buying locally, I’m also buying responsibly. And so should you!

You have to get there early, though: the most sought-after wares (baked goods, free range eggs) are gone by 10am, although I showed up at 11am today and still managed to score a nice 8 pound leg of grass-fed lamb from Mint Creek Farm.

If you started your garden late this year you can also pick up seedlings and fresh herb plants to get back on track. Perhaps, like me, you live in a tiny apartment and don’t have a garden—check out Tiny Greens for microgreens ranging from broccoli to mizuna for edible (highly nutritional) goodness you can grow in a windowbox.

Also, because I know many of us have become conditioned to expect higher prices for organic food, I want to assure you that farmer’s markets are as direct-to-consumer as you can get, so the cost is a lot less that what you might be used to in the supermarkets.

Stop by the Green City Market (located in Lincoln Park on Clark St.) on Wednesday or Saturday mornings, from 8am to 1pm.

eat local: mado

I love seasonal menus. Seasonal = fresh = local = just plain good for everyone. One of the newest seasonal menus is at mado, a laid-back, rustically appointed restaurant in Bucktown (1647 N. Milwaukee Ave.). They’re BYOB—a plus!—and although I failed to B my own B, the experience hardly suffered from my omission. (Okay, so maybe some prosecco would have been nice.)

Mado is open all day, offering commuters (and the oh-so-lucky summer vacationers) fresh cups of organic, fair-trade Metropolis coffee in the mornings, small plates for lunch, and then a similar menu for dinner, but with the addition of several entrees. The restaurant’s owners, husband and wife team Robert and Allison Levitt, change the menu daily, depending on what’s available and looking good at the market that morning.

The servers are friendly and knowledgeable, and the food—we’ll call it contemporary Mediterranean—is outstanding. One of the benefits to the Levitts’ local shopping is that they butcher much of the meat they buy in-house, which in turn means that there are more unusual parts of the animal to showcase. The guanciale crostini, for example, is a small croute topped with thinly sliced pig jowl. Like the ethereal ribbon of prociutto it appeared to be, it deliciously melted on my tongue before I could even close my mouth.

Other recommended delights: scallop crudo with grapefruit and esplette pepper, hanger steak with gorgonzola polenta, and rainbow trout with walnuts, coriander and marjoram.

Oh, and for dessert, if it’s still around, you have to try the Buffalo Ricotta with organic farmer’s honey. Just trust me on that one. I was about to lick the plate when my sense of decorum (shaky though it is) stopped me, and the server said knowingly, “Go ahead, we don’t judge here.”

Make your way to mado: 1647 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL.

Check out other reviews here:

Yelp

Metromix

NewCity (a great article by food writer Michael Nagrant, my hero)

electricity on a rainy day

Everytime I’m over at my grandma’s for dinner, I notice that after she makes toast, she unplugs the toaster. I always figured it had something to do with an irrational fear of electrocution, but if that were the case, wouldn’t one want to NOT touch the plug at all? Perhaps I was projecting.

So finally I asked. Her response? “I’m saving electricity.”

I thought, saving it for what? A rainy day? How does unplugging something save electricity? If it’s not “on,” it’s not using power. Right?

Oh no, I was wrong. I was schooled by my grandma.

It’s called “standby electricity loss,” and as it turns out, any appliance, electronic device, whathaveyou, continues to draw energy from the socket even if it’s turned off. Like silent vampires sucking the money out of your pocket, anything with a plug is wasting energy while idle. If it’s plugged in, of course.

But if running around the house plugging and unplugging everything sounds like a pain (or inspires fears of electrocution in you like, uh, some people I know), then get a “Smart” Power Strip. They monitor and manage the electricity usage of anything you plug into ‘em, from computers to toasters.

By unplugging or managing the energy of appliances that are not in use, the average household can save several hundred dollars a year in energy costs.

So it’s not only “green,” it’s saving you cash.

growing home benefit June 6th

On a typical night in Chicago, more than 21,000 people are homeless. Only a fifth of that number are served in shelters, and the total number skyrockets when the number of “underhoused,” ie., families living on top of each other, is taken into account. With the demand for public housing doubling the number of units available in the city, housing is literally impossible for thousands of people.

Growing Home, an offshoot of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, has taken on the mission “To provide job training and create employment opportunities for homeless and low-income people in Chicago within the context of an organic agriculture business.” The organization has been around for more than ten years, training its program participants on three farms, two of which are actually in the city itself, and growing the high-end, organic, sustainable produce that it sells at farmer’s markets.

Since 1992, they have “Seen a 90% success rate in participants improving their living situations, either by finding stable long-term housing or renting their own apartments,” and have also helped their graduates secure employment in many different fields, accomplishments that have been recognized nationally and internationally.

Their annual benefit is being held on June 6^th, featuring a gourmet meal prepared by chefs such as Shawn and Holly McClain (Green Zebra) and Paul Virant (Vie) and a keynote address by Chef Art Smith. Visit www.growinghomeinc.org for more information.

You can also support their efforts to end homelessness in several other ways:

*Contribute – Donations and gifts make it possible to purchase necessary supplies.

*Volunteer – Whether as a mentor or working on the farm. Contact Rebekah Silverman at (312) 435-8601.

*Educate – Yourself and others: learn more at growinghomeinc.org

*Buy – Growing Home sells its locally grown, organic produce at the Green City Market in Lincoln Park every Wednesday and Sunday during the summer months. You can also support the Coalition for the Homeless by purchasing free-trade organic coffee through their site, www.chicagohomeless.org

A super-easy way to "go green"

Looking for an easy way to “go green”? Lighten your carbon footprint by changing your lightbulb.

Use CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs), readily available at most stores now, and they’ll not only outlast your old bulbs (they last about 10x as long), but they’re energy efficient, meaning they use less power. Each CFL saves you about $30 over the life of the bulb.

Accoring to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, if every American household were to swap just one bulb to CFL, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

How’s that for easy?

what the hell is a carbon offset?

I visited the Field Museum a few weeks ago and when I bought my ticket I was asked if I wanted to buy a carbon offset for $1, which I did and then immediately wondered where my dollar went. I mean, I’m paying whom for what?

The Field Museum’s carbon offsets are purchased from the Chicago Climate Exchange, “the world’s first and North America’s only active voluntary, legally binding integrated trading system to reduce emissions of all six major greenhouse gases (GHGs), with offset projects worldwide.” Wow. It’s like the stock exchange, but with gas. Or anti-gas, I suppose. The Beano of stocks? Okay, enough.

That’s great for companies, but what can we do about our individual dirty footprints?

At climatecrisis.net, they’ll calculate an index of what your carbon footprint is. I travel to Asia twice a year, so my carbon footprint is a 9.85, much higher than the average 7.5. If you go to nativeenergy.com, the company responsible for (ostensibly) reducing Al Gore’s carbon footprint, they make it more complicated, showing an animation you have to interpret to understand your impact on the environment. (My animation looks dirty and the flowers around it are dead.)

So what does nativeenergy.com recommend? That I buy some carbon offsets, of course. They’ll even go ahead and charge my credit card monthly if I so desire.

When you go to “check out,” it looks like you’re putting money ($168/yr, in my case) toward wind-powered energy or reducing methane emissions—carbon offset projects, both of which are great—but then you read the explanation:

"The projects are currently under contract with us, and we will make this purchase for you when your project or projects achieve commercial operations (it is our contract to do so that the projects rely on to proceed with development and construction)."

Sooooo…How long might they hold my money? What if the projects never “achieve commercial operations”? What does that parenthetical mean?

It makes me glad to read that there are so many companies out there committed to reducing their carbon bootprint, but I have to admit I’m still skeptical when it comes to purchasing offsets for myself.

For more info on the CCE, visit www.chicagoclimatex.com.