For more info on the event:

http://www.plantchicago.com/events/

I am doing a *special* herbal workshop on Saturday, December 3rd with the upcoming holidays in mind!

Edible Herbal Bodycare and Beauty Products

Want to learn how to making more natural, herbal based bodycare products?  Maybe you are looking for creative gifts to give this holiday season?  In this workshop, you will learn to make a homemade lip balm, tooth powder, deodorant, salt scrub, bath salts, and more!  You will make a few items to take home with you!

Date: December 3rd, Saturday, 9-11:30 am

$20 Radical Root Members, $25 non-members

Please register as early as possible, as space is limited!  You can send checks made out to Radical Root Farm to:

Radical Root Farm

147 Westerfield Place Apt. C

Grayslake, IL 60030

Please indicate what classes you are signing up for!  Questions?  Email me, Alison, at: radicalrootfarm@gmail.com .

People, it’s finally happening.  My herbal workshops are starting this July!

I’ve been working and preparing to make them as good as they can be!  So join me, won’t you, in the journey to good health!  Learn what you can do for your family to keep everyone healthy and feeling good.  You will learn, you will eat and drink, you will make things, you will have fun!

Classes are as follows:

The Herbalist’s Kitchen

In this workshop, learn what common ailments can be treated using common kitchen spices, wild plants you can find in your yard, and vegetables from your CSA box or farmer’s market!  Learn what it is to have food be your medicine, and learn about both treatments and prevention.  We’ll then cook a meal together using Radical Root farm-fresh ingredients, putting together what we learned!

Thursday, July 21st, 5-7:30 pm

*New date added*!   Saturday, July 16th, 5-7:30 pm  (cancelled due to lack of enrollment)

Meets at Prairie Crossing in the Yellow Farmhouse in Grayslake, IL

Cost: $25,  or $20 for Radical Root CSA members

Making Healing Fermented Foods

Learn the amazing healing benefits to fermenting vegetables and other foods.  Learn about the whys and hows of incorporating herbs, and make your own kim chi or saurkraut to take home with you!  We’ll be using Radical Root farm-fresh produce to make your own personal healing concoction to take home.  Please bring a mason jar to class.

Thursday, August 25th, 5-7:30 pm

Meets at Prairie Crossing at the Yellow Farmhouse in Grayslake, IL

Cost: $25,  or $20 for Radical Root CSA members

Making Healing Fermented Drinks

Learn to make delicious, healing, fermented drinks.  Learn how to incorporate herbs.  We will learn and make and taste healing brews of all kinds, such as Ginger beer, mead, medicinal wines, kombucha and more!   Bring two mason jars to take home two starters to get you going, you herbal brewmaster, you!

Date and Time TBA

Meets at Prairie Crossing at the Yellow Farmhouse in Grayslake, IL

Cost: $25,  or $20 for Radical Root CSA members

Cold and Flu, The Herbal Way

Make this winter a healthy one for you and your family.  Learn treatments and prevention with food, common culinary spices and wild plants.  Learn about making syrups and teas to keep everyone healthy, and learn to make ‘fire cider’, an herbalist favorite, to take home with you!

Date and Time TBA

Meets at Prairie Crossing at the Yellow Farmhouse in Grayslake, IL

Cost: $25,  or $20 for Radical Root CSA members

Please register as early as possible, as space is limited!  You can send checks made out to Radical Root Farm to:

Radical Root Farm

147 Westerfield Place Apt. C

Grayslake, IL 60030

Please indicate what classes you are signing up for!  Questions?  Email me, Alison, at: radicalrootfarm@gmail.com .

This winter we are doing some heavy reading, and I am doing a lot of food reading.  This includes books on food politics (currently: Diet for a Hot Planet by Anna Lappe) as well as on cooking (currently:  Mark Bittman’s Food Matters).  I always think about food a lot this time of year, because the question of “what should we eat for dinner/lunch/breakfast?” is always a part of our day, and because it is winter, it is limited.   We barely ever go to the store, so before winter hits, we do our best to preserve as much as possible.  This fall we: froze broccoli.  Canned tomatoes.  Made saurkraut.  Made kimchi.  Froze pesto.  Stashed away a lot of winter squash.  Froze some bread from the market.  Froze sliced bell peppers.  Dried hot peppers.  Made pickles.  Stashed away plenty of frozen meat from the market.

We are running low on some of these things now, however.  We are down to our last bag of frozen broccoli and almost out of the hot peppers.  And I am trying not to get antsy about having a salad anytime soon!

Breastfeeding has also made me think a lot about food.  Everything I eat I think of Huck eating.  I try to get the most nutrition possible for him.

Over the holidays we stayed with my parents, who grocery shop a lot.  My mom and sister happen to really like Trader Joe’s, and I was offered to have some chai tea from a mix.  It was Trader Joe’s brand.  I knew when my sister offered it to me she was testing me, because I’m known as a sort of food snob among much of my family.  “There’s nothing bad in it!” she told me, somewhat defensively, before I even gave my answer.  I picked up the cylinder of mix and read the ingredients.  They included: nonfat dried milk, powdered black tea, malodextrin, sodium something or other, dy-glycerides, dextrose, corn syrup solids, and more.  A lot more.  “What do you mean there’s nothing bad in it?” I asked back.  And cue my family’s collective eyeroll.

I do really love chai tea.  Here is my very basic recipe that I make at least three times a week:

Cooking Chai

And just so you know…I am a cook that never measures.

Cinnamon Sticks

Ginger (chopped into slices or chunks)

A few cloves

A few cardamon pods

A little bit of black peppercorns

Black tea bag

Take all herbs (except for tea bag) and cook with some water in a pot with a lid.  Let it come to a boil and then lower it to a simmer.  Instead of tea, it is making what herbalists call a “decoction”.  (Really just a fancy word for soup.)  Simmer on low for up to an hour, then shut it off and leave it steeping for as long as you like.  Ladle some in a cup with the black tea bag for a couple of minutes.  Remove tea bag and sweeten with raw honey and organic milk.

I usually make a medium pot and just keep ladling it out for myself and whoever else.  It’s full of very warming herbs for the winter, and also great for the onset of sickness.  (The cinnamon and ginger, while anti-inflammatory, are also anti-viral and work as diaphoretics, so they will make you sweat it out.)

Also, have you seen our updated website?  Check it out!: www.radicalrootfarm.com

Yes! CSA! Join it!

Dreaming of Greens,

Alison

Not that I NEVER buy them, but I rarely do.  This is why I make so much saurkraut during harvest time so I can have all those vitamins and minerals in the winter that I do in the summer when my beloved greens are around.  (Shameless plug:  We will be selling our very our Radical Root Sauerkraut and Kimchee this year, later in the year!  All raw and fresh and fermented in glass and chockfull of nutrients and pro-biotics!).

But anyway, greens.  As much as I love saurkraut, I have been missing eating greens.  The other day Alex and I visited the store to buy a few things, and as I walked around the produce department, I noticed bunches of dandelion greens for sale.  Not that I’ve never noticed the selling of dandelion greens, but I have been noticing they had been looking very lush at our farm lately.  I picked up a bunch and inspected it.  I had thought about harvesting dandelion greens for a while to eat, and the ones around our farm looked exactly the same as these ones being sold for 2.99.  I am not really sure why I hadn’t really paid much attention to them before this year, but I figured I should try it now, especially since Susun Weed (acclaimed New York herbalist) recommends it for pregnant women.

So that evening we went to the farm and I harvested a bunch of dandelion greens.  One thing about dandelion greens is that they do get more bitter as the spring goes on, so I knew I’d have to cook them as opposed to eating them in a salad.

Dandelion Greens, Harvested and Rinsed

So I cooked them.

And I dressed them in an oil and vinegar dressing with salt and pepper.  But I must warn you, dear readers, I did not cook them enough.  Dandelions are very bitter this time of year.  I cooked them only a couple of minutes, but I’d recommend doing it longer.  Susun Weed recommends boiling them in water for at least 5 minutes.  I should have done this, because while I like bitter, I could have used alittle less so.   The last few bites I actually sort of had to choke down.

So if you’re living in the city and if you know of a place that is definitely not sprayed, I’d harvest some dandelion greens!  Some may have even planted themselves in your pots (if you have potted plants outside) or if you have a small box garden.  Then experiment!  Dandelions are very high in vitamins A and C as well as many detoxifying minerals.

Another weed that you may see, especially if you have a small garden or a small yard or, again, a potted plant outside: chickweed!

Chickweed is a sweet little plant that makes a great salad green (I top my bean and rice tacos with some sprigs) that is also high in vitamins.  Sorry this picture isn’t better..if you are unsure what it is, I’d look in some plant ID books.  A nice thing about chickweed is that it is not bitter and actually just tastes like a greener salad green.

And meanwhile, our greens are coming!  Even though it’s been a little chilly, the rain has really invigorated the plants.  I cannot wait to make my first batch of kale of the season!

I picked a Saturday for this month’s first date night, and we combed the internet reviews looking for a restaurant to eat at.  We are new to Grayslake, as many of you know, so we wanted to try some place close by.  However, our track record with restaurants has not been good.  The town we were at before had horrible, fast food-tasting restaurants, and most of them we had tried.  But we always searched for that restaurant we could come back to, some place we could take friends.  Plus, I always like the idea of restaurants…I like the idea of taking a night off from cooking, I like experiencing new atmospheres…it always seems like a good idea to try them out!

Listening to some rave internet reviews AND listening to a few people in Grayslake swear it to be good, we picked an Asian restaurant that will go unnamed.  We had high hopes.  Alex ordered his dish, I ordered mine.  And when it came to us….well, let’s just say I was having some de ja vu.

This has all happened before, I thought.  Sure, the food smells good, and looks kind of good, but the flavor just tastes cheap.  I ate half of the veggie and sickly-sweet spicy noodle dish and immediately starting feeling like crap.  Eating restaurant food without much thought has been something I have done before, but just then it felt impossible to do so.  My mind was reeling:  how was this cooked?  What oils did they use?  What country did these bell peppers or ginger come from?  Is it one of the countries where it’s still legal to spray DDT, and if so, how much of that am I ingesting right now?

Oh, the agony!  What happened to the days where I could eat at any given Thai or Mexican restaurant and not give a freak?  I could ingest all of the oily vegetables and rice I wanted and not even think about it, the plate’s grease a distant memory forgotton with a swig of beer.  I was so carefree then.  Now I am constantly tortured by my consistent upkeep of food politics.

Of course, my nonenjoyment of date night was driving  Alex crazy.  He was hungrily wolfing down his basil noodle stir-fry.  He seemed to be enjoying it ok, so I tried not to let my dissatisfaction ruin it.  I yearned for the days where I could enjoy food like this, greasy Asian noodles that were alittle too sweet and possibly laced with MSG.  But alas, I could not.  I kept thinking, I could have cooked something better than this at home!

At least then I could have used a good, organic oil to cook it in, I’d know what ingredients I was using, and it would have been a heck of a lot cheaper of a date night.  We could have even eaten outside at our small patio table, an option not available to us at this restaurant.

We walked out, Alex feeling too full, me feeling sick and annoyed we had spent so much money on my feeling sick.  It was then that I told Alex I was swearing off restaurants.

Now, maybe not all restaurants.  You can go to Chicago and see restaurant owners and chefs that really do care about ingredients, cooking methods, etc.  Chefs periodically email us looking for organic vegetables and ask if we can sell some to them.  These restaurants are worth seeking out and perhaps worthy of our date night.  Maybe we can save up for these restaurants and eat a meal at them once in a blue moon.  Until then, date night might just be limited to eating in our little kitchen or on our patio outside followed by an evening walk.  I guess I’m just a cheap date.

I came up with this blog idea in hopes it will create a community for our CSA members (who I hope will share in the comments section their own recipes and tips for their CSA boxes!).  I like to think of the CSA season as a kitchen adventure.  It makes one cook more (if they don’t already!) and introduces them to new vegetables they may not be used to, or sometimes have never heard of!  CSAs are great for cooking exploration past your standard grocery store fare.  If you were with us last year, you got a newsletter that had recipes that came with it, especially for the more unusual vegetables.  You will get the same this year, PLUS what I hope to be more tips, tidbits, anecdotes and recipes with this blog!  But like I said before….I want to hear from you too, dear readers!  Our CSA members will especially benefit since what you get in your box, we get here at home.  So we will all be trying to find out the favorite way to prepare kohlrabi together!

I know a lot of our CSA members are great cooks, so please share your wisdom!  I will be trying my best to experiment more and make some delicious meals myself.  So let’s see what happens!

This blog is a work in progress.  We will see how it shapes up.  I will also be posting the current newsletter on this blog, so it can always be just an internet click away!