The 100 Yard Dinner and other News
Farm News
This Saturday, we’re hosting our “100 Yard Dinner.” It’s a culmination of the fruits of our season’s labors-a true harvest feast. It’s a meal designed to showcase what we can grow, harvest and transform into delicious dishes right here on our farm. We like to say that 90% of what our dinner guests will eat comes from within 100 yards of the dinner table. This year, I admit, our garden is not the cornucopia of vegetables that it was last year. Nonetheless, it is respectable. We’ve got Rainbow chard, planted in May, but continued to thrive and survive during the height of the heat and drought.
We’ve got ripe tomatoes, potatoes and giant sweet potatoes, harvested at the end of the summer.
Our herb garden will feature prominently on the menu, from parsley to basil to lemon balm; we even grew hops that we’ll use for a soothing tea.
The featured “protein” of the menu will be our Freedom Ranger chickens. We raised them from day-old chicks to sturdy pastured broilers in about 10 weeks.
Our chef, Alisa, will be making a goat buttermilk marinade for the chicken that will be fried southern style. Of course, we’ll have an egg course with a creamy sunchoke puree and some beautiful pea shoots we grew.
Let’s not forget cheese. We made a special “prairie blazing star banon” for the meal; a petite soft-ripened cheese wrapped in an Illinois wine-soaked sycamore leaf. If you’re intrigued, you can see the full menu on our website. It’s a testament to the bounty that can be grown right here in central Illinois, even in the face of drought, heat waves and pop up thunderstorms.
Farmers’ Markets
This weekend, we’re attending THREE farmers’ markets: Urbana, Chicago’s Green City Market on Saturday, September 29th and Chicago’s Logan Square Market on Sunday, September 30th. For those of you who patron the Logan Square market, this may be our last one for this season, so come on out to get your favorite cheeses. You can even stock up on chevre and freeze it for the winter if you like. We’ll have:
- Lots of chevre—plain, herbs de Provence, cracked pepper
- Sheep Milk Feta
- An assortment of bloomy rind cheeses including Angel Food, Little Bloom on the Prairie, Ewe Bloom and Black Sheep
- Moonglo
- Roxanne
- Huckleberry Blue
- Mollisol Pecorino
For our Urbana shoppers, we’ve got gelato—even though the weather is cooler, you can still enjoy our gelato with a warm apple pie:
- Vanilla
- Chocolate
- Hazelnut
- Rhubarb Swirl
- Stracciatella
- Anise Hssop
- Cardamom
- Ginger
- Thai Basil
- Concord Grape Sorbetto
- NEW FLAVOR: CHOCOLATE SORBETTO
- NEW FLAVOR: ESPRESSO SORBETTO
