The Real Dirt on Farmer John

I have an interesting link for you, courtesy of Ron.

There is a documentary coming out about an eccentric organic farmer who runs a CSA farm in Caledonia, IL, and it looks really interesting. Roger Ebert reviewed it. Ron reads just about everything Roger Ebert writes, so of course he read this review, and — being familiar with my affinity for crazy hippies, organic produce, and community-supported agriculture — sent me the link.

He also rustled up a link to the farm itself here. Be sure to read the Farmer John stories on the Web site. Some of them are funny, and some of them will break your heart. They are all worth reading, I think.

There are some CSA farms in our area — one is in Bristow, and I forget where the other one is — and I think I am going to subscribe to one of them this year. We used to have a subscription to Biver Farm when we lived in Belleville. We did that for a couple of years. With a CSA farm, what happens is you pay a set amount of money at the beginning of the season, and then you get a bag of groceries every week for the whole growing season. You don’t know what’s going to be in the bag. It’s just a big bag full of produce. You get whatever is ready to be picked that week.

One time, we got fennel bulbs. We didn’t have a clue what to do with them, but Ron bought a cookbook the farmers were selling, and it had a recipe in it for baked fennel. The recipe was so good that I still pick up fennel at the grocery store every chance I get and bring it home for Ron to bake. We got some to-die-for berries. We got some Swiss chard. We got kohlrabi one time. I don’t remember what we did with it. Made slaw, I think. The first year we subscribed, it was a good year for bok choy, so we ended up with a head of bok choy every week for … I dunno … three or four weeks, I guess. I made a lot of stir-fry that year, and I think I used some of it to make chow. (If you aren’t familiar with chow, it’s a kind of zippy slaw that involves mixing minced cabbage, sweet pickle relish, mustard, and a few dashes of hot sauce together. You basically start with a head of cabbage, throw it in the food processor, and then add a small jar of relish and enough mustard to make it the right texture. Ideally, you want it thick enough to spread on a bun, but just slightly sloppy. It’s a Southern Illinois tradition; you put it on barbecue. I learned to make it by watching my boss at Burger Nook, where I flipped burgers and waited tables as a teenager, and where I nurtured the deep and abiding affection for mom-and-pop diners that remains part of my psyche to this day.)

A CSA subscription is kind of a crapshoot — you don’t know what you’re going to get from week to week, and you don’t know how well the crops are going to do — but it makes you a lot more aware of where your food comes from, and it kind of forces you to get out of your usual rut and try new stuff. It makes grocery day a lot more exciting, too. You might get a bag full of stuff you love. You might get a bag full of stuff you hate. You might get a bag full of stuff you’ve never seen before. Most weeks, you get some combination of all of the above. Whatever happens to be ready that week is what goes in your bag. It’s as close as you can come to having God plan your menus for you.

If you’ve never tried a CSA, I highly recommend it. It’s soul food of the highest order … and a nice failsafe in case your own garden doesn’t cooperate as well as you’d hoped. I’m planning to do a CSA as backup this year, as we are still figuring out the soil and lighting conditions in our yard. If we get more produce than we can eat … well, that’s why the good Lord gave me a cabinet full of Mason jars and an intense love for the gentle PLINK! of a wide-mouth lid sealing as it cools.

Emily