mood: 
adventurous
music: silence
I'm still trying to get caught up to the present here. So far, I'm up to Friday, April 4!
In another act of boldness, on Friday, April 4, I bought some eggs. Okay, that doesn't sound bold. How about this: I took some eggs without paying for them! And one of them was a duck egg!
Okay, before you go calling the cops, let me explain.
I've been on this locavore kick ever since reading Plenty (and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food, and starting on Fast Food Nation, and watching King Corn and Super Size Me). Of course, what I really mean by that is that I've been thinking "I need to eat more local food." Examples of actually doing so, however, have been limited. Winter in central Illinois is not exactly harvest time.
At the grocery store we've bought: honey that came from Mackinaw Valley Apiaries in Mackinaw, Illinois (about 60 miles north of Springfield); eggs from Phil's Fresh Eggs that came from northern Illinois (about 150-200 miles north of Springfield); and jam that came from Kathy's Kitchen in Virginia, Illinois (about 30 miles northwest of Springfield). But we hadn't gotten anything really local, direct from the farmer. (We've bought a CSA share from Hill Street Farm in Modesto, Illinois (about 50 miles southwest of Springfield), but we don't start getting any food from that until May 17.)
Via the Local Harvest web site, I found that the James Family Farm near Sherman, Illinois sells eggs direct to the public. Imagine that -- you can go to a farm and buy food! Ah, the wonders of the modern world!
Actually, that last statement isn't entirely sarcasm. It turns out that, not too long ago, it was illegal in the U.S. for a farmer to sell their food directly to the public. I kid you not. Of course, I can't find the citation now (typical!), but I think it was sometime in the 1970s that Federal legislation was passed allowing farmers to bypass distributors and sell direct the the public. What a concept!
Anyway, the James Family Farm is located 7 miles from where I work, so I decided to go there after work to at the very least locate it and possibly also buy some eggs. (Mary, this is 0.8 miles from your house. FYI.)
I drove east on Andrew Road, looking for a sign that says "James Family Farm". I didn't see one. What I did see is a mailbox with the number "3750" on it. That's their street address! Of course, I missed it on the first pass and had to turn around. (I waved at your house, Mary. Did you see me?) When I went back, I saw a small gravel road/driveway going back through the trees. There was an iron gate, but no sign to indicate that this led to a farm.
I followed the gravel road anyway, and before long it emerged from the trees and I saw... cows! Chickens! A barn! Dogs and pickup trucks and kids and well, all the things that you would expect to see on a real farm, as opposed to what you get (but never go to see) on a factory farm. There were cows grazing on grass, and there was a chicken coop with a couple dozen hens roaming around outside in the sun. These were real free-range, cage-free eggs.
(Incidentally, if the eggs you buy at the grocery store say "free-range", that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. If it comes from an "industrial organic" factory farm, it probably means that the chickens live in a massive building with hundreds or thousands of other chickens, but that there is a small door that leads outside to a tiny strip of grass. This door is kept closed for the first 6 weeks of their life, to protect them from disease. As a result, they generally never realize that they have the option of going outside.)
I walked up on the porch, knocked on the door, and Andrea answered. When I told her that I was interested in buying some eggs, she said that they were just about to go out to the chicken coop and get some. Talk about fresh! So while we talked, she sent her kids out to get the eggs.
There was just one problem: I had no cash with me. Debit card? Yes. Cash? No. When I told her this, she told me not to worry about it. She said that she'd never had someone buy eggs from her that didn't come back, and that I could pay her next time. When was the last time your supermarket chain told you that? Michael Pollan has a wonderful expression in his book In Defense of Food: "Shake the hand that feeds you." Well, now I've done that. Or at least one of them.
When the kids came back, in addition to the chicken eggs, they also had some duck eggs. Andrea asked me whether I had ever eaten a duck egg. When I told her I hadn't, she insisted I take a duck egg -- for free.
While I was talking to her, there was another woman there who was, I think, picking up some milk. She asked me how I had heard of the farm and I said I found it on the Internet, via Local Harvest, and had been reading Andrea's blog postings. Andrea said she had wondered whether anyone was reading that. She had received some comments from some readers in California, but those obviously weren't her target audience!
Here's an example of Andrea's writing, from an entry called Seasonality:
Nowhere are the seasons more evident than on a farm. December and January have been spent in a kind of peaceful hominess. We don’t really go anywhere and we don’t plan anything. When it gets dark we read and shut out the lights by eight o’clock. We sleep in too. The world is dark longer and we all respond in kind by allowing our bodies to go with the natural rhythms of light and dark.
Winter is story time. It is time to rest and time to dream. We dream of warm days to come, planning what we will plant and imagining our harvest. We dream of the far away places that our stories take us. Back in time and forward sometimes too, our books carry our thoughts to places beyond our four walls. We don’t listen to the radio and we don’t subscribe to television. Our days in the winter always end with several chapters of our most recent book, our latest adventure. After dinner, everybody grabs a blanket and pillow, cuddling on the couch, on the floor or beside the reader in the reading chair, and we read.
This is, I think, a perfect ending to a winter day. When it’s cold, the wood stove will be warm and cheery. After story time, the bed will be cold when we slide in between the heavy blankets. It is so simple, I hate for it to end.
(Go read the whole thing. I'll wait.... Nice writing, huh? Sort of makes me want to quit my job and go live on a farm. But only sort of.)
I asked Andrea how long they had been there and she said about 3 years. The house is a converted barn and has a gorgeous great room, with a tall vaulted ceiling, lots of windows, and big wooden beams. I immediately coveted it! However, I contented myself with leaving with my baker's dozen of eggs, unpaid for until next time.
Dawn and I decided to try the eggs in omelets. I had never cooked an omelet before. Dawn doesn't eat eggs very often, nor had she ever cooked an omelet, but she at least had eaten omelets before. I'd never even done that.
I decided to experiment using the last of the eggs from Phil's Fresh Eggs, so I cooked two cheese omelets, one for Dawn and one for myself. That went reasonably well, and Dawn said it tasted good, so the next day I was ready to try my fresh eggs!
But first, of course, I had to take some pictures. Look! Real farm fresh eggs! And a duck egg! (What? Oh, you can't see the pictures. Yeah, I still haven't posted them. *sigh* But back to the story.)
I decided to be a bit more daring for my second ever attempt at cooking omelets and to try cooking mine with sautéed onions. Of course, I'd never sautéed anything before, either. Dawn was a bit more familiar with that, however, and gave me some advice. That worked reasonably well. Unfortunately, I tried flipping my omelet a little too early, so it tore open (oops), but it tasted good anyway.
Later that weekend I tried just regular scrambled eggs (very good). I also gave the duck egg a try. In addition to being slightly large than a chicken egg and having a very smooth shell, Andrea said that a duck egg is made up of mostly yolk. Sure enough, when I cracked it into a bowl, I saw a significantly larger yolk than I'm used to. I decided I would try it just soft fried. I don't fry eggs very often (I prefer scrambled), so I'm not very good at it. As a result, the white was slightly overdone. It tasted good anyway, however. Truthfully, I couldn't tell any difference in the taste between it and a chicken egg. Perhaps next time I'll try scrambled duck eggs.
Anyway, by Monday morning I was down to 3 eggs, so after work I drove out to the James Family Farm again to pay for my previous dozen and to buy another. We've slowed the rate at which we're consuming this next dozen, of course. I expect I'll generally try to pick up eggs on Fridays, since I usually have more time to make breakfast on the weekends than during the week.
My next action will be to place an order for chickens. I hadn't realized it until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, but traditionally people would eat beef and pork in the late fall and winter (when the animals were fat), then eat chicken during the summer. The James Family Farm will have chicken for pickup in late-May, late-July, and late-September. I'm guessing that I might eat 2 chickens over the course of 2 months, so I'm going to order 2 and see whether my guess was correct. (Yes, we have a freezer. Ironically, we bought it because we were ordering so much from Schwan's. Now we're starting to eliminate Schwan's and buy local.)
So that's the conclusion of this episode of "Wally Buys Food"! Tune in next time when Wally... uh... buys more food.
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