The Sun-Times goes fundamental this week, focusing on where you should buy your raw ingredients, rather than where you should eat someone else’s cooking. Monday was, after all, the unofficial beginning of summer, and while we have been enjoying our leeks and ramps and whatnot, June is when the serious produce starts flooding Chicago’s myriad farmers markets. Bill Cunniff has a list of times and locations to end all lists, covering the entire city and nearby suburbs - more than 80 in total! If that’s not enough, here’s Sue Ontiveros’s guide to taking full advantage of that resource. You have no excuse not to eat locally grown produce this summer, honestly. Oh, and if you want to one-up the farmers, here’s a growing calendar to guide your personal and municipal gardening adventures. And descending even further into the realm of improbable activities, Lisa Donovan checks in with a rough guide to eating cicadas, who are just rousing from their 17 year cycle of dormancy.
Two other things to note:
1) It’s Hunger Awareness Day next Tuesday, June 5th, and Sandy Thorn Clark has a profile of Mary Ellen Diaz’s charity First Slice, which feeds 600 Chicagoans in need each week, plus a few suggestions of how you can participate next week at venues citywide.
2) Denise O’Neal has a piece on celiacs, noting that there are over 55,000 in Chicagoland. We just wanted to point out that you can filter your searches on MenuPages by restaurants offering gluten-free items; we have twenty-seven in the database, which is a start.
Let the outdoor shopping season begin! [Sun-Times]
Flavor of fresh [Sun-Times]
Growing calendar [Sun-Times]
Real or not, cicadas as food whets appetites [Sun-Times]
Hunger Awareness Day [America’s Second Harvest]
Serving up dignity [Sun-Times]
Celiac diagnosis leads to food line [Sun-Times]
