Greenhouse effect

You might have to wait a while for divine raspberries or heirloom tomatoes, but getting good local eats in winter isn’t as hard as it might seem. Sure you buy stuff trucked in from Chile, but we’ve tracked down high-quality sources for those of you who want to eat a bit closer to home.

Pleased to meat you
One Saturday a month during winter, Marilyn and Larry Wettstein pack up their organic meat at their downstate farm, Organic Pastures (309-467-6006, orgpas@mtco.com), and head for Chicago, Evanston and Oak Park, where they meet their dedicated customers at different drop-off points with lamb, pork and beef that’s almost pure Angus. E-mail or call to place an order and find out when they’re making the drive. From even farther south, organic farmer Stan Schutte (217-895-3652, triplsfarm@rr1.net) will bring up Angus beef and pork that’s from a Berkshire cross, a famously juicy breed. Like the Wettsteins, Schutte makes the drive approximately once a month.

Eats on a cold tin roof
At least a portion of the produce at True Nature Foods (6034 N Broadway, 773-465-6400) this winter will have a zero carbon-emissions commute from farm to market: To pick winter-hardy vegetables like cabbages and leafy greens, owner Paula Companio will simply walk up a ladder to the store’s new “green roof,” where True Nature’s first cold-season crop (that was planted in October) is coming in. Companio also has meat and other items from local farms, including superb chicken and eggs from the Country Cottage Farm in DuPage County.

Milk it for all it’s worth
Oak Grove Organics may stretch the definition of local—the farm’s 290 acres are south of Peoria—but this dairy’s products shouldn’t be missed. Owner Tony Huls’ herd of Jersey-Holstein cows are grass-fed, and the milk’s pasteurized at the lowest possible temperature to preserve its taste. A recent nonprofit nationwide survey of organic dairies trashed more than a few producers, but Oak Grove was one of the few to receive a perfect score. The milk is available at First Slice Café (4401 N Ravenswood Ave, 773-506-7380), Sunflower Market (1910 N Clybourn Ave, 773-348-4667), and Fox and Obel (401 E Illinois St, 312-379-0112).

Get her goat (cheese)
Prairie Fruits Farm is the only farmstead cheese maker in Illinois. That claim may sound like mere marketing, but the word farmstead is the mark of a small, sustainable operation, meaning that all of the milk that goes into Leslie Cooperband’s goat cheeses comes from her own herd. Cooperband’s 25 goats graze on land near Champaign-Urbana and produce what she turns into fresh chèvre and aged goat cheeses like Angel Food, a runny, gooey delight. Cooperband’s goats will slowly stop giving milk this winter, but she’ll sell chèvre through December and aged cheeses through at least January. The cheese is available at Pastoral (2945 N Broadway, 773-472-4781), Fox and Obel and Marion Street Market in Oak Park (101 N Marion St, 708-848-2088).

Basket cases
“It’s like the antithesis of a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture],” says Erika Allen of Growing Power’s market basket program (www.growingpower.org/market_basket.htm). The Milwaukee-based organization delivers a weekly box of vegetables year-round to more than a dozen sites in Chicago, and unlike a CSA, there’s no long-term commitment and you can call even a few days ahead for a delivery. In the winter, the produce grown by Growing Power is limited to winter-hardy crops and root vegetables. The rest is trucked up from small African-American– and immigrant-owned farms in the South with whom Growing Power’s built a relationship. The box comes in different sizes and different levels of sustainability—Allen says they wanted to include people who had poor access to fresh vegetables but couldn’t pay the premium for organic food.

Deliver me from Jewel
Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks (www.freshpicks.com) is like “the Peapod of the local organic scene,” Shelly Herman says. The innovative farm-to-your-kitchen delivery service sources as much locally as it can (in the summer, 90 percent) and it delivers within Chicago, Oak Park and the northern suburbs for a stunningly low flat fee of $3.50. It’ll have a steady supply of root vegetables from area farmers through February, but it’s also working with local farmers who use greenhouses or hoophouses (a series of hoops covered with plastic to protect the crops), like Genesis Growers and Iron Creek Farm, to get nonrutabaga vegetables like lettuces and tomatoes year-round, too. “There is a misconception that you can’t get anything locally here when the season dies down,” Herman says, as she goes about filling an order to prove that’s simply not true.