Green City Market Braves Chilly Weather For First Saturday Outdoor Market

By Chuck Sudo in Food on May 11, 2009 6:40PM

Chef Bruce Sherman of North Pond conducts a cooking demonstration.

Saturday was the Seasons of Lettuce Festival at the market.

Watercress from \<a href=\"http://www.growingpower.org/\"\>Growing Power\<\/a\> in Milwaukee.

Sunday Dinner\'s Christine Cikowski plates a burger made from Heartland Meats in Mendota.

A closeup of garlic chives from Smits Farms in Chicago Heights. Smits is where we get a lot of our herb planters.

That\'s right: canned chicken. Already cooked, this can be used as a salad base, for soups, or just spread onto some toast.

\<a href=\"http://growinghomeinc.org\"\>Growing Home\<\/a\>, the non-profit which has hoophouses and a job training program in Englewood, had some beautiful dill on display.

An assortment of milk from \<a href=\"http://www.bluemarblefamilyfarm.com/home.php\"\>Blue Marble Family Farm\<\/a\> in Barneveld, Wisconsin.

Some of the organic pastas for sale from Pasta Puttana.

The weather Saturday was more akin to late March than early May, but it didn't keep people from venturing to the southern tip of Lincoln Park for the first outdoor weekend of Green City Market. We loaded up on microgreens, Piedmontese beef tri-tip roasts from Heartland Meats and ground elk from Hawks Hill Elk Ranch, and ate a cheeseburger worthy of Kevin Pang's attention from the fine folks at Sunday Dinner.

Mick Klug Farms had piles of beautiful purple asparagus on display while North Pond chef Bruce Sherman wowed home cooks with a simple cooking demonstration. The revelations came from Blue Marble Family Farm and Pasta Puttana. The former is a dairy farm in Barneveld, Wisconsin that gets their milk from a small, BGH-free herd of dairy cattle. Even Blue Marble's skim milk had richness and flavor. If your experiences with skim are of the translucent, watery swill you find in the supermarkets, prepare to be awed.

Jessica "Pasta Puttana" Volpe honed her pasta making skills at Terragusto before branching out with her own flavored pasta recipes, made from organic durum wheat she sources in Kansas. Her whole wheat pasta works very well with some bitter greens, like dandelion.