Kathe Roybal and Tracey Vowell, knee deep in their lambs quarters

Kitchen to Farm: Three Sisters Garden

By Amelia Levin

In Native American culture, there’s a myth that “Sky Woman,” a goddess of the upper world, fell to the earth on accident, and there she died giving birth to twin boys. Legend has it that from her grave grew three sacred plants: corn, beans, and squash, known as the “Three Sisters” in Native American farming.

Tracey Vowell and her partner Kathe Roybal knew this was the perfect name and philosophy for the now 10-acre farm they would develop over the course of six years. “In Native American agriculture, it’s very commonplace to plant corn, beans, and squash in the same bed,” she says. “The idea is that the stalk of the corn makes a tall trellis, something beans can climb onto, and when the beans make their fruit, they put nitrogen in the soil which helps grow the squash. Squash plants have prickly vines which help to keep small animals away.”

It’s literally a sustainable circle – each plant helps the other in some way. Perhaps the same could be said about restaurants these days. As more chefs choose to showcase local, seasonal foods, they depend on farmers like Vowell and Roybal to supply them with the high-quality and sustainably grown foods their diners want. On the flipside, those farmers depend on the restaurants for survival. Being noncommercial entities, selling to restaurants provide these small farmers with substantially more income than just selling products at farmers markets. It’s like a “three sisters” microcosm – the farmers, the chefs and the food—within our larger community.

Developing that farm-chef relationship has been at the forefront of Vowell’s past and present. Having managed the kitchens at Frontera Grill and Topolobampo for six years, she forged strong bonds with legendary Chef Rick Bayless and crew, playing an important role in the 20- year transformation of a small Mexican restaurant into what is now a nationally recognized institution. In the late 1980’s, Vowell, a recent LSU graduate looking to move out of her native Louisiana, packed up a U-HAUL and, with Roybal, made the trek to Chicago. Although Vowell had studied print making, cooking was also a passion. Responding to an ad in the paper, Vowell started in the Frontera kitchen first as a lunch shift grill cook, and then worked her way up to sous chef for a few years, and later, to executive or managing chef for both restaurants. Toward the end of her Frontera career, Vowell knew she needed to get out of the kitchen. “I had 20-plus years of cooking under my belt, and thought to myself, I probably don’t want to do this forever, and I didn’t want to be a restaurant owner.” Vowell shares her “turning point” moment that secured her thoughts of becoming a farmer. “I remember standing outside the restaurant with the whole staff for a group picture, and the sun hitting our face, blinding us almost.When you look at the picture, the vast majority of the kitchen staff is standing in the back under the awning because they couldn’t take the light. I was tired of working in a cave all day. I thought, ‘there’s got to be a more enjoyable way to live your life.’There’s a big, beautiful world out there and I certainly wanted a more peaceful lifestyle.”

A lover of the outdoors and “the land” as she says, in 2000 she bought nine acres of it just south of Kankakee, and they moved – Vowell, Roybal, their Labrador retriever, and their hound dog. The 10th acre came later in the form of a hay patch at the far end of the farm where hearty crops like black beans and white corn grow.

Financially, Vowell still had to work in the early years. Slowly, year by- year, she eased her way out of the Frontera kitchens until 2006, when she became a full-time farmer.

“Rick was so supportive through the whole thing,” she says. “I guess you could say I graduated from the kitchen to doing it outside.ere’s nothing like putting something in the ground, cultivating it, putting it in your car, driving it to the restaurant, and seeing people cook with it all and looking around the dining room thinking, ‘what you just ate for dinner came out of my own garden.’”

Much of the successes she and Roybal have reached in the past couple years came from a lot of trial and error, and a little help from friends. “I’m lucky to know a lot of farmers who have been very free with information,” Vowell says. “Not only were there great gobs of farmers associated with Frontera, but also Bill Warner at Snug Haven Farm, Chris Covelli at Tomato Mountain – they helped us a ton, and Greg Gunthrop was really sweet.”

Her first attempts at farming were tough. “Our soil condition and timing was just perfectly wrong,” she says. “We blew through way too many crops and had a failure on a grand scale because there’s no way two people can keep up with 10 acres of farmland. But we whittled it down and now have a more unified grouping of crops in rows.”

WEED EATER

The other challenge was the weeds. “With carrots, beets, and peas especially you’d better bring your game because you only have a day or two before you have to knock back the weeds.”

Ironically, one of the most prevalent weeds became a sought after product: lambs quarters. Lambs quarters, “one of the most noxious weeds in the country,” according to Vowell, does make for a nice braised vegetable similar to the less-bitter Swiss chard.

Now, after a few years in the works, Chicago chefs clamor for Three Sisters pea shoots, sweet, candy-like tomatoes and cornmeal made from delicate and mild-flavored white corn. Bruce Sherman dresses farm-fresh salads with the peppery pea shoots that look like mini cilantro with a thicker stem.

Others go for the crowd favorite, which is that white cornmeal, such as Rob Levitt at Mado and also Sarah Steiner of Prairie Grass Cafe,who uses it for a creamy polenta topped with homemade Italian sausage and braised greens. Andrew Zimmerman of Sepia makes grits using the cornmeal. Restaurant-owner newbie Chuy Valencia of Lakeview’s Chilam Balam, who knew Vowell from Frontera uses the cornmeal for nutty memeles, or mesa boats topped with black bean puree. Carrie Nahabedian of Naha has been spotted stopping by the Three Sisters booth at the Green City Market.

Bayless, a fan of the white cornmeal too, also goes for the Three Sisters infamous black beans at the Frontera kitchens. “We grow those in great quantities, like a few thousand pounds a year,” she says. That’s a hefty amount, plus they’ll also do four or five other varieties of beans. “We grow an odd collection of stuff,” Vowell says. “We don’t want to be in head-to-head competition with other farmers, so we just focus on a handful of American crops that are distinctly Illinois or Native American that otherwise might be difficult to get.”

AT THE FARM

The Vowell and Roybal house sits at the edge of a country road running through the quiet farms of Kankakee. A metal pole barn sits near the expansive 20 x 50-foot greenhouse, filled with small vegetables like asparagus and microgreens, and just outside, perennial gardens with mint, lemon balm, horseradish, thyme, and the strange-looking Egyptian Walking onion, a green, wiry plant with small bulbs shaped like garlic cloves, plot the earth. Here and there, flowers grow, which Vowell will cut and sell. Also near the house it is here, in a 2 ½-acre plot of land that the famed Three Sisters tomatoes grow, with vines upon vines of bright red beefsteak tomatoes, multi-colored heirloom tomatoes, small juicy yellows, and super sweet cherry ones.

Beyond the house are the rows, of squash and beans, and of course, corn, from some traditional yellow sweet corn stalks to the white corn, and this year, some blue and red varieties. e farm makes almost a rectangle, about 400 feet on the short sides, and 1,800 feet on the long ones, Vowell says.

Travel through the rows to the edge of the rectangle where the train tracks run and you’ll see a massive commercial farm just beyond. The dichotomy between these two neighbors is like night and day. “We definitely look at ourselves as sustainable farmers; we’re not certified organic, but we stay within organic farming rules,” Vowell says. That means not spraying crops with pesticides. “We’re more likely to mow down crop and take it out than systematically spraying.When a squash bug shows up, and we can’t take care of it quickly, and their numbers become heavy, we shut that part down and move onto a new plot.” For the small numbers, they’ll use natural sprays to try and take care of the problem.

That’s appreciated by the customers flocking to their booth at Green City Market on Saturdays during the warmer seasons. When Three Sisters first joined the dynamic roster of small, local farms, it was a challenge to get noticed among the big operations like Nichols at the front entrance.

They stood out by their unique offerings and also having chefs highlight their foods on menus. “People would come up to us and say, ‘I had some of your black beans at Prairie Grass, can I have some more?’ I think we’ve finally broken through that ‘I don’t know who you are stage’ and we’ve developed a group of people who come to see us before they even go to the big guys.”

Always knowing she’d do more than one thing in life, for now, Vowell’s sticking to the farming gig, but she’s been cooking more too. She did a pig roast for a Slow Food dinner, and this fall, will cook for some benefit dinners and small, special events.

“As a farmer, I like that I’m learning leaps and bounds every day, and that I’m free to make my own decisions and take on a more independent lifestyle, but I still really enjoy cooking,” she says. “Even though I’ve left the restaurant world, I wouldn’t trade anything for those years.” Just like the sustainable circle that is the Three Sisters, restaurant work helped her get and appreciate where she is today.And now she and Roybal help their mentors back.

Amelia Levin is a Kendall College culinary graduate and chef, freelance writer, and recipe developer covering the Chicago food scene. And when she’s not recipe testing or planning the next great feature for Edible Chicago, you can find her editing at her newly launched web site about all things food related in Chicago at ChicagoCulinarian.com.

EXOTIC EDIBLE FUNGUS: HUITLACOCHE

One crop that’s also important to Frontera, Tracey Vowell says is their huitlacoche. A mushroom like fungus in both looks and taste that grows on the ears of corn, the “corn disease” is literally considered smut in America, but incredibly important to Mexican cuisine, she says. Pan-fried, soft and chewy bulbs crisp up around the edges for an earthy and smokey taco with mushrooms, onions and chili salsa.Or, they can be pureed for fillings, sauces, and soups. Originally grayish in color, the bulbs turn jet black when cooked.

“The huitlacoche is as important in Mexican cuisine as the truffle is to French cuisine,” Vowell says.And perhaps that’s because it traditionally grows wild, and can be difficult to isolate. But with the help of scientists from the University of Illinois, Vowell and Roybal have managed to do just that. “We collected the fungus from an ear of corn, put it a hypodermic needle, and injected it right at the top of the ear of other corn.With any luck the fungus travels down the silk channel to grow. Sixteen days later, when we go to harvest, we see what we’ve got.”

RECIPE

SWEET CORNBREAD