What’s In Style This Season

by Lisa Futterman

It’s a misty late August morning at Chicago’s Green City Market and most of the action is centered at the Green Acres booth by the Clark Street entrance. Chefs converge here and confer quietly with their sous chefs, checking off lists and hauling cases of heirloom tomatoes and kale to the loading zone. Beth Eccles (who owns Green Acres Farm with her husband Brent) and her crew busily stack shiny eggplants,make change, and offer cooking tips to the early customers. Amidst the orderly chaos of a typical farmers market day, Eccles’ vegetables provide a calm backdrop, glowing from within and radiating energy from the tip of each purple carrot and the striped rinds of a stack of watermelons.

Beth’s booth is a favorite of many professionals and home cooks alike, due in equal parts to her gorgeous harvest and to her enthusiastic presence. In 1996, the Eccles expanded the North Judson Indiana farm founded in 1933 by her Japanese grandparents and began the transition from a conventionally farmed wholesale outfit that specialized in Asian produce to a sustainable (and soon to be organically certified), pesticide-free farm covering over 150 acres, with offerings that not only change with the season, but also with vegetable fashion trends.

How does a rural farmer stay on trend and know which plants are going to be hot-sellers? Says Eccles “We go to organic food conferences and pore through seed catalogs and foodmagazines.We were delegates to the 2004 International Slow Food Conference and we met a Colombian farmer who sends us seed potatoes.” Trendy items that are all over the food blogs, like this year’s shishito peppers, don’t get past the Eccles. “Tony Priolo (Executive Chef at Piccolo Sogno) is probably our number one customer.He brings back seeds from Italy, and this year he wants us to plant an Italian mustard green that he says is ‘all the rage’ over there. All the members of the mustard family—rapini, Chinese broccoli—are huge. Restaurants like Mado and Sola are using the mall the time.”

In fact,Green Acres produce stars on several Chicago menus during this late August week. Chef Mark Steuer of Hot Chocolate offers a bread salad tossed with heirloom tomatoes, watermelon, arugula, and blistered shishito peppers—all grown by the Eccles—while Chef Jason Vincent’s “Green Acres Ratatouille” is on the entrée menu at Nightwood in Pilsen.

There are plenty of Green Acres vegetables to choose from, including more than 80 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, freshly dug potatoes. “Her fingerlings are the best around,” asserts Nightwood’s Vincent;multicolored beets, and a cornucopia of melons and peppers, to name but a few. Edible weeds like wild watercress, purslane, and lambs quarters have recently caught on. The Eccles harvest and bring them to market to be sold and served on sexy plates in homes and restaurants all over Chicago. Not everything they plant is a hit, and just like high-waisted jeans and summer scarves, some vegetables get phased out after one or two seasons. “When my family had a stand at the downtown market, our Filipino customers went crazy for unusual but traditional things like Chinese bitter melon, Asian mustard greens, and daikon radishes, but those products don’t fly at Green City Market, so we make room for more popular produce.”

Eccles hadn’t always planned to inherit family farming as a career. She and Brent were once both employed in academia in Indianapolis. “When things were slow in the summertime, I would wander off to the city farmers market, and I began to see how exciting a market can be.” Once they took over Green Acres, Brent became the grower, while Beth gravitated to selling and marketing. “I still work in the greenhouse but the business needs me to talk to the customers. Everyone loves our Japanese eggplant and it sells out every week. I need to be in the booth telling people about the other amazing varieties of eggplant we grow.” When asked how it feels to see (and taste) her harvest at a high profile restaurant, her face lights up. “My brother and I grew up weeding, planting…the fun part is selling! I love living on the farm, but I love coming to Chicago and talking to people about food.”

PRESIDENTIAL FILES:

One of her regular customers at Green City Market was Sam Kass, private chef to the Obama family. Kass became friends with Beth Eccles through conversations over baskets of Tuscan kale and beets. “The Obama kids would be running around our booth but no one knew who they were,” says Beth. “He always bought them arugula, but he was also very insistent on having their family try new things.”

So this past spring, Beth had a monumental experience. Realizing her daughter Ellie, 13, had a field trip scheduled to Washington, D.C., she emailed her friend, now White House Chef Sam Kass to ask for a tour of the ground breaking White House Garden.

“It was amazing to be there,” says Beth. “Sam was so proud to show it to us.He said; ‘This lettuce is going to make the Obamas 250 salads.’ But I had to tell him to thin his tomato plants.”Nothing wrong with a little friendly advice— from an expert gardener to a very high profile chef.

Lisa Futterman is on the forefront of vegetable fashion. As a chef and cutting edge food writer, she brings a unique perspective to Edible Chicago, from the farm to the veggie runway (a.k.a. farmers markets), she keep us in vogue.