Fifth Street Farmer's Market

Jared and I are trying to eat more like locavores, meaning, eating things that are grown or raised within 100 or so miles of where you live. Before yesterday, we hardly ate any local food at all, so we are just beginning this experiment and so far so good! The main reason to eat food from your area is it cuts down on the pollution required to transport food around the world and your food will be fresher since it has less distance to travel to get to you. Plus, you get to support your local farmers, ranchers, butchers, bakers et cetera. You can read more about it here.

One easy way to eat locally is to frequent your town's farmer's market. The Farmer's Market in Naperville has a lot of variety, is easy to get to, and has reasonable prices. You can buy fresh flowers, get your knives sharpened, and buy a whole chicken, if you want. Most of the vendors seemed to only accept cash, so be prepared for that. Also, some of the food isn't local, but each vendor has signs with what city they are from so you can choose local goods if you want. They are open every Saturday morning (close at noon) until October 30th, so you still have a chance to try it out!

We bought honey, giardiniera peppers (Jared's favorite), corn, eggs, bacon and bread. This morning, eager to try all of our goodies we had bacon from Yuppie Hill Poultry in Burlington, WI with eggs from Herbruck's Poultry Ranch in Saranac, MI (which is further than 100 miles, but close enough) and orange cranberry breakfast bread baked at Breadsmith, which is a chain with lots of locations around Chicago. But they bake their bread in the store so I guess it's considered local? Again, close enough!

It was all super tasty! The picture is blurry because I was rushing to eat it! Now you are probably thinking, this food doesn't look much better than your average breakfast. But trust me, it was! The eggs were big and fluffy, the bacon was crunchy but melted in your mouth, the bread had a sweet glaze on top but was quite tangy with the cranberries and orange. It was so good, we basically had to have breakfast again for lunch.

That's right, people! This is the best BLT that has ever existed. We used the same eggs and bacon we had for breakfast and sourdough bread also from Breadsmith, plus lettuce and tomatoes. This isn't just any BLT, first sign is the glorious fluffy, yolky egg on top. I got the idea from Sugartoad, a fancy restaurant that serves their BLT's with a fried egg.  Also notice the bread is only toasted on one side. This is to give the bread some structure to support the sandwich, but the outside of the bread is not toasted so it won't scratch the roof of your mouth. Genius, huh?! I was inspired by an article on perfect sandwiches in the August issue of Southwest Airline's magazine. Have you ever read those? You should, the articles are always surprisingly interesting and well written. Anyway, I toasted the inside of the bread in bacon grease. Yes, in bacon grease. I got that idea from an episode of Master Chef with Gordon Ramsay. And finally, the sourdough bread is the best sourdough bread I've ever had. The crust is almost hard it is so crunchy, but the bread is perfect for sandwiches. It's just chewy and substantial enough so the sandwich doesn't fall apart. Plus, it actually tastes like sourdough! 

So, I love this sandwich. All BLT's should be this good. Honestly, I only wrote that long intro about locavores and farmer's markets as a segue to talk about this glorious creation. You probably have all the ingredients you need in your fridge right now. Except for awesome sourdough bread. You should definitely get some, come back home and make this sandwich for dinner. Enjoy!