Fall has always been my favorite season. There are so many wonderful things to appreciate about the fall. I love the colors of autumn, and the way falling leaves paint everything in a seasonal pallet. Fall is the season of corn mazes, hay rides, pumpkin patches and apple picking. My two favorite holidays, Halloween and Thanksgiving, are in the fall (three if you count my birthday!). I even enjoy the crisp fall weather, and coming inside to warm up with some hot cider! But perhaps my favorite thing about fall is the food.

Every fall, farmers’ markets explode with beautiful, delicious produce. In the Midwest, fall brings apples, pears, Brussels sprouts, kale, sunchokes, cranberries, mushrooms, potatoes, and a tremendous variety of winter squash. My wife and I especially enjoy visiting these markets in Autumn, when we are always overwhelmed by the sheer variety of produce available. Often, there are more than a dozen types of squash at just one stand, and even more apples at another!

The foods of autumn are often rich and indulgent, the kind of food that sticks to your ribs and warms your insides. When the weather starts to cool, it’s no longer unbearable to use the oven. Thus, fall brings sweet and savory pies, roast meats and veggies, braised meats, and all of the other satisfying foods I love so well. Fall is also the time of year for hot mulled wine or cider and (my favorite) dark beers.

Of course, Thanksgiving, perhaps the largest feast of the year for many Americans, is also celebrated in the fall. Thanksgiving brings its own slew of traditional recipes. There’s the turkey, of coarse, as well as potatoes, green beans, corn, stuffing, pumpkin and apple pie, and much more.

Here at The Spice House, we are gearing up for the fall cooking season. We have spices for apple and pumpkin pie, holiday roasts, mulled cider, and everything you need for your Thanksgiving feast! Don’t forget to visit our recipes page for plenty of delicious fall recipes!

An awareness of where food comes from is a vital part of a community’s ability to secure wholesome, nutritious foods.  Unfortunately, due to the increasing industrialization of farming over the last half-century, this sense of connection between the food we eat and the way in which it was produced has been severed for many American. Traditional, family-owned farms are being replaced by large, vertically-integrated food production corporations. This has created a food system that, many would argue, is unhealthy for the environment, unhealthy for the farms, and unhealthy for consumers. The process of food production has become largely hidden from the views of most consumers. Fortunately, organizations like FamilyFarmed.org are working hard to re-establish this lost connection between food and farm.

In March 2011, FamilyFarmed.org hosted the FamilyFarmed Expo at the UIC Forum. The expo, which lasted three days, brought together farmers, retailers, restaurateurs, chefs, politicians and consumers. The focus of the Expo is increasing the availability and awareness of local, sustainably produced food and agriculture. Since The Spice House strongly believes in the importance of community and supporting local interests, we sent two of our manager, Paige  and Adam, to the Expo.

This year’s FamilyFarmed expo featured over 150 exhibitors in the main hall, including a number of local farmers and food-producers showcasing their products. Many of the farmers had exciting local produce to sell, creating a sort of indoor farmers’ market feel. Amongst the delicious items I sampled were Nessalla Kambucha and Ruth and Phil’s Gourmet Ice Cream. Also in the main hall was a “food-court”, with  booths operated by local restaurants whose menus feature local and organic products. I enjoyed a delicious lunch crafted by City Provisions, a local Deli and Caterer.

Of course, the expo wasn’t all food and fun. Many terrific organizations were present to promote sustainable agriculture. Represented were political organizations gathering signatures for petitions supporting sustainable agriculture, activist groups like the  Food Animals Concerns Trust who are fighting for the humane treatment of food animals, farm programs like Growing Home, environmental agencies such as Food and Water Watch and Green Earth Institute, and many legal and financial groups supporting family farms and environmental groups.

In addition to the exhibitors in the main hall, the FamilyFarmed Expo also offered a wide variety of relevant seminars. Topics included vertical farming, beekeeping, composting, raising urban chickens, and many more. I attended seminars on home canning and preserving, humane meat production, and home cheesemaking.

The event was truly a fantastic learning opportunity. It reminded me just how much each of us as consumers can affect change in the way our food is produced. I found it inspiring to be surrounded by so many hard-working people who are dedicated to improving our food, our farm system, and our environment. I also had a wonderful time tasting and savoring so many wonderful local agricultural products. In all, the expo reminded me that food which is produced sustainably and conscientiously is wholesome, healthy, and simply delicious.

“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add an useful plant to its culture,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821. When Europeans first came to the new world, there were no cultivated fruit trees, and no apples of any kind. For the next 300 years, Americans worked to fix that. Colonists brought over seedlings and cuttings, planting apple, peach and other orchards to grow fruit for alcoholic beverages, livestock feed, and for eating. The varieties brought from Europe were modified to suit the varying climates and uses of different areas of the country, so that by 1905 W. H. Ragan’s USDA Bulletin No. 56, “Nomenclature of the Apple”, cataloged more than 14,000 different American apple varieties. They bore lyrical names such as Seek-No-Further, Bottle Greening, Victoria Limbertwig, Prissy Gum, Winter Banana, Maiden’s Blush, Sheepnose and Nickajack. Jefferson himself cultivated varieties including Esopus Spitzenburg, Rall’s Genet and Taliaferro at Monticello. Since apples grown from seeds seldom bear any resemblance to the parent plant, new cultivars developed accidentally in orchards as often as they were specifically bred from grafted rootstocks. Small orchards and backyard gardeners created apples specific to their region, blending characteristics like color, flavor, acidity, resistance to cold or heat, and storage ability to fill thousands of niche apple needs. By WWII the number of apple strains was nearly 17,000.

In the second half of the 20^th century, America’s food culture shifted towards mass-production to feed a growing population, increasing mobile and prosperous. Small farms gave way to agribusiness, and plant diversity suffered. Apples were now bred for storage, disease resistance, transport and uniformity. Thousands of apple varieties vanished, either going extinct or fading into obscurity in overgrown, abandoned orchards. Today, only 15 varieties account for more than 90% of U.S. production.  The top three varieties, Red Delicious (from an Iowan cultivar of the 1870s), Golden Delicious (West Virginia, 1914), and Granny Smith (Australia, 1868), account for over 50% of all apple sales in the U.S.

Here in Chicago, there’s a group that’s fighting against the disappearance of apple varietals. Chicago Rarities Orchard Project (CROP) is part of a small but growing movement to preserve and restore fruit diversity, and they’re starting with apples. In conjunction with NeighborSpace, the City of Chicago, and Altamanu landscape architects, they’re planning to open their first orchard in Logan Square as early as this fall. In the meantime they’ve been collecting rare seedlings in a nursery at Chicago Honey Co-op, and promoting awareness for their project with the help of Chicago Botanic Gardens, Logan Square Kitchen, Gingko Organic Gardens, Slow Food Chicago, Slow Food USA, and Uncommon Ground restaurant. Orchards are slower to get running than regular community gardens, and need a better guarantee of permanent space usage, but once the orchard starts producing fruit it will be an asset to Logan Square and whichever other neighborhoods host future orchards.  CROP plans to give at least half their harvest to schools, foodbanks, or directly to the community through open-picking days, giving Chicagoans an opportunity to learn about our threatened pomological heritage the best possible way: eating it.

We at The Spice House are always thrilled to see new developments in the Chicago food scene, whether it’s the production or consumption ends. And although apples, since they’re not a spice, don’t fall directly into our purview, we bet our Apple Pie Spice will make great pies out of whatever rare varietals CROP grows. We can’t wait to try it out.

If you can’t wait for CROP’s orchard to get started, and you want to render a service to your country by adding (or saving) a useful plant, there are several sources for heirloom apple scions. Trees of Antiquity is a California-based nursery that sells a wide variety of heirloom fruit trees, from apples to jujubes. Urban Homestead or Virginia has been seeking out antique Southern apples since 1992, and now sells rootstocks from nearly 100 varietals, including several they’ve saved from near-extinction. Both these nurseries cater to home gardeners and hobby orchardists, so if you’ve got a plot of earth big enough for an apple tree, you can grow your own delicious history.

Kosher Spices from The Spice House

Most of our customers who keep kosher already know that the Spice House offers kosher spices. Our Milwaukee customers in particular may have noticed the symbol on their spices consisting of an outline of Wisconsin containing a “K”, indicating kosher certification. However, we are often asked why spices from our Milwaukee store bear a kosher symbol while spices from our other locations do not.

Though the basic principles of kashrut (kosher law) are simple, the interpretation and implementation of these rules can be quite complicated. Fortunately, since vegetable material is generally considered kosher by default, most whole spices can be assumed to be kosher without specific certification*. For the most part, kosher certification for spices means supervision of how the processing is done.

The Chicago Rabbinical Council considers the following spices to be kosher without specific supervision (original at http://www.crcweb.org/spice_list.php):

(source: http://www.crcweb.org/spice_list.php)

Spice blends and some whole spices do require rabbinical supervision to be considered kosher. For this reason, Rabbi Tuvia Torem visits the Spice House in Milwaukee every few months in order to oversee their operations and certify the products as kosher.

Each Spice House location contains its own processing facilities. Most of our ground spices and all of our spice blends are processed “in house” in the store at which they will be sold. Currently, only the Milwaukee Spice House has its facilities certified by a rabbi. What this means is that, although all of our locations sell “Sunny Spain”, only “Sunny Spain” produced in Milwaukee is certified Kosher.

All of the Spice House locations obtain their spices from the same sources, and process spices in much the same ways. The reason that only the Milwaukee Spice House has rabbinical supervision is simple; kosher certification in Wisconsin is much less expensive than certification in Illinois, and the staff in Milwaukee are more familiar with kashrut requirements.

Those customers seeking spices with rabbinical kosher certification should call the Milwaukee Spice House and place orders with them directly. They can be reached at 888-488-0977.

Our Kashrut Certificate can be viewed at: http://www.thespicehouse.com/file/misc/kosher-cert-2011-12

*It is important to note that, except in our Milwaukee store, our spices may have come into contact with equipment that is not considered kosher.

Spice House managers Paige and Tracy recently traveled to the Icewine Festival in Ontario, an annual celebration of a rare vintage.  This wine, produced exclusively in cold wine-growing regions, is made from grapes that are left on the vine past the usual harvest time.  They have plenty of time to dry and shrivel slightly, concentrating the juice, before winter freezes them.  Picked only at night when the temperature drops below -10C, each grape produces one drop of thick, intensely flavored juice.  This is fermented into a marvelously sweet and complex wine worth celebrating.  The Niagara region, which is covered in small, often German-style vineyards, goes all-out for three weeks in January, with a street fair of food and wine, ice sculptures, and a cocktail competition.  Many of the 60+ vineyards in the area participate in the fun, with tastings and food pairings of their own vintages of icewine (including an icewine paired with homemade marshmallows and another served with spit-roasted pig and icewine applesauce).  Despite being outdoors in Canada in January, it’s a cheerful if well-coated and -scarfed crowd that moseys from vineyard to vineyard in the fresh frigid air.

This is by no means the only winter-specific culinary fun.  Most food festivals are held in more clement weather, and correspond with more conventional harvest times, but there are plenty of activities for those who don’t mind a little chill. With the Chicago blizzard behind us and a tang of spring at least temporarily in the air, let’s not write off the last few weeks of winter delicacies.

For those who can travel, there are dozens of festivals held in the winter, usually to showcase foods or beverages that are pushed to the background during the produce-laden summer and fall. The International Pizza Expo will be in Las Vegas March 1-3, while the 23rd Annual Fiery Foods and BBQ Show will be in Albuquerque from March 4-6. Wine and beer are often celebrated in the winter.  Cities from Charleston to Portland have Food and Wine Festivals in late February and March; San Francisco is in the midst of its annual Beer Week, running through February 20, in which the San Francisco Brewer’s Guild shows off the incredible variety of beer made in and around the Bay Area; Michigan and Minnesota also hold winter beer fests. In many areas shellfish are at their peak at the end of winter.  Fulton Texas has it’s 32^nd Annual Oysterfest in March, and Penn Cove Washington will be munching though their 25^th Annual Musselfest.

More locally to us, the 17^th Annual Twin Cities Food and Wine Festival is held from March 5-6 in Minneapolis, and the 21^st Annual Cincinnatti Wine Festival on March 10-12.  In our hometown Chicago, Restaurant Week starts today (Feb 18), when 200 of the city’s best restaurants will offer special prix-fixed menus.

Here in the Great Lakes, and across the Northern US, late winter is also Maple Sugar Season.  When the first hints of warmth draw the maples out of hibernation, it’s time to tap the trees.  In Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana small local festivals spring up, where the public can help out with the sugaring, taste the sap and the fresh-made syrup, and enjoy a range of maple-flavored delights.  Medora Indiana hosts the National Maple Syrup Festival on the first and second weekends or March, while smaller events like the Parke County Indiana Maple Syrup Fair run nearly every weekend between now and April all over the region.

Of course, if you’d rather stay snugly at home and hold your own celebration of food, we fully support that.  A nice cozy kitchen full of wafting aromas and warming dishes is often the very best way to appreciate the flavors of winter: preserved, slow roasted, long-simmered, seasoned to perfection.

With the Green Bay Packers headed to the Super Bowl (sorry, Chicago, we love you but we’re Wisconsin born and bred), we thought we’d take a moment to celebrate two of Wisconsin’s favorite industries: football and cheese. (Spices are a tad further down the line.) The Green Bay Packers were formed in 1919, and by 1923 were a franchise of the NFL. Today they remain the only team still associated with the small town of its founding. With strong ties to the local community and a rabidly devoted fan base (every home game has been sold out since 1960), the Packers are a publicly owned team. Many Wisconsinites have a share framed and hanging on their walls. (Check our Evanston location for one of these.)

The name “Packers” come from their original sponsors the Indian Packing Company. Despite this initial association with a meat packing company, Packers fans are commonly known as Cheeseheads after the most prominent local industry. European immigrants, largely from Germany and its neighbors, brought dairy farming traditions with them to Wisconsin in the 19th century, and Wisconsin’s first commercial cheese factory started operations in 1841. Today Wisconsin ranks behind only much larger California in milk production, and leads the nation in cheese production (and, I would guess, consumption).  With 600 varieties being commercially produced, Wisconsin cheese accounts for about 25% of all domestic cheese. This includes conventional, mass-produced cheeses, but also covers a wide array of artisan cheeses. Wisconsin has the highest number of licensed cheesemakers and is the only state to offer a European-style Master Cheesemaker program. And unlike most US dairy states, Wisconsin has a high proportion of small, grazing-based dairies (as opposed to the more common industrialized types), so the quality of milk and cream for cheese making is high. In short, this is a state that takes its cheese seriously. So it’s an indication of how much we love our football team that we wear cheese on our heads to show our support.

Patty and Tom will be heading to Dallas to cheer on their local team, but for those of us staying here, cheese based snacks are on the menu.  Sure, there’s always classic nacho dip cheese and crackers, but how about cheese-filled puff pastry shaped into the Pack’s oval “G”?  Or cheese fondue?  Or classic Wisconsin cheese soup?  There’s only a week of planning before the big game, so get creative, get cheesy, and GO PACKERS!

It is with an extremely heavy heart that I share the news of the death of the founder of The Spice House, my father.  Our loss is magnified in that we have also lost our mentor, the man who taught my husband Tom and I our craft, his teaching has been an evolving process, one that we did not see coming to an end so soon.  My Dad never stopped reaching out to us, pushing us to go further, look harder, re-examine our dedication to quality, to our customers, to our staff. He constantly challenged us to explore other vendors, new countries of origin, different connections, a twist in flavors, novel combinations. Yet his teachings were not just contained to the spice world,  he also had some strong feelings and connections to, the inner spiritual world, and his tendencies toward philosophical teachings were perhaps the place where we struggled the hardest as his students.  He believed that the spices had music in them, if you just knew how to listen.  Our thoughts are that his spice work continues on through our stores, this gives us great comfort, and something to strive for.

On any given day, we start out with some sort of organized plan of how the day will  go. (well okay, semi-organized in my case.) We always have more work to be done than could actually be achieved in our set period of time. Hence when someone yelled from downstairs up to my office announcing, ”Patty, your Dad is on the phone” this usually meant a serious derailment of our plans! On any given day, a call from my Dad could be close to an hour of things he wanted to share. I feel pretty good about the fact that we just about always took those calls, no matter how busy we were. If my husband and I were both in the office, we would point at each other in a Mexican standoff until one of us took the phone! We did listen. Right now, I would give anything to have more of these calls. My Dad’s death was unexpected, although 78, he was in good physical shape, other than his eyesight; he was in full control of his facilities, and his mind was razor sharp.  We just don’t feel that our work together was done. Perhaps my Dad’s work with us was done, but we suspect, knowing the full strength passion of my Dad for the spice-work, there will be a path down which the work will continue with his input.

This is a very hard time. We are holding a viewing tomorrow, September 26, at a beautiful historic venue in Milwaukee, The Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery, at 901 Juneau Ave , from 2-6. Lots of street parking and a large parking lot across the street to the North. We welcome all, and would love to hear your customer stories in person, it would help the grieving process. Of all the phone calls we have taken, everyone says, let me know if there is anything they can do to help. Here is something. If your father is still alive, call him, and tell him you love him, if you can. You never know when that chance will be gone forever. My Dad and I were able to say that many, many times to each other, and I am so very thankful for that now. I know you are still listening now, Dad. Tom and I love you so much. We are listening back.

 Ocassionally we end up on a really nice roll of fun PR. In the current Greek Issue of Saveur magazine, we are recommended in their section called The Pantry, as a resource for our Aleppo pepper. They use it in this really great sounding recipe, roasted lamb with rosemary.  (Saveur’s photo at left) We also had a nice mention in Food and Wine magazine this month, we are included in their list of five obsessed spice importers. This is one obsession we are okay with!  NBC Chicago did a piece on our cinnamon last week, running with a trace back the ingredients concept. While tasting one of Bill Kim’s fantastic desserts, a Vietnamese Cinnamon caramel ice cream, at Urban Belly, they wanted to source his ingredients.  He very generously led them to our Vietnamese Cassia Cinnamon. We can not wait to go and try this, by the way. Interesting how reporters sometimes know more about where are spices are ending up than we do! Last, but not least, we have made some wonderful connections via email correspondance with some really interesting food blog posters. I really want to thank Alice and Jared Zhao, who blog under eataduckimust,  for their sensational blog post about The Spice House, calling us a Chicago Landmark. Your photography is awesome, by the way. So, who does handle the PR?

As small business owners, my husband and I wear many hats. I actually wear the head of PR hat.  I like to pretend to my staff that I am really, really good at this job. (Luckily none of them actually read my blog, so they will not know about this confession!) In reality, we are just SO lucky to have a really high quality product and a pretty unique business. Stories, for the most part, just come to us naturally. In the end, we are not really sure how this relates to actual sales figures, maybe only nominally. The power of spreading the word does not always show up in Google Analytics. Yet to be on the radar of all these great food reporters is a pretty special thing to us. Kind of like when you read those studies that say while employees really like raises, it can be of more importance to them to get pats on the back and a “job well done” from the boss. So, Thanks You to all the writers who help out our small family business with these mentions. It is greatly appreciated. It is not easy for a Mom and Pop business to survive in this day and age, we probably would not without your help. Next exciting lead, Rachel Ray’s lifestyle editor recently requested several gift boxes that might be featured in her holiday gift recommendations in an upcoming magazine. We really have our fingers crossed ont this one. Now,  about my raise as the PR director……….

The Spice House had the great privilege of hosting Julia Child when she visited Milwaukee. She was given a list of many food related places she might enjoy, and she selected our shop as one of her stops. We very carefully planned what we wanted to showcase. The first was a cinnamon log from Vietnam. This Saigon cassia cinnamon had been off limits to our country for many years, because of the trade embargo after the war with Vietnam. Much to our surprise, in a true Julia manner, she took the log that we were simply trying to display, grabbed it out of our hands, and bit off a huge piece of it. If you have never seen a cinnamon log, it is very much like a baseball bat.  The bark is essentially wood. My entire family, rarely at a loss for words,  sucked in our breaths. We were afraid she would break a tooth! To her credit, Julia kept masticating  this hard bark, until it was soft enough to swallow, at which point she pronounced it DELICIOUS!

The second item in which we wanted to involve Julia,  was the blending of our curry powder. We had mixed up a beautiful batch, our curry powder includes around 15 ground spices. Each spice, individually placed in our giant mixing bowl, resembles an artist’s easel. When we mix the batch, envision sand art, only with spices. So intrinsically beautiful. Yet Julia charged by this display focusing on an item we were not at all proud of, bacon granules! (this was a holdover from Milwaukee salad bars in the 70s) “Bacon granules, on my, how I would like to try these! My these are good!”

Julia later wrote a letter thanking us for her visit, which is still in my father’s possession. She wrote, ” The Spice House is a local, no, a National Treasure.” This letter is one of our most prized possessions. Thank you, Julia Child.

Last January, we were excited to learn that Anthony Bourdain was going to be coming to Milwaukee to do a piece for his show Anthony Bourdain:No Reservations. A James Beard award winner chef, Adam Seigel, was chosen to prepare a meal from him, featuring locally sourced ingredients. The Bartolatta restaurant group have been long time customers of our, if you have ever eaten at any of their restaurants the attention to quality is very obvious, so naturally they want the freshest, highest quality spices also. They contacted us and asked if it would be okay if the show’s crew and the chef came in to film, it would take maybe an hour or so. We were told Anthony would not be along, it would be just the crew, darned. However, on the off chance that they might just say this in order to keep chaos to a miminum, I decided to make the dreary winter drive from Chicago to Milwaukee. It is never that owners Tom and I feel the need to hog the spotlight when cool things happen in our shop, it is just that we don’t want to miss out on anything! (I will always lament that I was in a Chicago shop  working when Paul Prudhomme dropped into the Milwaukee shop for a spontaneous visit which turned into a house tour.)  

Chef Adam Seigal and Patty Erd mixing up some curry powder.

 At any rate, Anthony did not come by, but it did not really matter, we still had a great experience. I got to meet and interact with a wonderful chef. We asked him what he was making for Anthony that had any of our special ingredients in, and it ended up Chef Siegel really likes our Maharajah Curry Powder. So we decided to mix up a 20 pound batch of sweet curry powder firstly. Next to turn it into our very extraordinary Maharajah curry powder, we take a few pounds of this sweet curry powder, to this we add a little extra cardamom, and a whole ounce of the world’s most expensive spice, saffron. I joked with my staff that they were probably suprised that I could still name all the ingredients by looking at them, as my days in the blending room are long behind me. The chef said it was the same way in his kitchen, he could still do everything he used to do on the line, sometimes to the surprise of the staff; he just has a whole lot more on his plate right now. We mixed the curry powder, letting the camera crew know this could be only one take, as no matter how talented the chef, we would not be able to “deconstruct” this once started! Another positive outcome of the day is that I believe we made two new lifetime customers out of the camera crew. The episode about the HEARTLAND will air on Monday night, on the No Reservations show on the Travel Channel at 9pm Eastern time. The crew filmed for about 12 hours, what will air is around 7-8 minutes. Will you see The Spice House or won’t you? Just like whether Anthony would or would not appear in the shop, we will just keep our fingers crossed. We are also quite happy when our jewel of a town, Milwaukee, which is so often overlooked, gets some well deserved credit. Stay tuned.