During my family’s summer vacation, we went to our friends’ house in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. They have a homestead there. They have pigs, chickens, a dog, and a big garden where they grow carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, squash, pumpkins (for pumpkin pie and jack-o-lanterns) lettuce, radishes and lots of other things.

I interviewed my friend Elsa, who lives on the farm with her parents and her little sister. She says her favorite food is potatoes. Their farm is really cool. They grow lots of their own food and they have lots of space to raise it. They live in the middle of a big forest and they had a play fort there that they built out of big branches, until it was destroyed in a big rainstorm.  I asked her how it is living on a farm and she said that it is quite smelly.

I wanted to know what chores she does. She has to collect the eggs, feed the chickens their corn, and give them water. She cleans the pigs’ pen and she tries to train the pigs to come when they are called (last year she actually did it!)

Compared to my chores, Elsa’s sound messier and much more fun.  Elsa’s house is powered by solar panels.  They don’t have a lot of electric lights, but they do have enough to power a computer.  At Elsa’s house they sometimes have a bear that walks by. This never ever happens where I live. I think it would be great to live on a farm like this.
 

On Christmas my grandparents come to our house in the morning for breakfast and presents.  We like to have coffee cake and stuff like that, but my grandpa can’t eat a bunch of carbohydrates because he is diabetic.  We make a breakfast casserole with eggs, cheese and ham, but no potatoes, and it has some broccoli and red bell pepper in it to make it look colorful…red and green…you get it!  This way grandpa can pig out too!

I said before I wanted to find tasty recipes with broccoli!

We get to see what Santa left in our stockings before breakfast, but have to wait until after we eat to go down to the playroom and see what other presents we get.  The kids always eat faster than the grown-ups!

This year on Christmas Eve we are going out to dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse…I’ll let you know about that next month!

My grandmother and I worked at the 61St Farm Market.  It was very good to be outside and see all the people purchasing the different things that were for sale.  I met these two young students who had a lot of questions to ask about healthy eating.  They asked me what  Fooditude was all about.  I told them that it was all about eating good food and having a great time eating and learning about its origins.  It rained that day but, we still made it to the market and had a good time.

Amir

My family and I went to a Moroccan restaurant in our neighborhood called Shokran. It is owned by Khalid Kamal who also has six other restaurants in Chicago. We went on a Friday night and they were very crowded. We had to wait for 1 hour for our table. We were seated in the back room with orange draping on the ceiling. Our waitress was Laura and she told us of the special that night, "Seafood Bastilla"

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