Suppliers, sites of interest, recipes and more!

Chez Sites

Welcome to the links page of the Chez Marché Cafe.

Wondering how to cook your garden bounty? Looking for something better to do with weeds than compost them? Visit our Chez recipe page.

Visit the Chez Gallery and see some of the work currently hanging at the Chez. View samples from past shows, too. (Not recently updated, sorry.)

Got a hankering to get some civic involvement? Here are some places to get you started. Most of them have their own links page, so this should keep you busy for a while.

Places to stay and things to do when you visit Waupaca

We have four favorites: one is the Pine Oak Creek Cottage. Nice folks, nice place, great for those who want to relax by the water. Located on a quiet canoe lake in the famous Chain of Lakes. Seasonal.

We're smitten with the Crystal River Bed and Breakfast. In a historic, beautiful setting and open year round. Hosts Deb and Robert are wonderfully low-keyed and generous. And their gourmet breakfasts are outstanding!

Another beautiful B&B is the Apple Tree Lane Bed and Breakfast located on the edge of town in Waupaca. The rooms there are extraordinarily beautiful. Also located along the Crystal River and open year round.

Finally, the Artha Sustainable Living Center Bed and Breakfast offers a rejuvenating stay in a peaceful, rural setting, just minutes from Waupaca. The owners are charming and gracious and we're sure you'll enjoy your time there.

Find out what the Waupaca People for Peace are up to

Learn more about alternative energy

Visit Artha Yoga Studio

Local discussion and education group the Winchester Academy sponsors intelligent speakers and provides an invaluable service to the community. Check their website for upcoming events.

Tell them we sent you!

Eat Smart!

Eat healthy, sustainably produced and harvested fish. Check the lists of the best, and the worst, choices available today.

Food Culture and History

Greenwood Press provides high-quality, authoritative reference books in all subject areas taught in middle schools, high schools, and colleges, as well as on topics of general interest. Its many award-winning titles in the social sciences and humanities range from in-depth multi-volume encyclopedias to more concise handbooks, guides, and even biographies. Its books on food and food culture are wonderful. [Although, I must add that they've hired me to do some writing for them, so I might be a little bit biased. --b.]

Chez Suppliers

Sunnysky Farm
Over the years, and since the Chez first opened, we've enjoyed tons of fresh vegetables from Sunnysky in the form of CSA shares. They grow fabulous organic vegetables there. Check them out for more information about CSAs and how you can get their superb produce for yourself.


Learn more about wild foods

Lamb's quarters grows very well here in central wisconsin. It's commonly considered a weed and is tossed aside as a nuisance plant, but it's also a slightly nutty green that sprouts early in the spring, providing one of the first wild foods of the season. Not a native to the area but pervasive today, and it's delicious. Go to the recipe page for a simple recipe, but treat it as any green. It's wonderful in salads, or braised for dinner, or just as a snack in the yard. My mom says her mom used to beg her to pick it for her in the spring.

Food issues and activists

Visit the website of Joel Salatin, owner of PolyFace Farm in Virginia. Salatin is an outspoken advocate of local foods and sustainable farming, and a sane voice in the continuing saga of the Wal-Martization of organic foods.

Visit the Farm: One of the longest operating intentional communities in the country.

Local Harvest can help you find growers in your area, wherever in the US you are. A great resource for local food.

Eat Wild has lots and lots of information about why pasture fed animals are so much safer and healthier for us to eat than factory farmed meats.

The Raw Milk campaign. We can't, and don't, serve any illegal raw milk products at the Chez. However, there are compelling cases to be made for the health benefits of drinking raw milk. There are also some compelling risks, especially to pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems.

A good alternative for those who can't, or won't, drink raw milk is milk from Wisconsin Organics. Wisconsin Organics sells milk that's pasteurized at the lowest legal level. Most milks, including most available certified organic milks, are "ultra-pasteurized," meaning that they're high-heat pasteurized for long shelf life. Wisconsin Organics milk is full of life and flavor and we recommend it whole heartedly.

Jose Bove: French farmer and farm activist

Interview with Bove about his decision to destroy genetically modified corn seed being stored in a silo in France.
Bove biography
Interview with Bove about his part in the dismantling of a McDonald's in France.

Globalization and its effects on our food systems
Impact of Globalization on Family Farms, a presentation given by Bill Christison, president of both the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and the U.S. National Family Farm Coalition.
From the article:
"While the farmer growing cereal grains - wheat, oats, corn - earn negative returns and are pushed close to bankruptcy, the companies that make breakfast cereals reap huge profits. In 1998, cereal companies Kellogg's, Quaker Oats, and General Mills enjoyed return on equity rates of 56%, 165% and 222% respectively. While a bushel of corn sold for less than $4, a bushel of corn flakes sold for $133."

Effects of Global Warming on US wine production


Recipe Blogs and Websites

Epicurious is the website of Gourmet magazine. They have a tremendous archive of reliable and well tested recipes there, searchable by ingredient, user ratings, time of preparation, and more. Additionally, there's an online food dictionary that includes pronunciations. A very handy reference tool. Articles, shopping, forums and more.

Gumbo Pages showcases writings, photographs & recipes by Chuck Taggart. The site is dedicated to the preservation of New Orleans culture. This is one of the first pages I found on the internet, ten years ago or more, and I still refer to it regularly. Chuck is a remarkable writer, and an even more remarkable cook, judging by his writings. Great creole and cajun recipes are to be found in his recipe pages. It's also, now, a terrific site for gathering insider information about what's going on in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Leite's Culinaria is an award winning food blog with marvelous recipes.

A great thai cooking site, Supatra Cooks Thai, that I happened across while reading the City Pages (a free paper published in the Twin Cities, and a subsidiary of the Village Voice). What I particularly appreciate about it is that she adapts local ingredients and tools to Thai cooking. For instance, she's discovered that the Danish aebleskiver pan is particularly well suited to making a traditional Thai pancake. My Danish grandpa would have loved her ingenuity.

This foodblog is an homage to cupcakes.

Other well-written and inspirational food sites:
Pro Bono Baker
William Rubel's Hearth Cooking
The Accidental Hedonist
Adventures in Thai Food and Cooking

Chez Pim
Ptipois
David Lebovitz.com
101 Cookbooks
Chocolate and Zucchini
Movable Feast
Smitten Kitchen
Old Scrote's Cookbook

Not for vegetarians
Offal Good
Meatpaper.com
Hats of Meat


Etc.

I am addicted to this site.

Read my friends' books! Jeff Tamarkin is the editor of Global Rhythm magazine and the author of Gotta Revolution!, the strange tale of the Jefferson Airplane and the time and space that they happened in. Jeff and I have worked together for a long, long time; he's a great writer and a terrific wit. I know you'll enjoy his writing.

Caroline Leavitt is the author of eight novels: Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines and Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Various titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines.

Her essays and articles have appeared in Salon, Parenting, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, Parents, McCall's, Redbook, Mademoiselle, The Boston Globe and New Woman, as well in the anthologies Father, Forever Sisters, A Few Thousand Words About Love, and The Most Wonderful Books.

And she's just been awarded a 2005 honorable mention, Goldenberg Prize for Fiction by the Bellevue Literary Review for "Breathe," a portion of her novel-in-progress. Her web site includes links to a few online bits of her writing, and you can get all her books through the local library system and from quality new and used booksellers (Go to the Bookcellar, next door to the Chez).

Visit local musician Doug Thompson's site. Doug is a great songwriter. And we're very lucky to have him here in Waupaca. You can hear him sing every other Thursday night at the Chez.

Is Charlie your Darwin? Join the Friends of Charles Darwin. It's free and it allows you to put the initials FCD after your name, like some kind of fancy shmantz.

Maybe the best free horoscopes ever. Certainly the best I've ever seen.
Click here.

Animated Paul Bunyan tales.

Visit this Cornell University Library website for the Haiku of the day.

Start your day with a song. Visit NPR's Song of the Day site, edited and selected by Stephen Thompson, creator of the A.V. section of the Onion and former editor there.

God knows I try to avoid it, but occasionally we all have to shop. Here are some sites to get you into the mood...
Mighty Goods
Tree Hugger
Etsy.com