I’m going through withdrawal. It’s not from the pain meds prescribed for a recent injury. No, I go through this withdrawal every November:

Farmers’ market withdrawal. From May through October, unless I’m out of town, I can be found at our local farmers’ markets at least once a week, and usually twice. My husband and I begin anticipating the markets in early spring; when they end in October, there’s a hole in our routine. Saturday mornings seem especially empty without a trip downtown to the market. In large part that’s because of the wonderful local food. But as important is the street scene. It’s always a festive, congenial atmosphere. Friends greet each other, and smiling vendors describe their wares. There are dogs (on leashes) and lots of kids, some selling their family’s products.

Fortunately, the Illinois Stewardship Alliance and Slow Food Springfield are helping me and others like me to make our farmers’ market withdrawal at least more gradual.

For the third year, they’re hosting a Holiday Farmers’ Market: Meet Your Local Producers in the Illinois Building at the Illinois State Fairgrounds on Nov. 21 from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Festive as the regular farmers’ markets are, Holiday Markets are even more so, and this year is no exception. There’ll be music, kids’ activities, cooking demonstrations, and many farmers and vendors will offer samples. For lunch there’ll be soups and sandwiches made with local ingredients. There’ll be fresh and dried holiday wreaths and arrangements. There’ll be handmade soaps and lotions (my daughter swears by Afterthought Farms’s goat milk lotions), herbs and herbal products. There’ll be pies, cakes and cookies, breads and rolls, tortillas and pizza dough – even homemade dog treats! There’ll be turkeys, beef, chicken, pork and eggs. There’ll be cheeses and wines. There’ll be a wealth of produce: lettuces and greens, squashes and pumpkins, apples and pears, and much, much more.

Many of the vendors will be familiar to regular farmers’ market-goers, but there are also newcomers. Groth Farm will be selling pastured pork. Rolling Meadows Brewery is just getting started; they’re still in the licensing process, but will have information.

Gail Record of Clarewood Farm and Bakery will be selling the first baked goods whose ingredients are primarily from local sources. She raised her own pumpkins for her pumpkin pies, and got her flour and oats from an area farmer. Eventually she plans to grow and mill her own flour, and grow berries and other fruits for her baked goods.

Chef Chip Kennedy will be doing the cooking demonstrations, as well as providing the lunch of soups and “upscale” sandwiches. Kennedy and his business partner Josh Sonneborn began their catering business, Five Flavors, in 2007. They specialize in stylish, contemporary menus; soon they’ll begin offering cooking classes, some with unusual topics, in their new facility on West White Oaks Drive. Springfield natives and friends since childhood, both graduated from the Scottsdale Cordon Bleu culinary school. Sonneborn returned to Illinois; Kennedy journeyed west to Portland, Ore. That’s where he became enthusiastic about local, sustainable ingredients. I’m looking forward to trying his lunch offerings, especially the butternut squash soup drizzled with black walnut cream, topped with black walnut crunch.

I’ll be demonstrating how to cut up a chicken. The most popular cooking class I taught was called One Chicken, Two People, Three Meals. The concept was simple: Use chicken breasts for one meal, leg-thighs for another; then make stock from the carcass for soup, using the wings and meat from the bones in the soup. Someone who’d taken