Author: foodnerd

a bender, chicago style


when you work too damn much, and haven’t had time to cook, and find yourself alone on a Friday night without enough energy to actually go out and do something fun, this is what happens: a quick drive to Goose Island Shrimp House, and an evening in front of the TV with fried seafood, hot sauce and spicy chips.
The breading is thick and crunchy — they clearly bread and fry to order, given the wait time and the quality of the crunch — but the shrimps aren’t really all that. Not really fresh enough in my opinion. The oysters, though, are winners, huge & briny & hot, very yum.

quit yer damn whining and cook

OK, i have been yelled at before for spoiling Top Chef in posts here, but i think this one is safe enough.
I am so tired of the fine-dining chefs on that show whining every time they get a challenge that is centered on “low food,” for lack of a better term: comfort food, TGIFridays, bar snacks for poker players, whatever. Last night, almost all of them would not shut up about how adrift they were, how completely clueless about what to do — and though a couple of them came up with things that were at least tasty and interesting, far too many of them bungled their dishes completely.
I mean, come on — if you can cook at that level, you had better be able to turn out a decent plate of something at home, for your friends, with one hand tied behind your back. If you don’t have that basic ability to cook food that tastes good, what in the blinding hell business do you have in a 4-star kitchen? (And conversely, in what universe do they live, where nothing is worth eating that doesn’t come from Joel Robuchon or Alain Ducasse?)
This was the thing that struck me most about my stupendously inventive dinner at Alinea, about which I *swear* I will write soon: all those absurd, whimsical, virtuosic tour-de-force things that came to the table suspended from a pin, every last one of them was perfectly cooked and utterly, magnificently delicious. Just because you are a brilliant fine-dining genius artiste does not let you off the hook of giving me something tasty to eat. It may be art, but it is still food.
I have my two picks for who it’s gonna be this time around on Top Chef. Anyone wanna guess?

another thought on the subject

As I read more in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, particularly the Grass section I’ve just finished about both corporate organic and extremely local intensively managed not-government-approved-but-might-as-well-be organic farms, the concept arises that local food is perhaps even more important in the fight for safe clean food than organic is. Local production by its very definition cannot be subverted into an industrialized machine, with the universe of sins that come as part and parcel of that industrialization. I have been thinking a lot about what this means in my own life.
Bottom line, I am going to keep doing what I am doing, going to farmers’ markets whenever I can, growing my own vegetables and herbs, and supplementing that with organic from whatever supermarket I can get to, and generally doing the best I can. I will try harder to buy local, though, because the figures on how much petroleum is burned growing and transporting food to me are appalling (one quarter of america’s petroleum use, if I remember the figure correctly, go to food production and transport?).
But here is the other thought that came out of this: If getting food and other goods locally is the most effective way to fight or at least circumvent the industrial food machine — and all its foreign-oil, agribusiness, big-box, gene modification and chemical allies — then isn’t devoting time to the production and gathering of local food an intensely political act? And if that’s true, it isn’t just the farmers who are politicized. Isn’t devoting time to “traditional” housewifery activities such as cooking, preserving, & gardening now even more overtly a deliberate political act in this attempt to improve the world? (Even sewing and crafts start to fall into this view of the world, if by so doing you thwart globalization and fossil fuel use.)
I think that hardline old school feminists really ought to put that one in their pipe and smoke it. The debate goes back and forth, who is most righteous, the mommies or the careerists, and most of the arguments are subjective. This view of local food strikes me as a pretty rock-solid argument for the mommies — which I suppose I am, even with a full-time technology job and without any kids, considering how much cooking and crafting I do and wish I could do. Really it seems to boil down to a couple of things: what do you enjoy doing with your time? and what are your economic politics?
The worry for me, though, is what about those of us, men and women, without the time, inclination or know-how to eat local in any meaningful way? It’s all very easy for me to say, considering that the same way men are reputed to think about sex every 17 seconds, I think about food at least as much, and cook far more than is warranted for a career girl living alone in a city.
How can we help the not-so-food-obsessed make the eat-local thing work?

gino’s east

So last night a bunch of dancers and I went out for Chicago deep-dish pizza, and since I had not yet been to Gino’s (home of the insanely long lines) I went along with the plan, just to see if ALL Chicago deep-dish pizza sucks or just the stuff I’d been having.
Pretty much it all sucks.
But Gino’s is much better than the others. The crust is butterier and drier in texture, almost crumbly — it’s nice not to have it be all doughy, but there’s still way the hell too much of it, and it’s not that tasty. Way too much cheese, pretty decent sauce, and the spinach mushroom pizza has a very nice lightly-creamed spinach topping, if almost zero mushrooms.
It’s fine, it’s not horrible, but I can’t imagine voluntarily going there, forking out absurd amounts of money, waiting in line, and then waiting another hour after ordering to get food ever again. What is the point?

eatin’ good in the neighborhood: schwa

I have been absurdly busy lately, AND i left my digicam cable in Boston, so i have yet to write up all the good stuff from my trip to CA and beyond. So sorry for the lack of posts, y’all. But tonight I had dinner with C for the first time since July, since by some miracle we are both in chicago at the same time. I’ve been reading all kinds of buzz on Schwa, which is just up the street from my place, so because we both needed to watch the season premiere of Lost at 8pm (mildly disappointing, but i suspect only b/c they need to set up a whole season’s worth of mindfuck in 45mins or less), we decided to get a late dinner at Schwa. Yum.
They do fixed menus of either three or nine courses. The 3 course meals appear to be standard sized portions (american style), while the 9 course is a standard haute cuisine parade of tiny plates. We went for the nine, of course, despite the appetizer course of fancy cheeses and Ur-Weisse that went along with Lost.
The entire staff is 4 guys, doing everything from booking reservations to cooking to dishwashing to waiting tables to marinating the enormous tub of beef shortribs we were eyeing from the dining room. It’s a little odd when you walk in off a seedy stretch of Ashland Avenue into what looks like a shuttered storefront, and find yourself in the middle of a tiny dining room, elegantly decorated and half full of diners. It feels like having a fancy dinner in your living room, but once you get past that, I’d say that Schwa can compete with any dining room in the city.
A few of the dishes were a little over-elaborate in my opinion, with an element or two that didn’t work or could just have been left out entirely (the butter-poached lobster with passion fruit puree and potatoes didn’t in any way need a lavender foam, no matter how groovy a lavender foam may be — and no matter how well the lobster and passion fruit work together, which you’d never guess, but they totally do), but as i said to C, that’s pretty much picking nits that in a lesser restaurant i would totally let slide. Everything was well cooked, delicious, and inventive, and we had a fantastic meal. The service was attentive without being formal, and I definitely had the sense of being in a craftsman’s workshop — it reminded me of my brother’s glassblowing studio, if you swapped out the furnace for a cooktop and ever so slightly lowered the volume on the hip hop.
I am a little goofy on wine, since we had a bottle of champagne and a bottle of burgundy, and i have to get up in 7 hours, so i am not going to go into detail about all 9 courses right this second, but let me just mention a few highlights:
turmeric ice cream with date puree
fleur de sel over all the icecreams (i am SO doing this at home)
beef tartare with asian flavors and a quail egg
yuzu syrup on the plate with the trio of beef – tartare, pickled tongue and shortrib
a tiny spoon filled with confit eggplant and pickled trimmings
quail egg ravioli with ricotta and brown butter, at once insanely rich and somehow light
perfect sweetbreads with a melted pool of humboldt fog and a bit of wine-poached rhubarb, apparently local from the market even in october
strawberry foam with berries and salty olive oil ice cream
I think probably i could live without having absolutely everything reduced to a paste or puree smeared on my plate, which is pretty much the way it is at Schwa, but since i have no shame at all i just ate everything with my hands or at the least scooped up all the smears of whatnot with a finger so as to truly appreciate every bit of them. And not one paste or smear was anything less than exquisitely delicious, so i think i forgive them their youthful extravagances. We had a lovely time, and we’ll go back. Stay the course through the annoyance of having to leave voicemail to get a reservation — it’ll be worth it.

unspeakably tasty

I have written on this site before about the goodness to be had at the Caribbean Baking Company on Howard Street between Sheridan and the El. But today I was reminded anew of the tastiest thing yet that i have had there: the jerk chicken patties.
The beef patties are excellent, canonical renditions of spicy ground meat in bright yellow pastry. The curry chicken patties are even better, sweet indian-style curry in a paler yellow pastry, flaky and wonderful. But the jerk chicken, sweet jesus, these things are perfect. Surprisingly spicy, faintly sweet, deeply savory, and in a shatteringly flaky, pale, almost-sweet-but-not-quite pasty shell.that perfectly complements the filling.
If you haven’t already, get yourself there. Yum.

darda seafood

I managed to connect with Cindy from FoodMigration this time out, and we dragged ourselves through rush hour to Milpitas to check out the Chinese Muslim cuisine at Darda Seafood.
Yum.
As you might imagine, Muslim Chinese hail largely from the northern and western parts of China, and the food leans strongly to lamb and wheat. We ordered the thick sesame-scallion bread and the cold ox-tendon terrine, both recommended by the magic article from Gourmet, along with a dish of pan-fried hand cut noodles with lamb that we saw on the table next to us. (Cindy took one for the team and leaned over to ask our neighbors what they were eating — just one of many reasons why she is such a delightful dining companion.) After some consultation with the waitress, who by this time in our ordering had figured out that we were not just a couple of amateurs wanting General Gao’s Chicken, we chose a black cod steamed with salted vegetables and a plate of sauteed pea tendrils with cloves of roasted garlic to round out the dinner.
Everything was delicious. The gamy lambiness made the noodles more interesting than usual, and the noodles themselves were thick and chewy, sparked with bean sprouts, shreds of cabbage & bits of cilantro. The pea tendrils, well, not much need be said about pea tendrils other than yum. The tendon terrine was beautiful, all marbled shades of brown, savory with a bit of five-spice, and just slightly chewy, becoming more yielding as it warmed. The cod was perfectly cooked and tasty, and the bread, oh my god — the smell alone, all yeasty and oniony, is just dreamy.
There’s a ton of other places in this same mall, which as described in the magic article is indeed huge and almost entirely Asian, so if you are in the area, stop by and explore. (The mall itself is tucked into the corner of the junction of the 237 and the 880 freeways, so it’s conveniently accessible to many locations, assuming it’s not rush hour.)

porridge place

I really wish I lived near a Porridge Place, because the one that I’ve been eating at here in Cupertino is so awesome. Good Chinese food, fast and cheap, and intensely satisfying. You walk in, pick from the steam trays and platters behind the glass counter, and the waitresses bring you your tasty bits along with hot tea and a big tub of steaming rice porridge with cubes of sweet potato floating in it. I will post pictures once I am back home, because I think I managed to forget my download cable. Duh.
I ate there last night, because I’d been in bed all day with a head cold (three cheers for exhaustion!) and really wanted hot comfort food. I got some ground pork in a thin juicy sauce with slivers of mushroom, tasting faintly of ginger & soy, and a pile of mildly garlicky greens, and an extremely savory tea egg. This turned out to be particularly excellent because the liquid from the pork thinned out the rather thick congee and made it just the way I like it, and the greens gave the right note of bright freshness.
I still feel sort of crappy, so I went back again tonight. This time I spied some 1000-year-old eggs with tofu, so I got that, along with some napa cabbage braised with shiitakes & dried shrimp, and a plate of chewy-crunchy salted turnip with spicy red pepper. Then they asked me if I wanted pork sung with my egg-and-tofu, and when I said yes they drowned the bowl with fluffy pork goodness, which made me happy, happy, happy. I just love rice porridge with sweet-salty pork threads dissolved in it, and the spicy turnip & fermented eggs were awesome with it. Delicious. I ate not even half of what I ordered, and I am stuffed to the ears, and the whole works set me back $11 and change. Three people could easily eat on what I ordered, and two would be stuffed, so this is cheap eats for sure.
I am toying with bringing my two coworkers here one night after meetings — there are some scary looking foods (which I am sure are delish) like tiny whole squids or soybeans mixed with tiny silver dried anchovies, but the vast majority of dishes are highly approachable: tofu, sausage, cabbage, green beans, cucumber, ground pork, fish, shrimp.
It looks to me like at least half the patrons get takeaway, to be used as a quickie dinner. Geeky bachelors and young families walk out with a few cardboard cartons of savory prepared dishes and a tub of congee, which beats the hell out of Domino’s Pizza any day. It reminds me of the prepared foods counter at Whole Foods, only better. And if you choose to eat in, it feels more like a Chinese version of tapas, comfort-food style. It’s just awesome, and I will be sad not to have it near me when my work at Apple is done.

so sorry, very busy

hi everyone, sorry i haven’t been posting. Was at dance camp for a week — woot! — and am back in Chicago for less than 24 hours to drop off some luggage & make sure the house hasn’t burned down, then I am back to Cupertino for another week. There are some posts about Chinese food in Silicon Valley, with more fodder coming up soon, for sure a Chinese Muslim place in Milpitas, and a few other odds and ends, though none from camp, since the food there is borderline school-cafeteria quality, at best. We mack down a ton of it anyway, since we are burning calories at an insane rate, but it is hardly up to standards. Alas. So stay tuned — hopefully i will have time for a few posts while I am in CA.