Author: foodnerd

perez posole

As promised, the report on the posole at Perez. Yum yum. Six bucks gets you two meals’ worth of savory red-orange broth full of soft hominy and big melting chunks of pork. A shade bland, but squeeze in a few of the lime wedges and magically it’s perfect. With tortillas & hot sauce on the side, along with raw lettuce & onions to add in for crunch and body. Seriously between this and pho I am starting to think that all broth soups should have lime juice in them, I love them so much.

well, at least it’s not just me

having horrible experiences in supermarkets. I didn’t notice it being quite so horrible in Boston, in the mainstream markets — maybe it’s that in eastern Massachusetts we are all so lefty and organic we don’t realize it, that even our blue-collar citizens are aware of the perils of processed foods. I wanted to live somewhere different and see what it’s like, and I guess I found out one of the ways it’s different. God help America; we need it.

it sucks having no kitchen



I have been struggling to eat often and well enough, though the meals when I have them have been pretty good. I didn’t realize just how much I rely on my kitchen. Funny story: my pal H packed me off to this empty apartment with a few things from her pantry, and I did one frenzied pass through a crappy supermarket (i had to pee REALLY bad; more on the crappiness of Dominick’s markets in another post). So with these paltry supplies and one skillet, I tried to figure out what I would make. I decided on a couple meals, one of which was a box of Goya rice, a can of octopus, and a can of ranchero sauce. I intended to cook this that night. But I went to see an apartment after work, and by the time I left there I was ravenous — and it’s an hour’s train ride way the fuck uptown to the apartment, and I knew I would be nauseous the whole way because I was hungry. So I looked for a taqueria for a quick bite, but what I found was a Cancun-style seafood place. And I bet you can see the punchline coming…. I ended up eating pulpo ranchero for dinner: rice with octopus in ranchero sauce. I didn’t even know this was a real dish, i was just trying to combine a set of random ingredients in the least weird way possible. Turns out it is in fact extremely tasty. *yay*
When I finally ended up making my version at home, it didn’t really stand up. The rice was fine, and the sauce was much spicier, but the pulpo tasted canned and the sauce was kind of eh. It’s food, but just barely. Oh well. I’m eating the rest of it mixed with some mexican chorizo and eggs, which is a great improvement. I have to stick to things that can be made in a single skillet, which is an interesting exercise that I am eager to conclude.
Screw it, we’ll talk supermarkets in this post. Dominick’s is just overpriced and has crap selection. In the ‘hood up north it caters to its primary demographic with packaged food and more packaged food, with not even a boneless breast of chicken to be found, while near work in the gallery district it caters to *its* primary demographic by being relentlessly yuppie, but the sort of yuppie who doesn’t ever cook. Blech. I went to a Jewel, in Wicker Park, which was better, but still expensive. This one was inhabited by hipster couples, some with infant, some without — oy vey. But at least there were reasonable things to buy. I had a much better time at the indy markets up on Devon, and I think I’m going to stick to the indies and to the occasional Whole Foods run, and only hit the big supermarkets when cornered. I guess Fuck Corporate Groceries is on to something, not just a personal experiment but a straight-up necessity.

walking down devon


So on Sunday to while away my day I took a walk down Devon. All of Devon, from Sheridan to Kedzie, which looks on the map to be about 3 miles. The first part is boring, but once you cross Damen it starts to get interesting until it crescendoes in a mile-long stretch of Indo-Pak chaos: restaurants, bakeries, sari shops, jewelers, electronics hawkers, the works. I walked by one storefront marked “sweets and snacks” and got about another block down the street before I realized that it had been jammed to the rafters with people, so I went back and went in. It’s called Tahoora Sweets & Bakery, and I got a boxful of sticky Indian desserts, including some egg-shaped things stuffed with cream and rolled in coconut, a shredded-carrot cake, a giant pistachio-topped fried ball, and one of those greasy-sticky mini-funnel-cake things I don’t know the name of. I also got something called halwa puri, which I saw on pretty much every table in the place. It was a sectioned tray of spiced potato, spiced chickpeas, pickle, raita, some safety-orange stuff that seems to be the halwa (sort of a lightly-sweet relative of cream of wheat, with raisins and almonds, served warm), and 3 big puffy greasy puris. I got mine to go in plastic tubs, because there wasn’t a free table in the place, and I was the only gringo, and it didn’t seem fair for me to take up a whole booth for myself, and besides I was hungry and didn’t want to wait. So I ate on a bench at a bus stop, scooping up potato & pickle in greasy bits of puri and generally snarfing away. I got about halfway through and was full — not bad for $3.50. I forgot to get a napkin so I just rubbed all that grease into my cuticles (which were intensely grateful and looked better that day than they have in months) and went merrily along. It was all so good, and it held me through the whole long-ass walk, and the latter half made an entirely satisfying lunch, as you can see in the picture.
I also stopped at a place called Ambala that sells canisters of salty snack mixes; I had one at H’s that was great, and I tried to get one for myself, but I think I got one slightly different, so that will be fun too. It has shards of potato chips, nuts, dried fruit, spices, yum yum. This place is much more elegant and high-end inside, and has a whole range of sweets. I didn’t buy any because I’d already gotten a boxful elsewhere, but the shopgirl offered me a taste of their mini-funnel-cake treat, which was not glowing-orange and was the only one of these I’ve ever had that didn’t taste like the frying oil was stale. It was fantastic, crispy and sweet and syrupy without being cloying, so i will be going back there for my next batch of sweets.
Then the street morphs into a Muslim section, and then stops briefly in Central Asia (one Turkish shop and Argo Georgian bakery). I got some Turkish sheep’s milk feta and oil-cured olives, and a big yeasty round loaf at the bakery, and cilantro and dill at the produce market next door, so I can have a Baku-style breakfast tomorrow, yum. I stopped at a dollar store and bought the most hilarious shower curtain ever (i’m staying in a totally empty apartment, you will recall). This thing is like tissue paper, and the printing doesn’t line up properly — whaddaya want for $1.19? And then I trucked on through the Hasidic neighborhood, spying Hashalom, reputedly the only Israeli felafel in the city, but I was still full so I’ll have to try it later. And then at Kedzie I went over the river, but saw only Home Depot and strip-mall hell, so I turned around and caught the bus back east. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs more time, not least of these being an African restaurant called Toham (at Newgard & Devon) that claims to have smoked goat, so I will be heading back sometime soon.

moodyburgers

Tonight we went to Moody’s Pub, where there seems to be only one really good way to order: Berghoff beer and cheeseburgers. I asked for my burger well done (I like my steaks rare, and I love steak tartare, but commercial ground beef is just kind of icky when it’s soft and pink), and damned if it didn’t come out fantastically crunchy on the outside and still tender inside, with a nice toasty taste, not at all burnt. The fries were magically crunchilicious too, even when they got cold, which they did rather quickly because we were sitting outside on the patio in our coats, just because we could. I think in terms of taste and overall joy-factor, my heart still belongs to Charlie’s Kitchen in Cambridge, but these Moodyburgers will hold me quite nicely, especially considering that they can be consumed either in a fabulous tree-shaded patio or in a dark divey snug of a bar.

viet food court

My friend H is recovering from her months of job-seeking and wasn’t up for leaving the couch, let alone leaving the house, so I went for dinner on my own. She did, however, pass along the nugget of information that I could walk from her place to Argyle Street’s asia-fest. I figured it was 3 el stops, it had to be too far to walk, but turns out I was wrong. I went with H’s recommendation to seek out the Vietnamese Food Court, and was well pleased. I knew I wanted pho, because it was cold and I was feeling tired and rundown myself, but I wanted also to try one of the many things on the menu that were new to me. So I went with an appetizer that turned out to be 8 little soy sauce dishes, each filled with rice flour and steamed, then topped with dried shrimp fuzz (what pork sung would be if it was made out of shrimp) and shrimp cake, shallots and scallions, and served with the usual viet-sauce of lime, sugar, fish sauce, & chillies to be spooned into each wee dish. You had to sort of scrape the little rice cake free of the dish, then shovel it right into the mouth. They were delicious, each one a mouthful of sweet, salty, savory, spicy. The pho was very nice, nothing mindblowing, but very satisfying and beefy in the broth, and the meatballs seemed homemade and the rare beef was tender. And the whole thing came in a marvelously bizarre setting: the room is a mishmash of elegant bamboo and gold calligraphy and tube lights and cheesy paper decorations, and at the front is a stage, which that Saturday night was featuring a homegrown band doing reasonably convincing covers of the Cranberries and Bryan Adams and Guns N Roses. Hee.

caribbean-american baking company


On the walk along Howard Street from my temporary dwelling to the el stop is a tempting bakery that has a huge selection of Jamaican treats. I got a pile of sweets to share with the office — banana cake (tastes just like banana bread), sweet coconut bread (more truly a bread, with raisins in) — and some other stuff for myself. Jackass corn had to be bought for the name alone, and turned out to be the lovechild of gingersnaps and graham crackers. They’re really hard and crunchy, and I think they would be lovely with a cup of tea. Grata cake is a big brownie-size bar of the filling of a Mounds bar: grated coconut and sugar, with the top dyed hot pink. I *heart* grata cake.
It so happens that this bakery is apparently the only purveyor of jamaican patties in the city, and sells them to caribbean restaurants all over town. I got a bunch to share with H + J, and they were fabulous. The pastry is nice and flaky, not too greasy, and the beef filling is good and spicy, and the jerk chicken filling is just to die for yummy.