Category: Food Finds

Back in June i got some mesclun at the farmer’s market, and this curly little wonder was part of it. The merchant couldn’t tell me what it was, because they got it from someone else who kept his components a trade secret. It’s delicious, a bit tangy, a bit spicy, curly and dark green with markings of dark reddish color. Anybody know what it is?

I got some peaches at the lincoln park farmer’s market this weekend that were just dreamy. I was dithering over yellow or white but the nice boy at the stand said the whites were his fave, and gave me a taste when i seemed skeptical. White peaches are usually sweet but flavorless, in my experience. These were stupendous, though, so i bought some. Along with a couple yellows just to compare, and a box of yummy end-of-season blueberries. All of which i have been eating for breakfast all week long — yahoo! I love summer stone fruits, oh yeah, mmm, mmm, let me sing my fruity song of joy, la la.

Ayinger Ur-Weisse is maybe the best beer ever. It is certainly my new favorite. T brought it to the party on Saturday, and though i was stealing nips out of everyone’s bottles, since T had bought lots of different kinds of spendy beer I hadn’t tried, this Ayinger was by far the best. Sadly, he’d only got 4, and they were slurped up by the time I rooted around in the bucked of ice looking for one of my own. Since I am leaving for Germany today, I am going to keep my eyes peeled for it over the next week. Heh. I will return with tales of beer and pretzels and sausages and doner kebab (god, I can’t wait to have doner kebab in germany again, yum!), so stay tuned in a couple of weeks.

Treasure Island is a Chicago foofy-food store that seems to be similar in concept to Trader Joe’s except not as cheap. Decent but not comprehensive selection. They had good chopped liver spread in their deli case, but the real find is the smoked salmon trim — 8 bucks for a pound of smoked salmon bits. If you don’t care about having a nice pretty side or uniform slices for presentation, this stuff is just what you need. Good quality salmon, great price. I put mine into pasta with dill, shallot, black pepper & a bit of the creme fraiche. Yum yum, fantastic summer dinner and still a big pile of salmony goodness left for the rest of the week. I had a photo of it, but i never downloaded it and I’m off for vacation soon, so sadly y’all are gonna have to live text only for now.

Coke Zero, the new product attempting to mimic Pepsi One, does not suck at all. In fact, though as a loather of Pepsi and daughter of a diehard Coke-head, it pains me to say so, Pepsi One did not suck either — it tastes just like real Coke with sugar and caffeine. I often yearned for it to be in the vending machines as a commonplace, just as ubiquitous as the mostly crappy but tolerable Diet Coke. I will probably continue to yearn just as much even though there’s now a Coke option as well that has no calories but still tastes damned close to The Real Thing ™, but a girl can dream.

Our friend T returned recently from a trip to Japan, and he brought us a present of some sort of dessert. It was beautifully packaged and well labeled, but exclusively in Japanese, so we had no idea what it might be. Last night we busted it out to go with some of the A-number 1 tip-top grade green tea that tallasiandude brought back from China.
The dessert present turned out to be crumbly white filling wrapped inside a thin layer of sweet pink ume paste, wrapped in a sweetened red shiso leaf. These were accompanied by a block of the same pink paste, with a cute little serving knife, so you could cut off thin strips and lay them over the little leaf packets. They were fantastically delicate and delicious, with the strongly perfumed shiso blending with the sweet and fruity plum paste and almost almondy dry filling, and they were perfect with the grassy green tea. Now, I like a gooey choco-treat every now and again, don’t get me wrong, but when it comes right down to it, I prefer Asian-style sweets much more. They’re subtler, less cloying, and often more interestingly flavored.

In the chip dept, I was of course unable to resist these because I love any and all things containing black pepper. These are good, quite spicy and savory, and a nice alternative to regular Dorito flavor crystals, but not very discernably flavored with black pepper. They are decent, but I won’t go out of my way for them again.

My coworker brought in some fantastic donuts this morning. Classic cake donuts, rich yet light, super crunchy on the outside (even by afternoon when I had another taste), and with a lovely light chocolate icing on top. Dreamy. Can be had at Impallaria bakery and deli. Possibly best donuts ever.

So on my way to the train up here in Rogers Park, there is a convenience mart that has some intriguing looking cartons of potato chips in the window. So, duh, I go in one morning to see what they got. In the potato chip aisle I encountered a man who told me he was about to go smoke some weed, and showed me his little nugget of impending joy; I told him that you definitely needed snacks for that and moved to the counter with my purchases of Vitner’s snacks:
superspicy Hot Cheeze Crunchies, decent but too hot to eat plain — needs a sandwich
kosher dill pickle chips – very good indeed, realistic pickle flavor!
Louisiana hotsauce chips – as yet untried
Sweet Baby Ray’s bbq chips – very good, ate them for supplemental breakfast yesterday
Sizzling Salt & Sour chips – spicy plus salt/vinegar: two great tastes that taste great together? i’ll let you know. (Update: Damn skippy! These are great — flavor crystals that eat through your mucous membranes in not one but TWO ways! Yum.)

En route to dim sum at Shangri-La in Belmont, which by the way is a fantastic Chinese restaurant in the least likely of settings (the name! the weird black & white mosaic tile entry! the T-shirt printery next door!) where we had some spicy beef noodle soup that contained some absolutely top-shelf beef that was soft, moist and still marbled with tender connective tissue despite its long stewing time (better than our own beef by a long shot), and also some fried string bread and spicy steamed spare ribs and soft boiled dumplings in spicy soy sauce that I know as suan la chow show from having had them at Mary Chung’s. Where was I? Oh yes — en route to this deliciousness, I saw a woman walking past us carrying a large cake or bread ring studded with red orbs. It looked rather festive and very intriguing, and I suspected it may have emanated from the Eastern Lamejun Bakery next door to Shangri-La.
Of course I was not able to resist. I scoped out the goods while waiting for our table, and scooped up the goods as soon as we were done with lunch. We ate the treasure with friends who came over that evening with fancy cheeses & wines. It turned out to be a firm, sweet, light, eggy bread like challah but a bit dryer and sweeter, with a very nice flavor and a touch of sesame seeds on top. The orbs, as surmised, were hardboiled eggs dyed red, presumably for some kind of Easter symbolism (I am not so up on my specific Christian-pagan imagery). It’s too bad that organized religion is responsible for so much evil in the world, because the rituals and celebratory foods are really quite delightful.