Category: General

Holy Shitake’s post about how to use bacon to make baklava better than you ever imagined possible. Excuse me while I wipe the drool from my keyboard.

is the only way to describe it. the last few days, regardless of what city i have been in (chicago, ithaca, boston), it is just too fuckin hot and humid to move, let alone eat. today it is so bad (and really, today is better than most of the days have been) i am hiding out in the basement, and ate sun chips dipped in a mixture of cottage cheese and cilantro salad dressing. the picture is of the new blue flavor of gatorade i have been subsisting on, in a pale green glass that at least looks refreshingly cool. feh. i hate humid heat.

so in a whirlwind of activity, we packed the car full of stuff and headed west the Thursday before Memorial Day. we stopped at the foodnerd homestead to say hi to my mom, drop off white-cream donuts for dad, and acquire a bag of fresh asparagus from the family patch, and then drove straight through until 1:30am, with a few stops for ingestion & elimination along the way. We hit the road again at 8am, and pulled up in front of my apartment just before 3pm — and managed to unload all the aforementioned stuff before the rain came.
A few highlights:
– i’m pretty sure we saw a bald eagle flying overhead somewhere in Ohio.
– Hardee’s fried chicken is surprisingly good, considering.
– virtually all the cornfields we saw were fallow, full of last year’s brown stubble. what’s up with that? why wouldn’t they be full of growing green by now?
– the Comfort Inn at Barkeyville, PA has really good free waffles, along with free wireless and soft beds. Who’da thunk it?
– we saw a lot of Ohio’s finest along the way, but not even a glimpse of Indiana’s finest. Weird.
– my mom packed us a crazy picnic of cheese and nuts and deviled eggs and animal crackers, and a showstopping platter of prosciutto-wrapped canteloupe. Awesome.
– wendy’s now lets you have salad instead of fries in your burger meal. kinda cool, really.
– Dairy Queen kicks ass.

Well, May has come and gone, I have been out of my mind busy the last three weeks, and it appears that our only serious competitor, Dr. Biggles, has been about the same, so we have no soup recipes. I have the cookbook prize in my possession, so the contest will happen someday, but perhaps the thing to do is table it until soup season resumes in the autumn. Perhaps by then we may have a little time to ourselves to tinker with creamy chickeny concoctions for the general betterment of mankind. Tune in next October.

It’s been really frustrating this weekend: I haven’t been able to get me & tallasiandude to decent restaurants. I am accustomed to having good places to eat at my fingertips for any situation or location, but I haven’t been here long enough to have places in my head, and the places I DO know I’m not sure where they are or when they’re open. So we’ve ended up dragging ass all over town only to find closed doors, or dithering for an hour trying to figure out where we want to eat, or just giving up completely.
For instance, tallasiandude wanted to try Italian beef, after hearing it described in delicious detail by H & J. So we tried going to Man-Jo-Vin, at Belmont & Damen, only to find it closed (i think for the holiday weekend). By then we were pretty hungry, and still wanted to try & make it to a dance before a movie, so we tried to find something quickly along Belmont or Clark. And didn’t, really. We ended up at the Golden Nugget on Clark, which provided a serviceable BLT & grilled cheese-n-tomato, and a decent waffle with ice cream & strawberries. Acceptable, but not exactly what I had in mind for impressing my guest with the culinary marvels of this fair city.
After the movie, I wasn’t sure what might be open around 9pm on a Sunday, but we were downtown so I thought we could check out the Billy Goat Tavern & get a burger. Closed. It was getting later and we were growing crankier, so we capitulated and thought we might try the big open patio at Pontiac Cafe on Damen in the midst of the Wicker Park madness. What is not apparent about the Pontiac from a mere drive-by is that it is an insane meat market, which isn’t *so* bad in itself, but staff is annoyingly self-important and the menu was tedious and expensive. We blew it off, and tried to go to the yuppie noodle bar across the street (which had just closed), and by this time we felt even older & lamer than we did when we walked into the Pontiac’s swirling morass of horny 20-something hipsterflesh, so we retreated to the all-nite low-rent diner Lorraine’s, on the corner of Damen & Chicago, where we had powdered mashed potatoes, powdered orange drink, fried chicken, squishy white bread & butter, a pork chop sandwich, and a pizza puff straight from the fryolator. Pizza puffs are a weirdly ubiquitous food here, and I had to try one. They’re pizza topping enclosed in a dough packet & deep fried. Not bad, really, especially late at night. Lorraine’s is deeply sketchy, with dirty dishes & marginally functional staff. We felt infinitely more at home there than we did at Pontiac.
But recall that this saga began with a craving for Italian beef. So we got a little more organized this morning, and looked online and called ahead. Johnnie’s is closed for the weekend. Al’s is closed. Max’s is closed. Man-Jo-Vin is still closed. So we decided to look for local, possibly-of-dubious-quality Italian beef. All of the handful of purveyors along Chicago & Damen were closed. So we went to plan B: the DeMar coffee shop, where we had a great waffle and respectable eggs & hash browns the other day. Wait for it, wait for it…. closed.
So we gave up and went to Mr. Taco around the corner on Marshfield, despite not really wanting Mexican, and sat in the open air patio. Happily, the chips were light & crunchy and came with great green & red salsas, and the tostada al pastor was really good. The other gorditas & tacos were fine too, and the orchata was yummy. But it weren’t no Italian beef, and poor tallasiandude was fed, but unsatisfied.
As a foodwhore, i feel it to be my responsibility to make sure my friends not only eat, but eat well, at every meal, and the amount of compromise, capitulation and sheer futility over the last few days have been making me crazy, feeling guilty & inadequate. Pathetic, I know, but there it is. I gonna have to get busy learning where shit is in this town.

today I ate my leftovers for lunch on the roofdeck atop my office building. it was warm and sunny and it made me happy.

My drug of choice is caffeine. Since I’ve gotten to Chicago, I’ve been drinking the office coffee, because it was there and it was free, and I had no caffeine-procurement facilities of my own. But as the days went along, I drank more and more of it, and found myself unable to think without an afternoon infusion as well as a couple big mugs in the morning. It was getting ugly. I needed to get back to my usual morning mug of strong black tea, the Irish kind that gets the job done right but doesn’t cause the rest of your bodily systems to completely freak out.
But I couldn’t find it anywhere. Argh! Can’t cave and get crappy Lipton! What to do? LTHForum to the rescue. A thread there happened to discuss where to get british foodstuffs, and named an Irish shop named Tara. I got there, but too late — it had already closed since it took me 8 million years to get there on the el. But there was mention also of a Jewel up the street from there with a tiny corner catering to the construction workers and bar staff in the neighborhood (which IS chockablock with Irish or at least Irish-style bars). And blessedly there was my box of Lyons brand tea. A little bit reconfigured, in a cubic box rather than flat, because they’ve reshaped the bags from flat & round to pyramidal, but I brewed some up today, it tastes just as I remember it, and all is right with the world. Thank heavens, and god bless my little addiction.

So today I ducked into the Marquette Inn on Madison for coffee to stave off an increasingly evil withdrawal headache (caused by ATM failure, which in turn caused failure to acquire caffeine this morning due to NO MONEY), and while I was in there I figured I’d have a little soup for lunch since it was starting to SNOW. Stupid snow. I’m only just a little bit bitter that it’s snowing and freezing though it’s almost May, and I would just like to say that Chicago has a bitch of a windchill. Especially near the lake — I am glad I am looking for apartments well away. So anyway — the cream of chicken rice soup arrived, and the first warning sign was that it jiggled. Like jello. Eeew. It was so solid that the saltines rested lightly on its surface, sinking not at all. And sad to tell, it was pasty and bland and in no way delicious. And to describe it as hot would have been generous. Sigh. At least the coffee was okay.

I’m not the only one who calls it Whole Paycheck. *giggle* (This is an awesome post for many other reasons too, btw.)

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.