Category: General

WOW, my site looks like ass in Internet Explorer! My profoundest apologies to everyone who reads me with IE. I have been using Mozilla/Firefox since I finally got too fed up with IE, and never bothered to surf my more-or-less standard MovableType styling with another browser. No wonder so many bloggers use a narrow column of body text — IE can’t seem to fit my tables in the window. Gah! When I get a free moment I’ll try and tweak things to improve readability for those of you stuck with the Evil Empire’s browser. Bear with me till then…

“The researchers found that Americans worry more about food and derive less pleasure from eating than people in any other nation they surveyed.”
from NYT article “Our National Eating Disorder” (thanks to KIPlog)

New Maxwell Street Market. Canal St between Taylor & 15th St, Sundays 7-3. Why, oh why can we not have mexican food like this at home? My favorite new discovery is birria – a hot soup of goat, broth, tomato, chilis, clove, cinnamon, cilantro… etc. Served with a pile of thin warm tortillas. Delicious, very spicy, filling, totally soul-satisfying – kind of like chinese spicy beef noodle soup only without the noodles and with tomatoes and cilantro. (here is a vaguely approximate recipe, based on my taste memories)
When you see a jostling crowd of mexican people jammed into a food stall, it’s a decent guess the food is worthwhile… so we snagged a first course of tacos from the far 15th st side of the market — carne asada with great texture and flavor, chorizo also good, and fabulous green tomatillo hotsauce. Starving so these were just utterly wonderful.
H talked me into a mexican coke — not as sweet, and really good, but my bottle claimed to have high fructose corn syrup — weird since the whole point is that in mexico they still use cane sugar. H’s said sugar, so who knows.
Dessert course started with a hot chocolatey drink – champurrado. Chocolate, cinnamon, corn – creamy soft chewy mouthfeel. Terrific on a blustery fall day. Then we found the truck with the lady selling fresh fried churros – we got ours with gooey vanilla filling. How can you not love a dessert that is crunchy and fried? Good contrast of textures and flavors, with the crunchy sugary outside, the soft warm doughy inside, and the gooey filling, but i suspect I might agree with J and prefer it without the filling. However, filling your churro offers the opportunity to see the *hilarious* machine used to fill them — a skinny nozzle like used to steam & froth milk for cappucino, but with a little lever that causes it to extrude flavored pudding when stuck into the tiny hole in the churro.
I was saving my known quantity for last, and so I was stuffed already by the time we got to the cocktel mixto — but of course that didn’t stop me. It’s still awesome. Not quite as transcendent as I remembered, which is sad, but nevertheless satisfyingly tangy, cool & spicy. Ate the leftovers for breakfast in the airport after having a meltdown dealing with boneheaded United Airlines staff who couldn’t figure out how to check a bag after going through security. (Note to self: don’t buy letter openers on vacation, or if you do, check the damned thing. Duh.) I kind of wonder whether it would be doable at home — the shrimp isn’t too hard, it’s the octopus that’d be the trick to get right. The texture is so good, soft and meaty without being too chewy. The rest is just water (from poaching the seafood, it looks like), ketchup, lime juice, hot sauce, onion & cilantro. And saltines. Mmmmmmmm.
H had some canela – hot cinnamon tea which smelled great, though I didn’t try any b/c I was utterly stuffed to the eyeballs. Speaking of eyeballs, we all passed on the eyeball tacos available at one stand. (I have a strong stomach and an adventurous palate, but *shudder*.) J had a huarache – flat corn oval filled with black bean, topped with meat and cotija and onion and cilantro, which I remember from last time as being delish. We were all too full for grilled corn with cheese & chili powder, or potato chips drenched in hot sauce, or milk caramel lollipops, or atole. Our horchata was good but way too watery — that’s what we get for buying it at 3pm after all the ice melted in it. And H bought 3 pounds of gorgeous glossy orange habaneros, with which she intends to make the winter’s batch of hotsauce — the girl likes the spicy. I’ve never seen such pretty peppers; it would’ve made a great photo, if only I’d had the camera.
Update on the green & red tamales to follow once the foodsluts and I get to eat a few.
I really have got to work on my basic conversational and culinary spanish — i was totally at sea. Thank god for J being all cool & bilingual and stuff.

I’ve been eating a lot of late-night crap meals because I’m out late dancing, but a few things have crossed my path:

• Garrett’s popcorn, cheese flavor & caramel flavor. Wow.
• All pickle relish is apparently neon green here.
• Bosnian food is what happens when Turkish & Slavic food interbreed: I had a sandwich of spiced ground meat kabob & barbecued chicken liver on grilled turkish-style bread.
• There are plenty of restaurants open all night here. That’s my kinda town.
• Beef chow foon is a reliable sketchy-chinese-restaurant standby for all occasions. And I have learned the characters for pan fried, for bean, and for fish. Yay me!

I just love Chicago. In particular I love the architecture (and the real estate prices, oy), and the fact that it’s just like NYC but with lots of nice midwestern people in it. And the midcentury modern stuff everywhere, it’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. But none of this has distracted me from my first love. Last night we had Turkish takeout from down the street, one of two in the immediate neighborhood (*swoon*)… bean salads and kebabs and fabulous tomato sauces. And for lunch today we went to the Swedish deli, but on the way we ran into a White Castle, and because I was heretofore a slider virgin, we had a little burger amuse-bouche. Harold & Kumar were on to something good, damn. At the deli we got herring in mustard-dill sauce, and pickled herring, and sweet pickled cucumbers, and potato lefse, which is an astonishingly tasty, very potatoey flat soft bread. I also got some fishy products in squeezable tubes as presents for the other foodsluts (cod roe spread with dill, etc. — i love the scandinavians). My friend lives in Andersonville, where the last vestiges of the Swedish community linger on. She also reviews restaurants, so for dinner we got a truckload of free sushi, most of it good, some of it kind of blah… but we have learned that white tuna is a creamy melt in your mouth tasty treat.
Stay tuned for further adventures… I intend to get down to the Maxwell St. Market for some more seafood cocktail and other mexitreats, and we are planning an outing for something called Italian beef. The place with the duck fat french fries is still closed (there was a fire some months ago, apparently) so I am just going to have to come back for that some other time. Sigh.

When your best friend is over, and you pull some cottage cheese out of the fridge for her to have with some fruit, and when she goes to put it back away, she just stands in front of the open door, blinking, gaping into your fridge and trying to find even the smallest cottage-cheese-sized chink in the monolithic wall of leftovers, ingredients, condiments and beverages that you have carefully and creatively wedged into the only pattern in which it all fits. (It was way in the back, behind the pot of soup and on top of the yogurt & browned butter.)

Brian reminded me of this today: the two coolest cheese specialty shops in the world, based solely on name: the one in the Carolinas called What A Friend We Have In Cheeses and the other in Israel, called Cheeses of Nazareth. Given the rise in Jesus-based discourse of late, it seemed fitting to post them for posterity here. *giggle*

He had this to say after seeing Supersize Me:

What shocked me were the gasps I heard from the audience, most of whom seemed generally surprised that big business could be so

dear lord, these pictures are the sexiest, ballsiest food porn I’ve ever seen. Just tight, tight closeups of golden, shiny, crunchy fried potatoes in a sake-soy sauce. No backstory, no soft-focus, no romance — just the money shot. With descriptive and instructive text on how to make your very own at home. I’m in love.

Our friend N from Maryland visited this weekend, and arrived bearing marshmallow donuts and the Best Bacon Ever, bless her heart. Bacon from the Hollins Market in Baltimore is thick-cut, super-fatty, and wicked smoky — when we first saw it in the market last fall, it looked so luscious I had to buy some and finagle it home on the plane. While we were at it, we got some smoked ham hocks too, for winter melon soup, which were so superior we won’t use any other hocks. (Hollins Market is also the home of Chuckie’s Fried Chicken, the Best Fried Chicken Ever, but that’s another story.) And so now whenever we visit her or she visits us, fabulous pork products end up in our kitchen.

yeah, ok, so there’s only 3 in the picture…
I was distracted by eating the first 6 or so
before I remembered to photograph –
can you blame me?But wait, there’s more: the 3 of us hooked up with littlelee & spleen to get busy with the awesome homemade dumplings at Taiwan Cafe in chinatown. Normally tallasiandude & I go there, order dumplings and something else (to fill the 20 minute wait for made-to-order dumplings), and can’t even finish the one order, so this time we brought reinforcements so we could order multiple dumpling types. It paid off handsomely. The pork-shrimp pan-fried dumplings were the best they’ve ever been, perfectly crispy bottoms with thin, tender tops, and the xiao lung bao were enormous and floppy with their cargo of delicious pork soup. The other dim sum things were pretty good, but not extraordinary, but we did order a Fu-chou style fish ball soup that was a knockout. The fish balls were the usual firm white smooth fish paste, but inside is a dark savory nugget of pork: two great tastes that taste great together. The balls were floating in a clear broth with lots and lots of pepper (yum), green onion, and tiny bits of celery in the bottom.
And last night for dinner we acted on tallasiandude’s craving and went to Kaya in Porter Square for the DIY Korean BBQ. They have terrific kalbi, super buttery and flavorful, and the bulgogi is damn good too. And the soft tofu seafood chigae is all that tallasiandude said it would be. It’s very spicy, with a buttery broth, and a wonderful texture that comes from the abundance of pillowy, disintegrating soft tofu. And they have chamisul soju, which not only makes you pleasantly tiddly in short order, but tastes great with kalbi.
All that plus some yummy vietnamese dessert treats (agar-agar in thin coconut milk, red beans in thick coconut milk, neon-green sweet rice with coconut milk), a box full of takeaway egg tarts and lotus seed moon cakes, and a last minute goodbye dinner of beef pho and Christina’s ice cream. (Speaking of which, Christina’s concord-grape sorbet is excellent.) A high-quality eating weekend — oh, and we did some sightseeing and stuff too. *grin*