Category: General

looks like they finally repealed the foie-gras ban in chicago. one american absurdity down, 4,999,999 to go.
John Harvard’s Brewhouse is pretty mediocre in general, though certainly serviceable and reliably open late — but they have an incredible chicken pot pie. Very nearly as good as the ur-potpie I had at the late, lamented Locke-Ober (before Lydia).
i think my favorite sausage from Paulina Market is the smoked thuringer. i am not alone in this, as at least one party guest remembered them from years past and requested them specifically. they are properly robust to stand up to party condiments, and they are just plain smokilicious. i also tried something new this year, a fresh hungarian sausage (very long, spicy with paprika, and pleasantly dry and crumbly in texture) and the german wieners (long skinny hot dogs, only better tasting than an average supermarket dog).
year-old wedding cake is pretty tasty stuff. the outer frosting tastes a little bit like freezer funk, but the insides are much as we left them.

and i do still love my cat, despite the time he clawed his way up my face then threw up on my hair at 7am.

Truer words were never spoke than in this xkcd comic.
Though honestly, I consume so much of my bacon at greasy spoon diners, I don’t usually bother cooking it at home unless i have houseguests. In which case, big fat bacony breakfast for everyone!!

…but i am not sure what my work life would be without Coke Zero. It’s not a habit or a daily thing, but when one works on data verification until 11:45pm and gets up at 5:15am to catch a flight to a client site, and must still be lucid and presentable and, saints preserve us, personable for the entire afternoon — it simply would not happen without a slow drip of the Zero.

The mayhem of work (and everything else) finally stopped, primarily because I left town to visit my parents for the holidays, then headed to LA to visit the husband’s family en route to the honeymoon in Hawaii. Hot damn.

So posts will be sporadic while we’re traveling, but I have every hope of posting lots of stuff about kalua pig and poke and shave ice real soon. I have been poking about on the various hawaiian foodblogs looking for tips…

Anyway. While in California we took a long weekend to go camping with friends in the Mojave Desert, which was awesome — I love this particular bit of desert, and always find it relaxing and refreshing just to be there. We did a couple of really great hikes, one up a wash to a steep climb to a rockface, and another up a pair of big cinder cones. And by camping, I mean sleeping in a tent cabin with a wood stove and a ceiling fan and electricity to run the toaster oven that hedge brought along for cooking cornbread. For dinner the second night we had ribeyes grilled on the cast iron pan over the fire, with sauteed chanterelles foraged by a friend from the Bay Area. Really roughing it, you know.

On the way home, we stopped in Kelso Depot to check out the new visitor’s center. They’ve restored the old early-20th-century train depot building, and installed a bunch of pretty nice natural history exhibits and restored the upper rooms where depot and railroad staff lived, and set up some historical displays. It’s worth the time if you are in the Mojave, and the gift shop has some very good botanical guides and a field guide to scat and tracks, if you’re nerdy like us about your hiking.

And the point of all this, at last, is just to show you a cool photo I took outside the depot building, of the sign for the depot lunch counter which has been restored to its 1924 glory (considerable) and is just aching for a good line cook to bring it back to life. Really — the park service is advertising for a concessionaire to put the lunch counter back into service. I am irrationally fond of this picture, and will probably blow it up, frame it, and hang it in my kitchen so i can think happy thoughts of the desert whenever I see it.

Haven’t made a pie, haven’t made the sticky rice.
Did manage a decent panful of fried rice last night, made from leftover rice (clever me made a double batch the night before, yay), freezerburned soybeans, carrots, leeks, and the last scraps of salt-fried pork chop from Wing’s Kitchen.
Given the bounty of the winter veg share, we are going to have to start eating meals based on root vegetables, and pronto. Perhaps some nice mittel-european dinners based on pork and cabbage and turnips… and maybe the occasional curried stew of winter squash and potato… the gears are grinding now, hope for the best.

Too busy to have many posts. God damn it, this better stop soon. Anyway:
Pretty much anything about Bob Dylan bores me within 30 seconds. There’s a long article about him in the otherwise riveting Oxford American Music Issue, and I got about 3 paragraphs in this morning and couldn’t take it anymore. (for what it’s worth, subscribe to the Oxford American — the writing is good, even if not always to your taste, and the annual Southern Music CD is worth the subscription price alone.)
i am dying to make the sticky rice with chinese sausage and smoked oysters from the recent Gourmet magazine. I am stockpiling ingredients for the time, hopefully soon, that I will have time to undertake a cookery project that isn’t streamlined to the greatest possible extent so as to fit in the scraps of time I am not working or sleeping or attempting to hang up the art in my house.
i also need to make an apple pie. I have twelve boatloads of apples and several eagerly hopeful requests from the husband.

This is awesome. But tell me that you are not astounded at how tidy all those eurofridges are.
Or perhaps I am just a freak with a problem.

in order to find a Chicago deep dish pizza that they could say nice things about, Saveur had to a) leave Chicago — the pizza in question is in the suburb of Morton Grove — and b) choose a pie that varies significantly from the norm in style and quality. HA!
I quote: “in recent years, a number of pizza purists have forsaken the belly bombs served in many downtown pizza parlors in favor of the leaner and fresher-tasting pies proffered at a pizzeria called Burt’s Place…” And even so, i would have to taste them myself before I’d be willing to grant them a special dispensation.

The newest issue of Saveur just arrived, trumpeting an entire issue about how great a food town Chicago is.
Well, DUH. Been saying that for years now. 🙂
I haven’t even read it yet, but I was appalled to see that they put a deep-dish pizza on the cover. Oh, please. Have an original thought, already, willya? And on top of that, deep-dish pizza is nothing but a dowdy, doughy, unappealing mess. Why could they not choose one of the many, many other things emblematic of Chicago that DO taste good?
For starters, the Italian Beef. Found nowhere but Chicago, as far as I can tell, outrageously delicious, and varying widely enough in style and execution to trigger religious disputes among the citizenry.
Sigh. Perhaps they will redeem themselves when i get down to the reading of the articles… but i fear not. I still slobber over this particular slice of food porn whenever it arrives, but the caliber of the magazine has been declining the last couple of years. Much of the original staff has moved on, the redesign of the graphics was dreadful, making it just as pedestrian as all the other food mags, and the articles have started feeling a little too rote a little too often. Eh, I kvetch. I’m still gonna read every damn word of it except the wine articles.