point proven

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.

ahem, i told you so

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.

a simple need

ok, sorry, i STILL haven’t had time for posting. I SUCK.
but here is my thing at present: i need to buy a new folder/folio for work, because the cheap-but-highly-useful one i’ve used for the last umpteen years has cracked a bit and now catches on my sweaters when i hold it on my hip — and pulls in my work sweaters, which are actually attractive and mildly expensive, are Not Okay.
Googling has been distinctly unhelpful. I am willing to invest in a nice thing if necessary and justified. Suggestions from the peanut gallery, please, as to where I can find an object meeting these criteria:
– holds standard 8.5×11 pad of lined paper on one side
– has simple flap on opposite side to hold random bits of paper, printouts, notes, etc. No fancy-ass special compartments, slots, mutliple tabs, etc. need apply — just a doohickey that I can easily and quickly slide my papers into.
– attractive. ideally, fabulous retro-modern or brightly colored (orange? green? red?) but i am flexible on this subject. simple black will do.
– not made of plastic. plastic splits and causes snags in sweaters: Not Okay, see above.
– simple and slender and lightweight
– durable. this object is going to get carted around all over, shoved in bags, taken to client sites, whipped out in airports, dropped on the floor, etc. and it needs to remain presentable and professional looking.
– not thick, padded, zippered, “executive” or otherwise fugly
Can you help me, Internet?

embarrassment of riches

We went to visit the parents this weekend and also picked up from the farmshare today, and since the parents impressed upon us the ridiculous overflow from the family plot, we have more than a few vegetables and fruits:

This jumbled pile includes 3 trays of the most gorgeous blueberries imaginable, 1 tray of blackberries, 4 pears from my dad’s coworker’s tree, red peppers, hot peppers, yellow crookneck and zucchini squash to feed a small village, vast numbers of ripe tomatoes (we could have taken about 7 more lbs today from the farm, but we couldn’t justify it when we already have doubts about our ability to distribute this stuff to enough people fast enough), celery, chard, 13 heads of garlic, a fistful of beets, 2 types of eggplant, a big bunch of basil, cucumbers, sweet vidalia onions, and a watermelon.
Yeah. Summer is OK.

why didn’t i think of that: zucchini mash

okay, so my normal life with no massive task to accomplish seems to be still a little hairy, as i am finding myself without any time to blog. Part of that is that we are throwing our big summer shindig this weekend, and we came back from honeymoon to a house we’d still barely moved into, littered with boxes and wedding crap and half-unpacked suitcases, so we have a lot of setting up and tidying up to do, so that our friends won’t trip over boxes of records on their way to the beer tub. And of course work got nice and busy just as I got back in the saddle, so you really can’t win.
Anyway, while you wait for me to start posting all the great pictures and stories I have in the backlog (really, i swear), try this one on for size. It’s kind of timely, seeing as how I bet many of you have 18 zucchini in your fridge right now, giving you the nasty eye when you open the door to get a lemonade.
Our friends C & P gave us a great cookbook for a wedding present, Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and I have been poking around in there for fun things to do with the excess of produce currently on my hands. No one surpasses the mid-eastern cultures for great vegetable preparations. Yummy.
There are a few recipes in there for mashed or pureed zucchini, and i was just dumbstruck by this — how could i have failed to think of doing that!?! The damn things get all nice and mushy and soft when you cook them properly, so DUH.
Anyway. There are a few variations, but the basic idea is the same, and quite easy. Fry or boil zucchini until soft (I microwaved it), then mash with a fork in a colander to drain off some of the liquid. Make a paste of garlic and salt, and mash this into the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice. One recipe then adds raisins and pine nuts and a bit of dried mint; another one adds a dab of harissa and some ground coriander and a few caraway seeds; and so on — i think this would work with just about any Turkish/Persian/Moroccan/etc. spice combo you like.
These are intended to be served cold, as a dip or spread or side dish/salad. It seems to me it would make a lovely addition to a meze plate with bread and feta, or a tasty sidekick for grilled chicken. And I now have a nice compact tupperware of zucchini mash with raisins and pine nuts, instead of the 7 zucchini that used to be taking up space in my fridge. Hurray!

fried clams right next door!

On the way to a friend’s house some months ago, we drove down Rt 117 through Weston, and passed a fabulously retro-looking drive-in called Dairy Joy, with a sign out front saying “fried clams & hamburgers.”
Say no more.

We never got a chance to try it, though, until tonight. It was a perfect evening for it, warm and sunny with a bit of a breeze. We ordered a full fried clam plate with onion rings, a half-plate of fried clams with french fries, a crab cake sandwich, lemonade, diet coke, and a raspberry lime rickey.
This turned out to be a mixed bag. The drinks were horrible — the fountain coke was nasty, and the rickey was so overpoweringly sweet i couldn’t touch it. The crab cake sandwich was a naked cake on a naked bun, without sauce or lettuce or anything, which for $8.95 seems a little stingy.
But the fried clams were *top shelf*, the equal of any I’ve had — fresh and sweet and briny, no sand, with a lastingly crisp coating.
The onion rings were coated in the same light batter, which isn’t my preferred style for o-rings, but they were fine enough, as were the fries. Sitting on the plate with those gorgeous clams, dipped into tartar sauce or cocktail sauce (both very tasty renditions), they do just fine. The full plate is the better deal, so if you aren’t overly-hungry, just get a full plate and share it instead of buying two halves.
Of course, at a place called Dairy Joy, you more or less have to get ice cream for dessert. It’s soft-serve only, which is all kinds of old-skool for me, having grown up on the stuff. They have some interesting flavors, and are apparently known for their creamsicle twist and their “javaberry,” another twist of raspberry sherbert and coffee ice cream. We tried the javaberry, since my mom & I both love raspberry and coffee flavored stuff. This is actually pretty good, even though the raspberry is a touch too sweet for my taste, because you get flashes of both flavors as you lick your way through that cone, sometimes sweet raspberry, sometimes creamy coffee, sometimes a li’l of both. Next time, though, i think i am going for straight up coffee soft-serve. That stuff’s killer.

So before you pack the car and drag your ass to the North Shore or Narragansett Bay to get decent fried clams, consider the Dairy Joy, just down the street on Rt. 117… just bring your own beverages.

fabulous indian ice creams — sadly, not so fabulous after all

hi – sorry for the massive backlog and no posting… there is a TON of good eating that’s been going on, but we are only just back from the “honeymoon” travel-thon and then i was sick for a week. That sucked, but i am feeling normal now for the first time in months, so i should be able to start in on the posts shortly.
however.
in the meantime, we were walking down Moody Street this weekend, and stopped into Patel Brothers, and checked out their ice cream selection, and holy moly. Saffron-pistachio. At least 3 distinct varieties of kulfi. Cashew-raisin. And lots more, including some Latin-tropical fruit flavors that appear to be locally produced, if not entirely handmade in someone’s kitchen. We couldn’t buy any right then, but we are totally going back sometime this week. YUM.
UPDATE: Sadly, ALL of the ice creams we tried were no good. Boo hoo hoo! The saffron pistachio was the best of the lot, and it had so much saffron in it that it tasted like gasoline. Drat. All of them were afflicted with textural problems, as if they’d been melting and refreezing every day for a month, and some of them augmented their ice crystals with a sketchy chalky sort of feeling in the mouth. We tried an Alphonso Mango flavor in the gorgeous fancy packaging, same as the Saffron Pistachio, and even that was strangely flat, which may be the creamier variety of mango (versus the tart kind Americans are used to), but even so it wasn’t worth eating again because of the texture issue. The rose flavor in the less-fancy brand was just plain bad and we threw it out on the spot (the others got a reprieve of a few days in the freezer during which we felt no desire to eat them again, whereupon they got the boot as well).
Sadness. Despair. Oh well — i suppose one can always go to Toscanini’s and get perfectly lovely kulfi ice cream, and i bet they would do a saffron-pistachio special order if you were to ask them nicely….

champagne vitamins

so… the wedding was completely awesome. Everything, even the things that we screwed up, did half-assed, or just didn’t think of, worked out completely perfect. We’ll post for real about a lot of the wedding stuff, especially the eats, but for now we are on honeymoon in NYC.
Which means that we are slacking off as majestically as possible.
We have barely left the (absurdly swank) hotel room, since it has air conditioning, expensive linens, free champagne, and Utz cheez balls that our friend K gave us before we left. And wireless internet.
We did leave once, this morning, to wander out into Soho — which is disgustingly hot and humid this week — looking for food. We found a rather good Dominican dive on Lafayette & Spring, La Nueva Conquista, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that we have discovered in the course of our excessive slackery that expensive champagne mixed with Vitamin Water makes a surprisingly good drink. We’re holed up in the room, looking out at the bright midday sun, lolling on the cool white sheets in the airconditioning, drinking lemon-lime electrolyte Vitamin Water because we’ve just come in from the heat. And then tallasiandude joked that we should put in some of the leftover free champagne and make wine coolers, ha ha ha. So of course we did, and they’re not completely disgusting, but the key is that they make you feel GREAT. Well hydrated AND a little bit buzzy, just the thing for a lazy hot afternoon with not a single thing to do.
And let me tell you, having not one single thing to do is the greatest luxury i can imagine right now. We’re having a great time. More later.