viet food court

My friend H is recovering from her months of job-seeking and wasn’t up for leaving the couch, let alone leaving the house, so I went for dinner on my own. She did, however, pass along the nugget of information that I could walk from her place to Argyle Street’s asia-fest. I figured it was 3 el stops, it had to be too far to walk, but turns out I was wrong. I went with H’s recommendation to seek out the Vietnamese Food Court, and was well pleased. I knew I wanted pho, because it was cold and I was feeling tired and rundown myself, but I wanted also to try one of the many things on the menu that were new to me. So I went with an appetizer that turned out to be 8 little soy sauce dishes, each filled with rice flour and steamed, then topped with dried shrimp fuzz (what pork sung would be if it was made out of shrimp) and shrimp cake, shallots and scallions, and served with the usual viet-sauce of lime, sugar, fish sauce, & chillies to be spooned into each wee dish. You had to sort of scrape the little rice cake free of the dish, then shovel it right into the mouth. They were delicious, each one a mouthful of sweet, salty, savory, spicy. The pho was very nice, nothing mindblowing, but very satisfying and beefy in the broth, and the meatballs seemed homemade and the rare beef was tender. And the whole thing came in a marvelously bizarre setting: the room is a mishmash of elegant bamboo and gold calligraphy and tube lights and cheesy paper decorations, and at the front is a stage, which that Saturday night was featuring a homegrown band doing reasonably convincing covers of the Cranberries and Bryan Adams and Guns N Roses. Hee.

caribbean-american baking company


On the walk along Howard Street from my temporary dwelling to the el stop is a tempting bakery that has a huge selection of Jamaican treats. I got a pile of sweets to share with the office — banana cake (tastes just like banana bread), sweet coconut bread (more truly a bread, with raisins in) — and some other stuff for myself. Jackass corn had to be bought for the name alone, and turned out to be the lovechild of gingersnaps and graham crackers. They’re really hard and crunchy, and I think they would be lovely with a cup of tea. Grata cake is a big brownie-size bar of the filling of a Mounds bar: grated coconut and sugar, with the top dyed hot pink. I *heart* grata cake.
It so happens that this bakery is apparently the only purveyor of jamaican patties in the city, and sells them to caribbean restaurants all over town. I got a bunch to share with H + J, and they were fabulous. The pastry is nice and flaky, not too greasy, and the beef filling is good and spicy, and the jerk chicken filling is just to die for yummy.

woo! interesting new potato chips!

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.)

my first solo meal in chicago

Not particularly auspicious, but there it is. I moved off my friend’s couch and into her friends’ empty apartment way up in Rogers Park. My first night there, I tried to pirate someone’s wireless from the apartment, but no dice, so I ventured out to find an internet cafe. 8 or 9 really long, cold blocks later, schlepping my heavy-ass laptop, I finally found one, a Starbucks that was going to make me pay for a T-Mobile subscription. F that. By now I am one hungry, cranky little camper, but there has been nothing in the way of places to eat, which I find bizarre for a residential neighborhood. So I hump it back to the one place I did see, a Giordano’s pizzeria. And I vaguely realize, somewhere in my hindbrain, that this is a stuffed-pizza place, and is at least theoretically a Chicago specialty, so all is not lost. Unfortunately for me, Chicago stuffed pizza takes 30 minutes to hit your table. I talked to tallasiandude on the phone (sorry, i know talking on the phone in restaurants is really bad, but the place was nearly empty and I was really quiet, I promise) to stay distracted. The pizza was actually pretty good, with a nice crunchy outer crust and good sauce flavor and lots of cheese, kind of like an Uno’s pizza without all the extraneous grease. I’ve been eating the second half of the thing each morning for breakfast, one slice at a time in my empty, borrowed kitchen. It gets me through the hour-plus trip down to the office, whereupon I eat a supplemental breakfast. 🙂

When Zero != Zero

Because of the FoodNerd, I spend a lot more time paying attention to what I’m buying at the store than I used to.
I look for organic products, the grain-fed/antibiotic-free meats, and while, for years, I’ve looked at the nutritional info on most of the packaged food that I buy (originally to check for fat, then sodium), now it’s all about trans fats — the partially hydrogenated oils that seem so pervasive in our food supply.
It’s really depressing to discover how many things we eat actually contain the stuff. I went through the candy bar aisle at Costco a while back looking for a cheaper alternative to the Balance bars and new Snickers marathon energy bars (which will run you almost a buck a pop), and just about everything had some kind of partially hydrogenated oil. (I ended up buying a large bag of peanut M&Ms.)
So, I had heard that several manufacturers were making the effort to take the trans fats out of their product lines (and adding a “trans fat” entry into the nutritional information table), so I’ve been dutifully checking the ingredients lists of some of my guiltier pleasures. Not much luck there.

Oreos? Trans fats.
Twinkies? Trans fats.
Doritos? Trans fats.

Now, here’s the rub: I’ve checked the ingredients list on a bag of Doritos before and was sad to have to put the bag back when I hit the partially hydrogenated something-or-other. (replaced by a bag of Tostitos — ingredients: corn, oil, salt.) So, how psyched am I when I notice the words “no trans fats” on the label on my most recent trip to the ‘Co? And I turn the bag around and halfway down the ingredients list, I see it again: partially hydrogenated blahbity-blah. Then I look at the nutrition label:

trans fats 0g

Um…
Now I’m wondering if I’m confused about what trans fats are. So I check the web when I get home. Ok, partially hydrogenated oils are trans fats… what gives?
Then I get to Frito-Lay’s page:

– The list below provides you with many choices of Frito-Lay snacks that contain zero grams of trans fat per serving. In some of our seasonings, there are trace amounts of partially hydrogenated oils, but in all cases, the amount of trans fat is so small that it is considered dietarily insignificant by the FDA, or equal to 0 grams of trans fat for the FDA labeling regulations.

At this point, I’m wondering what the exact wording on the bag was.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but to me, zero means, well, zero. As in none. nada. zip. It’s misleading, and saying that the FDA considers it “equal to 0 grams” sounds as stupid to me as the “Indiana Pi bill” that tried to legislate the value of pi.
But I guess that’s just how my brain works.
Given that I’m already making a concession in buying the Shawr’s/Stah Mahket oatmeal raisin cookies (because, well, they’re just too damn good), I can probably manage to eat a few Doritos without coming to harm. (Or at least, not any more harm that I’m already bringing upon myself.)
But I can still be annoyed.

dinner party, professional style

H & J let me tag along to a dinner party given by their friends D & T, and for this I am intensely grateful, because not only are D & T nice people, they give a hell of a dinner party. D was the chef, and he did three courses, all beautifully plated (readers of this blog will recall my frustration the last time I tried a plated dinner for guests) and utterly delicious. I bow before his greatness.
The starter was a creamy corn and potato soup, with chives and some sort of spicy heat, either curry or cayenne or a touch of both. He followed this with a monster pork chop, brined in bourbon, salt, honey and mustard, and grilled, with sage and a pile of caramelized onions. This brine gave the pork a smoky, sweet, salty flavor almost like ham, with a fabulous crispy exterior and a moist flavorful interior. The last course was a salad that I am definitely going to steal: watercress, matchstick raw beets and carrots, red onion, and a dressing of toasted pecans, dijon mustard, honey, salt, sherry vinegar, fresh thyme, and a tiny bit of oil. Completely fantastic, a wonderful mix of complementary sweet, earthy, nutty and peppery flavors. He said the recipe came from the second Union Square cookbook, which on the strength of this recipe alone I may have to buy.
A delightful meal, and a wonderful start to my social life in Chicago. 🙂

La Fama bakery

So while wandering the streets yesterday exploring neighborhoods and searching for apartments, I ran across a Mexican (?) bakery that looked interesting. Big clean empty room, ringed by glass-fronted cases containing trays of rolls and cakes and cookies, all apparently marked 35 cents each. It was around lunchtime, how could I resist? La Fama Bakery, 1751 W Chicago Avenue, turns out a fine selection of rolls and sweet pastries, much more consistent and delicious than some Italian and Latino bakeries I’ve tried. The review linked says things are heavy on the sugar; I disagree. Sweet, yes, but certainly not overly so, and I found on the whole these treats were less gooey-sweet than most American desserts.
I had a big bag of stuff, which I photographed with my new camera-phone (yay! foodnerd continues to be illustrated, even though tallasiandude kept the camera in Boston!), but sadly I didn’t stop to read the manual first, so I lost the image because I forgot to save it, in all of my pastry-anticipatory excitement. The image above is of three delightful items that were not completely consumed by my afternoon’s worth of dipping into the bag every so often, in lieu of stopping for lunch.
The best of all of them was a round, flat, thin crispy disk covered in cinnamon sugar. This is awesome. Sweet, spicy, crispity-crunchity, a little bit flaky-tender. Like the best pie-crust cinnamon roll EVER. You can see the last couple of shards of this at left in the photo above. If anyone knows what these are called, let me know. These alone are worth a trip.
There were a couple of bread rolls swirled into pretty shapes, both with different flavors — one more bland & airy, the other a little richer but still light. There was a tiny raised donut, a mini-loaf of yellow cake topped with pecans, a round soft cookie-cake studded with raisins (very nice), another round soft cookie-cake that had a topping of what appeared to be icing and coconut that had been baked so it separated into a pretty mottled pattern on the surface, and the gooey coconut ball you see in the picture above. It’s two half-spheres of bright yellow cake, glued together with berry jam, coated with more jam, and rolled in coconut. This would seem like it might be super-sweet & too goopy, but really it is quite light and tasty. I am eating it for breakfast this morning. Again, if anyone has names I can assign to these things, let me know — the girl at the counter was nice enough, but not exactly chatty, and there were no signs anywhere.
The business card I picked up says: La Fama Bakery — We are not the biggest, just the best. I have to say, I think I agree. Yum!

arroz con pollo, peruvian style

I am staying with my dear friend H in Chicago until I can find a place to live, and this Friday her husband J had some people over for an impromptu dinner, and for this he whipped up his signature arroz con pollo. Oh, yeah, yum yum yum.
He makes it with a whole bunch of cilantro pureed in the blender with a bit of water, and puts this in with the rice, the chicken thigh sauteed with onions & turmeric, the sweet red peppers, and the edamame (his twist on the usual peas). The whole thing comes out soft and savory and a most springlike yellow-green color. Comfort food at its finest, especially when paired with the incendiary tomato salad that H made to go with it. She makes this insane spice paste with vats of habaneros (perhaps I did not blog about the bagful of gorgeous orange ones she bought in October; she’s already blown through those and this is a new batch), and she used a scant dollop of this to make the dressing for her tomatoes and onions. On its own that salad will send smoke out your ears, but mixed into the rice & chicken it’s a lovely little zing to contrast with the soft moist starch. The radish salad was not an attack salad, but rather a nice tangy peppery crunch for texture. A lovely meal and a lovely evening.