sky rocket's in flight

after coming home from a surreal lunch meeting, i was on cloud nine. here's what i did in the high of my afternoon delight:

a peach and basil salsa. and that's a two brothers ebel's weiss to chase it down. happy friday.

the market map

california is one of the most amazing places in the world. in the same state that's home to death valley, known for its record breaking heat—and the lowest point below sea level in the country—there're also the jagged peaks of mt. whitney, which at 14,505 ft., tops out as the highest elevation in the contiguous united states. highways sprawl through barren deserts, where cacti and blowing tumbleweeds literally dot the landscape, and yet, somehow, there are glistening avenues, lined and stacked with palm trees, in cities up and down the coast—the sign of the tropics. where in just under about an hour a sunday morning drive will take you from the near summer heat of the los angeles basin to the tops of the san gabriel mountains, covered in winter snow and packed with skiers and boarders. and the agriculture. year round, california grows and produces some of the finest, most coveted foodstuff in the world.

that's why, when going through my ritual wesbite roundup, and i came across a detailed map of southern california's farmers' markets from the l.a. times, i immediately wanted to share. the thing literally dots the markets all over the southland, and can be broken up by zip code and day of the week, and provide detailed information for each different market. an absolutely invaluable tool.

if you're in the southland, take advantage. if you're not, like me, take this as a two-minute chance to view the ways and means of a place different than our own. two minutes is nothing. and, it's fun stuff.

thursday night panzanella

alicia came home the other day with a baguette. it was touched only on sunday when i cut a piece off for a sandwich. so today, when i was cleaning the kitchen out, i came across a hard and stiff as a tree trunk piece of transformed foodstuff. enter the influence of chef dante de magistris.

panzanella was something we served at the restaurant for events. it'd almost always be out with a crudité spread, but never once was it on the menu, nor would it be at any fine dining restaurant. the dish is literally a salad of leftovers. and here's what i did:


there's only one way to soften this bread and still maintain any hope of it returning to any sort of edible state. you have to rehydrate it. i cut the bread—literally taking a mallet to my kitchen knife the bread was so hard—into essential cubes. then just cover with water, and if you care about your food actually tasting good, season it. the key, and what i stole from dante, was hitting the mixture with tomato. i used a simple sauce we had in the fridge, but even juice works. you want the acid and the sweetness—and believe me, it'll show through. the bread literally absorbs this.


i love basil and only included this picture because of how flippin' big the basil leaves were on the plant i brought home from green city market. unbelievable.


the salad can be whatever you want it to be. mine was tomato, roasted red pepper, red onion, garlic, lots of basil, fresh mozzarella, lemon juice, olive oil and vinegar. season it how you want and boom, there it is. there's nothing complex about it and really, the point is to use what you have in the house. there's no reason to hit the store for anything you throw in it.

it makes you think about how much something like this makes sense, and thank god people in the old world cooked this way. for dante, tossing a panzanella on a crudité table added a touch of rustic italian charm, while hardly cutting into his food cost at all. and why in the world aren't we cooking like this more often, and encouraging one another to really do so?

there's time for cake, too

my good friend stacie has been going at the blogging scene for a while, and she has a great hold on what l.a. has to offer. whether or not you're in los angeles, she really goes for the underground scene, and accentuates her finds in her own style. a good read, with great hit lists for things to do and see, and what to eat and drink in the process. i'm reading mark kurlansky's the food of a younger land right now, which breaks the country down by its regional cuisines. there's a lot to learn when shifting from region to region, and for those not in on the l.a. ways, stacie's a good source for what's going down. and there's a lot going down out there. and that's my shameless plug for the day.

a benny, and a hell of a lot of fate

meet stephanie:

last week i dropped a hundred bucks for two tickets to stephanie izard's first wandering goat dinner. i haven't worked in almost two months, so shelling out that much cash wasn't easy. but we had to. it was my first attempt to check out the back side of the restaurant scene in our new home.

so on sunday night we cabbed it down western and got off near the united center. we were late, of course, and to top it off my stomach was tied up in knots. i'm sitting in the back seat, trying to blow it off to alicia that it's okay if the thing started without us, that we'd get there and it'd kick ass regardless. but what did i really know? in my head i'm going over the few facts i have about the dinner and figure it'll have to be served banquet style. long picnic tables and the grill going somewhere off to the side. well shit, because if i'm right, and everyone's sitting down and stephanie's giving some toast and we're the idiots who break it up when we walk in late, then what?

alicia said the next day that there was a serious angel watching over us, because it turned out i couldnt've been more wrong:


this is just one of the two yards that served as a modest set up, so laid back and chill, for such a highly anticipated event. there's a beer bar on the deck. a wine bar in back. there're high tops for schmoozing and tikis burning in the bushes. and right up front, in the foreground of the pic above, are bravo's starlets, lee ann and stephanie, plating two of the six plates, at one of the three stations, of the night. they're not hiding. theye're not schmoozing in sparkling white coats, nodding approvingly as food is passed around. they're working the station, hours and hours of prep obvious from the kitchen smells of rendered fat and charcoal and the stains of ass kicking on their tee shirts, their arms lifting to beat the sweat from their foreheads, out in the open for anyone and everyone to see. when you're a high profile chef, from a tv show with as big a following as top chef, and you open yourself to the public in the intimate confines of a person's house, anything can happen. any freakish, obsessive fan could've shown up that night. and if this worried stephanie, she didn't show it. i just don't think it's her style.


it's all about the beer on the line. and here's the food:


bbq pork shoulder on a biscuit with apple slaw. and yeah, that's a buttermilk biscuit.

warm polenta with sweet corn and shaved radish. a foreboding gooseberry sauce looms on the side.

action shot of simplistic plating. perfectly tender and subtly smoky: grilled octopus with green beans and lemon vinaigrette.

and bacon. lots and lots of bacon.

the hands down winner of the night. preserved lemon coolly kicks back with grilled calamari, stuffed with ground lamb that's seasoned just right. it's an incredible display of stephanie's ability to balance flavors, texture, temperature, and in this case, contrasting proteins. the plate's swiped with a sliver of almond puree that lingers so smooth on the palette. i was seriously pissed for being as modest as i was. it's the kind of dish you still taste the next day and though plates were lined up the for the taking, i never went back for more. big mistake.

my first oysters in chicago. i never did get a solid break down of this, but bacon repeats itself here, possibly in two ways. with the chives and crumbled bacon was what probably was a vinaigrette, but texturally hit the tongue like a foam, which lends itself to a sabayon. the texture, so delicate, was offset by the punch of salt and rendered fat, something like the smoke of bacon, which i love if i'm right, and i loved anyways, but it'd be nice to get a touch of self-worth, while i'm at it.

and yet another winner. the strands are evident even in the small uncovered bit that's hanging over the lip of the fry bread—yes, fry bread—this short rib melted as it was chewed. with heirloom tomatoes and the cooling lather of queso fresco, the fry bread was an airy doughnut that puffed away, unifying the dish completely.

though we knew nobody going in, we attached ourselves to three new friends (and shared a drunken and crammed cab ride home later on) as soon as we had drinks in our hands. and the true highlight of the night, and she left the impression it meant as much to her as it did to us, was when stephanie joined our circle, complementing alicia on her blue eyes, and shot the shit with us in what i'm discovering is true midwest style. we talked about hector the mascot donkey turned goat and the smell her cleaning lady would find in her apartment after so many days of prep and the blue shopping cart that's mysteriously hers and she can't wait to pimp out and hit the streets of bucktown with. she filled our beers when they hit bottom and changed conversation before it ever had the chance to get awkward, hanging out with us far longer than the formal hello, how is everything, thanks for coming—and i'm sorry but i won't remember any of this in five minutes—far longer than any of us expected. like her food; like the tee shirts; like the set up; like the new restaurant's name; like the staff and the toe sucking, pants dropping couple that partied on the deck behind us, what you see is what you get. a fun, genuine, humbled person, trying like everyone else to figure things out, and then make it all happen.

huge thanks to emilie for the pictures. it's the food that makes this post worth writing, the writing just a ramble of gibberish without the visuals. and to allen brothers, three floyds, and black dog gelato for supplying the goods.

i left the party—well after its scheduled ending—with a cup of fraises des boises in hand, and as chefy pointed out, its juice on my sweater. it was an idyllic summer night and if the party at all reflected true chicago style, moving here was exactly the right thing for us to do.

you should see the fridge now

last night i met even more of alicia's lebanese family, and soon enough our kitchen was full of fresh labneh, hummus, pita, olives... more food than we knew what to do with. this is how it goes in her family. you don't eat, you feed—and if someone feeds you, then you eat. i had the privilege to meet alicia's cousin maureen, who is a food writer and whose website is where the pictures above are sourced. on chance, i picked up a copy of gastronomica a year ago and there was an article by maureen about a fascinatingly eccentric baker in chicago. it was good. real good. she also writes for saveur and the tribune among others, and in a story last night, i was told she did a lebanese cooking demonstration at green city market. so today i'll keep it brief, digging a bit deeper amongst the roots of the family tree, and share this talent with you. enjoy.

the non-committal locavore

it's well documented now just how hard it is to eat local, and if the touted advantages are even advantageous, but the locavore movement continues to garner steam. what started as a grassroots sort of trend has now become mainstream, garnering attention on the likes of twitter, facebook, and other mass market media platforms. in a word, it's hot. in my own experience, it's just hard to do. i look forward to the farmers' market, and buy organic from the grocers, but it's just not all that easy to always do. like the single bachelor who fails at relationships every time the honeymoon is over and commitment comes into play, i just can't go all in. like the bachelor, undoubtedly i'd be breaking hearts, muttering the words, it's not you, it's me.

but we do buy local as best we can. last night alicia made what was really a garden vegetable sandwich, roasting golden beets bought at the wicker park farmers' market and slicing them thin, added with roasted red peppers and sautéed red onion, julienned cucumber, micro arugula, a white cheddar, honey mustard, and labneh on thick sliced san francisco sourdough wheat bread. the labneh we picked up from sultan's which they get from cicero, outside the city, the cucumber from the daley center farmers' market, the micro arugula from the wicker park farmers' market, and the bread from labriola, a local bakery. but the red peppers were jarred and from trader joe's, the cheddar was boar's head and sliced at the deli, and the honey mustard from the german mustard maker inglehoffer. she seasoned the onion, which was organic and from olivia's, with ras al hanout, which we brought with us from formaggio kitchen in cambridge, and salt and pepper, which we buy in bulk and add to our grinders, and is for sure not local. our staples, like the bread and condiments, will almost always not be of the locavore promise, which i'm okay with, because my favorite parts to the sandwich last night were the beets, cucumber, and the micro arugula, all from the local farmers. and i can't wait for later on this summer when we'll be using heirloom tomatoes instead...

and how is that not eating with the seasons? in the meantime, we'll be here saturday morning, continuing the non-committal support to our local foodstuff:

and the flowers croon

the beach is a so cal institution. so too is in-n-out. and of course, there's disneyland. i woke up this morning thinking about disneyland, which meant i right away had a craving for a pineapple dole whip float. pineapple dole whip. pineapple juice. in a cup. and there's only a handful of places on the planet you can get it. for me, it's the epitome of a hot summer day cure.

just the thought and i'm in the shade of a wailea palm. which is even better, because then i've got a mai tai in my other hand...

the redirection of the wandering goat

when we left boston, i left with it a sizable network of friendships and knowledge within the city's food scene. it's a great food city, but small in scope, and too passive in ambition. the limelight rarely drifts up the coast from the mecca that is manhattan, and when it does, it sometimes shines past the bean entirely (rob evans won the james beard award this year—he's from portland, maine). so bucktown, where we live in chicago, was really a shot in the dark for me. i'd never been here and went off alicia's word, and that of others, that the neighborhood was an understated food destination in the city, far more accessible than spots in lincoln park, downtown, and the rest of the loop. and it was evident our first night here how right she was.

so now we're three weeks in and i'm continually overwhelmed at just how large the food scene is, both in bucktown and beyond. before moving, and with a removed sense of the chicago scene, i worshiped the likes of charlie trotter, grant achatz, and rick bayless on reputation alone, but aside from bayless, these guys haven't even crossed my peripheral since i've been here. there's just so much more i want to see before i drop five hundred bucks for just my share of the tab. and that's what the city offers. loads and loads of choices. loads and loads of ambitious chefs who've opened shop in what is really the only place in the midwest one could open shop—and hope to stay afloat—which in turn has spawned loads and loads of competitive and stylistic gastronmoic banter. and all, on whole, and in contrast to boston, accessible.

but bucktown does seem to have this special mix of talent and accessibility that i'd heard about. rick bayless has benefited in recent months from a certain chicagoan in washington, but his restaurant's are in the city, away from bucktown. yet, i recently learned, he lives here, too. we even saw him the other day, leaving the wicker park farmers' market on a scooter, shouting something as he putputted by. so too does stephanie izard live here, we at least assume, this after bumping elbows with her twice in olivia's market across the street and once more at breakfast around the corner. check their feeds on twitter and there's an entire trail of bucktown spots they've rolled to and tweeted from, and who'd know the spots to be at better than these guys?

there're two gourmet grocers within a hundred feet from us. there's a wine and beer bar called bluebird where i had a birthday bottle of meinklang, an austrian rosé made from organic pinot noir gapes that blew our socks off—it only cost twenty eight bucks—where they also serve cured meats and salumis, kick ass imported cheeses, and homey appetizers and entrees, all while eliminating the pretension of fine dining and seamlessly accentuating the comfy, casual side of eating out. it's the kind of place a chef would go if life at home was out of control but needed the soothing chill of kicking the feet up and knocking back a few. so too is the bristol down the street, its menu dotted by the seductive language of slow food, dishes built around the old world trimmings and scraps of the animal, accentuated by sauces and butters and the garden rich flavors of the season. and then there's silver cloud, where one night i contemplated between the frito pie and a sloppy joe. whose grilled cheese sandwich is served with campbell's canned tomato soup—it's printed on the menu, verbatim—and whose proudest product is tatter tots, which could only come from a giant freezer bag, the taste and feel of which warp you fast back to grade school lunch ladies, which like the tomato soup, might even be the point.

but this sums up what could easily be the beginning half of a saturday night out. there's so much going on and at this point, and with the only down and dirty know-how i have on restaurants being those a thousand miles away, i can only hope to slowly immerse myself within. a hard thing to do when you're out of work and freshly moved in to a much larger apartment than the one prior, thus being empty and needing to be furnished, but here goes.

and on that note, here's a a first step: we snagged two seats.

my hipster hood

for my birthday, alicia's mom gave me this. i find it kind of funny because it really sums up our neighborhood, which though i still couldn't give you the definition of what one is in writing, is full of hipsters. come out with us and i'll point to a street corner and there you'll see them, kicking it in front of the atm or smoking on the curb. the copy on the backcover reads, "street food, street art, and street style: creative recipes for the graffiti generation."

i love this. the book itself is broken into five subcatergories, or cities. think long and hard about hip, urban cities on a global scale and what do you get? according to king adz, the book's editor and author, it's new york; it's paris; it's berlin and amsterdam and london. i can't agree or disagree since i've only been to the apple, but the book exudes enough confidence that i'm ready to jump in for the journey and say, yeah, that sounds about right.

here's an excerpt:

"this is for everyone. urban cookery (street food) is the most accesible form of cooking there is. just as street art has brought the beauty of art into the lives of the masses, street food is all about making diverse and tasty food available to all, using simple recipes that are quick and easy to follow. there is no mystery, no special secret."

new york street food recipes include chili con carne, spaghetti and meatballs, and a cheeseburger. which is funny because you say street food and i think, hands! but good luck with noshing down on that pasta and chili with your hands, right? and this is where i have a problem with the book. the food, on the whole, truly isn't street food. it's food that the street people eat, which i think is the whole point of the book, but is delivered indirectly, and thus is lost. it's in the subtext of it all—never are the recipes more than pedestrian—which, for me, is okay if you can figure it out, but is unnecessary work for the reader to have to do. but the food, again, nothing revolutionary, just familiar and tasty, and all the while spliced with interviews featuring skaters and artists, the pulse of the urban beat, which is where the book really excels.

what intrigues me most about the book is the door it opens for further thought. a dish like biryani, featured in paris, how does it differ from borough to city borough? and why? at what point did that one dish in its conception change, and then change again, and then pass down from family to family, from area to area, so many thousands of times—and is biryani at café bharath truly so different from one at a cafe on the other side of the seine?

happy birthday, california kid

today is my birthday. on past birthdays, and i'm thinking way back here, something like writing a first entry on a new blog would have been the test run of that new toy, the year's big gift. there was nintendo one year, blasting away at the ducks in duck hunt with the nifty gray and orange gun that came with, bauer roller blades another, the bulky heel brake coming off immediately so as to add the extra cool factor, and so on. but this entry, the blog itself, has been a bitch, a long time coming at the least, and truly only coincides with this year's birthday because i woke up at four in the morning and sleep didn't easily return, and thoughts of writing this entry did.

this blog is about food. but i want it not to be just another food blog—so many of them saturated with clichés and trendy, drawn out fads of chefs and media—but rather a blog that tackles those clichés head on. i will try not to be afraid to dabble in the trends and ask, if need be, just what this new hot thing is for, or why that one died out? i'll explore the histories of food, the familial passing of dishes and how these things evolve, like how the chicken shawarma i ate last night is so different than the one my girlfriend grew up on in lansing, michigan. questions, with my fictionaltendencies of a writing mind, i constantly not only ask myself, but see others asking, direct or indirect, all around. our language of food is present, however indistinguishable it might be, in the subtext of the ongoing dialogue, both mainstream and private alike.

and it starts, for me, with the navel orange tree in my neighbor's backyard from childhood. it starts with the branches that hung over our pink stone wall and the fallen fruit that my brother and i would sometimes toss to one another and whack with a bat, a sticky game that never lasted very long. or the rotten fruits that shriveled, always at least one fly, if not three or four, rubbing its conniving arms together over the orange's white and sickly open wound, the gangrene looking fruit a type of ranky, conjured ugly that i was too afraid to ever even poke with a stick. and never, to the best of my recollection, did i pluck an orange from that tree, nor pick one from the ground, and peel back its skin and plop its segments in my mouth. and yet the tree haunts me still. what the tree embodies—i, like the tree, a product of the san fernando valley—is the epitome of the subtext i aim to explore, and in this case, very much a part of both the private, and mainstream dialogue (see: chinatown). which means that this, for all its worth, is a food blog that starts with a food story in which a food was never eaten.