826chi guest post series: i love rice!

rice and beans with corn via the boastful baker's photostream.

the third in a series of guests posts from a group of kids that visited the 826 chicago headquarters and wrote about food.

the whole point to this guest series was to get more voices than my own telling short stories about foods that have a familial connection. with the last post i shared, i wrote about a connection between the two stories. and we see it again here with thoughts on rice and beans.

this all started because i'm guest bartending at prairie fire to raise money for 826 chicago, and i asked if 826 would like to share any of the kids' stories on the blog. when you read something like "rice tastes like little people in your mouth screaming to get out" from aaliyah c., you start to feel pretty damn good about asking for these stories. that's a heavy metaphor for a kids' writing exercise. awesome stuff.

a bramble via ian l grundy's photostream.

and since my bartending gig was cancelled last month because of snowpocalypse, we rescheduled for next tuesday—which happens to fall on mardia gras. so i've changed my cocktail to "the bramble" to bring a little cajun color to the night (maybe i should have beads, too...). it's a classic louisiana drink, layered on the rocks with bourbon, lemon, currant liqueur, and soda—even a non-whiskey drinker would keep ordering more and more of these they're so good. i'll be serving the drink from 6-8pm on tuesday, march 8, and any money raised for the night will be matched to hopefully give 826 chicago a decent chunk of change.

and finally, here's aaliyah, on rice and beans...

“I love Rice!” 

By Aaliyah C. 

The reason I chose rice and beans is because my family and I love rice. It is part of my culture. We like to make rice with different things, like rice with beans, rice and plaintains, and many many things. We make something different every day. Rice tastes like little people in your mouth screaming to get out. Rice smells like whole grain things. When I touch the rice it feels weird but I still eat it anyway. When I see it I wanna gobble it down. It sounds like nothing. Sometimes on special occasions we make it extra special to me and extra good, yummy. My family and I love rice and I hope we don’t stop making it!

a movie, food speak, and some grub

apples in fall shadows via green city market's photostream.

about a year ago i was just standing at the right place at the right time when a friend introduced me to jim javenkoski. jim is a midwest man, through and through, and the devoted daddy of twin two year-old boys who go with their pop every saturday morning to green city market. jim also holds a phd in food science, studying both at the university of wisconsin and the university of illinois, and is a supreme advocate for local foods and the small family farm. and he's on a mission.

every month jim holds a locavore dinner at a chicago restaurant and spreads his local food wisdom through the sensory experiences that follow—he suggests certain farms and products for the chefs to use, and in the process, these dinners have featured product the chefs might have otherwise never known about or purchased. and to top it off, the farmers are invited to the dinner to not only eat and drink, but speak about the foodstuffs and the stories therein. it's a rare chance for any regular guy like me to rub elbows with the farmers who feed me year round.

and this month jim's throwing us a curveball. he's hosting a movie screening.

beth eccles, center, led the RIA and balsan restaurant crew on
a tour of green acres farm in september, and i tagged along.

the film is called "INGREDIENTS", and a copy of it is sitting in our dvd player right now. a food documentary that went straight to disc and never had life in the theaters, the film shifts between ohio, oregon, and new york city, focusing on the relationships between the small family farm and the cooks who have committed to working with the ingredients those farms put out year-round. this film gets to the very heart of what i write about on this blog, what jim advocates at his dinners, and what is slowly catching the eye of more and more americans.

the dinners usually set you back about $75, but this time around the cost drops all the way down to $25 a pop. which, just to hear jim speak and see the film is worth the price of admission, but jim's sweetened the deal a bit. matt maroni and gaztro-wagon, the pioneer of chicago food trucks, will be dishing out his naanwiches and munchies for the movie, there'll be an open bar featuring local brews, and after the film, beth and brent eccles of green acres farm and marianne sundquist of in fine spirits—she hosted and cooked for the most recent locavore dinner—will host a panel discussion moderated by jim.

here's a short clip of the film's opening, anchored by none other than berkeley local food maven, alice waters:

the event is tuesday, february 22 at 6:30pm at logan square kitchen, a rentable and shared space that's helped artisan food makers find a certified kitchen for the foods they sell at green city market. and i think it goes without saying, i'll be there.

826chi guest post series: my amazing summer

ceviche in peru via .mayli.'s photostream.

yesterday it was hawaiian pork chops. today, it's ceviche.

this is the second in a short series of guests posts from the kids at 826 chicago, and while in just two posts the kids are finding a connection to these family table foods, there's also a common thread that's formed. on the surface the kids identify with the foods enough that for an exercise that calls for "recipes and reflections," we've seen two that span a generational gap in each family. what's beneath the surface though is that the kids aren't quite developing the understanding of this significance. the question isn't being asked, "what story is behind my mother's ceviche? how did she learn to make it?" instead the reflection we get is scene specific to the memory: watching the clouds pass overhead, dropping the bikes before going inside, and drinking lemonade.

which is refreshing for me to see, because it's easy to forget we once were at that point, too. a time when enjoying a simple thing like fresh ceviche, and sharing it with friends after a day in the park, was all it took to make the best day of the summer. it's called innocence—or naïveté or, calling a spade a spade, just plain youth—and it's given me pause to think back on those moments when i finally did ask the questions as to why a thing was what it was, and how did it get there, and why was it in our home?

call it sentiment, but i get a kick out of wondering what that ceviche will mean to tiffany ten years from now. my guess is that summer day will be a forgotten memory, but the stories of the ceviche, the time spent with her mother learning how to make it, will surface.

“My Amazing Summer” 

By Tiffany M.

It was a nice beautiful day. I was hanging out with my best friends Jackie, Lorely, and FiFi. We were lying down on the grass in the park. We were watching the clouds, relaxing, and there was a wonderful breeze. Jackie, FiFi, Lorely and I then got hungry. So we decided to go back to my house for lunch.

We took our bikes and rode them as fast as lightning because we were so hungry. When we got to my house we dropped our bikes and went inside. We sat on the couch drinking lemonade and trying to decide what was for lunch. Then I faced them and said, “Why don’t we have ceviche?” Jackie, FiFi, and Lorely agreed. So my mom helped me cook the ceviche. Jackie, Fifi, and Lorely gathered half a pound of cubed fish, 5 limes, 1 big red onion, half of a green pepper, 1 small tomato, 1 teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of pepper, 2 spoons of vegetable oil, and a bunch of cilantro. We cut all the ingredients and mixed it up. I served everyone and we ate it all. It WAS DELICIOUS!! This was the best summer day EVER!! THE END.

826chi guest post series: hawaiian pork chops

the infamous index card recipe from gherringer's photostream.

to be totally candid, i couldn't wait for wednesday morning to roll around so that i could begin posting this guest series from a group of kids who recently took a field trip to the 826chi center with a theme of "recipes and reflections." when i approached 826 about raising money for them when i guest bartend next week, i had no idea there was a food theme in their program. here's the prompt they offer for teachers on the theme:

Everyone loves food, but what does it really mean? During this field trip, students bring a family recipe and discover how food holds more meaning than just the ingredients in the recipe. Students work with volunteers to write reflections, incorporating memories of the recipe and its place in their lives. At the end, volunteers type the stories and the class is mailed a class book with their class photo on the back.

so much of what i've found through this blog is rooted in the premise of this simple exercise. there are endless stories to tell surrounding our food—which is why i can't get my fingers to type fast enough to introduce to a new way of storytelling on this blog. writing on "hawaiian pork chops," and the first in what will be a series of posts from the 826 kids, here's dylan's reflection on his family's recipe...

"Hawaiian Pork Chops"

By Dylan C.

The recipe for Hawaiian pork chops runs in my family. They taste really good and also they are easy to make. We make them for holidays or just days that we just like to have good food. It tells people that I really like yummy food. Also every time I hear “Hawaiian pork chops” my mouth waters, especially when my dad makes them. Some ingredients are brown sugar, ketchup, salt, pepper, and plenty more. The holiday we usually make it on is the Fourth of July. When I hear the word I get really hungry. When we make them everyone can help themselves—or at least if you hurry up.

charity guest bartending for 826chi

this isn't my drink, but it'll look something like it,
ward eight via cookthinker's photostream.

a week from tonight, for two hours, i'll be wearing my bartender pants. thing of it is, i've never worn those pants before. i don't even know what they look like. so one can only hope pants like those have pockets full of whiskey, right?

i'm guest bartending. i've been fortunate to cross paths with sarah stegner at prairie fire here in chicago, who is both co-chef and owner of the restaurant. every tuesday night the restaurant hosts a guest bartender, inviting them to serve a cocktail of their own recipe, with any tips raised going to a charity of that person's choosing. when sarah asked me a while back if i'd come in and do this, i didn't really hesitate to say yes.

i'll be pouring out a ward eight, which is a classic whiskey drink with somewhat of a story. the drink is named for a boston politician appointed to state government in 1898, and it was the voting margin in boston's ward eight that helped push him over the top. and the restaurant that created the drink? locke-ober. a place that is alive and kicking pretty strong near beacon hill still today—and brings the story full circle, with our short-lived boston roots. but i'm calling mine a ward826.

most major cities in the u.s. have an 826. l.a. has one, and so does boston. and there was one down the street from alicia and i in chicago last year, and we didn't even realize it—which made us feel pretty small, with our mfa-creative-writing-gung-ho-literary-student-loan-debt-enthusiasm and all. that's because 826 is a non-profit writing and tutoring center, for children.

"the facade of 826chi. the boring store is a front for the spy store is a front
for the after-school writing program," via rcavalcante's photostream.

the 826 centers are a product of writer dave eggers, whom a lot of people know from his book a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. when i was writing more, his mcsweeney's collection of stories and essays was the one publication i wanted to see my work published in. the writing is off-the-grain, unique, and the kind of stuff we'd all be better off with stumbling across just a bit more.

a student reads in november via 826 chicago's photostream.

so even though i've worked closely with taste of the nation and am more recently working with green city market and the upcoming family farmed expo, there wasn't much hesitation when i decided to go to 826chi with my tips for next tuesday night. and they reciprocated. so much so that they've shared a few samples of student writings from a recent "recipes and reflections" field trip to the center. the kids bring a family recipe with them on the trip, and the point is to discover how food holds more meaning than just the ingredients in the recipe. if you've read this blog before, that should sound just a tad familiar, no?

everything looks better upside down, via 826 chicago's photostream.

so for the rest of the week leading up to my stint behind the bar at prairie fire, i'll be featuring an entry a day from the kids.

and in the meantime, if you're in chicago, make plans for next tuesday night. i start pouring my ward826 (whiskey, oj, lemon, and grenadine i'm making myself) at 6pm and won't stop until 8pm. and the kicker? the auer family foundation has stepped up as a matching donor for the night—so whatever tips are raised, we're now throwing the kids twice as much.

cheers to that.

guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it, part two

The third post in a series of guest posts from the team at RIA and Balsan in the Elysian Hotel, Brian O'Connor gets down to the anatomy—sometimes hair pulling—of sourcing product, and specifically seafood, that's sustainably harvested. This blog exists because I wanted to know the stories behind where my food was coming from—and this post hits on that note, to the T. For more on Monday's dinner, go here.

The dining room at RIA.

OK, now that we’ve set the ground rules for sustainability, how do they translate into real dishes at a real restaurant? 

Yesterday I mentioned the challenge of a longer supply chain. At the restaurant we try to know everyone from whom we purchase product. We visit our local farms and hang out with the farmers at the market. Our Sommelier, Dan, gets regular visits from winemakers and makes his own way out to their properties as much as possible. While we’ve had a few chances to drop in on oyster farms in the northwest and we can work out a trip on a fishing boat now and then, it’s difficult in the middle of the country to build the kind of direct relationships we’re used to with the multitude of mariners who regularly catch our fish. 

So what can we do to make up for it? “We have to know, and trust, our purveyors,” says our Chef de Cuisine Danny Grant. He singles out a handful: Pierless Fish, Ingrid Bengis Seafood, and especially Mika Higurashi at SONA (which stands for Sustainability of Natures and Aquaculture). “I know I can tell Mika what I am looking for and she will find the highest quality and the best source.” It’s a lesson learned over and over in this business: personal relationships are the path to success.

So now that we’re more comfortable outsourcing our direct purchasing to a trusted wholesaler, what do we buy? Let’s walk through a dish we’ll be serving Monday night: Sea Scallop, Caviar, Octopus, Fumet Blanc.

A RIA dish: Scallop and Octopus. With
turnip, sturgeon caviar, fumet.

The above is a chilled appetizer of gently poached scallop and octopus with hakurei turnip, American sturgeon caviar and a classic fumet emulsified with a touch of crème fraîche. It features a variety of seafood, each of which can be sustainably sourced.

Ingrid’s Diver-Harvested Scallops 

Sea Scallops are a success story for sustainable seafood. In the 1970s industrial scallop capture nearly destroyed the natural population of Atlantic scallops. By the 80s the US began to restructure its scallop fisheries, introducing catch limits and rotational fishing and even closing off entire areas to harvest. The tenacious scallops showed their resilience and populations rebounded faster than anyone imagined.

Scallops have little inherent vulnerability. They are small, mature quickly and reproduce in large numbers (females produce 15-60 million eggs). Additionally, biomass has been closely watched since the 80s and populations are known to be large and strong. While East Coast US fishing regimes are not always thoroughly enforced, the fisheries have been managed reasonably well.

However, there remain concerns about by-catch and habitat damage due to the trawling used to capture the majority of commercial scallops. These trawls scrape along the ocean bottom, regularly upsetting the balance of the ecosystem and also capturing skate, flounder, sea turtles and other marine life.

From a diver's eyes via piggyhiggins' photostream.

Thankfully, a responsible alternative exists: scallops hand-harvested by divers. This less-invasive method avoids much of the ecosystem damage and by-catch while also functioning on a day-to-day basis. Instead of large ships dredging up scallops and then holding them aboard for a week or two before returning to land, the “diver” scallops are harvested in the morning and brought ashore in the afternoon. By the next day we have them in the kitchen.

When they come ashore, Ingrid Bengis-Palei or one of her employees is waiting for them. Ingrid Bengis Seafood was a pioneer in the Northeast quality and sustainability revolution of the 80s and 90s (she’s been called the Alice Waters of seafood for her role). She knows most of the Mainers who gather seafood in the icy waters around Deer Isle and she works with them to find the best of the best. As so often happens, the individual touch so important to sustainability also brings us product of the highest quality.

Wild Spanish Pot-Caught Octopus

Like lobster pots in New England, these pots help Spanish fisherman
 effectively catch wild octopus, via catrien's photostream.

Researching Octopus is a great way to dive into the complexities of sustainability. A variety of octopus fisheries exist worldwide, each of them managed differently. A quick glance at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood card finds international wild octopus listed as “avoid.” Uh oh. However, the Aquarium publishes more detailed Seafood Reports that approach the issue with an academic level of detail and flesh out more specifics for each fishery. The major reason octopus gets a red “avoid” is because it is nearly impossible, sitting at a sushi counter or browsing in a grocery store, to reliably tell the provenance of the product. With a bit of research, though, one can find sources of responsibly caught octopus.

Our relationships help us find these sources. We get our wild octopus from Spain, where fisherman head out daily to pull in their pot traps. The octopus has a relatively short lifecycle and produces hundreds of eggs, which means it has little inherent vulnerability. Overfishing does not occur and the inland pots catch mostly mature octopus with negligible by-catch. The true size of the stock is unknown, but fishing levels have remained constant for nearly 30 years in a well-watched regime. The remaining environmental concerns revolve around uncertainty: little is know about the octopus’s role in the larger food chain.

Additionally, Spanish fisheries have been remarkably creative in responding to the ecological and economic challenges of modern fishing. Spanish institutes often develop and fund those Sardine-counting studies I mentioned yesterday and the Spanish have been at the forefront of modernizing aquaculture to restore marine environments (more on that in my final post).

Petrossian American Sturgeon Caviar

Petrossian is a caviar staple, and a staple in our kitchen, too.

Unlike the scallop, the wild sturgeon is not a success story. Sturgeon are long-lived fish and they tend to reproduce rarely. They are inherently vulnerable to overfishing.

Worldwide stocks remain at levels so dangerously low that many governments have outlawed their capture. Black market fishing continues, often catching the fish only to open them and remove the gleaming black caviar inside. As stocks near extinction (and the remaining fish tend to be chock full of PCBs and Mercury), the US has banned the import of Caspian Sea sturgeon caviar.

In the US wild sturgeon are making a comeback and there is even one viable (and heavily regulated) commercial fishery in the Columbia River. The meat of these fish is delicious. For caviar, however, we turn to aquaculture—fish farming.

After years of research and failed experiments, in the 1980s scientists in California finally succeeded in raising sturgeon in captivity. Since then, commercial sturgeon aquaculture has taken off and currently exists in three states with plans to expand to others. As these operations improve, caviar packers have begun to partner with them to cure, pack and age the sturgeon roe in the quest to create a product comparable to the legendary Caspian caviar.

Petrossian has been selling caviar since the 1920’s, when they worked with Cesar Ritz to establish caviar as a symbol of luxury. While there is a certain status conveyed by the tiny eggs, we like them because they are delicious—well cared for, aged and packed.

Petrossian sources their sturgeon roe from Stolt Sea Farms in Sacremento, California. As might be imagined, aquaculture avoids the sustainability concerns of wild seafood such as population vulnerabilities and overfishing. By-catch isn’t really a problem when one is raising only fish for harvest.

There are, however, other environmental concerns associated with aquaculture (more on this in the next installment!) and Stolt does a fine job addressing them. The sturgeon are raised in water that is re-circulated, avoiding the escape of farmed fish or waste into natural ecosystems. The waste is processed and sold as fertilizer. The one remaining challenge in current sturgeon aquaculture is that the fish are carnivorous and eat more seafood than they produce.

One Dish, 1200 Words 

The heartbeat of the kitchen...

OK—I hope the anatomy of a single dish’s sourcing helps to illuminate some of the thought that goes into selecting our seafood. Are we perfectly sustainable? Of course not. Are there trade-offs and compromises involved in our decisions and sourcing? Certainly. But by utilizing the resources we have and cultivating relationships with like-minded people, we can take great steps toward operating a more responsible restaurant.

One of the most common refrains in discussions of sustainable seafood is that transparency is key. We need transparency from the folks catching the fish about their methods and the status of their fisheries. We need transparency from our purveyors regarding the provenance of the product. And we need to remember that our guests need transparency in order to make well-informed decisions. We don’t list every single purveyor on our menu, but we do our very best to ensure our team knows the source of every single item on the plate.

By the way, the hakurei turnips come from Heritage Prairie Farm in La Fox, Illinois.

guest blog: a contest!

This post is the second in what has now evolved to be four guest entries from my friends in the kitchen at the Elysian Hotel—and today we're hearing from Executive Chef Jason McLeod. On Monday night they're hosting a 'ocean-friendly' seafood dinner at RIA, in partnership with the Shedd Aquarium's Right Bite program. The dinner is $150 per person, so this is quite the bounty for whoever wins... but for me, I'm helping spread word of an issue I care deeply about.

Common in South America, this little guy will be spreading the
ocean-friendly message Monday at RIA, via Oleg Volkov's photostream.

It's official. Not only will we be cooking with some gorgeous sustainable seafood Monday night, but we just found out we'll have some very special friends visiting us throughout the dinner, too. Some, how do I say this, unique friends... and I think it's safe to say it'll be the first time either will have set foot in the Elysian. Actually, I doubt they get out much in Chicago at all.

Roll out the red carpet, people—we'll be joined by a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink. And I know, those names are great, aren't they?

I don't know about you guys, but this takes me way back to my childhood. We were lucky enough to have a zoo that made trips to our school with all sorts of cool stuff from the zoo and that day was always one of the best of the year. I mean, getting up close to animals and reptiles and birds I'd never seen before and skipping out on class? That's the real deal, man.

Needless to say, this news had the staff giddy with excitement—which got us thinking. We need to have some more fun with this. To spread the message to more people. So, because we're now on twitter and constantly plugged in to that always spinning network, we're gonna open up two seats to the Shedd Dinner via a little contest... and whoever comes out on top? Those seats are theirs, on us.

The Blue Tongue Skink will be there Monday night, too. Common
in the Land Down Under, we'll have one in the dinning room.
via floridanaturephotography's photostream.

And here's how it's gonna work...

Part 1. Correctly answer the following two questions in the comment section of this blog post (correct answers will be published on the blog upon receipt):

1) Our ocean-friendly dinner menu will be featuring sea scallops. This tasty seafood is considered what species? 

(*UPDATE* No need to go crazy specific here, just tell us if it's a bird or reptile or... you know.)

2) The ocean-friendly dinner menu will also include Dungeness crab. This crab is named after a region found where?

3) What luxurious seafood was once considered to be 'poverty food,' fed to prisoners and servants? Some servants even demanded contracts that they could be fed this food no more them three times per week.

Part 2. Post the following on twitter, tagging @riabalsanchefs in the post (tweets submitted before correct completion of Part 1 will not be accepted, first person to finish is dining with a plus one on us):

1) A photograph of any RIA dish featuring any of the above three types of seafood.

Follow the rules and finish first and you'll be hanging out with a Red Foot Tortoise and a Blue Tongue Skink, too—though, maybe don't dress like them?

And keep a look out for Brian's second post, following the first he posted the other day. He's been working his tail off on this project—and that's not easy when you have a restaurant to run!