Category: play

I grew up working in my dad’s supermarket. I started sorting 16 ounce returnable bottles at age 12 and worked at the store for the next decade. I was there all through my formative years – after school, on weekends, and during summer and holiday breaks. Today, the thought of going into a Jewel or Dominick’s is repulsive. It’s not that I have a bunch of bad memories, I’m just sick of being inside supermarkets. Just sick of it.

Let me contrast this experience with that of a buddy of mine. He owned his own pizza shop at age 13 and worked in the business during his formative years. I’m talking pizza overload during all of his teenage years. So shouldn’t he be sick of pizza? Shouldn’t he be repulsed every time someone wants order a bunch of pizzas and watch some football? No! And no! In fact, he’s a pizza aficionado. A veritable pizza guru. A pizza Yoda who can actually make a pie levitate.

What do you do when you have this sort of love for pizza? Well, you have all your friends over once a year and make pizzas to order. I was lucky enough to get invited to this private event and I snuck a camera in, hoping that I could learn something. Watch and learn grasshopper.

Use your fingers, don’t use a rolling pin. It’s all about making it round and keeping the air bubbles out.

In fact, do a fork-tap all over the pie to keep those pesky air bubbles out. That’s caring.

Since your home oven probably can’t get to 800 degrees, pre-cook the dough for a little just to make sure it’s crispy. Use a pizza peel to move it in and out. Oh yeah, you can just stick your bare hands in the oven (below) if you’re tough enough. If you’re afraid of burning your fingers, well, maybe you should just have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or something.

Lay out the ingredients and give your friends free reign in choosing the toppings. Hey, it’s your party and their party. It’s everybody’s party. I’ve obscured the faces in the previous and next picture to protect the innocent, of course.

Here’s what mine and my wife’s looked like. I’m a straight sausage guy, but my wife tosses in a little mushroom and black olive. It’s all good, we’re all happy. No need to fight about what toppings to use because we got plenty to go around.

Thanks man, the pizza rocked.

This food blog experience has really opened my eyes to the genius that’s often hiding within regular folks. Take for instance this blog called the Burrito Bracket. It’s done by a resident of Wicker Park who has decided to have a “tournament” pitting 19 top burrito places in the neighborhood against each other.

The championship comes up in a few weeks so you better start paying attention. At this point, there is one more match-up in the Elite Eight before we get down to the final four. Here are the pairings with all of the match-ups and a link to the review.

My favorite post thus far is titled The Burrito Spectrum. The only point of the post was to espouse a certain theory on the burrito, which I found refreshing and informative. This fellow Nate got in my kitchen and really shook things up. He explains the burrito by taking his readers on a trip from the taco to the sandwich. It’s groundbreaking stuff and has given me several new terms that I plan on using in everyday life.

Nate, you rock! Keep it up.

Hecky’s. You’ve seen it. I’m talking about the one at 1234 N. Halsted. It’s integrated with a gas station on a very fluid stretch of Division Street. I’m sure it’s not as charming as the original Hecky’s in Evanston, but it’s all owned by the same legendary ribmaster, Hecky Powell.

What side do you get with your ribs? In somewhat of a deviation from my standard operating procedure, I went with the baked beans (the cole slaw was standard). As you know, I usually pair big chunks of bovine or swine flesh with either a grain or potato. But with ribs it’s just a little different; I don’t feel the need to get a starch in every bite.

So on this fine evening I made a great call, Hecky’s ribs and baked beans did not disappoint. It was good all around – tender ribs and smoky baked beans. There wasn’t any special zing in the sauce, but it was tangy. I’m not necessarily going crazy over these ribs, but I made some errors when ordering so I’m taking responsibility. I should have ordered some extra sauce to help me understand it better and I should have taken a different route on the style choice.

They give you two rib options. One is “classic” and the other is “Chicago style” (I think that’s what they termed them). As the woman behind the counter describes them, Chicago style are a little tougher and stay on the bone a little better. My wife and I opted for the classic because in general we feel that fall-off-the-bone is good. And they were good. But they went a little overboard with the fall-off-the-bone. These things fall off the bone more than any other rib I’ve had in Chicago. In fact, you can’t even pick them up by the bones because the gravitational pull of the earth is too strong for the meat/bone bond.

It really piqued my interest to try the Chicago style. I think I’d definitely like the “tougher“ texture, so I’ll be back soon. Plus, there’s even more reason to be back if you listen to the majority opinion over at the LTH Forum, the fried chicken is supposed to rock (mostly at the Evanston location). As always with the LTH Forum, they denigrate the supposed “fake” Hecky’s that I frequent on Halsted. New and non-traditional usually gets panned. Whatever.

I am a breakfast pastry titan. If I were to enter any sort of competitive eating contest (look out Kobayashi!), it would certainly be in the realm of cinnamon rolls, donuts, scones, muffins, or some sort of quick bread. Yeah, I said quick bread. Well, I actually wrote quick bread, I don’t think I’ve ever uttered the words together.

According to Wikipedia, a quick bread uses a chemical leavener such as baking powder as opposed to a leavener like yeast. The chemical leavener makes the quick bread “relatively uniform, reliable, and quick.” Imagine that.

The classic quick bread is banana bread. I ate it sparingly as a kid but lately I’ve developed a special fondness for it. In part because I’ve sampled plenty of the homemade banana bread at the Jupiter Outpost and it’s really good. Check it out above.

It’s usually the same woman working the counter at this warehouse district coffee shop and I think she’s the owner/baker. They have a full boat of coffee and espresso drinks and some breakfast and lunch sandwiches, but I haven’t strayed from the bevy of quick breads and cakes. They’re all baked daily in a kitchen about 15 feet from the counter and there is no doubting the freshness once you sink your teeth into one.

The banana bread is stuffed with fresh bananas and walnuts. Look closely at the picture and you can see that you get some of each in every bite. It’s moist and tasty and perfectly complemented by a cappuccino.

Did I mention that she makes the cappuccino like it should be made. At Starbuck’s, to get a real cappuccino you have to tell them to make it dry or extra dry; if you don’t you get a latte. That’s not the case at the Jupiter Outpost. Her small cappuccino barely fills the cup past half way – foam and all. Now that’s a cappuccino, plenty of espresso flavor with just a little milk and slightly more foam.

It’s a great place. They care about freshness and they respect the roots of good, Italian espresso drinks. The reviews on Yelp are a somewhat mixed. I just like the place and I’m becoming a regular.

Here are a couple of dudes that care about food. Two guys just traveling around town looking for good burgers. Check it out at the Chicago Burger Project.

It’s based on the Time Out article about the top burgers in town. Nat and Adam have motored through a bunch of the burgers. It’s great stuff. They have a ton of great pix and they dig far deeper than I do.

They started back in March at That’s-a-Burger and have been banging through three or four burgers a month. They don’t mess around. Keep it up Nat and Adam.

Yeah, I have a new standard breakfast. It’s about a half cup of Milk & Honey Granola and some milk. Easy, tasty, local (I think), fast, and not bad for you. Notice that I didn’t say good for you; that would probably be stretching it given the amount of brown sugar I detect.

I first saw this at Stanley’s Fruit and Vegetables on North and Elston a few months back and grabbed the nice, resealable bag on a whim. Since then I’ve been a mission to find granola as good and I can’t match it. I like my breaky sweet, as you know, and they don’t short you on the sugar. But the grains are substantial and it’s pretty nutty, so it balances out the sweetness nicely.

It just feels right eating this. It’s granola, man. People in California and Colorado eat it all the time so it must be good for you. And it’s low impact. When I finish my morning coffee I just dump some granola in the same cup, pour some milk over it, and start shoveling. That saves me a rinse and some dirty dishes.

Now about it being local, I have to do some digging on that. Technically, to be local, I guess all the ingredients need to be from local farms. But I think most almonds come from California, which probably officially rules out this being acceptable as part of the localvore challenge put on by the Green City Market. But the oats and certainly the dried cherries could be local. I checked their granola specific website and it does not speak to the localness. Oh well. Hopefully there is a caring, conscientious, born-and-bred Chicago starving artist in the Milk & Honey kitchen bagging it and loading up their VW van for delivery to Stanley’s. However, if that was the case I doubt they could keep up with the demand from all of the local Whole Foods and Treasure Islands. I’m just NOT going to ask the question for fear of taking some of the local luster off of my granola. Ignorance is bliss.

The Milk & Honey Cafe itself is pretty good. Here’s what Yelp has to say about it. When I go I usually get an egg dish of some sort. I’ve never had the granola live, in-house.

It’s a great atmosphere in the summer with the outdoor patio and such, but it gets crowded fast on weekends. It’s Division Street, so what do you expect?