Oh, boy, it's been a while.
During my absence, I found a new hobby--one that's not entirely unrelated to my love of good food. Since mid September, I've been taking a weekly class of pottery making, at a local studio. It was as much a result of boredom as that of frustration. I'd wanted more Japanese-style bowls and plates for my food (and for my food porn), but not too surprisingly, good ones are exceedingly rare in Chicago. Especially after the much-lamented closure of the Japanese ceramic shop in Mitsuwa, finding up-to-date ceramics at a reasonable price have been pretty much impossible. So, I thought, why don't I try making them myself? To begin with, we could use some ramen bowls.
Of course, it didn't go as planned. What I discovered during my first few days at the pottery studio was that it wasn't me who determined the shape of the finished product; it seemed that the clay itself decided to take one shape, and once it knew what it wanted to be, there was no way I could force it to become anything else. I cranked out a lot of lopsided, thick-walled bowls of varying sizes, in addition to quite a few outright dead ones (which, thankfully, could be recycled). Ramen bowls were at least a few months away, I decided, with a bit of amusement. And I meekly obeyed the commands of the wild, assertive lumps of clay on my throwing wheel.
The first trick I learned, therefore, was to "let live." Since most of my bowls came out uneven, I soon realized that I need to take their lopsidedness and turn it into something interesting, if I didn't want to start all over again. When one part of the wall had significantly more clay than the rest, I pinched the thick part to make a pour spout; when my finger got caught on the rim of a small dish, I squished the rim even more to give it an artsy flair. That sort of thing.
After a month and a half, I'm surprised to see how much progress I've made. Not that I'm a great potter by any stretch of imagination, but my bowls turn out much more even and they do listen to my commands more. It's not just the clay becoming whatever it wants to be, but now I can, at least sometimes, guide it to take more or less the shape I have in my head. And most of all, it's been such a fun.
Oh, and I've managed to make a few bowls that I can actually use on the dinner table, too. This shallow bowl with Tenmoku glaze is one of them:
Daikon Sprouts, Jamaican Pepper and Chicken Salad for two
Instruction would be just a line: toss all the ingredients together and serve. Daikon sprouts ("kaiware" in Japanese) have a very refreshing flavor akin to that of the shredded daikon you find next to your sashimi. Don't forget to rinse them thoroughly, though--there was a huge outbreak of E-Coli in Japan, blamed on daikon sprouts about a decade ago. This incident, much like the recent contaminated spinach incident here, drove all the daikon sprouts off the supermarket shelves. It took years for the supermarkets to muster the courage to carry them again, and those were sad years--I love the wasabi-like, refreshing flavor of the daikon sprouts. The slight bitterness of the pepper is quite nice, though not absolutely necessary, in this salad.
On Sunday, we had a mostly quiet day, with me sanding our ghastly orange table (with an extremely obdurate paint) and Patrick working on a website for a band. Around the end of the afternoon, though, we grew restless and decided to go out for a long walk with nowhere in particular as a destination. We strolled east on Devon, turned south somewhere before we hit Broadway, and walked down till our straight-south line was broken by the St. Boniface Cemetery around Argyle. It was just on a whim (and the possible hopping-on to the 22 bus) that we turned west, then trod north on Clark.
As it turned out, it was a lucky turn. Just after a few minutes since we'd started our northward march on Clark, a group of about six or seven women stopped us at an intersection south of Andersonville. One of them showed us a square-shaped brochure and explained that they're giving us the ticket for an Andersonville Dessert Crawl, while the rest of the group milled around us, all of them looking cheerfully back and forth between their spokesperson and us. Apparently, a lot of the restaurants and businesses in Andersonville were offering little samples of sweets as a fund raiser for the "good cause."
Though we were a bit surprised, of course we jumped at the opportunity. Free desserts are always welcome in our book. "You have to promise that you'll do this, though," said the spokeswoman, and we graciously promised that we would. Patrick and I thanked her profusely and we parted ways. From a short study of the brochure, it appeared that we missed a few businesses south of us, so we decided to walk all the way to the south end of the area and start from there. The first destination was the Wooden Spoon, a very cute shop selling baking and cooking tools. Inside, the folks from the yet-to-open Cocina de Frida were serving strawberry and pineapple dessert tamales, neatly wrapped up in little corn husks.
After that, we tried dessert after dessert, sweets after sweets in various restaurants and venues.
Okay... this is a trifle horrifying. Did we eat all this? In an hour or so? Well, to be sure, we took home the lemon-iced cookies and pumpkin crumble bar, which were wrapped up in a transportable form, but that's still a lot of sugar and fat. No wonder I was merely an inch from getting a heartburn as we walked back home under the bright moon--out of the sheer sense of caloric duty, for our legs were pretty tired by this point. The scarier thing, though, is that the list is not in any way comprehensive.
We missed the chocolate kahlua mousse from Fireside, raspberry chambord brownies a la mode from Ravenswood Pub and baklava from Taste of Lebanon, which are all served along the Ravenswood Ave., which we decided to be a bit too out of the way for our exhausted legs. We also didn't have the tiramisu from Calo (they ran out), and didn't try the doggie treat at Scrub-a-dub-dub (for obvious reasons). Erickson's Delicatessen had Swedish candies in baskets, but we didn't get that, either. We somehow missed Anne Sather's brownies, too. So, if we'd had time, energy and stomach space for everything on offer, we'd have had 26--that's twenty-six, my dear--different desserts from the same number of Andersonville businesses in a matter of a few hours.
And even scarier than that is the fact that we shared the portions. we had only one ticket, so in most places, we got only one piece of the dessert and shared it. I can't imagine how stuffed (and eventually sick) I would have been, had we had one ticket for each of us. So, if you're thinking of joining the event next year, I'd suggest either sharing a ticket with someone or bringing a bunch of Ziploc containers so you can save for later what won't spoil too quickly. I've got more to say about the Dessert Crawl, but it's running long, so I'll save that for tomorrow.
Last weekend, we had a little overnight trip to Door County. The fall colors were starting to set in in some places, and the lake water was amazingly clear. We drove around, enjoying the crisp, autumnal air, spent a few calming moments on a serene cobblestone beach, admired the Milky Way with our mouths open, and generally got refreshed. It makes me feel old to say that I really loved Door County, but I did.
On the way back to Chicago from the tip of the peninsula, we stopped at a farm market, operated by the Seaquist Orchards, and picked up half a peck of honey crisp apples. They were so sweet and crisp--as their name implies--that they had the same power to tempt us to eat them impulsively as chocolates and cookies do. Though I'm not a big fruit eater in my normal life, those apples made me one, if temporarily. I've had them piled up on the dining table, and they're already down to two-. (Apparently it's the case with other people, too, for we saw quite a few farm markets and pick-your-own orchards on the peninsula emphasizing honey crisps on their signs.)
The apples are so good we've been eating them fresh, but I did play with them once. Using some leftover wonton wrappers, I made appetizer/dessert wontons.
I'd come across an interesting idea of using shichimi, Japanese seven-spice mix, in sweet desserts, and I'd wanted to try it. (Unfortunately I don't remember where I read about that idea.) The spicy kick and the citrusy aroma of the shichimi I had at hand seemed perfect for pairing with apples, so I jumped at the opportunity. For the filling base, I mixed softened cream cheese, some sugar and a pinch of shichimi. To bridge the spice mix and the apple, I decided to fold in a thin slice of ginger in each wonton. After wrapping the shichimi cream cheese mixture, diced apples and ginger slices, I shaped the wontons into small parcels, and deep-fried them till crispy.
The result: I could have used a lot more shichimi. When I taste-tested the shichimi-sprinkled cream cheese before frying, it had an unmistakable aroma and heat of the shichimi. But apparently the frying process made much of that heat and aroma evaporate into thin air, and the finished wontons had only the slightest hint of shichimi left. This was a disappointment, but there was a nice surprise as well: the ginger slices lightened (jazzed up, might I say?) the whole thing fantastically. I thought the ginger would be a nice, refreshing touch in this fat-heavy combination of cream cheese and deep-frying, but the ginger worked even better than I expected. Cooking also brought out the tartness in the apple that wasn't very pronounced when eaten fresh.
We had the wontons as an appetizer, but this would be a nice dessert, maybe paired with vanilla ice cream (drool...). Next time I make this, I'll use a lot more shichimi and see how that works.
Pear tomatoes from my mom's backyard and a handful of Thai-flavored cashews...
Chop up the cashews, toss with halved tomatoes, and let them rest for fifteen minutes in the fridge, and you have Thai cashew tomato salad. Work time? Two minutes. Juice from the tomatoes work as the liquid base for the dressing, for which the seasoning comes from the lime- and chili-flavored nuts. Brought to you by Trader Joe's spicy concoction, Thai Lime Chili Cashews. (Hey, I'm not getting commission from Joe or anything...)
When I cleared out the stuff that had accumulated on top of Patrick's old refrigerator back in August, I found an old Betty Crocker cookbook among expired coupons and takeout menus. There were other dust-coated cookbooks as well (like a Technicolored "Candy-Making" and a dubious "Olive Oil Cookery"), most of them from the '60s and the '70s, but they got tossed out. (Or, I tossed them out.) For some reason, the Betty Crocker cookbook stayed on. It wasn't until a few days ago that I leafed through the '62 cookbook called "Betty Crocker's Good and Easy Cookbook." Soon, though, I wasn't just leafing through. I became engrossed.
"Her" recipes and meal ideas were fascinating in so many ways. Guacamole didn't call for cilantro (although it did ask that you get avocados--phew). She pretty much boils every imaginable vegetable, from the predictable potatoes and peas to the shocking eggplants to the almost criminal celery. To me, who didn't spend her childhood in Betty's country, the recipes and directions aren't nostalgic. Some of them are outright horrifying, but in that horror, I realized, lies the huge distance that the American food culture has covered over the past 40-plus years. The tuna chow mein bake, which combines cream of mushroom soup (out of a can), tuna (out of a can) and cooked chow mein to be baked in the oven, wouldn't make its weekly appearance on the dinner table very often these days (or so I hope), but there was a time when such an oddly "oriental" dish was an exotica that only a knowledgeable homemaker could put on the table.
I was talking to Patrick the other day, showing him the ghastly colored photographs in the cookbook, when he confessed a particular fondness for the "red cinnamon apple rings." He used to have them occasionally, when he was growing up. Amused and on a whim, I decided to try recreating the hyper-red, plasticky circles that didn't seem at all like apples on the yellowing pages.
The recipe called for red cinnamon candies, which, not too surprisingly, I didn't have at hand. So I made a quick trip to Target and picked up a bag of them for 99 cents. This is good, I thought. I didn't want to spend too much to obtain ingredients that I don't usually have at hand--which, in this case, quite a few--like canned soup and salted beef. I melted the candies in a little bit of hot water and threw in circles of a pared-and-cored apple. (I had an apple I grabbed from a motel's breakfast buffet on the day before, so there was no guilty feeling of ruining a perfectly good apple in this artificial concoction.) The bubbling red syrup was kind of pretty, I have to admit, and the apple pieces soon took on the same unearthly red hue. I couldn't imagine how intense the color would have been if I'd used the food dye as called for.
The red circles set the tone of the entire dinner. I fought off the temptation to use herbs and spices that I've become used to in the 21st century kitchen, and pretty much stuck to salt and pepper (except for the orange peel and sage I used for the mashed sweet potatoes). I sautéed pork chops (with salt and pepper, lightly dusted with flour) in butter, and mounted the apple pieces on top. For the sides, I made green beans and corn in (again) butter, and the heretic mashed potatoes. I was satisfied to see, on large blue plates, that the resulting dinner had the undeniable sense of '60s retro. The reddish pink syrup soon started to dribble down the side of the pork chops.
The apple rings tasted just as I expected--extremely sweet, with only a faint apple aroma, and similarly subtle cinnamon tang. With the cinnamon stronger, it could actually be pretty decent with the pork, I suspected (though I would be perfectly happy without all that color). Patrick, who thought the same thing, said that the cinnamon apple rings he used to have might have been store-bought, perhaps in a can. Most importantly, though, it was edible.
I'm tempted now to try other recipes in Betty's book. Many of them would be just a joke (like "sea dream salad" made with grated cucumbers and lime-flavored gelatin), but it's kind of fun. The obvious downside, though, would be the number of empty cans--soups, green beans, corn, fruit cocktails, etc.--that'll heap up in our trash bin. Or... would that be too dangerous for our health?
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