http://oddpairs.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/congrats-tastemaker-winners-spring-2010-odd-pairs/

That's me hiding from the camera on the right there. I can't take credit for the awesome food that won the contest (the soup and savory marshmallows pictured on the top left), but I did spend a good portion of my youth peeling and cutting those marshmallows (garlic, bacon and ginger ones... so effing good).

that supposedly one meal at Alinea is enough additives for one person, for THE ENTIRE YEAR.

My hippie organic anti-artificial-shit half and my ooh! science! half are fighting. What say you, people? Should food just be food already, or would it be WAY AWESOME to eat what amounts to some guy's food science experiment?

I am determined to work my way through everything on this list.

I think I'm off to a good start considering I've only been here a few months. My favorites:

Lula: I kind of moved to Logan Square to be close to this place. The dinner is a little spendy ($25 entrees) but completely worth it. Brunch is awesome too, if you go early enough to avoid the 1-2 hour wait.

Hot Chocolate: Miss Katie is over there slaving away so you know it's good.

Fox & Obel: They gave me a job. So +2 points for them.

Floriole, Hoosier Mama, and probably some of the others: Grads of my program (along with Mindy of Hot Chocolate and Doug of Hot Doug's), so they need your business to pay off their outrageous student loans.

and then of course there's Alinea, with their $150 tasting menu (and that's the cheap one). I have it on good authority that this place is a "total mindfuck" and maybe I'm a chump but I'M SORRY BUT I JUST HAVE TO GO.

I'd been wanting to go to Hot Doug's since I got here, but somehow had never gotten around to it. Lots of things suddenly seem pressing when you have piles of work staring you in the face, though, and so at about 3:00 on Saturday, when Rosy and I were sick of staring at our computers, we decided we couldn't go another day not having eaten there.

For those of you who don't know, Hot Doug's is sort of the ultimate in Chicago hole-in-the-wall places...a tiny place in a rando building on California that serves fancified hot dogs. It's particularly famous for having a foie gras hot dog, which was on the Chicago episode of No Reservations and which also got Doug a nice fine (or so I hear) for continuing to serve it when the city outlawed foie gras a while back.

Anyway. I don't really eat meat but my food curiosity usually trumps my pseudo-vegetarian-pescatarian-whateverism, and besides they have a veggie dog, so we got in line to wait. (The line on Fridays and Saturdays, when they have duck fat fries, usually snakes around the block.)

And we waited. And we waited. Dudes, if you're trying to check out this place, wait until it is above freezing at least. Waiting outside for an hour when it is freaking fifteen degrees outside is miserable and pointless (duh, I guess, but you know, once we had committed...). Go in the spring, go on a weekday (the duck fat fries aren't anything special in my opinion), go prepared for an unimaginable level of food coma, and you will leave satisfied.

But take your vegetarian friends to Earwax, for god's sake, that veggie dog was a piece of rubber.




I can't believe I'm admitting I ate this... "saucisson alsacienne": sausage with grilled onions, creme fraiche, and camembert.


Duck fat fries... meh.

The best thing about living in Chicago is that there is always an opportunity to do my two favorite things in life: complain about the weather; and talk about food.

Other people here love this as much as I do. They love it so much that they host indoor farmer's markets all over the city in winter so they can gather to talk about horrible, horrible weather and delicious, delicious food AT THE SAME TIME.

It was at one of these markets that I met Kris Swanberg who makes nicecream, awesome local handcrafted ice cream made in small batches with organic ingredients.

Backstory: I like to stalk the people who sell baked goods and desserts at farmer's markets and submit them to the following: "YOU MAKE SWEETS! I LIKE SWEETS! I QUIT MY JOB TO GO TO PASTRY SCHOOL AND NOW I MAKE SWEETS TOO! HOW DID YOU GET STARTED MAKING SWEETS? DID I MENTION I GO TO SCHOOL AND MAKE SWEETS?"

Usually they're very nice and polite and talkative and put up with me; sometimes it's a little more like, hey lady, you're eating all my samples.

Kris was the former, so while I ate up all her free ice cream we chatted about how she got started. She offered to show me a little about making ice cream, I offered my free labor, and a few weeks later I was separating eggs in the kitchen space she rents from a nearby bakery, where we cooked custard and talked about office jobs and school and earl grey ice cream.

So long story short, I have yet another dessert addiction which brings my total daily consumption of sugar up to, oh, 100% or so.

If you live in Chicago you can buy nicecream at the Green Grocer, Provenance Food & Wine, the Dill Pickle, and lots of farmer's markets around. My favorite is the cinnamon and spice, it's got just a little cayenne or something in there and it's soooo delicious. Plus I helped make it :)

Despite my busy and exciting life of screwing up pie dough and going to bed at 8pm, I have found a little bit of time to start exploring Chicago. "Chicago" meaning all the places within a mile of my house that serve alcohol, caffeine, or brunch. This place is one of my favorite spots so far to spend my nonexistent disposable income, mostly because of these:



Peanut butter and jelly handpies!! As in, little pockets of PIE DOUGH filled with PB&J and then FRIED, and served to you with their insides all warm and gooey. I am a woman obsessed. I actually DREAMT of these the other night. A little sad, maybe, but at least I am easy to please, right?

The rest of Handlebar's menu, especially for brunch, is equally amazing, but we won't talk about the fact that I preceded fried pie with a ginormous bowl of vegan biscuits and gravy.

Handlebar
2311 W North Ave
Chicago, IL 60647
(773) 384-9546

It's beautiful here today! I got celery root at the farmer's market:



I have never tried to cook celery root before but the nice lady at the stand assured me that I should not be put off by its gnarly appearance.



Only two weeks left til our farmer's market goes away, which in my mind is the real end of fall and the beginning of winter. I'M NOT READY