On May 5th Mike Bancroft of Co-op Image and Co-op Sauce and I served a menu of street snacks prepared with Midwestern invasive species.
Mike had visited my “You Art What You Eat” class at SAIC earlier in the spring and though I’ve been a longtime fan of his work as a educator and hot sauce maker, I hadn’t been aware of some of the provocative and humorous approaches to cuisine that he and Anne Kostroski had been serving up at their monthly pop-up dinner parties, The Stew Supper Club. One such meal featured an armageddon menu complete with pigeon which naturally sparked a conversation between us- cooking with invasive species seemed to be an obvious palette for our first collaboration.
Needless to say, cooking with Mike was a true joy, especially in his and Anne’s amazingly new decked out facility at 6338 N Clark. The menu was concocted in true E-Dogz fashion, a call and response of sorts. In my previous experiments, smoking the bighead carp seemed to be the best way to get the meat off its intricate bone structure. Mike mentioned he had plenty of garlic mustard growing in his garden, which would add the right pungent zing to a whipped cheese spread. We had both recently learned that the highly nutritious purslane was also invasive, so Mike pickled some from his garden to garnish the fish, which along with the cheese was constructed on fresh bagels, served open faced. Our second snack featured dandelion greens which I was familiar with from certain Korean dishes. I thought the greens might be interesting to cook in a pajeon, a scallion pancake. Mike had plenty of fix ins to construct a take on gochujang, the traditional Korean fermented chile paste. So we served the pajeon with a Co-op chile mash and house made miso- based hot/sweet/funky sauce.
We set up in front of the Logan Center on the U of C campus next to the Enemy Kitchen food truck. I had been slinging dogs until 2 am the night before on the northwest side, so I was running (typically) late. Unfortunately, in the frenzy of delivering our goods to hunger symposium- goers I did not find the time to snap any pics. I’d like to thank my friend Cathy2 from LTHForum for coming out that day and sharing a few pics of the food. Otherwise, imagine E-Dogz set up in Hyde Park with a fairly healthy line of folks waiting for invasive snacks and Mike and I hustling (with smiles on our faces) on the trailer.
image courtesy of Catherine Lambrecht
Bagel with Smoked Bighead Carp, Garlic Mustard Cream Cheese, and Pickled Purslane
image courtesy of Catherine Lambrecht
Dandelion Green Pajeon with Co-op Chile Mash/ Miso Chile Sauce
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