Food 2018

I felt like we were at the edge of the world, a dystopian future-world, the kind that I’ve unfortunately had negative fantasies about too often in the past two years–perched on a wobbly stool in an unheated trailer getting weird looks from the Slavic truckers waiting around us. We traveled far to get here, to a windswept stretch of truck stops off 80/94 in Gary Indiana. We traipsed through the thick mud of an ambiguous parking lot, confused by how to find our way into the elevated yellow trailer. Once inside, the wiry, tattooed counter guy, likely years younger than his grizzled demeanor would suggest, spoke in unintelligible grunts, barely cocking an eye through the fogged Plexi partition between us.

Balkan Grill is a way station for Serbian truck drivers to fuel up on calorie-dense charred meats and thick flat breads. I’d read about it in a piece by Mike Sula and it was high on my list. But as we waited twenty minutes for our orders of cevapcici–uncased, hand formed beef sausages and pljeskavica, an oversized onion-y burger, stuffed with cheese, contemplating where the grilling was happening considering there was no obvious exhaust in the back of the trailer, I wondered why we were doing this.

The food was good– hearty, simple, and satisfying. But something else drew us here. Call it a Bourdain-ian compulsion to find culture wherever you can get to it. In these xenophobic times, like cutting yourself to remind yourself that you can feel.

It was a fucked up week. Some food critic I had never heard of wrote a five point take down of the entire culinary landscape of Chicago. With too much time on my hands (wife and kid away for two weeks) I took the bait and indulged in a bit of online trollery, I’ll spare you the tit for tat. But aghast at some egregiously uninformed statements with tinges of racism, I couldn’t help but say something.

What have we come to? Everybody has something to yell about. And it’s too easy for everyone else to yell back. Truly informed criticism is dying. Facts don’t count. This is the pre-apocalyptic environment that makes me want to drive to a trailer in Gary Indiana and clear my head, uncomfortable as it may be.

I also turned to a recently fallen hero, Jonathan Gold, and watched “City of Gold.” Not only was I reminded of true journalistic integrity, but humility. Gold understood that the eateries he championed– humble, mom-and-pop run, immigrant-owned, were not doing it for him, but to serve their communities. And he acknowledged the tremendous work that is put into running these businesses.

John and Tony are gone. When Bourdain died, I thought hard about how much he inspired me and why. It came down to his ego-less-ness, which might sound odd considering his out-size personality. But he put everything aside to give the world a view into culture and platform the way that everyday people around the world ate and lived.

I have hope that a new generation of folks is emerging that speaks about food from perspectives within their own cultures (rather than, say, the scholarly gaze of journalism.) This year I found much inspiration reading about artist- driven cooking projects, all helmed by women, mostly women of color, sharing, unpacking, and complicated their respective cultures by cooking, hosting meals, and platforming conversations. Many of the projects are featured in this ArtSpace piece. My friend, New York-based writer, researcher, & cook Jasmine Lee, co-hosts a dinner series called Comic Sans Earth with her collaborator Bettina Yung. Their cuisine is rooted in Chinese, and specifically Hong Kong style ingredients and techniques, to quote Jasmine “Comic Sans Earth is a way for us to access our own histories.” Part of the proceeds of their inaugural event were donated to a New York based org fighting against deportation and family separation.

I was really inspired by an interview Jasmine published on the Creative Independent with Palestinian-American artist Amanny Ahmad, whose multi-faceted practices include cooking and hosting meals, horticulture & foraging, and writing. As a recovering artist, myself, who also embraced food, I related very much to her turn away from the materialism and market-defined hierarchies of the art world. Amanny and her peers are pivoting even further from the avant garde pretentions of contemporary art ideas like relational aesthetics to forefront conversations about immigrant experience, food justice, race, class, and sustainability. Houston-based artists Lovie Olivia and Preetika Rajgariah (who recently showed at Roots & Culture) share their own intimate cooking practices on Instagram as @twodykesandaknife and are launching a new project Pallets, Palettes, and Palates, that “intend to spark discussions that feature complicated topics of racial, ethnic, political and gender diversity through the lens of contemporary art and non-traditional dining experiences.”

Now is a time for activity, not passivity. Its too easy, too lazy, to sit behind a laptop and shout about how the world isn’t doing enough for you. I’m over it. In 2019, I want to focus on active endeavors like feeding myself, my family, my community. And being out in the world, eating, absorbing culture, learning, and hopefully meeting new folks.

For a second I thought about foregoing this annual round up, but alas, I was already a few thousand words deep before the past week’s drama. So, for the sake of respecting the hardworking folks making this food, let’s do this:

Morena’s Kitchen (and how I found her)

The best thing I ate this year (& ate & ate) was the pica pollo at the diminutive Morena’s Kitchen (its so small, her address has a fraction in it!) run by its namesake (the nickname of owner Mirian Montes de Oca.) Check out the Hungry Hound spot above (my prime time debut!) for all the deets. This stuff is the goods, my favorite fried chicken in town, not only gloriously crispy, but the meat has a deep citrusy, garlicky, herby marinade that sets it apart. And Mirian is the sweetest (sassy too.) This spot is peak neighborhood Chi, for sure. One lunch, this dude came in with a garter snake to spook Morena, which didn’t seem to make her flinch.

There’s another half to this story, although T likely wouldn’t want to block any of Morena’s shine. I found this spot, like so many others, through my bud, Titus Ruscitti, aka @chibbqking, aka Da Beef, aka King T, aka the guy behind Chicago Taco Tour. He’s an OG influencer, the guy that is literally out on the street every week (and increasingly around the globe), checking out every mom & pop and hole in the wall. Internet foodies and in-the-know journos pick up his recommendations and before you know it, boom, places like Morena’s are on ABC 7. From South Chicago to Beijing, King T is out here.

Chinese Century

Beyond the old Sunday night take-out order of bbq pork fried rice and egg rolls, this year, I noticed how Chinese food, ingredients, & techniques have infiltrated my weekly diet. Much like how twenty years ago salsa, tortillas, and beans became my staples– noodles, leafy greens, and stuff like black bean paste have landed in my weekly shopping cart. And that’s because Chinese food and culture is increasingly accessible and becoming a part of the American (slash global) plurality. I recently heard a piece on WBEZ about how Chicago has the only growing Chinatown in the country. Its very cool to see joints like A Place by Damao on Halsted, which I wrote about last year, owned and operated by a new generation of Chinese immigrants, serving a younger clientele. From the growth of Chicago’s Chinatown and expansion into adjacent neighborhoods, to burbs in places like northern metro Toronto, the San Gabriel Valley outside of LA, and nearby me in the western suburbs, to my own kitchen, this idea of the Chinese century is reaching our palates.

So here’s a quick recap of my year in Chinese cuisine– I did some major exploration in Toronto in June. We ate Hakka chili chicken downtown from Yueh Tung, kissed by the breath of the wok and heavily redolent of the garlic and ginger. In the could-be-China suburb of Richmond Hill, we blissed out on perfectly fried potstickers and sesame-paste & chile oil drenched Sichuan style wantons from Northern Dumpling Kitchen taken to go and eaten off the arm rest of our car. In also very-Chinese Markham, next door, we finally made it to the highly recommended Mei Nung Beef Noodle House for my favorite of the Asian noodle soups– niu rou mian. The soup was good, especially spiked with their house chili oil, but the noods did not quite have the personality of my faves at Katy’s Dumpling House in Chi-land. Perhaps I wasn’t able to fully relax into this bowl, though, since a particular outhouse-y odor lingered on the nose– the stench of another famed Taiwanese dish, stinky tofu.

Speaking of suburban beef noodle soup, a purveyor of Taiwanese chow in a food court in the west burb of Westmont, alongside Styrofoam bowls of hot soy milk and crullers the size of my forearm, does niu rou mian on weekends. Their hand pulled noodles have a delightful texture with an initial softness, but chewy bite-through in a complex broth with bits of dried ginger and a bone-fortified richness. In city noodle news, I sampled hand made Xi’an style cold rice noodles in another food court, the subterranean Richland Market, Shaan Shan Taste. In a vinegar and chile oil sauce with fresh matchsticks of cucumber, it’s the type of dish I like to make on a summer’s day, though the dried pho noodles I’d use at home are lifeless in comparison.

One of my favorite bowls of noodles of the year was at a Millennial-vibed Bridgeport joint, Min’s Noodles. They have a menu of customizable noodle bowls, but I settled for an old favorite, Sichuan dan dan noodles. Min’s fortifies their sauce with sesame paste, which further complicates the hot, salty, and sour flavors with a nutty creamy richness. Craving the creamy style dan dan but unwilling to drive to the city one day, I turned to a recipe by culinary life coach, Gary “GWiv” Wiviott, which turned out very similar and as good as Min’s. Good old tahini makes a reasonable substitution for Chinese sesame paste. Which got me thinking about the origins of an old hippy classic, the Moosewood-ian sesame noodles. Maybe Chinese food infiltrated our diets long ago.

 

The Year in Between Two Slices of Bread

Reviewing my best-things-I’ve-eaten-this-year list revealed that 2018 was low key a good year for sandwiches. A big factor was the opening of Tempesta Market by the team behind Nduja Artisans, makers of the meaty manna, addictive, gonna kill ya, spreadable salami that is nduja. They sneak the brick-red stuff into their goods in unexpected ways, they do an ndjua gelato! (which my sweet-toothed but spice adverse two year old gobbled without noticing the Calabrian chile heat) My two favorite sandwiches (so far) employ rendered nduja oil– in a vinaigrette on the Dante, which is an update on a classic Italian sub (somehow elevating a perfect form) and drenching fried chicken (!!!) in their take on a Nashville hot chicken sandwich (the Smashville.) This spot is like a cross between Publican Quality Meats and JP Graziano’s, with meat lockers full of house made charcuterie, imported goods, and a Renaissance painting- worthy deli case.

Shall we rack our brains on the perennial debate on whether wraps and things in flat breads qualify as sandwiches? For some reason, I do count gyros and shawarma, but not tacos and burritos. Is it the depth of the wrap? So where does roti fit in, somewhere in between a pita and a tortilla? If a roti wrap qualifies, then the chili chicken roti I had at JK Kebab, an Indo-Pak kebab place in Naperville (& original on Devon) was the best sandwich of the year, flaky, chewy flat bread encasing succulent and spicy shreds of chicken.

Speaking of gyros– this year Chicago discovered that in Greece, simply seasoned sliced pork stacked on the rotating spit is more traditional than our homespun lamb/beef forcemeat version. I had two excellent versions, at Apolis in Lisle and Charcoal Flame in Morton Grove. While both joints served up crispy, bacon-y goods, I definitely have to tip my hat to the latter who serves it up in a more traditional fashion than the Chipotle-esque topping-heavy approach of the former. I recently ate my favorite house made lamb/beef style gyros at Greek Islands, to compare, and I’m officially a pork convert. I gotta say though, does all Chicago gyros have to be served on that sponge-y Kronos pita?

Fleshing out the sammy list are the lowest key of the entries, the type of spots I eat at regularly out of convenience, suburban parent type places like cafes and bar & grills. Huge shout out to my best bud Ryan Hammer and family who opened a kick ass coffee shop and community hub in next door West Chicago, Kindred Coffee Roasters. Over the summer they introduced lunch, turning out super fresh, hugely flavored sandwiches off a panini press in their matchbox-sized kitchen. The Italian Panini with prosciutto & arugula is right up my alley.

Fortunately, we were able to fill the void of our dearly departed John’s in our little downtown Winfield with Berger Bros. Pub. They specialize in a genre of “small plates” type food that’s stuck in the 90’s (or maybe 00’s?) with balsamic this and ahi tuna that. Huge piles of Brussels sprouts with bacon, you know what I’m saying? The sandwiches are the least fussy offerings and pretty great– juicy hand formed burgers (no pulled pork on there for me though thanks), crispy grilled cheeses & melts (one with grilled chicken, bacon, & avocado works better than it should) and a super decadent pot roast on a brioche bun.

Closing out my sandwich wrap up, I’d like to give a nod to my favorite food blog on the internet, Sandwich Tribunal. For the past five years, @JimTheBeerGuy has been covering– eating & making, every sandwich on Wikipedia’s list of sandwiches entry, three per month. Thorough, personal, and appetite-inducing, it’s some of the best food writing that I go to regularly.

Stuff I cook!

My Pie

I had to quit my favorite pizza place this year. After too many rude and discriminatory experiences with the new management, I said goodbye to Al’s in Warrenville, who makes one of the best tavern style thin crust pizza in Chi-land. So what now? Wifey’s favorite food is pizza. I can be more discriminating than her and have found that the other local joints each screw up some element of their product. I do like Jet’s for chain pie, though you only want gut bomb deep dish so often.

So I make my own, which I always have, and Jessica actually likes the best. But I’ve got the routine down to where it doesn’t feel like a chore (fun fact: the labor involved in cooking is often in inverse proportion to the pleasure of eating.) It’s just about thinking ahead. My dough needs at least a 24 hour proof. So the day before, I mix the dough, takes about 10 minutes. I make a double batch, freeze half. Then pizza night comes together fast, stretch the dough, prep the ingredients, pop it in the oven. I can do the whole thing in 30 minutes. Folks often ask me for my recipe, here it is below. I do use a pizza stone and believe that it makes a huge difference. I think a peel comes in handy too, though you could use the back of a sheet pan. And I stretch the dough out on parchment paper to prevent sticking and making for an easy transfer.

Makes two 14”ish zas:

At least the night before make the dough– I use Gold Medal unbleached all purpose, but go ahead and splurge on the imported 00 stuff. So in your stand mixer (you could do it by hand too): 4 cups flour, 1 tsp dry yeast, and 1 ½- 1 ¾ cups ice water. It should be a sticky dough, but not too sticky to handle. I mix for a few minutes, until just incorporated. Put the dough in the fridge for 24-48 hours. On pizza night, pull out the dough about two hours before the cook. Crank the oven as high as it will go. I usually stretch out the dough an hour before the cook to let it relax. Then top it with your desired ingredients. And into the oven. I keep an eye on it, looking for golden color on the crust if not a bit of char. I also like the moisture to cook off the top and the cheese to caramelize around the edge a bit. It should be done in 10-12 minutes.

Sweet Leaf

I’m not going to say I suck at gardening. But our property is shady as hell. So, we’ve figured out which decorative plants work (employed to breath-taking beauty in my wife, Jessica Labatte’s recent photography show at Western Exhibtions.) But there aren’t a lot of edibles that I’ve had resounding success with. Cherry tomatoes, okay, chiles too. Leafy greens in the spring and herbs. I found one crop that went nuts for me this year– perilla, a big bushy mint that’s used as an herb and leafy green in Korean cuisine. It’s a cousin of shiso and similar in flavor profile, though perhaps a bit earthier. It’s probably best known in the west as a wrap for Korean BBQ or ssam. I put in four seedlings that grew over three feet tall each. I had so much of the stuff that I could use it on my catering menus. I had an idea to use it as a base for Thai one bite salad with peanuts, toasted coconut, ginger, lime, and dried shrimp. The leaf’s herbaceous-ness worked well, though it occurred to me that I could adapt the concept to tie in more Korean flavors. So I invented a Korean one bite salad– a base of perilla leaves with a smear of about half a teaspoon of a blend of ssamjang (or miso) and honey in equal parts, a few cubes of finely diced ginger (about ¼”), about a teaspoon of chopped kimchi, then topped with a pinch of Korean spicy dried squid shreds and a sprinkle of black sesame. Roll it up, pop in your mouth, repeat!

 

Also, Also

RIP Kenny Shopsin; burn-your-ass Lao sausage & papaya salad at Lao & Thai Spicy Noodles in Elgin; Eritrean at Keren in DC, a city I look forward to exploring more someday; Feijoada at Brasil Legal which you’ve driven by a zillion times on Western; the contemporary Great Migration cuisine at the Delta in Wicker Park; fried fucking tacos at Loncar’s in S Chicago; Pop’s Beef always my #1 (tried Chickie’s & Original Mr. Beef in White Flight-land and neither stacked up); the way-better-than-they-have-to-be smashed Tallgrass burgers at Avery’s favorite toy-train-food-delivering spot, 2 Toots in Glen Ellyn; the Peruvian eats at SanguCHE in Naperville esp. their sauces smothered all over salchipapas; hazy IPA’s– OG NEIPAs that Doug Sher brought me esp. Hill Farmstead’s Society & Solitude series and Trillium’s DDH Farnsworth St. also those Transients from Bridgman, MI; local hazies Marz Yuice & Penrose Midwest Vice; brut IPAs pretty cool too, like Hopewell’s Clique & esp. Middle Brow’s Brett Brut; figuring out how to make jaew, the Thai hot dipping sauce for meats (secret: tamarind); that insane hen-of-the-woods season and finding morels on my property; mom knocking it out of the park at Thanksgiving this year (green bean casserole!); and my Easy Eats catering team– Erin, Nate, Latham, Christina, Stella, Gabe, & Caitlin!