Chicago Foodies

Tartiflette: Comfort food, French style

Tartiflette is a winter dish, designed to be eaten after many hours – or even days – of hiking and skiing in the Alps. It's a dish that warms both the body and the soul. I mean: bacon, potatoes, fried onions, rich French cheese. What's not to like? Unless you're vegetarian or lactose intolerant, it's hard to resist.

One evening around two weeks ago, we decided to make tartiflette and easily found all of the ingredients except the crucial cheese component, reblochon. There's an earlier post on this blog which mentions Whole Foods as a supplier, but even the gentleman at the cheese counter there told me he "didn't understand why there was no reblochon these days". Still, at Fox & Obel I managed to come up with a good substitute: L'Edel de Cleron.

Achatz Tableside Dessert Preparation at Alinea

Gluten Free for You and Me

'Tis the season for Christmas stollen, holiday cupcakes, and rum cakes, too. Now many people who cannot tolerate gluten can grab a cupcake with friends or enjoy an easy dinner out in Chicago. Luckily there are many great resources and eateries for those who have Celiac Disease or gluten intolerance.

A few suggestions around Chicago include the following: Chicago Diner (www.veggiediner.com) in Boystown offers a vegetarian menu, but also has an entirely gluten free menu. Swirlz Cupcakes (www.swirlzcupcakes.com) in Lincoln Park makes at least one flavor of gluten free cupcakes each day of the week. My favorite blog for gluten free recipes and ideas is www.tamaraduker.com . The blog is rife with humor, honesty, and creativity in gluten intolerant cooking!

Joan Gussow

As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists. ~Joan Gussow

Overseer, Chefs Collaborative; former chair & professor emeritus (nutrition), Columbia University Teachers College; director, Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation; advisory board member, Center for Food Safety and Ecology Action; author, This Organic Life from Activist Cash

Terzo Piano – The Restaurant at the Art Institute of Chicago

Take the elevator to the Terzo Piano. It is hard to tell if the Art Institute's Terzo Piano restaurant was really designed with art-lovers in mind. On the one hand, it is ideally placed, being on the third floor (the ‘terzo piano’, see?) of the Art Institute’s modern wing. However, on the other, going there for lunch can really interfere with a culture-filled day out. Once you have had a look over the menu and ordered a pre-dinner drink, you start to realize that this is not somewhere you'd want to rush your lunch.

We started to get some strange looks as we tried to see "what everyone else is having". We settled on the butternut ravioli (very rich, the kind of dish you can get away with eating only in winter. I’m talking waistline, ladies), and my friend ordered the Uno, Due, Tre burgers, a plate of three small burgers, beef, lamb and shrimp.

I suspect the waiter was overjoyed when we finally ordered, because we had already spent far too long looking at everything on the menu. We changed our mind multiple times, as we saw more and more interesting dishes emerging from the kitchen. But, to be honest, I’d go here every week if only for the desserts and the wine (the financier with lavender ice cream is definitely worth trying).

And for those of you who lean towards French wines, you'll know it’s rare to find a bottle of Château d’Esclans this side of the Atlantic, and certainly this side of Lake Michigan. Speaking of which, after lunch, stop and take a look out at the view from the restaurant terrace. On a clear, blue-sky wintry day it makes you happy to be in Chicago.

The $165.99 Bottle of Sam Adams: Utopias

Is it beer? It tastes like a cognac. It's 'shelf-stable'  It's not carbonated. Could you even fermented to 27%?

I guess the answer is yes. Utopias is a whopping 27% that's right, 54 proof... that would be a mean game of quarters. But since it's $165 bucks you might be a bit more stingy with it. Sam Adams made a triple bock in the late nineties that came close at 18% and at $6 was a bit cheaper. That I do remember drinking in college but I also remember being surprised by it. Frankly it might have simply been the bottle or the oddity of it. This time around I had the opportunity to try it again and I can only wish that they'd relaunch it. But the Utopias was the focus of the evening. I do enjoy sherry and found the flavor to be in the same vein but what Utopias brings to the table as far as I can tell is that fermented undertone of malt. It has a very robust finish full of chocolate and nuts which points out the more myopic finish of grape, honey and raisin you get from sherry.
Whether the finish is worth the price tag is up to you.

2005 Jean-Marc Pillot Chassagne-Montrachet Clos Saint Marc Les Vergers 1er Cru

My wine drinking friends know that I am biased toward specific wine growing regions, and that I do tend to prefer what I call the Teutonic belt of wine of Alsace, Germany, and Austria.   One wine growing region I would drink much more of, if I was in a higher tax bracket, is Burgundy.   The reds (Pinot Noir) are delicate and exquisite and command high prices, but so do their whites (Chardonnay).    Generally speaking, the whites tend to be more affordable than the reds, and I find them to be a bit more consistent.  

In addition to the cost of Burgundy, the other challenge is to remember the labels of the wines you have tried.  Burgundy labels are actually very informative, but unlike a so-called "marketing label", where you remember the color and catchy name, and perhaps the kangaroo or frog, you have to pay attention to all the words.  Part of this stems from the divisions of land, where historically, people have inherited very small plots of land that have continued to become divided as it is passed down from generation to generation.  Burgundy producers, therefore, often produce several wines, albeit in small quantities.  This is in contrast to Bordeaux, where a chateau will own large vineyards and typically will produce only a small number of wines in larger quantities.   

Chicago Cupcake Crawl

The cupcake craze may be petering out on the coasts, but if the continued openings of cupcake-centric bakeries (Cupcake Gallery, Sprinkles Cupcakes in March) are any indicator, the demand for adorable, perfectly ganached cakes is still going strong in Chicago. Woe to the cupcake lover who wants to sort out which of the myriad bakeries is worth their while! Until now, you were sadly adrift, alone in a sea of decadent buttercream. Not all chocolate cupcakes look alike, but who can you trust??

2002 Gustave Lorenz Altenberg de Bergheim Pinot Gris

Pinot Gris is the same grape as Italian Pinot Grigio, though the two could not be any more different.  Italian Pinot Grigio is typically a light, easy-to-drink wine, and many of you may have seen the very common Santa Margherita on the menu or in advertisements.   Pinot Grigio of Italy today seems to be causing the damage that blue bottle German Riesling caused a generation ago, where many people were scared off from drinking it even today, assuming that all of it is sweet and of poor quality, in spite of good examples.  This may explain why Oregonians call their product the French name, Pinot Gris, instead of Pinot Grigio. 

Formerly known as Tokay in the Alsace region in France, the name Pinot Gris is now used to eliminate confusion with the Hungarian dessert wine Tokaji.   Pinot Gris tends to be very viscous and often golden in color, yet very dry.  Gustave Lorenz makes an incredibly good Grand Cru product from the Altenberg de Bergheim vineyard, and their 2002 is drinking exceptionally well with notes of honey, meyer lemon, and coriander.  The last I looked Que Syrah Wines on Southport had a few bottles selling for $32.

Wine Dinners: Austrian Wine Night

A few weeks ago, I had a few people over for Austrian Wine Night, the second of a series of wine dinner parties to spotlight lesser-known regions that produce good quality wines.

We served an apple butternut squash soup, and for dinner, we had Wiener Schnitzel with potato salad and asparagus, along with pumpkin seed oil (an Austrian specialty) and a delicious rye bread from the Austrian Bakery in Lincoln Park.   I knew there was something missing, though, when I realized I forgot to add salt to the Wiener Schnitzel (sorry guests!).   

The dessert was an apple struedel, served with vanilla ice cream.   In addition to the main meal, in absence of an Austrian cheese, seemingly impossible to find, I served a creamy Bavarian Blue and a swiss cheese called "Hoch Ybring", a granular and nutty cheese with a rind washed in white wine from cheese guru Rolf Beeler.

Meringues: What to do with leftover egg whites

As I spend more time in the kitchen, I am trying to do a better job reducing the amount of waste.   It is almost inevitable for me to throw away leftover rosemary, parsley, and cilantro, and to dump the remaining whipping cream for that recipe requiring two tablespoons.  I've made ice cream now, roughly 7 or 8 times, and most recipes call for egg yolks.  What I normally do is dump out the egg whites, but in my last recipe, which called for five yolks, it seemed like a waste.  This time I decided to save the egg whites, and what better way to use them than make meringues.

Food Quotes: Miss Piggy

After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual "food" out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps.  ~Miss Piggy

2005 Rene Mure Tradition Muscat

Muscat from Alsace (technically and typically the Muscat Ottanel grape) is from the same family of sweet wines that some of you may have tasted, or at least have seen on the dessert menus, and these include the bubbly and refreshing Moscato d'Asti from the Piedmont region of Italy.  Not to be confused with Asti Spumanti, the bubbly Moscato d'Asti are frizzante wines (meaning very low carbonation such that only a standard cork is required), typically very low in alcohol, sweet and fruity, and a nice palate cleanser.    Like Riesling, Muscat can be made in a variety of styles, from bone-dry to very sweet.

Homemade Ice Cream

Owning an ice cream maker has to be one of the greatest simple pleasures in the kitchen.   The satisfaction derived from making your own ice cream rivals whatever you can get from an ice cream shop or the supermarket shelves.

I have a Cuisinart ice cream maker with a bowl filled with a gel that freezes overnight.   I've heard of the manual hand-crank ice cream makers, and while I'm charmed at the simplicity, it seems a bit too labor intensive for me.

Ria and Balsan at the Elysian Hotel

After months of anticipation, delays and rumors, the Elysian Hotel finally unveils two new restaurants this week. Ria is an upscale dinner-only concept with a focus on seafood, while sister restaurant Balsan is more casual, featuring a raw bar, wood-fired oven pizzas and housemade charcuterie. Both restaurants are on the third floor of the sparkling (literally) new Elysian Hotel, whose elegant European courtyard entrance is worth a detour by itself. Executive Chef Jason McLeod leads the helm for both restaurants, and has ample amounts of luxury hotel experience under his toque from San Diego's Grand Del Mar resort and Four Seasons. He is also wont to walking around with a cast-iron skillet of sizzling sausages. The rich, meaty smell was making heads swivel like a turntable.

So, were the restaurants worth the wait? Are hotels finally shedding their reputation for overpriced, stodgy dining and leading the way with revolutionary new restaurants? I dropped by the media preview on Monday night to check out the action.

Beating Back the Flu with Tea, Whiskey, Zinc and Soup

In a previous post we compared the ChefsChoice SmartKettle to a sous vide machine. While it's fine for cooking proteins, it really excels at setting the right temp for tea. I can say that I now prefer my tea at 178º any hotter and it's uncomfortable. I am getting more and more snooty as time goes by. I guess when you're home, sick and curmudgeony any creature comforts are appreciated.

St. Teresa Food Pantry is Running Out of Food

 St Teresa of Avila is a food pantry at 1037 W. Armitage (between Kenmore and Seminary).  Relatively speaking it is a small food pantry.  The food pantry is supported by members of the parish, fund raisers, and a few “friends” in the neighborhood.  On the first and third Fridays of the month they serve a freshly cooked, hot sit-down dinner to about 120 people.  On the second, fourth and fifth Fridays (when there are 5 Fridays in a month) they distribute bags of groceries. This has grown from about 85 bags/week.  Last week we distributed 140 bags.  For them, this is a record that comes as no surprise with the growth and increased need at food pantries.

However this food pantry is empty.  They are down to $800 which is not enough for even one week’s groceries.  Here is how you can help, if you are so inclined.

2007 Chateau Ste. Michelle and Dr. Loosen Eroica Riesling

As Americans are now waking up to Riesling after years of bad blue-bottle cheap, sweet German Riesling, this Washington State Riesling has outdone itself for the reasonable price of $20 per bottle.   Ernst Loosen of  Dr. Loosen, a well-known German producer , decided to team up with Chateau Ste. Michelle of Washington State, the largest producer of Riesling apparently in the world, to produce a quality semi-sweet (or if you prefer, call it off-dry) Riesling.  

The Eroica had wonderful, mineral acidity, and a tartness that gave a green apple flavor.  The wine somewhat reminded me of a German Spatlase.  Many publications consider it to be America's best Riesling.  To be honest, I haven't tried enough American Rieslings to offer an expert opinion, but I'll take their word.

Tokyo for Foodies: Kawagoe and the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

Fourth and final post in a series

Further afield: places just a short train ride outside of Tokyo

Kawagoe

Inspired by this NYT article, I ventured to Kawagoe for a day, a town nicknamed "Little Edo" for Tokyo's ancient name. Many of the town's old kura (warehouses) survived WW2 bombing, and thus, you can get a glimpse of what the Tokyo of yore looked like. 

Today, the kura are used for retail space, and you can get a variety of candies, crackers, pickles and kimonos by peeking under the half-curtains. Kawagoe's most prominent agricultural crop is sweet potatoes and yams, so you can find all manner of candies, crackers and sake made from the sweet potato. I promptly snapped up a few bags of candied sweet potatoes, seaweed crackers and fruit-shaped cookies.

Ugly Christmas Sweater Party December 10th

For the first time ever, your favorite Chicago web publishers are teaming up to organize one big community meetup to celebrate the holidays. You are invited.

The party is being held at Black Rock Bar on Thursday, December 10th starting at 7:00 PM. The party’s free. The drinks are not, though there will be specials. Bring yourself, your friends, and the ugliest Christmas sweater you can find.

Note: We are looking for local charity partners for the event. If you know someone at a good one, hit us up!

Help spread the word by sharing this event!