Mug-o-meal

Mug one: delicious chili
Mug two: assam tea

I made a gigantic pot of chili to refill the freezer stash. Not all of it went into the freezer, though. Some, for example, went into the biggest mug we own. Then it went into my belly. Then I went into the bed. It was a productive weekend.

Better idea

Use the last bits of the season's first asparagus in scrambled eggs with leftover couscous. Saute asparagus pieces quickly in butter; pour in beaten egg, a little salt, pepper, and couscous; stir frequently over medium-low heat until eggs are cooked through. Eat with assam tea.

The asparagus was perfect. Other vegetables would be good here too, though. I remember making a huge mass of scrambled eggs last summer at Chrissy's in Santa Cruz. The addendum for that one was fresh farmer's market tomato. So you can use vegetables that disintegrate into their juice as well as vegetables that remain stationary. Oh, tomato. Now I suddenly wish the summer veg were out. All the spring stuff will be here soon. It was seventy freaking degrees fahrenheit today, for instance.

I need to remember the grain-in-eggs trick more often. (Not that couscous is actually a grain.) It's a very good idea when your refrigerator otherwise looks like a poorly stocked condiment aisle.

All oatmeal all the time

Dinner: plain, chamomile, clementine.

Breakfast: chopped dried apricots, cranberries, raw cashews, honey, assam.

I like two breakfasts

Here's the kind of thing I generally make myself for breakfast: fruit cut up in a bowl. Maybe I won't even cut up the fruit if I got up late. Maybe I'll have fruit and a piece of toast. The fruit can be anything ripe: this time it was an apricot and a handful of strawberries. I almost always have tea. Tea is great even if it barely cools down enough for me to drink a quarter cup before I leave. If I got up late enough not to boil a kettle, I might have iced tea, but it's clearly not what I actually want in the morning. I never make coffee except on the weekends.

Here's the kind of thing John makes for me if he can't sleep anymore and gets up early to exercise and shower and have a plate full of delicious breakfast ready for me by the time I get downstairs. Obviously this doesn't happen all the time, but it's really nice when it does. This time he made me an omelet full of lots of red pepper and onion plus a cup of tea. Tea tea. I even had time to drink it.

I like eating in the mornings.

Home again, home again, jiggety oof

Oh man. John and I got up at THREE this morning to make planes on time. That's three central, which equals one California. I am pretty broken. I don't know if I even have the energy to talk about what we ate yesterday.

Eleven City Diner

John wanted diner food after getting restaurant burnout. Clearly we could have gotten on the train and found a more authentic greasy spoon experience, but we had plans later and in short ended up walking through the entire loop to eat here instead.

There was a pickle and green tomato plate on the menu: how awesome is that? I almost ordered it even though I was otherwise having french toast. The french toast plate was massive, covered in fruit and toasty coconut. It was really rich and yet I ate the whole thing. John had eggs and hash browns, like you do. We also had some really excellent coffee. Apparently in Chicago the good coffee is either Intelligentsia or Lavazza; this coffee was Lavazza. It tasted like grain. I meant to buy a pound to bring back to the office, but only remembered at 4:30 in the airport. Perhaps The Internet can help me.

Essentially, this was good brunch but too expensive to justify often.


Old Jerusalem

Later on we went with my friend Nicky and her person Trevor to the Old Town/Wells St. art festivals, where we mashed our way through crowds of drunk 20 year olds clutching plastic cups. Everything smelled sickly sweet and fermented with spilled cheap beer. It was kind of like I imagine the smell of the middle ages, but with less excreta. When fatigue set in, we decided to go to Old Jerusalem. This turned out to be a good plan: a plan full of falafel and pita and and yet more (unremarkable) iced tea.

I'm not quite sure what to say about the food here, since I was paying a lot more attention to hanging out with people I've barely seen in ten years. It was fine. The vegetarian plate was big, full of tabbouleh and a cucumber salad and falafel and clearly house-made hummus and baba. I also find that in Chicago you get pita sandwiches formed differently than most of the rest of the country: instead of rolling everything up in lavash, or cutting a pita in half and stuffing each half, they cut a strip off one margin of a pita and stuff it from there. It works pretty well as long as you have stable pita.

Afterward we had to plead stupidly early flight and go collapse. Boo!


Today I am home. I took a nap. I washed my face. My eyes are burning.

I walked in the door, unpacked, and had a glass of our iced tea. The best thing about this tea is how little you need to use: one cup needs only five or six pearls. Plus you can then reuse them to brew five or six cups. If this weren't the case, I don't know how I'd have ever justified buying them in the first place. Mm, jasmine.

Chicago food frenzy!!

We haven't had much access to kitchens, so here's the restaurant rundown:

My Thai

We went here for dinner our first night, after getting up at 4:30 CA time to catch the plane and etc. With the time change, this ended up sort of being lunch. So. I got panang chicken and John got tofu with pan-fried noodles. We also both got massive glasses of iced tea which turned out to be powdered. Besides that, I was pretty happy. The panang was more heavily spiced and peanut-intense than my normal panang at Siam Royal. It was also thicker. This wasn't a bad thing, though; everything was perfectly tasty, as well as reasonably cheap.

Brian's Juice Bar and Deli

This beats both California and NYC for a cheap falafel sandwich: $3.75. They do premake and microwave the falafels, though, so they're soft and not crispy in your sandwich. Oh well. It still tasted good. I also got a raspberry smoothie, which cost more than the sandwich. Normally smoothies are not my thing, but for some reason I've been all "hey, juice! Maybe I should get a juice. Is there a juice bar around here?" lately. Maybe that's why the smoothie tasted so great. It was also full of crunchy raspberry seeds.

Lou Malnati's

Obligatory Chicago pizza. We even got an obligatory deep dish instead of a thin crust, which I prefer. One medium pizza with spinach cost $14.45. That's more than enough for two of us, due to aforementioned deepdishedness of said pizza. Compare that to your terrible, scraggy, gross, really expensive pizza, California! The pizza itself was fairly sweet, thanks to the tons of actual tomatoes across the top. My only complaint is that the crust was too buttery. We also had gargantuan 32-oz iced teas.

Chicago Diner

I went up the train line to check out neighborhoods, but I specifically got off at Addison to come here for lunch. So ok, Halsted? I could live here just fine. For one thing, I found a massive thrift warehouse with a complete book section in back. Silicon Valley really makes me miss decent thrift shopping. ANYWAY. So the diner itself is a Chicago vegetarian institution, full of hipsters and apparently featuring a nice patio that I didn't see. The waiter dude actually looked me in the eye and was actively friendly! That was nice. I had a grilled cheese with avocado and a cup of pea soup. Here it's not only possible but expected that you might order such a sandwich with non-dairy cheeze, and they make sure to mention the option. I had dairy, but still. Nice! The sandwich was huge and slippery, full of sprouts and tomato and raw onion trying to escape from every angle. The soup was also really good, with a not-quite-smooth texture and a flavor suggesting not only split but also fresh peas involved. I also had iced tea: it was standard good brewed iced tea. Afterward I went up the street and tried on shoes.

India House
Perhaps we are totally spoiled by places like Shalimar, but I was only moderately impressed by India House. The naan was a little too fake-buttery, like a flat, homemade version of cardboard-tube crescent rolls. The baigan bhartha was nice and smooth and peanuty; the palak paneer was a little harsh. It wasn't too spicy, but the taste of the greens was a little aggressive and bitter. Maybe they were using some greens stronger than spinach? It could have been listed as saag paneer, I suppose. The iced tea, though, was by far the best all week. It was clearly some kind of fruit tea with floral tones. John guessed peach. It could easily have been peach. I don't really care though, because it was good.

Clearly it's been iced tea week, a.k.a. summer. On that note, tea ratings!

On a scale of 1=bad to 5=good:
My Thai: 1
Chicago Diner: 3
Lou Malnati's: 3.5 (the .5 is for gigantic quantity)
India House: 5

Fortunately, when I go home on Sunday it'll be to a squat little pitcher of iced jasmine tea. Thanks, foresight!