Sunday, July 18, 2010

It's All About the Food, Full Stop.

By now it should be pretty clear that we are crazy about food. We plan our days around what we're going to eat. Entire vacations have been given over to culinary gluttony (Exhibit A: Napa Valley and Tokyo). We don't like "foodies" to describe ourselves because being a "foodie" implies that we like haute cuisine and trendy restaurants. I think "equal opportunity eater" is more accurate because we are just as likely to enjoy food trucks as we are Michelin-starred restaurants.

Let me give you an example of how we anchor our weekends around our search to source delicious foods. Last Saturday, we made our bi-weekly pilgrimage to the Green City Market. The GCM is one of the largest and well-known farmer's markets in the country, and thousands of people visit every Saturday to enjoy the locally grown (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin) produce and fruits, chef demonstrations, and a host of local bakeries and usually some live music. It is the place to be on Saturdays morning.

We then wended our way, munching on ridiculously flavorful Flaming Fury Peaches from Michigan, through the free Lincoln Park Zoo, the adjoining Lincoln Park Arboretum, and then walking back along Lake Michigan. We had a BBQ to get ready for!


We headed to Oak Park to our friends' Lolita and Lee A.'s house to get ready for a BBQ! Lucky for us, they had bought enough massive sausage from a very special meat vendor to feed a small Third World country. We promised not to divulge their source of this divine meat, but heavens, it was delicious. I believe we did not stop eating from 3pm until around 7pm.


We were so exhausted from all this eating that we fell into a true food coma when we returned home. The next Sunday morning, Daniel decided to make fried chicken from the Zatamaran's box with questionable expiration dates.


Is there a better way to start Sunday morning than homemade fried chicken? Well, maybe if there was a congo line, but incremental added value. We ran some errands and came back home to get ready for the World Cup Finals between Spain and Netherlands. Since we weren't partisan to either country, Daniel wore this shirt to Old Town Social to watch the game in a yuppie crowd of Chicago-ites.


For Sunday dinner, we biked to Takashi, where I was hoping that their noodle brunch would still be available, but didn't. SUCK. Funny enough, we had gone to a restaurant that had been Takashi's predecessor when we first started dating called Scylla. We had not been impressed, but turns out that the chef of Scylla was none other than Stephanie Izard, one of the winners of Top Chef. We tried their homemade tofu (okay), their chicken hot pot (decent), the sweetbread (good), the yellowtail (good), and their chocolate chewy cake (okay). Lucky for us, it rained all the way back and Daniel had to survive me shooting Looks of Death in my rain-soaked dress pedaling furiously in the rain.


Between last weekend and this past Thursday, I was away for business and sadly missed the Green City Market's Chef BBQ, where all the great chefs of Chicago come together for a knock-your-socks-off BBQ in Lincoln Park. You name the restaurant (e.g. Bristol, Lula's Cafe, Peninsula, Rick Bayless, Four Seasons), they were there. Because of weather issues, my flight landed in O'Hare after the event ended, but Daniel managed to smuggle all of the dishes for me to try at home. I'd like to think that his past life as a spy assisted in the food collection efforts. The picture below is that of large glass dining room with EVERY SQUARE INCH covered with food.


I had a bite of each before I passed out from another food coma. Daniel spent the rest of the evening sprawled on the bed complaining "I'm so full! I'm so full" and rubbing his belly. The next morning was still a work day for me (Friday), so Daniel made me a coffee with cinnamon art and a delicious scrambled egg breakfast with a beet salad and capers. Whoever said that Chinese husbands cook well was absolutely right about this stereotype.

Saturday morning, we biked to the Lincoln Park Farmer's Market on Division and Armitage, one we'd never been and were eager to explore. We were fortunate to find some delicious Mirai corn, the kind that are so sweet you can eat them rare. They are nature's candies and we were on a mission to find some. We actually procured some full samples and ate them animal-style while we strolled around the market.

We also bought blueberries, Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, and dried morel mushrooms. Daniel got a few compliments on his threadless t-shirt, but I thought mine was just as clever.
After the farmers market, it was another pilgrimage to the Cheese Warehouse with our friend Lolita A. It was screaming hot this past weekend, so we stopped to get flavored snow cones. Lolita got her favorite, banana, while Dan and I got fruit punch. It made our tongues bright red, and we spent a good 10 minutes sticking our tongues out at each other like teenagers.
It was way too hot during the day to do anything outside, so Dan and I ended up enjoying the creature comforts of AC until the evening, when we made our way to the KenmoreLive studio on Wells Street to eat free samples of ice cream samples from Vosges Chocolat (flavors: chocolate jalapeno, curry, and vanilla bean, chocolate nut), watch Mindy Segal from Bleeding Heart Bakery make a bourbon-caramel and butter-thyme topping for ice cream, and eat endless amounts of free sugar. Legal chemical highs are nice.

Sunday morning, Dan made breakfast again with a knock-out truffle oil infused scrambled egg with chiffon-ed-basil, "bandaged" cheddar, quartered Sun-Gold cherry tomatoes, cheddar sausages, accompanied by a fresh burrata with sea salt, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. It is summer in your mouth. Is your mouth watering yet?

Daniel did some surgical work on a torn part of our couch while we stayed indoors to stay cool. We did run errands to Costco and Target, and it seemed like all of Chicago had descended upon these stores. I definitely do not see signs of lessened consumer spending when I go to these places. For dinner, Dan busted out with Thai basil rice with shrimp. Now you see why I've gained 5 lbs since moving to Chicago? Not that I'm complaining about the food.

2 comments:

  1. Team Williams is missing Chicago for July 4th with good company and food. Glad you guys are carrying on... but really wish I was there for the farmers' market. The San Diego one is mediocre at best. Miss you guys!

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  2. one word. YUM!! next time you guys are back, can you have dan just make us food? no more eating out! =P

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