Avo

My parents came down to Chicago this weekend to spend some time with DRJ and I. We hit up the Frank Lloyd Write home and studio and had some good food. They took us to Blackbird Restaurant for an anniversary present.

The decor is minimalistic - mostly white with some grey. The kitchen is open. One can watch the 6 or so chefs at work in the back of the house. The music varied from down tempo electric to eclectic pop. The music was never too loud that it interfered with conversation. It was nice to see a wide range of ages in the place. From 20 something hipsters to those in there 60’s.

Here’s what we had:

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Amuse: a piece of fish with olives and some kind of cream sauce. It didn’t really do much for me.

Appitizers - We split the following:

braised octopus with fresh shell beans, smoked paprika, zucchini bread and pluots
This was ok, but had kind of an odd taste that didn’t completely work together. If you got everything together, it almost tasted like barnyard. It was odd. DRJ and I both thought that independantly - I had thought perhaps I was crazy.

crispy confit of swan creek farm suckling pig with sour cherries, roasted chiogga beets, housemade prosciutto and local cress
This was great. The sour cherries with the pork was perfect. The chiogga beets were almost a bit radish like in texture.

I wanted to get this, but no one was else was that into it so I passed:
crispy veal sweetbreads with nichols farm baby leeks, fresh green almonds, puffed wild rice and remoulade

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For our main course we had:

Mom:
grilled california sturgeon with oyster mushrooms, spring peas, rye gnocci, guanciale and mustard
This was great. They grilled the firm stugeon over hardwood and it really tasted like it. The rye gnocci was great with the broth. I think this paired the best with the wine.

Dad:
seared loin of venison with black mission figs, sugar snaps, bacon panisse and lime salt
He didn’t share any, but said it was good. It looked fantastic.

DRJ:
A dish with a fish called cobia (a jack type fish) with celery spaetzle. It isn’t on the online menu any longer.
Pretty good. The spaetle was really interesting.

Me:
braised organic pork belly with chinese broccoli, scarlet turnips, local cherries and bbq consomme
Fantastic. The pork belly melted in the mouth. The consume was a perfect bbq sauce taste with nice acidity to balance the fatty meat. The cherries and broccoli perfectly book-ended the dish.

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Desert was perhaps the most fun part of the evening.
Mom:
marcona almond panna cotta with nougatine, blueberries and chamomile
I didn’t get a taste of this, but mom said it was great.

DRJ:
mission fig beignet with black raspberries, butterscotch and bacon ice cream
This was a standout. The bacon ice cream tasted exactly like bacon. Uber bacon actually. By itself, it was bizarre. With the figs, raspberries (they were actually yellow ones) and beignet, it formed a perfect bite of fruit, smoke, sweet. Really a nice example of how flavors can be more than just a sum of their parts.

Me:
parmesan toast with local peaches and olive oil ice cream
This was really good. I wouldn’t have ever thought of this, but the salty parmesan paired with perfectly ripe peaches worked. The olive oil was really light in the ice cream so it tied it all together. I’d try to make this at home. I think it was a brioche bread that was almost carmelized with cheeze. Delish.

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Parting gift:
A little anise/fruit jelly - Meh. I’m not a huge anise fan, so this didn’t thrill me.

Plum Cookie - This was pretty cool. It was a tiny tiny little ball, almost like a mini beignet (size of a gum drop) with a ittty bitty piece of plum stuff in it. While the bite was small, the flavor was huge. It filled your mouth with tastes of a plum bar with a cream cheese filling. Pretty amazing how such a small thing can have such a huge impact. Really neat.

Lavender truffle with bee pollen - I think it was milk chocolate. It melted in your mouth. After you swallowed, one was left with a really pleasent sweet lavender taste. Subtle, but very nice ending to a great meal.

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For wine, I picked this:
‘02 Domaine de Beaurenard Rasteau
I was trying to find something in the lower price range since mom and dad were paying and they like wine, but aren’t really into it. I think it went best with the sturgeon. It had nice red berry fruit on the nose with a bit of earth. Palate was cherries, earth, a bit of cedar on the mid-palate. Nice firm tannins. Worked very well with food.

We had a really nice meal. Every dish had something about it that you couldn’t get elsewhere. The service was awesome. Our waiter really steered us towards what he thought were the most memorable items. Honestly, the prices were quite good. For 4 people, you could spend almost as much elsewhere in Chicago and not get food nearly so carefully prepared/well thought out. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

I just witnessed a guy walk into a bathroom stall wearing safety glasses.  Makes me wonder what happened in the past to warrant such precaution.  Perhaps an uncled died as a result of a malfunctioning bidet.

So I built a new computer yesterday.  Its pretty much teh awesome.  One thing I neglected to plan for was the need of a floppy drive when installing Windows on a raid.  I don’t know about everyone else, but floppy drives have pretty much left my life for good. 

So, I’m sitting at the Windows install screen looking at a message that basically says, “HAHA, welcome back to the early nineties!  You don’t have one of these do you?”  To which I answered, “I hate you.” 

So what does one do?  One looks at his awesome laptop and notices that it doesn’t have a floppy drive.  One looks at his PC graveyard and realizes none of those old machines probably work enough to download the driver and put it on a floppy.  I decided to run to Best Buy and purchase a USB floppy.  Then I can make the floppy on my laptop, and use an old internal floppy to install the drivers. 

On to the BB.  I ask you dear reader, “How much would you spend on a USB floppy drive?”  Its something that is nice to have, but you probably won’t use much.  I put my guess at $10, $15.  I was thinking, even if its $20, its late and I want to proceed with my install.  I get a young gentleman to show me do the correct aisle.  $56.99.  I kid you not.  $56.99 for a USB floppy drive.  I punched the young gentleman in the neck.  I purchased a 10 pack of 3.5 1.44MB IBM formatted disks and left in disgust.

Not to be thwarted, I cobbled together a zombie of a computer (or an inferi, for those of you who are reading Harry Potter).  Luckily it had a working windows installation on it.  Put a floppy disk in the drive and thought my troubles were over.  Guess who’s got a dead floppy drive?  Its me.  In a fit of rage I start tearing my office apart looking for a sharp implement with which I could end it all and came across another floppy drive.  Mercifully, this one worked.  The install proceeded.  Cherubim and Seraphim filled the heavens with a joyful chorus.

My new PC is up and running and I must say, games have never looked this good.  I am only having some trouble getting my 5.1 surround sound headset working with the onboard 7.1 sound card.  But I’m confident my new PC and I will reach and agreement soon. 

Back from Portugal and struggling to get back at everything.  We had a great time and I’ll post a trip summary and pictures this weekend. 

I’m leaving for Portugal for 2 weeks on Sunday.  I hate packing for trips.  I like to keep my luggage down to what can be carried on a plane, so its always a bit challenging.  In general, my rule of thumb is take half as many clothes you think you need, and twice as much money.  Its worked out so far, however it always seems like you’re bringing to few clothes - but you’re not. 

We’ll be spending a week based in Lisbon, taking day trips to locations around the area.  Then we head south to the Algarve region for 3 days or so.  Then up north to the Duoro river area, where we’ll rent a car and tour the wine country.  We end up in Porto for a couple days to check out the port wine industry.  Then back to Lisbon to return.

It has been a while since T and I have traveled internationally together, so I’m really excited.  We travel well together.  Our digital camera has been a bit flakey, so I hope it lasts. 

I’d hate to be the guy who has to split peas at the factory, what a drag!

My aunt-in-law made a ham for easter.  She’s not a huge fan of leftovers, so along with some sandwich fixings, I made her give me the ham bone.  I had extra onions, parsley, thyme, from my meal on Saturday so I just needed some celery, carrots and split peas for some soup.

Hit the store and started implementing the recipe from Joy of Cooking (Love this book just because it has pretty much everything you can think of).  One problem is that my ham bone was quite large and wasn’t completely covered by the amount of liquid the recipe called for.  I just rotated the bone every once and a while.  Next time, I’m going to make a double batch - that would be perfect for a decent size ham bone. 

So, simmered the peas (who splits them, I wonder) with the bone for an hour.  Added garlic, diced onion, carrots, celery along with a bouquet garni of bay leaf, parsley, thyme, pepper corns, cloves and simmered for another hour still everything was the proper texture.  Salt and pepper and it was done. 

Results were good.  Tasted like nice split pea soup.  Didn’t control my heat well enough so a little bit got burnt to the bottom, but it didn’t change the flavor at all.  Dumped it into my Cambro plastic (these are great, takes temps from -40 to 210 no problem) and into the fridge.  I’ll freeze it tonight in portioned containers and have quick meals for a bit.

Split pea soup… looks kinda gross, but tastes great.

Trying out ScribeFire (per Firethorn)

Ok, the title may get you thinking about haute cuisine - el Bulli or Alinea perhaps. This is something much less. We had some left over hard boiled eggs. Tator, Justin and I made a bunch of flavored fleur de sel a while back and so I was trying different salts on hard boiled eggs. The magic salt was the vanilla salt. After some time sitting, I think the vanilla salt is getting really good. I put some on a hard boiled egg, and it tasted like a custard! Makes sense, but most of the time you think of deviled, egg-salad, etc. It was a fun simple way of experimenting.

On Saturday, T and I had a movie day. It was nice to spend the day watching old movies and relaxing. For a meal, I did a slight modification on something I read in the Journal. I made a white wine risotto with escarole and tilapia poached in wine and herbs. The risotto had a nice flavor, but I think I left it too al dente. It wasn’t too bad, but another 5 minutes would have probably been better. I was worried about turning it into mush, so I err’d on the side of al dente.

The tilapia wasn’t fantastic. Its cheap and available, but poaching isn’t the best treatment. I had a feeling this was going to be the case, but I was feeling cheap and didn’t feel like splurging on halibut (which would have been much better) and the salmon didn’t look very good.

I cooked and served the dishes with a Picpoul from the Coteaux du Langudoc region in France. T and I get this wine quite often. Its affordable (9.99) and quite tasty. If you haven’t tried this variety, I’d recommend it. Its aroma has pears and pineapple which also show up on the palate. Nice round mouth feel and decent finish and has pleasant acidity that makes it go well with food.

Was channel surfing last night. The following programs were neighbors during the same hour.

• channel A = Columbine: Final Report
• channel B = Reality show about lesbian personal trainer having a slumber party that involved shopping for adult toys.

Seems there must be a lesson to be learned here…