I have a little bit of a qualm about the idea of upscale Southern, I think there was upscale Southern dining which is largely extinct and there is downscale Southern which is wildly popular in many forms and then there is an attempt to take the latter and serve it like the former. This is a bad thing if it just means charging more for a tamed version, like upscale barbecue or Cajun, but a good thing if it means taking the produce and flavors of the region and treating them with the respect we now pay other regions— using them freshly and seasonally and with respect for time-tested traditions. On the whole Big Jones, a “coastal Southern” restaurant in Andersonville, seems to be oriented to that better sense of upscale Southern dining, and with at least the start of some sophistication in that direction. The menu is still somewhat short and limited to pretty familiar things— gumbo, pulled pork, steak (!)— but maybe, over time, it will dig deeper into Southern traditions and become a Chicago equivalent of some of the innovative new Southern restaurants.

Very traditional start (because it started the same way as my recent Southern party!)— pimento cheese spread on a cheese biscuit.

This was the best dish of the night– a really tasty wilted salad with tasso ham, and pickled yellow beans. Fresh, tart, full of flavor, this is the sort of dish I imagined I would have (and didn’t, really) when I went to Vie some months back.

I doubt this pulled pork ever saw anything resembling a smoker, but very good when you combined it with the rather vaguely-named “Carolina sauce,” a green dressing that might have been Green Goddess, or perhaps something with mirliton, which appears multiple times elsewhere on the menu). The slaw that came with it was missing some oomph, though, needed mustard or vinegar or something:

I was a little surprised that a Southern menu offered little that would have flown with the younger son, and the presence of a stereotypical kids’ menu (chicken tenders!) was not the help to this parent that was intended. At least the mac and cheese was freshly and impressively made.

Fried chicken salad, untried by me.

A nice, authentic if not exactly world-changing gumbo, plated artfully with a pyramid of rice topped by an okrapus.

The bill was a very reasonable $60ish (the mac and cheese was comped, not for any fault that we saw, possibly for the fact that they saw me taking pictures….)

Big Jones
5347 N. Clark
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-5725

Tags: andersonville, big jones, southern

Director’s cut version of post starts here.  So here’s a dilemma. (If the following seems too woolly/inside-basebally for you, skip to the picture and the shorter version of the post.)

If you’re reading this you probably know about LTHForum (Chicago food chat site I co-founded) and the Great Neighborhood Restaurants awards (also started mostly by me), which are designed to call attention to, well, any kind of good restaurant, but with a special love for the little ethnic place that tries harder than the other 3 places just like it within a block, and produces something really special.

For instance, Cemitas Puebla, formerly Taqueria Puebla, on North Ave. In fact it figured rather prominently in philosophical discussions we had about the awards, especially in regards to whether we should apply tougher standards on places the more money they charged, or whether there was some absolute standard of deliciousness and that was all that mattered, money or class didn’t enter into it. Me, I took the practical argument that if Rick Bayless makes a Mexican sandwich (which is what a cemitas is) and charges $13.50 for it, you expect it to be made freshly of the highest quality ingredients, and so that’s merely the baseline for him, but if a neighborhood place charges $5 and yet manages to import its cheese and roast its chipotles and cook everything up fresh (as Cemitas Puebla does), then it gets credit for all that going-the-extra-mile-ness compared to the other places serving the same stuff in a more careless fashion. So yeah, Cemitas Puebla stands out for doing all that…

And then today I go to another cemitas place from Puebla, and they do it all too. In fact, better than the last meal I had at Cemitas Puebla, not that it’s not still an estimable place. It’s striking, in fact, how similar the two places are, not just the cemitas but the other things they have, like chalupas and Tacos Arabes, all of which must be typical for Pueblo. But now I wonder, did we give a lot of credit to Cemitas Puebla for doing things freshly and getting the right ingredients from back home, when in fact that’s what any respectable place of this kind would do? Did we give it extra credit… for our ignorance?

While you contemplate that deep question, I’ll let you feast on a picture of the cemitas from Cemitas China Poblana:

Shorter version of post starts here. This is a milanesa, that is, a very thin breaded steak, cooked up fresh as I sat there, in a particular kind of crusty Mexican bun (quite nice), with Pueblan cheese, avocado, roasted chipotle, grilled onions, and— the little leaf— a distinctly floral-medicinal herb called papalo, which they told me is actually grown locally during this time of the year, imported from Mexico in other seasons. They (or rather the woman there; I never heard the male cook say a word) said they also change the weekend specials based on seasonality as well— for instance, making chile en nogada, aka stuffed chiles in walnut sauce (a dish that RST once rhapsodized about when it was made at a now-closed Oaxacan place), in the fall when they have fresh peaches. (I didn’t ask why they weren’t making it right now with fresh peaches, and where it is exactly that peaches are in season in October.)

What’s with the China in the name? The menu explains it, there’s some historical tale of a baby kidnapped by pirates, of Asian descent, who wound up being raised in Puebla, circa 1600-1700, and so the place is named for her and her good works.

So here’s a place that looks like nothin’, it’s about six feet wide and 20 feet long, half a dozen cheap little booths, enough heavy-duty tile on the wall to be a bus station bathroom, and yet the people in there— a couple? Not sure— are in there sweating their butts off making not only the freshest, tastiest cemitas they can, but using local produce and changing their weekend menu with the seasons. Wow. If I had an award to give, I’d give them one. They deserve it as much as Cemitas Puebla, not to take anything away from them. But will a hole in the wall like this in an invisible neighborhood like Brighton Park ever make it onto anybody’s radar, the way a place like Cemitas Puebla, which is soon to be on Diners, Dives & Drive-Ins, just barely has thanks to the attention paid it on LTHForum? Hard to imagine, but if you’re ever anywhere near 42nd and Archer, check ’em out. You won’t be sorry, though you may be lonely there.

Cemitas China Poblana
4231B S. Archer
Chicago IL
773-847-8048

Incidentally, the awning says they’re also in Los Angeles, so presumably the Chicago folks are related to somebody who has a similar cemitas business out there.

Here were the restaurants within walking distance of our motel in Springfield: Applebee’s, IHOP, Outback, Red Lobster, Panera, Long John Silver’s, Bob Evans, Jimmy John’s, Smokey Bones, Hooters, Cheddar’s, and Carlos O’Kelly’s.

In other words, at first glance you might think a visit to Springfield is a journey into deepest Generica. But in fact Springfield has a surprisingly healthy (well, in one sense of the term, anyway) local food culture, and given that it boasts several of the state’s major tourist attractions, the person who finds himself there anyway can certainly eat interestingly, if not exactly well, there.

The occasion was a history long weekend for ourselves and the kids. Within a couple of days we managed to see Lincoln’s log cabin days in the rustic, WPA-era reconstruction in New Salem, trace his life and presidency at the high tech, Disneyfied (but quite captivating) Abraham Lincoln Museum, see his tomb in the classically grandiose, Gilded Age memorial at Oak Ridge cemetery, and walk through his rather overdecorated Victorian home (as so often, it’s the most modest and homey historical site that gives you the real lump in the throat, as you think… that’s the desk where he sat and wrote his side of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that’s the house he said goodbye to as he went off to become the Lincoln of history).

Oh, and we saw Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House, an odd man out in an otherwise Lincolncentric weekend (though there is the connection of Lincoln Logs), but absolutely worth the tour for one of Wright’s most exquisite, Arts-and-Crafts-meets-Shinto-temple spiritual architecture experiences. And on the way back, we visited Cahokia, once the largest city in North America (this was about 1200 A.D.), and still an impressive mound of earth which manages to evoke, despite encroachment by modernity on every side, what a thriving mesoamerican village on the outskirts of East St. Louis might have been like.

But the mention of spiritual experiences naturally will bring to mind the fact that Springfield is the birthplace of the corn dog, so let me turn now to food. Things we ate in Springfield:

Gabatoni’s— Saputo’s is the Italian place people usually talk about, and some place called Vic’s usually scores highest for pizza in local polls, but this also received high marks, so we gave it a try. It’s a perfect south-side Vito & Nick’s-type pizza place, undisturbed 60s-style Eyetalian decor,

very good cracker-crust thin pizza,

and waitstaff that treats you like you’ve been coming in since you were a kid. Part of the reason I suspect that they treat you that way is because they’re largely undiscovered by out of towners, so be among the first– and treat ‘em nicely back.

300 E Laurel St
Springfield, IL 62703
(217) 522-0371

Mel-O-Cream— Some months back I had an outstanding seasonal-local-donut experience at the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance presentation on midwestern sweets; one of the talks was on Sweetwater Donuts in Kalamazoo, and the highlight by far of the assortment brought down for us to try was donut holes made with bits of real Michigan cherries. I had no expectation that Mel-O-Cream, which noted donutologist Vital Info long ago had ranked as merely a middling donut mini-chain, would offer an experience to rival that– but then I saw peach donuts on offer, and grabbed the three they had as quickly as I could. Real peach chunks in season in cake donut batter— maybe Mel-O-Cream only goes from good to great for a few short weeks each summer when these peach donuts are in season, but if you have a chance, this is a donut almost worth the drive on its own.

(Various locations, which Cathy2 indefatigably catalogued here. Note that they’re open 6 to noon only.)

Cozy Dog— Inventor of the corn dog, I agree that this center for Route 66 fandom could use a dog that didn’t, as JeffB observed, taste so much of liquid smoke and chemicals, but it’s still pretty fine anyway.

But as Vital Info noted, this is also a first-rate old school burger place, slapping fresh meat on the grill and cooking up fresh-cut fries; I took his advice and had the greasy all-meat chili on the burger and it was a first-rate dogwagon meal unchanged from 75 years ago.

2935 S 6th St
Springfield, IL 62703
(217) 525-1992
www.cozydogdrivein.com

Coney Island— Speaking of chili from 75 years ago, this spot downtown has a great old “Since 1919” sign; the interior, alas, is redone, but the food seems unchanged, and here too a dog with all-meat chili and onions on it seemed like a perfectly preserved silent-movie-era meal.

219 S 5th St
Springfield, IL 62701
(217) 528-1193

Sgt. Pepper’s Cafe— I have to admit that the “horseshoe,” Springfield’s local specialty consisting of meat of your choice on toast, covered in French fries and a sharp cheddar sauce (traditionally tinged with mustard), sounded like bad drunk food to me. I had planned to accidentally forget to try one, but a comedy of errors trying to find a place that was actually open for lunch on Sunday put us at this Beatle-themed place where nothing sounded all that great. So I decided, might as well try one. And you know what? It was horrifying. It was a nightmarish culinary clusterfark of glop, rapidly cooling and setting like epoxy on my plate faster than I could have shoveled it into an undiscerning, alcoholically insensate mouth. Really, the vilest thing I have had his year, I have more sense than that even when I’m drunk, and yet people were eating it in the cold light of day.

Oh, but you didn’t have it at D’Arcy’s Pint, you say, or whatever place you think has the good ones. I grant you that Sgt. Pepper’s may have been a bad one, but nothing about what I had suggests that a good one is even possible. And if it is, someone else will be the one to discover it, not me.

3141 Baker Dr
Springfield, IL 62703
(217) 525-5939

Tags: abraham lincoln, corn dog, hamburger, horseshoe, springfield

Thanks to Helen at Menu Pages, my latest double linker. Who knew that posting about Wauconda was one of the secrets of blog success?

Elsewhere in the journalismosphere, Slate has a piece about cooking from a mid-60s Vincent Price cookbook, full of funny ha-ha surprise that Price’s recipes don’t contain human brains and the like. Apparently no one but me remembers any more that in addition to being a horror movie ham, Price was quite the culture vulture*, so renowned for his educated good taste that Sears put him to work picking art for them to sell next to the Kenmore washing machines:

A strange but true moment in American cultural aspirations, back when the middle class wanted to seem well-educated. Anyway, my point in bringing this up is to point out that hey, they’re not the first ones to cook from old cookbooks in search of sociological lessons.

* They also apparently don’t remember that he was in lots of non-horror movies like The Ten Commandments, Laura, Dragonwyck, His Kind of Woman, etc. He’s especially fun playing a sendup of his own hammy self in the latter.

Tags: horror, menu pages, movies, sears, slate, vincent price

An olive oil store at Woodfield seems like the old Saturday Night Live sketch of the mall Scotch tape store, but considering how quickly it relieved me of $45, it may be a goldmine in the making— though probably not as much of one as the indoor Legoland that drew me there.

Legoland first: we loved the outdoor Legoland in San Diego, two years later the kids talk about it, but I had serious doubts about stuffing it in a mall building and charging not that much less. Great for suburban kid birthday parties, maybe, but at $50 or so for the three of us, just barely worth it. The 3-D interactive movie was a lot of fun, the build-and-test-Lego-vehicles area was a hit though wheels were very hard to come by. The “factory” was a dud, a dragon ride was not bad, the little Lego Chicago was fun enough— Baudrillard would have loved the idea of seeing Lego buildings inside a mall that is itself a faked village of “buildings” (actually one big one with phony storefronts). There’s a cafeteria, and yes I could have been the first person to review its offerings, but I gave them a pass. Would I spend this much money to entertain the kids for two hours again? Maybe once a year. God knows any visit to Barnes & Noble seems to cost me as much these days.

On to the Olive Oil store. Inside there’s a table and rows around the wall of metal containers, like samovars, dispense olive oils and fruit vinegars. Some of the oils are icky concoctions (a blood orange-flavored olive oil was a nasty combination of flavor and feel) but there are some pretty good ones along the back wall and I was really impressed by the organic one at the end, and bought a bottle. The flavored vinegars are, for all I know, another blasphemy by the standards of Italian vinegar purists, but the kids really got into tasting them— I think they liked the challenge of tasting puckeringly-tart liquids— and we wound up leaving with strawberry and black cherry flavored ones. Hey, whatever it takes to get the kids to eat salad— and, eventually, to have a taste for real balsamic vinegar.

The Olive Oil Place
601 N. Martingale Rd. #145 (Streets of Woodfield mall)
Schaumburg, IL
773-969-3700

Read all about ’em at The Local Beet.

Tags: foraging, growing, lamb's quarters, the local beet, weeds

(The number refers to my pledge to write about 50 restaurants largely untalked-about on food sites to date. Others are accessible by clicking on the Restaurant Reviews button at right.)

Middle-eastern restaurants fall into two categories for me. Dives and “pillow of rice” places. Dives, like Salam or Alma Pita, have tasty authentic food in a dineresque no-atmosphere atmosphere. Pillow of rice places, like Reza’s, have a dressier atmosphere and serve grilled meats atop a pillow of rice which would feed five. Pillow of rice places may seem of good quality at first, but they inevitably bore the spit out of you long before you’ve eaten even a quarter of all that rice. Spare me the massive, flavor-extinguishing pillow of rice.

Habibi is a newish Egyptian place in Rogers Park which has definite pillow of rice tendencies— it’s done in a style that might be called Restrained Garish, photomurals of Egyptian archeological treasures around the walls, a fountain in the middle of the room, neon in the floor. The food is of high quality and often had bright fresh-spice flavors that can be missing in other middle eastern spots, but it’s a bit undercut by some pillow of rice-isms.

One son had falafel, which were freshly made and had a fresh-garlic bite; another had a beef shawarma sandwich which tasted of good meat and a little dash of something (cumin? sumac?) I had maklouba, said to be a kind of vegetable stew, though it was more like some freshly sauteed vegetables atop a pillow of rice, covered in turn with some pretty good, slightly overdone by fine restaurant standards slices of lamb. The maklouba would have been better not overwhelmed by a pillow of flavor-reducing rice, just as the hummus we had for a starter would have been better if it hadn’t been counteracted by day-old pita.

They brought us not one, but two freebies to try— mint tea (which the kids didn’t really touch, alas) and a fattoush salad which was very fresh-tasting and nicely made. They’re trying hard, and overall the food seemed a cut above, but some pillow of rice-isms are holding it back a little, and would make it a little hard for me to race back here when there are dives not far away offering tasty food without starchy impediments.

Habibi
1225 W. Devon Ave., Chicago
(773) 465-9318

Many links to thank people for.

Andrew Huff at Gaper’s Block has linked me twice lately. Much appreciated.

I made the HuffPoChicago’s blogroll. Thanks, somebody (and thanks Riddlemay for noticing it and posting it on LTHForum).

Steve Dolinsky tried out P&P yesterday and said nice things about my Reader piece but alas, wasn’t too happy with what he had. Well, like me the other day he ordered the spare ribs, it sounded good to me too but you gotta stick to the rib tips. I haven’t tried the jerk chicken but it sounds like maybe he just hit it at the wrong time. Oh well. Soul and barbecue places seem pretty variable, and P&P has some misses (I went there for breakfast with the kids the day I interviewed the owner, and it was tolerable but nothing to write about, which is why I didn’t), but I’ve been happier than not with what I’ve had— including the yams and the peach cobbler. (On the other hand, the Hungry Hound was pretty happy with Yats, the place the Hungry Mag loathed with every fiber of his being.)

Finally, I haven’t mentioned the launch of The Local Beet, Michael Morowitz’s and Rob (Vital Info) Gardner’s locavore site/blog/forum/webzine thing, but it’s clearly a good thing for those of us trying to eat in a way Michael Pollan would approve of, and though at first I felt like I had nothing much to add about eating local, sure enough I will have a piece in it on Monday as well. So watch for that.

And Liam will be 7 on Saturday.

Let’s see how long it is before these two appear in the same article anywhere again.

A few months back I went to a dinner at Mercat a la Planxa, the celebrity-chef-spawned Spanish restaurant in the revived Blackstone Hotel, and came away convinced that it was the most authentic Spanish restaurant Chicago had seen by a country mile. Where most Spanish restaurants dabble in a sort of Spanish-American which is like Mexican-American was in the 60s, a stock set of dishes which you might or might not see in Spain, made “Spanish” by the use of certain spices identified as Spanish, food in Spain is actually often very simple and unseasoned, a matter of eating a spectacularly tasty pork skewer, a bunch of sauteed sea creatures you simply can’t get here, or a roasted pimiento de padron garnished with coarse salt. Trying to replicate that doesn’t mean taking Cisco meat and seasoning it from a big jar of “Spanish” spices, it means getting pork that actually tastes like pork. And needless to say, that’s a lot harder and more expensive.

Mercat is only about half or maybe 2/3 of the way there, but it’s far closer than any other restaurant I’ve eaten at in the US. The primary piece of evidence for that was the centerpiece of the meal, a roasted baby pig ($55 per person, several people required, large box of leftovers provided). The pig was indeed sourced from an Indiana farm where they’re raised naturally, and it had a clean, delicious flavor which needed no heavy sauce to hide any industrial-pig funkiness— or make it seem Spanish.

That said, I’m just not the sort who likes to make an entire meal of one hunk of meat, and I vaguely regretted that we only got to dabble in the rest of the menu, because the best thing we had wasn’t the pig at all— it was a simple plate of white beans, deep with porky jamony flavor, that came on the side. Simple and profound. So I have been eager to get back and try some of the regular dishes on the menu.

My chance came when Santander announced an LTHForum event at the downstairs bar at Mercat. Said “event” proving to consist of three of us standing there, enjoying a first-rate caipirinha from the Brazilian bartender Ricardo, and sampling the tapas menu in three waves.

The first wave included pimientos de padron— rather, an acceptable-but-no-more imitation of them with some local pepper; tocino con cidra, slow-cooked pork belly served with foam of cider and truffle, which was more silly than tasty, and patatas bravas, which came out looking disturbingly like the fake-food version at the late, lamentable Del Toro, six cones of potato topped with a red pepper sauce. They tasted better than Del Toro’s Potato Poppers, but still, simpler, cheaper and better could be had at several places within a reasonable distance. None of this suggested that Mercat was a stellar Spanish spot.

The second wave was far more successful than the first, and restored Mercat’s position in my mind. Squid ink pasta, rabbit agnolotti, and grilled morcilla sausage were all impressively delicate and tasty, and a warm salad of fava and white beans, tossed with some herbs and jamon serrano, was magnificent in its simplicity— interesting, that the two most awe-inspiring dishes of my two meals were both basically beans and ham. We concluded with two desserts— a peach cobbler-y thing with Pop Rocks (the trend du jour, I guess) and some tiny salty balls (RIP Isaac) of melon, which wasn’t bad, though only the second best peach cobbler of my week, and a really nice, very arty row of six little chocolate balls, in a rosemary-flavored sauce with a tiny piece of banana marshmallow. Visually it’s the sort of dessert you find next to the word effete in the dictionary, but it was a nice, light ending to the meal, the rosemary reminding me of one of the desserts I made from a Spanish party I had last year.

So a meal at Mercat seems to be struggling with the problem of Spanish authenticity rather than entirely solving it, but there is much to admire in it, and I continue to regard it as easily the best Spanish restaurant in town. The only knock I have against the place is that, having been started by a celebrity chef, Jose Garces, it’s now in the hands of his executive chef, and as a result… the menu has not changed one jot that I could see since that first visit in April. Which is not the worst thing, especially for a place that seems to be drawing on the tourist trade to a considerable extent, but I have to admit it dampens my excitement for a place slightly, or maybe denies it a spot in the first rank, if there isn’t the sense of someone at the top tinkering and evolving the menu, but merely executing dishes (however expertly) placed there by someone else. Nevertheless, what virtues Mercat a la Planxa has are very real and considerable, and if Spanish food interests you (and it must interest a lot of people to judge by the rate at which Spanish restaurants are opening lately), a visit is essential.

Mercat a la Planxa
638 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL, 60605
312-765-0524

My report on visiting Spain.

* * *

I went back to P&P BBQ Soul Food with the kids and saw that they offered a 1/2 slab of ribs on the menu. I ordered it sauce on the side, but was somewhat surprised to find that the ribs had no smoke ring; they were a uniform gray and had, at best, only a hint of smoky flavor, even though some speckles did suggest time in the smoker. Not at all like the rib tips which even before being coated in candy-red sauce:

had the unmistakable pinkish hue of true BBQ. After I ate them I asked Keith Archibald, the pitman, if they had been cooked in the smoker or an oven. He assured me the smoker, but then explained that because of ribs’ tendency to dry out, they were only cooked for so long, compared to the tips, and then held or rewarmed or something.

Well, that’s a new one on me, and certainly contrary to my own experience, but hey, I guess all it means from a practical basis is, be sure and get the rib tips, which have plenty of real smoky flavor.

Meanwhile, Myles ordered the smothered pork chop. And frankly, it’s a reason to go there and not even worry about barbecue. A catcher’s mitt-sized hunk of pork– Myles, no slouch, barely made a dent in it– it is not merely smothered but downright drowned in thick, greasy, peppery gravy, and is absolutely wonderful.

Toss in a nice homemade cole slaw, real mashed potatoes, some candied yams, a peach cobbler for dessert… and nice folks.

P&P BBQ Soul Food
3734 W. Division
773-276-7756

My Reader piece on P&P

Tags: bbq, mercat a la planxa, p&p bbq soul food, spanish

Normally, no doubt at the cost of my advancement in the foodblogosphere, I try not to suck up to local fellow writers. (Someday I’ll find a WordPress template that actually shows the damn blogroll, I promise.) But today has been International Michael Nagrant Day and homage must be paid.

In the Sun-Times, he does a piece on Ming whoever, that chef guy with that TV show on PBS, which contains a perfect little precis of how and why FoodTV stopped being for people who can cook, and started being for people who can’t:

A 10-year veteran of food television and a former personality of the burgeoning Food Network, Tsai made his move to PBS because it allowed him more control over the end product.

“Back in the day, we [at Food Network] were all really boring. Emeril was horrible. Bobby [Flay], Sara [Moulton], we all admit this, we jumped on Emeril’s train,” Tsai says. “When ‘Emeril Live’ took off, it brought us to the next level. We could do whatever we wanted. I was making foie gras shumai, roasting whole duck and whole fish. But then, it [Food Network] became such a big business all based on Nielsen ratings and all on advertisers. Some of those advertisers don’t want to see the head of a duck or foie gras because of PETA activists. You started getting boxed in.

“There’s like two chefs left. No one cooks. It is opening cans of this or that … and it’s ‘yummy’ that. Look, that’s fine, their Nielsen ratings are high as hell, and that’s what middle America kind of wants. But that’s not for me…”

Nailed, it’s as simple as that. But the nail gun is set aside for a chainsaw in New City, as he rips into a ghastly-sounding Cajun chain import from Indianapolis, which I predict will come close to this year’s open/close record after this London restaurant reviewer-style evisceration. I hate that kind of thing when it’s routine, like it usually is in London, but when someone who’s normally thoughtful and fairly generous sees fit to get his Old Testament Prophet on, it’s always a worthy read.

(BTW, I saw the first on my own when I picked up a Sun-Times to ignore my kids with at Johnny’s Grill this morning, but I didn’t see the second until Helen linked to it and was similarly impressed at MJN’s righteousness.)