“The always superb Sky Full of Bacon video podcast from Chicago’s Michael Gebert serves up a tour of Oriana Kruszewski’s orchard which contains Asian pears, paw paws and black walnuts trees. Kruszewski’s knowledge, enthusiasm and perseverance is inspiring.” —HomegrownEvolution.com

Ever wonder about the farmers who grow and sell the produce at your local farmer’s market?  In this Sky Full of Bacon podcast, we meet Oriana, the Asian pear lady at Chicago’s Green City Market, and travel to her orchard in western Illinois.  She may not look like your typical midwestern farmer, but her challenges (from weather to pests) and her joy at making things grow are universal.

Sky Full of Bacon 08: Pear Shaped World from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Here’s another podcast shot while things were still growing, to help keep your spirits up through the long winter!  If you visit Green City Market in the fall, you’ve probably seen Oriana Kruszewski showing off whatever interesting thing she happens to have picked that week along with her trademark Asian pears— paw paws, persimmons, watercress, Asian herbs, ground cherries.  Oriana has some 500 pear trees at her farm near Galena; I visited her in October as the freeze was approaching and she was picking the last of her fruit for storage.  She’s always interesting to talk to and I think you’ll enjoy the chance to see what all lies behind the produce you buy at a farmer’s market.

For more information about Green City Market, go here. And as you may know, another fruit vendor at Green City had an entire blog about his experiences.

Mike Sula wrote about Oriana a couple of years ago; he fills in more of her personal history.

Josephine at LTHForum first posted about Oriana’s black walnuts in this thread; be sure to read Pdaane’s post about black walnuts in his Wisconsin home town.  (I’m in there too, eventually.)

Here’s a tart I’ve made a couple of times for Christmas using Oriana’s black walnuts:

____________________________________________________________________________________________
About Sky Full of Bacon
Sky Full of Bacon #7: Eat This City
Sky Full of Bacon #6: There Will Be Pork (pt. 2)
Sky Full of Bacon #5: There Will Be Pork (pt. 1)
Sky Full of Bacon #4: A Head’s Tale
Sky Full of Bacon #3: The Last Brisket Show
Sky Full of Bacon #2: Duck School
Sky Full of Bacon #1: How Local Can You Go?

Please feel free to comment here or to email me here.

Just got this from Nance Klehm, star of my foraging podcast:

swap seeds and enjoy a bowl of organic vegan posole! (BYOB)

THE SEED ARCHIVE
2446 south sawyer avenue (little village, chicago)
sunday, feb 15th 3-7pm

3-5pm SWAP n’ STORE
please bring seeds that are healthy, viable, open-pollinated, and true to variety. if you have no seeds come anyway and learn about sowing, growing and saving seeds!

6-7pm WORKSHOP
we will cover seed starting techniques, timing of sowing, issues of cross-pollination, seed collection and storage of seeds.
________________________________________

SEEDS ARE ALIVE
a seed’s potential is only released through the cycle of sowing and saving. to keep future generations of heirloom and wild seed in the hands of the public we need to plant them and pass them on.

The SEED ARCHIVE is housed in chicago. it is a public archive of healthy seeds collected from many places and people. seed is loaned for free to those who are commited to growing them, enjoying them and returning some of the next generation of seed back to store at the seed archive.

Questions: [email protected]

Left to right: Louisa Chu, coon dinner, Peter Engler.

1. So Anthony Bourdain did his Chicago show, and after the obligatory “Hey, you’re no Second City!” pat on the head every New Yorker seems compelled to offer, it was plenty good, full of weird stuff mostly brought to media prominence by LTHForum foodies.  So a big bow for creating a Chicago defined by, not Pizzeria Uno, Al’s Italian Beef, and Lou Mitchell’s, but Hot Doug’s, Moto and Calumet Fisheries. (As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “I’m tired of the old cliches. Let’s have some new cliches!”)  The only thing I found weird about it was… how green the backgrounds of the driving-around shots were.  It’s like they drove around Bensenville to show us what’s between L2O and Hot Doug’s.

And the Mother-in-Law!  It cracked me up no end to see a TV star dragged on one of Peter (Rene G) Engler’s expeditions to eat the fascinatingly awful Mother-in-Law, cheap Depression food extraordinaire.  Now, how plugged into the zeitgeist is your faithful Sky Full of Bacon correspondent?  Saturday night, I was shooting at a certain dinner in Wisconsin, and two of my dining companions were… Bourdain on-screen guides Louisa Chu and Peter Engler.  And what dinner was it?  The raccoon dinner in Delafield, WI… where Cathy Lambrecht got the raccoon, which she gave to Homaro Cantu of Moto, thus inspiring him to create on the spot the very “road kill” dish seen in last night’s episode (now made with duck, alas).

So prepare to learn more than you could ever hope to about le cuisine raccoon in an upcoming Sky Full of Bacon next month or so.

2. Here’s the most interesting link the foraging podcast has gotten to date:

those aren’t just distasteful shrines to opulence piled up in places like Mountain Village — those are also resources held in reserve for a day not far away when we’ll need all that stored wood, all those spare parts, all that housing space. Just think: that single-family tens-of-thousands-of-square-foot weekend getaway spot my friend squatted in could one day be … a hostel for dozens of trekkers … an indoor village for some future self-styled traveling-buddha-like career-bumming class of wayfarers … or a series of studio apartments for the future dwellers in some Rewilded West.

3. Remember all those stories during the Olympics about how Michael Phelps ate 26 eggs and two rashers of bacon for breakfast every morning, and all that.  Because he was so hungry from… swimming. Riiiiiight.

4. I read that John Robbins, one of the big proponents of veganism going back to his 1998 book Diet For a New America, lost his fortune in the Madoff scandal. I find this weirdly satisfying.  Not that I think there’s an exact analogy between being a pious preacher of radical nutritionism and being a Ponzi scheme operator promising financial miracles, but read this and see if you don’t think Robbins was ripe pickings for a pyramid scheme:

He said that he had a few words for those of us who might be concerned that what we were doing on the planet was not important. He held his hands in a V-form with just the tips of his fingers touching and told us that our job was simply to stand and smile, that each of us who could stand and smile would be holding the wedge open for 10 more vegans behind us and 10 more behind each of them and so on until the wedge could grow big enough and strong enough to move over the face of the earth and help heal the earth.

Just sign here!  As it happens, I’m reading a book which I plan to rip into shortly for exactly this sort of Elmer Gantryesque approach to nutrition, so stay tuned.

I have now successfully spent three of the last four Super Bowls at Avec.  (The year the Bears were in it, they closed, so we went to Quartino instead.)  This is pretty much the perfect day to do so; it’s not empty, but it’s certainly half as full as it normally is, so there’s room to sit, the staff is relaxed and willing to chitchat, all in all it’s the most civilized day at one of Chicago’s best, if busiest, spots.  (No, there’s no TV there.)

This year I had the added bonus of a slight acquaintance with one of the chefs— sous Justin Large, seen toward the start of podcast #6, the second mulefoot pig one— so I enjoyed a couple of extras as well as some of his guidance on what to order.  As it happens the menu at Avec has just been switched out with some new items, and I really enjoyed a couple of them and urge you to get there, sooner rather than later, to try them:

• Olives.  Best olives I’ve had since Spain.  Great olive oil for soaking up, too.

• Charcuterie— we got sopressata, another similar-looking large salami, coppa (very nice if less funky than Mado’s), and a smaller spicy salami.  This is less of a novelty than it was a couple of years ago on the local restaurant scene, and certainly more expensive than similar things at Mado or other places, but it still remains a first-rate plate of housemade stuff, and we hung onto the wine-tinged mustard that came with it for later use (even though we didn’t use it on the charcuterie, which it would have totally overpowered).

• Pork shoulder— Justin recommended two main dish type things, the first a crock with a hunk of pork shoulder braised in a winey sauce with garlic sausage, a couple of slices of beef tongue, and assorted wintry vegetables, with a little bit of horseradishy mustard baked on top of the pork.  I loved this, the broth was rich and robust and set everything else off really nicely (without making it all taste the same).  I highly recommend having this soon.

• “Chicken and dumplings”— His other recommendation was a dish of crisp-roasted chicken thighs with some livery dumplings, cabbage and other goodies in it.  This was quite good too, although I kind of feel like it needed to be an entree-sized portion, the chicken went quickly.  Maybe don’t order it to share, just get one for yourself.

• Rapini— a nice special of garlicky rapini.

• Molasses ice cream with espresso and currant shortbread or something like that— desserts didn’t sound that great, compared to the past, and I think we were just so-so on the dessert, partly because the espresso overpowered the fairly subtle molasses ice cream.

All in all, another terrific, solid and hearty meal at one of Chicago’s exemplary spots, which I am happy to return to at least one Sunday every January.

The great thing about food versus something like music is that if you imitate something great in music for a cheaper price, you wind up with a cheesy musical like Beatlemania for the bused-in matinee crowd (“Mash Hit— the incredible true story of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the making of an American Halloween classic!  Tickets now on sale at the Cadillac Theater box office!”)  But if you imitate a meal by Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz for a cheaper price, you get publicity like this and this.

When I read these pieces, though, I thought— $300 may be a big markdown from $1500, but that’s still putting Achatz and Keller’s cuisine way out of the average American.  And is that kind of elitism what the Age of Obama is about?  Hell no.  If I’m going to feed my family a fancy dinner, I don’t want to have to get a government bailout to make it happen, I want to be able to get everything at my local Aldi, and still have enough change from my $20 to buy a pack of unfiltered Luckies, or some crack.

I knew there was only one American who had the culinary skills, the day and a half of training at Cordon Bleu, the dysfunctional childhood spent binging and purging to share my vision and make the Achatz-Keller meal happen at a price that’s truly family-friendly.  Yes, it’s none other than Sandra Lee, of Semi-Homemade With Sandra Lee.  Luckily, because of the global reach and reputation of Sky Full of Bacon, I was able to contact her and get her exclusive advice on how to make a meal every bit as beautiful as the one Keller and Achatz made with a fraction of the effort, expense, or knowledge of food.  Here are some of her suggestions, which are sure to delight the whole family.  To see the original dishes, go here.

Cornet of Salmon: “This is basically an ice cream cone with fish in it.  Well, who has time to fish for salmon?  Fish sticks are a family favorite, just put them on a vanilla wafer with a dash of onion powder.  I call it Jaws On a Surfboard.  Doesn’t that sound like more fun to eat?”

Prawn with yuba, miso and orange peel: “It’s too hard threading shrimp onto one of Alinea’s fancy little pieces of metal, and then wrapping orange peel around it.  I just take an Orange Dreamsicle and then stick shrimp onto it with frosting from a tube.  Sprinkle with seasoned salt and your family will love the presentation and the taste!”

Caviar on lemon gelee with califlower: “Caviar!  Who has time for that?  Just wet some instant mashed potato flakes and roll Lemonheads in them.  Everybody will get a big kick out of discovering what’s inside.”

Black Truffle Explosion: “My chocolate truffles work great in this.  Just stick in the microwave and boom!”

Hot Potato/Cold Potato: “This is where smart shopping can save you money and time.  You’ve already got the instant mashed potato flakes, so follow the instructions on the box to prepare a cup’s worth.  Then just stir in some T.G.I.Friday’s Potato Skins– they’re from the freezer section so they’re already cold!  That’s precious time you can spend with your family instead of slaving in the kitchen all day, cooling things.”

Hen Egg Custard With Ragout Of Black Winter Truffles: “I have news for those fancypants chefs— eggs only come from hens!  So if you paid extra for that, you got gypped!  (No offense to Gyp-Americans.)  A Jell-O pudding cup with one of my truffles in it works just fine.  I loved those pudding commercials with Bill Cosby, didn’t you?”

Wild Striped Bass with camomile, shellfish, ginger: “Kids love fish sticks— and they’ll double-love them when they’re striped with peanut butter and jelly.  To save time, buy the kind that has the peanut butter and the jelly in the same jar!  That’s how you let your family know you really care about their happiness.”

Read the beginning of this lardoblogging saga here.

After three months I started to get pretty curious about my lardo.  I mentioned it to Rob Levitt at Mado, saying I wasn’t sure how to tell when it was done, and he had a really novel suggestion: “Taste it and if it’s good, it’s done.”  (It was very kind of him not to end this sentence with “ya moron ya.”)

David Hammond was stopping by the other day so I took the opportunity to break the lardo out and try it, slicing it as thin as I could:

I toasted some bread and we both had a piece:

This is definitely the best thing to do with lardo, it softens up as it half-melts on the bread, though it never melts like butter, retaining a chewy, almost meat-like texture.

We both agreed that it was pretty nice as it was— supple, tasting of the salt, garlic and herbs. That it was hard to imagine what more it might pick up from another three months of laying in the salt mixture.  Somewhat impulsively, I decided it was done.  (I must admit I kind of regret this now, not sticking out the full six months, although I really do doubt it would have made a real difference.  Maybe packed into a true conca full of brine expressed by the fat, but this was just sitting on dry salt by now.)

I divided the lardo into two groups.  One I went ahead and vacuum-sealed into small bags, for presents or door prizes or whatever.  But the three largest pieces I took and wrapped in cheesecloth:

and hung from an old roasting pan rack in my wine cellar which, at least this time of year, should be as reliably cool as any Italian root cellar.  I may pick up a wine fridge sometime so I can ensure more precise control of more sensitive cured meats like the coppa I plan to make, but for this, which basically doesn’t have any meat, just fat, it’ll be fine (though humidity probably won’t be high enough, in the long term).

By the way, one of the problems serving lardo is that it can be tough to slice it thin enough to do the melting on bread thing.  But I discovered a cheap and perfect solution: use one of those new peelers that everybody has that you hold like a Gillette razor.  You get perfect thin slices.

I was starting to feel like my quest to try 50 unwritten-about restaurants was turning into Mike’s list of mediocre bummers.  A lot of places that just didn’t measure up to what small promise they offered from the outside. (Especially since I was sitting on the whole stash of mostly good Bridgeview middle-eastern places till the piece appeared in Time Out.)  Which is the reality of doing this, of course; you try a lot of places and if you’re lucky, once every three or four times they’re good enough to want to go back, once every 50 or 100 times you find a true gem.

You can try to improve your odds in some ways.  First, of course, there’s location; your odds of finding a good restaurant of a particular type go way up if you’re in a neighborhood where those people actually live.  Another is by looking for certain indicators.  For Mexican, menudo and pozole are a good sign— it means they serve a lot of locals on the weekends— while anything that reeks of crude stereotyping and travel brochure cliches is a bad sign, since it means they’re aiming mainly at gringos.  (I call this The Sombrero Rule, as in, never eat at a Mexican place with a sombrero on its sign.)

I tried a place a couple of weeks back that passed the first test but not the second.  It’s called Sol Del Sur (which maybe suggests another rule about avoiding places with Spanish names that English speakers can readily decipher).  The location, Logan Square on Fullerton, could have been promising, there are some authentic places not far away (Gloria’s, Rinconcito Cubano).  But it turned out to be pretty much Mexican-American, aimed at a margarita-swilling crowd and, if I had looked more closely, giving off a number of sombreroesque clues as I walked in (travel brochure-esque decor, chimichangas as a main attraction on the menu).  Actually it was probably above average for that, if I lived in some distant suburb I would be glad to have a place that could make a decent salsa nearby, but in Chicago, it’s nothing special.  (I didn’t count it as one of my 50 places because it had been mentioned, briefly once, on LTHForum.)

Yet another place a few days later proved that the rules are only guidelines.  I spotted this sign:

!Muy sabroso, Senor Pan! Much of it seemed to be on a similar level of not-as-slick-as-it-thinks corporate inauthenticity— or at least suggested that someone involved had had a past career in fast food.  The menu was in the same font as Chipotle’s; a large banner inside offered a dollar menu.  It felt very much like the imitation-American chains you see in Europe, half Mickey D, half Cafe des Poseurs.

But I ordered a Cuban sandwich…

It was shockingly… pretty good.  Quality ham and cheese, house-roasted pork with some crispy crackling flavor around the edges, same Gonnella (I suspect) bread as all the other Cuban places in town, which isn’t Miami-authentic but is what we settle for here.  A side of plantains was just fine, too.  So, you never know.  Judge a place by its sign, you gotta, but accept that sometimes, a better place may lie inside.

Sol del Sur
3268 Fullerton Ave.
Chicago IL
(773) 384-8869

Senor Pan
4612 W Fullerton Ave
Chicago, IL 60639
(773) 227-1020

For the first time I’m stumped for a catchy name for my next podcast.  It’s about Oriana Kruszewski, the Asian pear lady at Green City Market, one of those bundle-of-energy people who loves telling you about what she grows even more than selling it.  So anybody have an idea for a name, in the same not-too-punny but interestingly allusive vein as The Last Brisket Show or There Will Be Pork or Duck School?  (Doesn’t have to be a movie reference…)  If I use yours, I’ll come up with some kind of appropriate prize.  If you want to know more about Oriana, read Mike Sula’s piece from a couple of years ago.

Kaze file photo.

Some factoids:

• I live a couple of blocks from Kaze, the sushi and Japanese joint in Roscoe Village.

• Kaze has been around about 4 years.

• Until tonight, I averaged .25 visits to Kaze per annum.

I went once, almost exactly three years ago, and, well, that held me till tonight. Kaze’s claim to fame is sort of creative fusion sushi, that is, sushi gussied up with diced banana peppers or truffle oil or who knows what. And I had a very mixed reaction to that overall, three years ago. One thing I had was really good— mackerel in kimchi juice, the tart spicy kimchi juice setting off the oily mackerel nicely. I can still remember how it tasted; and judging by my post, I seemed to have liked a couple of other things pretty well. But some of the ones with a big glob of stuff on top:

One of the problems with the multitude of toppings placed on the fish was that there were far too many for me to keep track of with photos alone. Banana peppers, garlic, enoki, tuna penuche (okay, I’m joking), I just couldn’t keep track of all the flavors being thrown at me. Here is, yes, tuna, with yellowtail which is a TUNA, and salmon, each topped with some damn thing, and slathered with the soy sauce and truffle oil, to the point of practically seeming like dessert sushi (how far were we, really, from tuna with whipped cream and a cherry on top?). Looking back on the meal at this point, where the most satisfactory dish had been the one with the strongest fish, I began to feel that the sauces were doing pretty good fish a disservice, making it seem bland by globbing it up and covering it up with too-strong alternative flavors instead of enhancing and sharpening it with something simple and clean.

But tonight I was craving sushi, and my garage door had broken earlier in the day, making the logical thing a walk to the nearest sushi place, however deep my philosophical differences with it.  So I decided to see if I would feel now the same way I felt then.

I plopped myself at the bar— almost empty when I got there, full within a few minutes on this Friday night— and ordered a saketini (name aside, the least absurd of the absurd fusion drinks on offer) and listened to the specials.  Two really appealed to me— a braised oxtail/coconut curry soup poured over some kind of Japanese custard, and some little river crabs deep-fried with some kind of dipping sauce (you eat them like soft-shell crabs).  But I decided I couldn’t finish the whole order of the crabs myself, and stuck to the soup, as well as a plate of sashimi and sushi, chef’s choice.

The soup— well, it was quite good.  Would have been better if strands of oxtail meat didn’t seem to be as precious as saffron threads in it, but it was plenty spicy and appealingly coconutty.  A very nice soup… although I couldn’t help but think that I had just paid $8 or $9, probably, for a cup of something that (mostly tasting of coconut milk and spicy heat) was functionally identical to the soup going for $2.95 a quart at the Thai place in the next block.

My plate of sashimi/nigiri—virtually identical to what I had three years ago, I believe, everything I mentioned above (banana peppers, garlic, enoki, mushrooms, truffle oil) turned up on it.  And like I thought three years ago… it was, basically, a disservice to the fish, which is of pretty high quality, not mindblowing, but certainly above bargain sushi lunch spots like Umaiya.  By far the best part of the plate was among the simplest— there were some really nice slices of amberjack, fatty and very clean-flavored.  Dipped in a light ponzu sauce, they were first-rate.  But at least half of the gussied-up sushi pieces were, to me, botches, muddying fish flavor with something not only heavy-handed in itself but persistent enough (e.g., truffle oil) to hang over onto the next piece.  Not good.

After this, my preconceptions largely reaffirmed, I felt like ordering one cooked dish.  My waiter suggested a flounder in a parsley-butter sauce; he was high on this, it sounded like boring banquet food to me, so I pushed him for another suggestion.  Somehow that led to tuna tartare, the official dish of California in 1996, which I’d gotten stuck with three years ago after explicitly saying I didn’t want that kind of obvious thing.  Hurriedly backtracking to the cooked kind of cooked dishes, I said oh fine, give me the flounder, without much enthusiasm.

To his credit, he didn’t steer me wrong.  It was small but terrific.  Lightly, almost fluffily fried, floating in the middle of a vast green sea of parsley-butter sauce, it was a sunburst of happy fried and herbal flavor on the plate.  Now, I have two cavils about the way it arrived— one, it seemed like a spoon might have been more appropriate for eating it and enjoying the sauce (and not the teeny-bowled parfait spoon that came with the soup earlier), and two, as if to mock the crack I made three years ago, there actually was whipped cream on top of it.  I thought I must be crazy, it had to be creme fraiche or something, but no, it was honest to God sweet whipped cream.  But easily shoved aside to melt at the far edge of the parsley sea, I ate the fish without it, and I loved it.

Kaze seems to be popular as heck with my fellow Roscoevilleins, everyone else at the bar seemed to know the sushi chefs already, so there must be an audience for fusion sushi banana splits.  But having given it two shots, I have to say I remain convinced that that’s a sure way to ruin good fish with a lot of flash and filigree it doesn’t need.  So the thing Kaze is famous for, I would say beware to.  Yet around the edges of all that there seems to be quite a good Japanese fusion restaurant turning out interesting dishes of high quality.  So I may be back sooner than 2012, but if I do, it will be while ordering carefully to avoid the main attraction.

Kaze Sushi
2032 W Roscoe
Chicago, IL 60618
(773) 327-4860
www.kazesushi.com

The foraging podcast has passed 5000 views at Vimeo, mostly thanks to BoingBoing.

See it here.