D'oh, nuts!

    Fate has a way of upbraiding you.
    If you remember EGD's most recent guest post, a week ago Sunday, a friend related a terrible experience with Dunkin'' Donuts at Midway Airport — service so bad that at least one reader doubted it could be true. It was.

     In my little introductory paragraph, I really laid into Dunkin' Donuts. "Never eat at a Dunkin' Donuts for any reason whatsoever," I urged.

     Though I felt guilty about it. My condemnation was based purely on thinking their donuts are not worth putting in your mouth. I wouldn't do it, and I'd eat a Circus Peanut. Even as I applied the lash, I remembered those many long ago mornings in my early 20s when I'd look forward to breakfast consisting of a pair of Dunkin' muffins in a waxy paper bag and a cup of coffee as I made the drive from Oak Park to my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal.  A bran muffin for the main meal and a chocolate chip muffin for dessert. They were good company in my dead grandmother's dinky blue Chevy Citation. Peeling off chunks of the muffin top, the shiny, dense, best part, life seemed to hold promise.

     Maybe they were sweet and awful and I just didn't know any better. But I still liked them.

     The day that post ran — garnering twice the readership of anything I wrote the previous week (heck might as well say it — earning better stats than anything I wrote all month) — I found myself at O'Hare with my wife, heading out on the trip that we are now returning from (apologies to readers whose comments I didn't post. "AHA! You're on VACATION! You're OUT OF TOWN, not CURRENTLY RESIDING IN YOUR HOUSE IN NORTHBROOK. Which is now EMPTY..." My wife doesn't like me to post that on the blog. People are crazy. Things happen).

     My wife isn't crazy. She is sensible, and eats good food. Sitting there by the gate, she wanted something not in our store of foodstuffs. She wanted a banana. Knowing I was at an airport where prices are insane, I asked, before setting out in search, what the most I should spend on her banana. 

    "It could be five dollars," I warned.

     "Two dollars," she said, sensible. In a supermarket, a banana costs about 19 cents.
     I dutifully toddled over to a nearby market sort of place, with sandwiches and cheese sticks and such. Insane prices. $12 for a modest bag of candy. And no bananas. Nearby was a Dunkin' which had — and you see this coming, right? — a bowl of big, yellow, unblemished, perfectly ripe, bananas.  Price — $1.10 apiece.
    So Dunkin', which I had keelhauled that very day, was offering the cheapest, best foodstuff for sale at O'Hare, not that I did a survey. Having advised others to never patronize the place, I was patronizing it myself. Touché, fate.

     Walking back to the gate, I couldn't resist tucking the banana into my fleece pocket, so that one end poked out.
     I walked up to my wife.
     "Say it," I instructed.
     She smiled, instantly understanding.
     "Is that a banana in your pocket," she said "Or are you just happy to see me?"
     "Both," I said.
     She took the banana.
      "I was going to say it even before you asked," she said.

     My friend, by the way, said that Dunkin' Donuts did apologize to her for their abysmal service, without so much as offering her a gift certificate, not that shed' patronize them again. I would. But only for bananas.
     

Foods I love #5: Bolo de cenoura

      Carrots and I go way back. To the days when my mother would serve frozen peas and carrots and I would instinctively go for the orange cubes. Who wouldn't? The peas were mushy and green and gross and I hated them. But the carrots — bright, sweet, and encouraging.
      Later they were crinkle cut and, even better, roasted. Glazed with brown sugar at Thanksgiving.

     Carrots are root vegetables, meaning they grow underground. But compare them with their cousin, the potato. Tubers are big brown lumps of mundanity that must be enlivened by ketchup or sour cream or cheese. Carrots are slimmer, sexier, yet harder to find, as if the great mass food manufacturers can't be bothered coping with their complexities. Carrots are more colorful, more exciting, yet it is potatoes that McDonald's fries in enormous quantities, some nine million tons a day, worldwide. Mickey D's only sells carrot sticks in a few niche markets, like Ireland. 

     To be honest, I am not a fan of carrots in their raw form. I will eat them, and even enjoy them if you heap enough humus on one end. But a carrot stick is work, crunchy in a bad way, grainy in the mouth.

     But what wonders can be done with them with the application of heat, ingenuity and fat.
     When my wife and I got married in 1990, my sole contribution to the wedding dinner menu was to suggest we start with cream of carrot soup with ginger. I've ordered many a main course simply because it came with carrots.  One River North eatery served a carrot salad, with pine nuts that drew me in regularly. Then it was gone. I complained, and after the waiter explained that carrots were not in season, I objected. "They sit in cellars for months," I believe were my exact words, and didn't go back for years. A head of lettuce will last three weeks in the fridge; a fresh carrot will be good for three months.

     I can't say I am always on the look-out for carrots — that would lead to too much disappointment. They're that rare. But carrots have a way of finding me.
     Earlier this week, at the excellent Padaria Ribeiro bakery in Porto, Portugal, my attention was drawn to dense orange triangles, covered with chocolate sprinkles. 
     "What are those, sweet potato?" I asked, tapping on the glass case.
     "No, carrot," the clerk said. That focused my attention like a star flare. The magic word. I ordered one, with coffee Americain, and took a seat at one of the little tables outside, watching the university students, in their colorful top hats and canes, parade by.
     English is prevalent in Portugal. But when I went back into the bakery, after we consumed the orange slice in a delirium of pleasure, and asked what it was we had eaten, she said, "bolo de cenoura."  Simply Portuguese for "carrot cake," but this was not like the traditional American carrot cake with cream cheese frosting you'd find at Gibson's. It didn't have pieces of carrots. This was almost more like a pudding. The carrots are pureed. 

      What histories I could find said that the dessert was created in Brazil, Portugal's former colony, in the 1960s, based on American carrot cake, then filtered back to the mother country. 

      To my delight, my wife enjoyed it as much as I did, and immediately found a promising New York Times recipe. Which we will have a chance to whip up now that we are home — today, if all goes well — after our near fortnight in Portugal. I appreciate your patience, with last week's metaphor series and this week's favorite food series. They were fare I could whip up ahead of time and leave sit until it was time for them to be consumed — well, except for this one, pounded out in a guest house room in Porto Tuesday night, with memories of a superlative slice of bolo de cenoura still very fresh in mind. 
      

Food I love #4: Fresh challah

Fresh challah at Masa Madre, a Mexican Jewish bakery in East Garfield Park, now, sadly, defunct.

      True story.
      Once I stopped by Tel Aviv Bakery on Devon Avenue for some ... I don't know what. Hamantaschen maybe. And while I was buying whatever I was there to buy. Could be bagels, though those should really be gotten at New York Bagel on Touhy, I detected a smell, a tantalizing aroma: warm challah, fresh from the oven.
      So I bought one. How could you not? Dense, rich, ever so slightly sweet bread, the crust shiny with egg white. 

     At the car, I put whatever I bought — does it matter? — and began to drive. Proud of myself, thinking of how surprised, and pleased my wife would be with the fresh warm challah that I was thoughtfully bringing home to her.  
     But it's a long drive — say 25 minutes — from Tel Aviv Bakery to our house. And it was late afternoon. A loaf of challah, it's big. A lot for two people. What harm would there be from a pick-me-up, just a hunk of challah, from the end? Yes, it would detract from the complete braided purity of the loaf. But it was just a taste. Surely, she would not begrudge me that.  

     God it was fantastic. If you haven't eaten a chunk of warm challah — and that's the ideal way to eat it. Not sliced; cutting it with a knife commits violence against the bread. Challah is braided, by talking three fat strands of dough and weaving them together, and so pulls apart, naturally, along those original fault lines (and really, how many foodstuffs are braided? A sign this is something special).

      At Sabbath, when the Hamotzi — the prayer over the bread  — is said, the challah is passed around and everybody breaks off a hunk. It might even be a commandment somewhere. I'll have to check.

    So I'm driving, and eating this warm, really superlative challah. Time passes. I'm basically in a fugue state, lost in reverie, communing with the challah, as retrospective as a mollusk. I'm glad I didn't drive into the back of a truck.

     And now I'm home, and I gather up whatever it was I bought — it could have been cookies, I really have no idea. And I pick up the white paper bag with the challah in it. And the bag is weirdly light. Like there isn't an entire loaf in there at all. I look inside. A pathetic heel. That's it. Something had happened to the warm loaf of challah. All that was left was ... a scrap, a remnant I was embarrassed to share with my wife. Though I must have. Frankly, my mind is blank of how that went over. Nature can be kind sometimes. I'd ask her, but I'm too afraid of what she might recall. 
      I'd eaten most of the loaf in the car — I shouldn't feel the need to point that out, but this is also read by people slow on the uptake, and I don't want people writing in say, "So what happened to the bread?" Nor do I need to be told that eating 1,500 calories worth of challah is not a smart move.
      You'll notice that today's subject is not "challah" but "fresh challah." That's because they are really two very different types of food. Challah, regular, not fresh challah, the kind usually sold in grocery stores, can still be good — you can make a sandwich out of it. But fresh challah, no more than a few hours, less than a day at most, from birth is entirely different. Because over time a dryness, a stiffness, a subtle change that is both slight and enormous. 
     The thing to do with un-fresh challah is to make stuffing — I've written about that. Or French toast. Add cinnamon and a cap of vanilla to the egg batter — the vanilla is the secret. I was known for making absolutely nothing in the years my boys were growing up, but challah stuffing and challah French toast.

     I feel almost guilty writing about fresh challah as a favorite food, because I really don't get it enough to qualify. I really should stop by Tel Aviv Bakery more often.

Food I love #3: Hot dog cart dogs

      So here's the question: if the ideal hot dog is charbroiled — and it is — then why would anybody ever want a hot dog that has been floating in hot water for a few hours?
      If you want your bun toasted on the grill — and you do — then why consume a hot dog slapped in a roll that has been steamed over the self-same hot dog water?
     Answer: it's a mystery. You just do. A hot dog cart dog is a gestalt — the boiled dog, the warm moist bun, the cheap mustard, eaten from a sheet of wax paper or, as above, crinkled paper nest, standing up in some strange city.
    That has to be a factor — just as a crowded ballpark ennobles a hot dog in a shiny foil-like wrap that you'd be hesitant to touch, never mind eat, in any other situation, so hot dog cart franks have a built-in romance and a splendor. 

     And rarity. Chicago has virtually no hot dog carts, another mystery, one I delved into 30 years ago, in a column that ran under the way-dull headline, "A New York Tradition we're healthier without." 

     NEW YORK CITY — Within an hour of arriving, my wife and I celebrated our being in Manhattan by sharing a potato knish bought from a cart at 46th Street and Broadway. It was great.
     So, too, were the hot dogs from a metal wagon in front of the Plaza. And the hot, sugared almonds from a nut stand on Fifth Avenue. And the big, salty pretzel purchased minutes later.
     Frankly, we would have gotten more food on the street — falafels, Mister Softees, cream sodas — but we also were eating three meals a day in restaurants. And more. We went directly from dinner at a funky restaurant in the West Village to the city's single outlet for Krispy Kreme doughnuts, a southern institution that has just invaded Gotham to great fanfare.
     I am not ashamed to say that eating a 45-cent original glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut, hot from the oven, was one of the outstanding experiences of my life.
     Well, maybe a little ashamed.
     Food on the street is just one of the many things that makes New York very different from Chicago. Writers are always wringing their hands over loss of diversity. They see the Starbucks and Gaps and Hard Rock Cafes popping up everywhere and conclude that all cities are now all the same and the entire world is merged into one vast Anyplace.
     But this is simply not true. Uniqueness still exists. New York is so different from Chicago that a glance at any 10 feet of storefront is usually enough to tell you which city you're in. Even the garbage cans are different in New York, and they're at curbside because the city doesn't have  many alleys. The little stores are different — New York has its bodegas, with ziggurats of fresh fruit out front. The street signs are different — New York has all those barking signs, "DON'T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE" and this simple, almost lovely one: "Don't Honk."
     In general, New York has a tougher, more armored look — more sliding metal grates, steel doors and security cameras.
     New York certainly sounds different. In Chicago, certain streets are filled with foreign languages — French tourists, Russian and Hispanic immigrants, whatever. But in New York half the time when I overhear foreigners, I can't even figure out what kind of language they are speaking. Again and again I puzzled over some mushy blast of whirling verbiage, all harsh consonants and spittle. What is that? Macedonian? Urdu? Pathan? No clue.
     Since New York drivers don't pull over to let firetrucks pass, the way we do here, they have a lot more of that piercing, pulsing death scream strobed out by emergency vehicles as a desperate last resort.
     Which is perhaps why people stay up all night in New York, packing the streets. In Chicago, we sleep, because we can.
     Lest someone misunderstand, I should stop right here and state, clearly, that I am not praising New York. I have this image of walking by a softball game and hearing somebody yell, "That's him! The guy who likes New York! Get him!" then being chased by 20 big guys waving aluminum bats.
      For the record: Nothing about New York is better than Chicago.
     Different, yes. Particularly those street food vendors. I kept wondering about them. Why so many in New York — four at a street corner, in places — and absolutely none in Chicago?
I took a deep breath and plunged into the bureaucracy.
     "There is no such thing as a hot dog cart with a wash-up sink," explained Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Public Health. "Where does the food handler wash his or her hands?"
     Another city official speculated that a strong Chicago restaurant association had something to do with our lack of food carts. He, of course, didn't want to be named.
      I then wondered, if food vendors are so pestilential here, how do they pass muster in New York?
     Taking two deep breaths, I plunged into New York's Health Department. Spokesman Fred Winters said that New York vendor carts have sinks and running water and precautions are taken.
     "Our vendors use rubber gloves or wax paper," he said.
     Winters couldn't let that bit of naivete float in the air too long, however. He quickly added, "They don't always do it."
     The vendor who sold me a hot dog in New York certainly didn't. I had flinched when he lifted a bun out of the package with his bare hand and used his thumb to split it open. Where had that thumb been? And I flinched again as Chicago's Hadac waxed poetic on the perils of food carts.
     "The person is handling money and currency, which is soiled," he continued. "The person may be shaking hands with someone. And then there is the issue of where does that person go to the bathroom?"
     So why, in his opinion, do they permit them in New York?
     "Maybe this is a quaint tradition," he said. "Maybe if New Yorkers want their hot dogs and sauerkraut they're not going to let anything get in their way."
     "Not going to let anything get in their way" – that's the motto on the city seal of New York, isn't it?
               — Originally published in the Sun-Times Oct. 13, 1996

Food I love #2: Pork chops

     Confession time.
     In the years I regularly patronized Gene & Georgetti with my pals, the check was inevitably picked up by someone else, a Springfield lobbyist type, or law firm partner, or utility bagman, or top Sun-Times editor with a bottomless expense account. Whatever my regular dish, the "Schultz Special," aka filet mignon on a piece of toast, cost — say $35 — was not my concern. Nor the bottles of wine, nor the carrot cake dessert. My problem was getting back home in half decent condition after spending an long afternoon with Steve Neal and Dan Rostenkowski and half a dozen other hale fellows well met. A bar I did not always clear.
     But sometimes, on rare occasions, I would find myself the host of my own lunch at Gene's — thanking a colleague perhaps. And then, knowing the knee-weakening check arriving, eventually, would be my responsibility or, worse, I would have to try to expense it, I would rein in the dogs of appetite. Sometimes I would get their garbage salad — an oval platter piled high with lettuce and cocktail shrimp — or their pork chop.
     A pork chop is both steak lite and a bargain. At Gene's 20 years ago they were $19.99, which seemed less of a gut punch, bill-wise. On the lunch menu now, a petit filet mignon is $67, a double pork chop $38. Twice the food for half the money.
     Much cheaper and honestly, still quite good — a pork chop is the love child between a t-bone steak and a chicken breast. 
     Now that I have diabetes, I run through pork chops. Zero carbs. Zero sugars. Toss a couple on the grill. I'll have them for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, though not all three on the same day. Not yet anyway. The cheapest steak you can find runs you $7.95 a pound, on sale at Jewel. Pork chops are $2.99 a pound, and if they're trying to unload them, they'll give you two for one. As I said before, I'm a man who likes a free chop.
     I don't want to give the impression that cost rules my culinary habits. I am still employed, and would not eat as much L. Burdick's chocolate as I do if that were the case. But there is ... treading carefully .. a certain Stockholm Syndrome effect at work, and over the years, I have gotten more practical. So I enjoy a thick pork chop, dusted with tarragon, both sides, eaten along with a nice cup of all natural applesauce.

     And yes, I know at this point there is one reader, or a dozen, who is scratching vigorously behind his ear thinking, "Heyyyyy, wait a sec. A pork chop? Ain't ya, you know, Jewish?"

     Yes I am. And I've addressed this before, and recently too. Too many times — there must be some kind of perverse pride at work. I must like poking the empty stereotype. But for you newcomers, despite what you read on the Daily Caller, Jews are not a mass of conformity, with our beards and black coats and secret handshakes. Jews get to be individuals — it's one of the redeeming qualities of the faith. 

     Actually, everyone gets to be an individual; Jews just are less good about ostracizing the oddballs — if we were, there'd be no one left. I'm speaking of the more liberal branches. The Hassidim seem to have no problem imposing uniformity. No pork chops for them. Which is fine, in my opinion. That means more for me. 

    

Food I love #1: Beef and broccoli

     I'm still on vacation. I could have easily extended "Meet my Metaphors" for another week, but thought, "enough already," and decided to tack in a new direction. Writing about food is fun and easy. As for reading about it, well, you tell me.

     Business took me to the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab last month — that story is coming. My appointment was at 2 p.m. so, responsible journalist that I am, I of course had one thought: get downtown early, swing by Star of Siam for lunch.
     The Star of Siam has graced Illinois Avenue, tucked just west and below Michigan Avenue for ... I'm going to hazard a guess before checking: ngggg, 32 years.
     Not close: 42. The Star of Siam opened in 1984, the same year I started writing, freelance, for the Chicago Sun-Times. Fashions come and go, but we icons soldier onward, defying time.
     When with a group, I'd start with chicken satay and peanut sauce, and am passionate about their Pad Thai. But by myself, and with Mr. Diabetes standing over my shoulder, clucking disapproval, I went with my. go-to: beef and broccoli.   

      Fresh, firm, bright green broccoli. Succulent marinated strips of beef. Shards of ginger. An oyster sauce. Eaten with chopsticks — that's part of the fun, and I have my pride. A splash of red sauce to keep things interesting. Meat and vegetables — I can tell myself it's healthy, ignoring all that oil glistening over it.
      No rice, of course, no big glass of super sweet Thai iced coffee. (What's the Stones song? "Dancing, dancing, dancing so free/Dancing, Lord, keep your hand off me/Dancing with Mr. D..." A song not up to the Stones' elevated standards, critics felt at the time, but I'll take my symbolism where I find it. I should have put it on my list of diabetes songs — Mick is singing about death, not elevated blood sugar, though the two do intersect, uncomfortably.
     Beef and broccoli is not Thai, but Chinese — well, Chinese-American that is, concocted in California chop suey shops about 100 years ago, according to what little is known. Just as spumoni is unknown in Italy, so beef and broccoli isn't really a thing in China. Or so I'm told.

     I order beef and broccoli 90 percent of the time I'm in a Thai or Chinese restaurant. Maybe 95. Which is a point of amusement for my wife and of concern for me. Where is the adventure of life? And I do occasionally order something that is not beef and broccoli, just to show I can. But am inevitably disappointed because, well, if you really want beef and broccoli, anything else is something less.
     Speaking of which. I probably should add that, last time I was at Star of Siam with my wife, she felt the place was not up to their previous standards. I demurred. It was fine. Was she right? I'm not the one to tell. I tend to like what's put in front of me, particularly when it's beef and broccoli. But even if she is correct — and she usually is — well, even noble Homer dozed, and the best can have an off night, like the rest of us. I'm hoping to get her to go back. This most recent visit, I found it especially good, cleaned the plate with gratitude and appreciation, then headed off to my appointment.

Flashback 1999: Crudity in eye of beholder

 

Uffuzi Gallery

     In looking up M.C. Escher references, I reread this column. Note the unashamed pointy-headedness of the opening. Young, and showing off. It also ran on a Tuesday, in the features section, where my columns were briefer: only 550 words, compared to the column today at almost 800 words.

     When the subject of the crudity of our day arises, as it so often does, I like to tell this story from Herodotus:*
     An Egyptian army mutinies, fleeing toward Ethiopia. The pharaoh, Psammetichus, finds out and confronts the soldiers, begging them to reconsider. Think of your wives and children back in Egypt, he says.
     At that, a deserter pulls aside his tunic** and says, "Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children."
     That's a crude story — charmingly crude, in my eyes, because the macho bluster resonates over the eons and makes the anonymous Egyptian foot soldier seem very real.
     I tell this as introduction to a letter I received this week. A lone person who wrote to object to my defense of Niles North presenting the risque musical "A Chorus Line" and to argue that vulgarities in school are wrong.
     "Please tell me, how is that supposed to be helpful to our young people?" he asks, listing the various off-color details of the play. "It seems that there is a complete loss of any kind of standards here."
     My purpose is not to embarrass the reader, whose letter was erudite and well-reasoned. I believe that he speaks for a large number of people who look around and see a world in 1999 very different from the world in which they grew up, and who aren't pleased with the changes.
     And "A Chorus Line" isn't the half of it. We see things now that we would never see, even a few years ago. For instance, Simon & Schuster is publishing a book, aimed at teens no less, with the newspaper-unprintable title of "The - - - - -Up."
     This is far from what our letter writer wants schools to teach. He quotes Samuel Johnson:
     "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things — the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit." He adds: "There is nothing in Johnson's words about barnyard epithets."
     Or is there? This is where he lost me. I would argue that, as in the case of our anonymous Egyptian soldier, or "A Chorus Line," there are instances when, to be good and genuine, to reflect real people, a work also needs to be somewhat obscene.
     After all, is not life itself often obscene, messy, crude? The more you delve into the real lives of people, the messier it gets. The degree to which this mess is reflected in the culture is dictated not by questions of right or wrong, but by fashion.
     Many fail to see this. They view culture as an endlessly descending staircase, like one of those M.C. Escher prints, that goes down and down but never bottoms out.
     It doesn't bottom out because standards do tighten, though we seldom notice. For instance, certain words that could be sung out on a high school stage in the 1940s — say in a minstrel show — would not be sung today. Our sensibilities changed.
     The most important thing, whether you find something offensive or artistic, is to remember that being crude and being bad do not always go together. Sometimes evil hides in the guise of high culture, as the great Dr. Johnson himself noted:
     "Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly; he may cheat at cards genteelly."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 6, 1999

*  From "Speculations about the Nile," Herodotus, II. 19-31, translated by D. Grene, quoted in Michael Grant's "Readings in the Classic Historians." 

** The exact phrase is, "...one of their number showed him his prick and said, 'Wherever I have this, I will have wives and children.'" I don't recall if I tried to get that published and failed, or didn't bother. But it remains unprintable in the Sun-Times, then and now. Their loss.