Restaurant notes: Prairie Grass

 

    I shouldn't write about Prairie Grass Cafe. As it was, the Northbrook institution was packed at lunchtime on Wednesday. We were lucky to snag the one remaining table in the bar.
    And the special I had my eye on — a turkey burger with Chef Sarah Stegner's signature slaw, sweet potato wedges and a honey mustard cranberry sauce that sounded intriguing — was sold out. I shifted to their Amish blue cheese-topped bunless burger, forced ordering the slaw on the side, so as not to go slawless. Even after our server warned that there would be an upcharge. Fine, charge away; $8 is a small price to pay to soften the disappointment of wanting peerless slaw and not getting it. Slaw with chunks of apple in it. Worth every penny.
     First, an appetizer, which is why I'm writing this. Grilled Brussels sprouts with bacon and a basil remoulade. Really, look at the thing. Once glance and I realized, with a sinking heart, that I'd have to write about it here, just to share that photo. It would be journalistic malpractice not to. Even though that might encourage you to patronize the place. Making it all the more difficult for me to get in.

    And here's the funny thing. I had been against ordering the Brussels sprouts. Even though I'd eaten them many times here, and always loved them. Based on my lifelong aversion to Brussels sprouts, as mangled by lesser chefs. My wife, who knew better, who always knows better, ordered them anyway. 

     "You'll like them," she said, right as rain. She got the whitefish with potato wedges and broccoli. 

    In my defense,  I can't be 100 percent certain even the previous Prairie Grass sprouts had that remoulade — a scrape-worthy green sauce. I like to think I'd remember that. The sirloin burger comes without a bun, under a circle of toasted blue cheese. 
     Was the meal perfect? No. The vegan coffee ice cream, topped with crushed chocolate covered almonds, made by Chicago's Pretty Cool Ice Cream, tasted more coconut than coffee — that would not do, in my wife's reconning. She actually popped a stick of gum, to get the taste out of her mouth. Not the experience you want for $14 a bowl. In its defense, I shrugged and polished off the whole thing. Then I tend to be less discerning; "a cheaper date" is the phrase I use. We agreed that days where there is no pie on the menu at Prairie Grass, well, those are pieless days. Someday I have to ask Sarah how her keen sense of social responsibility jibes with there being days of no pie. Is pie not a human right? I believe it is.
     That said, despite the ice cream, and more salt on the broccoli than was necessary ("I'll wash it off" my wife said, when I said she should include it in her doggy bag) we left thinking that we really need to come back here more often in the middle of the week, vis a vis nothing, just to perk up our spirits. And I suppose you may visit as well, but truly, not all at once. Space yourselves out. It's busy enough already.

On Veterans Day, Pete Hegseth picks which vets to honor — and which to abuse

Display at the Obama Presidential Center Museum on the Department of Defense joining militaries around the world in allowing trans soldiers to serve openly in 2015. 

     Wednesday is Veterans Day — originally Armistice Day, begun in 1919 for the first anniversary of the end of World War I, which wasn’t called that at the time, since nobody knew another was coming. It was called “The Great War” or “The World War.”
     The first Armistice Day was a dramatic moment in Chicago — at 10:55 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1919, soldiers in Grant Park let off a fusillade of artillery and small arms fire, promptly stopping at 11 a.m. — the war had ended, famously, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Cops paused Loop traffic. L cars stopped. A full minute’s silence, then a cheer went up and LaSalle Street became a blizzard of confetti.
     Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1954, acknowledging the millions of Americans who had served in World War II and the Korean War.
     There is no possessive in Veterans Day — it isn’t “Veterans’ Day” — for the simple reason the day does not belong to them, but to us. It is a time when the American public is supposed to reflect on our debt to those who served our country. (And are still alive; we honor the fallen on Memorial Day.)
     But which veterans should we honor? Do Black veterans count? Black people have served since the Revolutionary War, but the Army wasn’t integrated until 1948. This was done over the objections of the brass, such as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Omar Bradley, who argued that mixing races would lower morale, hurt unit cohesion and turn the military into a social experiment rather than a fighting force.
     This wasn’t accepted by President Harry Truman, nauseated by the horrific abuse Black soldiers suffered when they returned home to the segregated South, which instead of honoring Black vets often brutalized them for the crime of wearing crisp uniforms and carrying themselves with pride.
     Truman said he was from Missouri, and his forebears were Confederates, but: “My very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers just back from overseas were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten. Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President, I know this is bad. I shall fight evils like this.”
     He did, by desegregating the military. But what one president giveth, another may take away. Donald Trump’s secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has waged an open battle against Black service members, blocking or stalling promotions of Black and female senior officers, claiming any advancement had to be due to DEI rather than merit. Others have been dismissed or forced into retirement. Online tributes to historic Black service members have been taken down while books by Black authors were removed from military academy libraries.

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After all that, she hardboiled the eggs

Not poached.

     Sunday morning the dog cleared her throat by my bedside at 4:40 a.m. and I did what I always do. Rolled out of bed, got dressed, took her on her walk, fed her, and then made the executive decision not to try to go back to sleep, but to head up to my office, to email my blog post, finish the column and, taking a break at 6 a.m.-ish, go downstairs to see after coffee, which involved reheating yesterday's.
       Breakfast seemed an option — sometimes I wait for the wife, sometimes I don't. She had bought Muenster cheese the day before and that settled it for me. I put a slice on a piece of toast, sprinkled with with oregano, and browned it in the broiler. Heaven.
     And hour later, when my wife got up, she asked if I had breakfast. I admitted I had, seduced by the presence of Muenster cheese. 
      "I think I'll poach an egg," she said. 
      "You mean steal it, perhaps from a game preserve?" I replied. 
      I was playing off the dual meanings of "poach" — to nab something, usually an animal, that doesn't belong to you. And "poach" as to cook something by simmering it in water.
     Leading to today's episode of my favorite game — what's the connection? And which usage is older?
     Honestly, I was stumped. The Oxford English Dictionary starts by tracing the word to the French, pocher, meaning, to enclose in a small bag — we see a remnant of that in the expression "a pig in a poke." Plus, don't forget, "pouch."

     Then the cooking meaning: "Poach 1. trans. To cook (an egg) by dropping it, without the shell, into boiling water. [F. pocher, in this sense, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.]" The usage is traced to 1390.
     Then a meaning having to do with poking things with a stick or finger, such as an 1859 usage, "We'll poach the fire"
    Then stamping with the feet and, finally, a third section:
     "III. 9 intr. To encroach or trespass (on the lands or rights of another) in order to possess oneself unlawfully or unfairly of something, esp. in order to steal game; hence, to take game or fish illegally, or by unsportsmanlike devices." 
      This usage is far more recent, 1611: "to poche into, or incroach upon,, another mans imployment, practise, or trade" 
    I should probably point out that "pocket" comes from here, with a familiar usage showing up in Shakespeare's Henry IV ""Have you enquir'd yet who pick'd my Pocket?"
    If we want to gaze into the more distant past — and we probably shouldn't, especially if you're having that poached egg — I see that poc in Old English was a pustule, or ulcer, or other little bags of skin filled with fluid, going back to the year 1000, hence the word "pox." I have to think they're somehow related. 

Maybe 450,000 Lollapalooza fans trampling Grant Park every year isn't such a good idea

You can't get there from here. The former U.S. Steel South Works site.

 

     The 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition worked so well, between the Graf Zeppelin floating by and Sally Rand, with her naughty bubble dance, many Chicagoans never wanted it to leave.
     They extended the fair for an extra season in 1934, then wondered: why not keep the party going? Mayor Edward J. Kelly proposed building a sprawling lakefront pleasure center — a "wonderland" of exhibition halls, picnic shelters, public beaches, an ice skating rink, a casino, and a big parking garage. Paid for by the federal government, of course.
     There are some funny moments in the "Secret Diary of Harold Ickes," where Franklin D. Roosevelt's penny-pinching secretary of the interior, a University of Chicago graduate, dismisses Kelly's dreams of a "Coney Island" on the lakefront, warning FDR that a significant chunk of any federal money thrown at the plan would end up in the pockets of the Kelly-Nash Democratic machine.
     Still, Kelly's dream was not far-fetched. The site where this wonderland was to be built became McCormick Place, and having a vast hall — then two — has been a magnet drawing exhibition business to Chicago: all those auto, electronics, restaurant and houseware shows.
     With the historic fireworks coming from last week's election, you could be forgiven for overlooking that more than two-third of Chicago voters — 68% — said "yes" on the referendum question: “Should Chicago develop a permanent festival and outdoor event space for large-scale events?”
     Hell yes. The result isn't binding, but makes sense. Venues lure business. As it is now, big music festivals hijack public spaces not only while they're going on, but during lengthy preparation and even lengthier clean-up. Repairing Grant Park after Lollapalooza took a month. Restoring the damage after this year's rain-soaked Riot Fest in Douglass Park might take until Thanksgiving. Yes, the festivals cover clean-up expenses — topping $1 million with Lolla —but that adds to the already astronomical ticket prices. One assumes a dedicated festival space would suffer less costly damage.
     The devil is in the details. The question is where to put such a venue. The traditional Shangri-La for land-hungry dreams was U.S. Steel's abandoned South Works, 600 acres of windswept nowhere. I've been there; the skyline glimmers waaay in the distance, across the lake, an unreachable Oz.
     But the future Illinois Quantum and Micro Electronics Park was somehow gulled into exiling itself there, and could fill half the site. Would the other half be enough? Grant Park is only 319 acres. I can see a series of fun stoner buddy movies about glitter-spangled concertgoers sloppy on ketamine trying to get home to Buffalo Grove from East 87th Street.

    Which should give pause — the assumption is that attendees of festivals would relocate to whatever permanent ground is settled upon, convenient or not. That might not be the case. One reason Lollapalooza is so successful is that concert goers like the nearby hotels and public transportation. Nobody wants to have their afterparty on Avenue O.

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You must keep my kitsch forever!

     Occasionally, an unrepentant Trumpie will write in, their message plopping into the Spam filter, because they've been writing for years, and at some point I blocked them.

     Being a curious sort, I sometimes click on their email, just to see what they have to say, even though, almost inevitably, it is, "Aha! More Trump derangement syndrome! You HATE him!!!!"
     And if I am feeling energetic, I might send a link to this 2018 column, "Hate Donald Trump? No way. It's more a sense of luftschlossmoddermüde," where I explain that I certainly don't hate him, and for an obvious reason: he's beneath hatred. "Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?" Then coin a compound German word to describe the weary disgust he engenders, in me and I'm sure in many others.
     The column spends quite a while pulling the matter apart. He's president and rich and famous but clearly, it's not enough. Nothing is ever enough, a grotesque Midas breaking his teeth on the gold junk he shovels into his constantly flapping maw. Who can honestly say they would be him? Donald Trump makes austerity seem enviable. 

     Then, last week, the realization hit me after Trump took an unusual step: it's even more complicated than that.

     I have sympathy for Donald Trump.
     Truly. I really do. Bear with me. He's so wounded, so needy, so fragile. I started to feel that certain tingle of pity in 2018 when I drove downstate to Granite City to watch him reopen a blast furnace.
     I remember some readers being shocked by my lede sentence:
     " Donald Trump is a charming man, and people like him."
     But it was true. He was charming. The guys at U.S. Steel loved him. Why would I drive across the state just to disgorge the prejudices I'd left with?
     "... he knows how to relate to an audience, to feed their sense of being menaced by outsiders, of being betrayed by a government too stupid to live in the real world, like they do. Fifty-three minutes of praise, exaggeration and braggadocio, sprinkled with half-truths, non-truths and the occasional fact tucked in for variety's sake."
     And ... for want of a better word, vulnerable. Maybe even "broken." I wrote:

     You could feel Trump’s neediness.
    “How am I doing?" he asked, and the crowd roared.

     He had been president for over a year, yet still had to point out that he was getting all this attention.

    "Look at the cameras! It’s like the Academy Awards.”

     He reached out to the gathered steelworkers, who came in on their days off to be there with him.

    But hearing him, I better understood his appeal. He has a vulnerable charm, at times a humanity. He pandered shamelessly to his audience.“We need steel,” he said.        “We need steel plants. And to see an old, big monster plant like this re-opening — that is an honor. I look at the faces of you people; I could be one of you. I like you guys. I could be one of you.”

    Yeah, if steelworkers were rich real estate developer spawn who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
    That sense came back a few days ago when he made the Oval Office a National Historic Monument, so nobody could ever change it. A truly unhinged act. The whole White House is already a National Historic Monument, and that didn't stop him from impulsively tearing down the entire East Wing. And now he thinks the cheap Home Depot shiny gold-colored tat he's stuck up over all the walls, the line of gold loving cups, are going to be preserved past the first day his successor is in office? 
     That IS delusional. He goes around destroying what others have created, to further his own self-assigned glory, then panics at the prospect that others who follow will do the same to him. So typically Trump: every accusation a confession.

     Pressed on the issue, Trump admitted that the designation wouldn't preserve the decor. He pretended he's trying to keep anyone from — what? — making the Oval Office into the Hexagonal Office. When really, he's pleading: "Don't forget me."

     If only we could...

     That desire, that fear, so clearly motivates him as he defaces Washington piecemeal, to leave his mark. To not be sucked into the void he sprang from.

     I ... actually get that.
     Looking around my own office. At all the books, all the beloved mementos, prints and familial stuff, I can't help but relate to him. Nobody's going to want this. Not the boys. Being a journalist of minuscule reputation — to borrow Chekhov's spot-on phrase — sure won't do it. No museum here. Someday, maybe someday soon, this is all stripped out, sent Goodwill bound, or trashed, the house no doubt torn down to make way for another white farmhouse on steroids.

    To think otherwise is pure ego. And truly, when the entire arc of the Trump era finally reaches its crashing bottom most point, that is what will stand out — as always. Enormous self-regard, the great engine of history. You need some vanity to get out of bed in the morning. To fill that void on page two three times a week. So it's a balancing act. I'm proud that, finally, I learned to manifest myself while at the same time realizing, it's not all about me. None of it is about me.

      Because it's so easy to submit. Saddled with a little too much ego and suddenly you are Joe Biden thinking, "Heck, maybe I will run again." And far too much, you end up Donald Trump.  A monster. Blinded by it. Made stupid by it. Mad Midas pissing his initials on the carpet. Completely undone. 

     Though never forget, the poison that ruined him — that ruins guys like Elon Musk who accomplish something great and then make that leap to decide that, therefore, a) they are great and b) everyone else is shit — is found, diluted, in every vein. I have more than I'd like. And probably you do too. 

Flashback 1991: Jews in Ethiopia an ancient riddle

  

Photo courtesy of VisitEthiopia.et.

   Rabbi Capers Funnye died Monday. I can't recall how he got on my radar, but in 1991 I attended a service at his South Side synagogue and wrote about him and other Black Jews. What I remember most about the story are peripherals — editors at the paper were reluctant to run it, since it wasn't "news" ("It's news," I recall saying, "if people don't know about it.") And the complaints from angry Ethiopian Jews in Chicago who felt the divinity of their origins were being questioned. Anyway, I've posted the story previously, but not the little sidebar that went with it. In the years that followed, almost the entirety of the Ethiopian Jewish population were also air-lifted to Israel, that pariah of the western world. I guess those Falashas are colonizers too, moving from one part of Africa to a spot just north of the continent. 

   When French scholar Joseph Halevy made contact with the Jews of Ethiopia in 1867, he found they were skeptical about his claims to being Jewish.
     Halevy was a white man and, as the Ethiopians knew, all Jews were black.
     The question of how tens of thousands of black Jews came to be planted in a remote, impoverished region of Africa is one of the great riddles of anthropology.
     They often are called Falashas, a term they consider pejorative because the word means "stranger" or "outsider" or "no roots" and signifies a lowly place in society. They prefer to be called "Beta-Israel" or "House of Israel."
     The Ethiopian Jews claim to be descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Anthropologists guess they were converted, en masse, thousands of years ago.
     They do not practice Judaism as found in Skokie. But there is no question they follow Judaism of a sort. They follow certain kosher dietary laws, observe Jewish festivals, are circumcised, keep the Sabbath on Saturday and read the Torah translated into Ge'ez, an ancient Ethiopian tongue.      Their priests are called kohanim.
    They lived in obscurity as blacksmiths and potters until the ouster of Haile Selassie in September, 1974, when they became swept up in the civil war that devastated the country.
     In 1975, Israel's orthodox Jewish establishment declared that the Ethiopian Jews were true Jews, descendants of the lost tribe of Dan, and therefore had the right of return and to settle in the land of Israel. At the time, only several hundred Ethiopian Jews lived in Israel.
     Over the next decade, the Israeli government conducted a rescue, dubbed Operation Moses, that secretly airlifted as many as 20,000 out of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum and resettled them in Israel.
     Fewer than 20,000 were left in Ethiopia.
     The airlift was kept under wraps until 1985, when news of it broke, embarrassing the various African governments who collaborated in the airlift and bringing it to a halt.
     Since then Ethiopian Jews have continued to trickle out, depending on the politics of the moment. Only a handful live in Chicago.
     The relocation to the Middle East was a jarring adjustment for both sides. The Israelis sometimes reacted with racist fear and an air of religious superiority to the Ethiopians, who had to cope with racial biases of their own.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 31, 1991

Wait a sec! This isn't the Donald Trump we know

 

     Words don’t often fail me. I wouldn’t last long in this job if they did. But Tuesday night, after sitting with a big bowl of popcorn, serenely watching the Democrats run the table in the midterm elections — a strong majority in the House, more than enough in the Senate, even the governorship of Texas — I snapped off the television, sucked my front teeth, tweeted out a clip of Anthony Quinn doing his ecstatic Zorba the Greek dance, then went to bed.
     But the clip, even without elaboration, was deceptive. I didn’t feel ecstatic, or celebratory, or even particularly glad. What I felt was calm, focused and more than a little wary. So ... after all that thundering for years about rigged elections, conjuring up will-o'-the-wisps of voter fraud and mobilizing the Justice Department to chase after them, the biggest crybaby in public life since Nero is going to just shrug and go, “Oh, right, I lost. Good for you.”
And we’re supposed to believe him? Does that sound probable to you?
     Maybe I bought a bully’s bluster. Didn’t realize that, like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” one solid bop on the nose would change him from a preening predator to a blubbering wreck, complaining that Fox News doesn’t love him anymore.
     Or maybe there’s a Plan B — they won’t certify the election. Another mob will be sicced on the Capitol. He tried it before.
     Did he really say he was “absolutely willing” to accept the election results? That he would “look forward to working with” the Democrats? That they did a “good job”? Does that sound like the Donald Trump you’ve gotten to know over the last 10 years? Can I be the only one in the country who is suspicious?
     Smarter political minds than my own seem to accept it. Wednesday I reached out to political whiz David Axelrod, the man who helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Why isn’t Trump fighting this tooth and nail? His reply might be the most succinct remark in the history of punditry since Dorothy Parker supposedly responded to the death of Calvin Coolidge with, “How can they tell?”
     “Too big to rig!” Axelrod said.
     Could that be it? Yes, the scope of the loss was enormous. Seven states flipped: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. With Mississippi — Mississippi! — incredibly, still too close to call. Governorships in Texas, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Iowa. Why not enjoy it? Grab our skis and head for hell, because obviously it’s frozen over, every red state now a winter Democratic wonderland.

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