Assembling the IKEA cabinet of happiness

 

 
     So I went to the opening plenary at the Organization of American Historians at the Sheraton Thursday. It was a brisk walk across the Loop from Madison Street to North Water and Columbus Drive, and it put me in, shall we say, maximum high spirits, seeing the people, the buildings parallaxing by.
     I got there about 4:10 p.m., checked in for my press credentials.
    "I'm from the Chicago Sun-Times," I said. "Or what's left of it."
     Which is very on-brand for me — acknowledge the elephant in the room, say the unsaid thing, spill more of my business than is purely necessary. Shutting up, as I often also say, is an art form I struggle to master. Still.
     There was 20 minutes before I was supposed to meet a reader who is a member of the organization — her email lured me there — and there was a concourse filled with booths from book publishers. Why not plunge in?
     Here I did an unthinking thing. Regular readers know that in 2009 I took a trip out west with the boys, then 12 and 13. When it was over, I wrote a book about it, pieces of which pop up here from time to time, like dead fish floating to the surface of a poisoned pond. It was supposed to be a keepsake for them, but for that to happen someone would have to publish the thing. So I'd have something tangible to hand them someday. Otherwise its a bunch of electrons that could wink out of existence with a hard drive crash. And look, here were these publishers, all around me.
     So I blundered up to one after another who might in theory be interested. There was the University of Illinois Press, which I'd actually sent the manuscript to, years ago. They rejected it with a sniff of "Not an Illinois book," ("But it begins in Illinois!" I'd objected. "And ends there! And involves three Illinoisans on an adventure!" No dice).   
      To my credit, I did try to browse the spreads of new books — but honestly, while the covers were well-designed and they were all in English, the subjects didn't interest me. If I'd been encouraged to take whatever volumes I wanted home with me, I don't think I'd have snagged one.  The subjects were obscure, rococo and uninviting. 
     The only book I actually flipped through was "Food Autonomy in Chicago" by Pancho McFarland, published by the University of Georgia Press. Years ago I'd been to the The 70th Street Farm in East Englewood with Sarah Stegner, then chef at the Ritz, to check on her tomato plants, and somehow imagined that a book with that title might connect me to similar stories related to food autonomy. Stuff I could put in the paper.

     But honestly, I couldn't make sense of the table of contents — the words slid off the page. I didn't take notes on the chapters, and the media at the University of Georgia Press didn't respond to a request for the table of contents. But two paragraphs describing the book from the publisher might give a sense of the thing:

     This examination of a sector of the food autonomy movement in Chicago provides important new ways of understanding race relations, gender, sexuality, spirituality, pedagogy, identity, and their importance to the dynamics of social movements. Additionally, the book explores how revolutionary culture, principles, and organization of American Indigenous, diasporan Africans, anarchist Mexicans and others have been adopted, adapted, or rejected in our food movement.
     In this autoethnography of the food movement, McFarland argues that at our best we work to establish a new society like that theorized and enacted by Indigenous and Black anarchists. However, the forces of Wetiko (colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy) make the work of BIPOC food warriors difficult. Wetiko’s conceptual categories—including race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship—influence our worldviews and affect our behaviors.

     Are you beginning to see what a book on three guys getting lost in Yellowstone Park might not find an eager publisher? I am. 
     Though not on the spot. I presented myself to several editors at several publishers, whose reaction could be best described as a sort of numb disinterest. Being with the Sun-Times meant nothing. Being a published author meant nothing.  I meant nothing.

     What did I expect? Them to leap up and embrace me. "Comrade!" 

     Eventually it came time to go upstairs for the talk — I plan to write about that Wednesday. Afterward, still not grasping the situation, I returned to the publishers' concourse to resume raking my fingers against the brick wall. 

     "We're looking for books about Native-Americans," said an editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, when I finally paused for breath and could register the plea in her eyes, which said, in essence, "Please go away now."

      Suddenly I saw myself as if from afar. A gray-haired man, spewing nonsense. Really, had I been a bum, whoops, unhoused person, living on Lower Wacker Drive, and wandered up, with my layers of jackets and shiny pants and red ruined face and went from booth to booth, asking for a chaw of tobacco, I don't think my reception would have been much different. 

     Feeling quite eviscerated I collected what little remained of my pride the way a person who had actually been slashed across the abdomen by the razor of book publishing circa 2025 might collect his guts in both hands, and waddled out the door, trying not to step on his dragging entrails.

     I rode the train home, grim, and came home. grim, my mouth set, my wife's attempts to boost the mood water off a duck's ass. I grimly made myself  a plain dinner. Cashews. Cheese. A simple salad. Stuff that wouldn't boost my blood sugar. 

     Sometimes the only thing to do is go to bed and hope it makes sense in the morning. 

     And you know what? It did make sense in the morning. I blinked into the world, had one taste of stale grimness, a kind of mental drymouth, spat that out, and starting thinking, belatedly. 

     Looking back on the night before, I realized my mistake. Not right away. For maybe an hour I puzzled over it, like a guy trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet, holding a sheet of instructions in one hand and pawing through an unpromising mess of shiny metal screws and wooden dowels and plastic spacers in the other.

     But eventually an idea took shape, an that idea was this:

     It was my fault. 

     I should have parked my ego at the door. Shut up about the damned book already. I should have asked each publisher what their favorite new book was. Should have asked them about their visit to Chicago. Asked them anything. It's not all about me, obviously. I went in there hot, talking about myself, and should have resisted that and done my damn job. I had set myself up, dropped my guard. 

     How many times have I quoted that damn T.S. Eliot line about humility? It doesn't mean jack shit if you are not yourself humble. Which I'm not. But can be. With work. I've done. On occasion. It takes effort. You can sure as hell try. Harder than I thought to try Wednesday night.

     Not just try, as Yoda says. Do.  There is no try.

     But no shame there either. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you — that isn't T.S. Eliot, but also true. Realizing that it was my fault was very liberating, oddly. The world is the world. Every loser and headcase has a grievance. Certainly a better takeaway than, "You're a loser who can't get his books published." Today is a new chance, a bright shiny span of hours to use as I please. Learn from yesterday's sorrow then fling it away.

     There is an expression in Norwegian, "Du er din egen lykkesmed," which Google Translate puts into English as "You are the master of your own luck." Though my Norwegian friend Gry says it scans to locals as, "You are your own source of happiness." It's too easy, when something makes you unhappy to let it sit in your craw, festering, to accept it on face value, blame others — "Wah, those publishers were indifferent to me!" — when you can also spit it out, rinse, learn something. You have X days to live, and then you wink out forever. How many days, how many hours, are you willing to lose to unhappiness based on things beyond your control? Are you going to be happy? Or not? Your call. Don't look for outside validation. Your own happiness is always within you, though often hiding. You need to flush it out.

Train accident

     A long, continuous train horn. Unbroken. Wehrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... 
     "That's a person," I said to my wife.
     Meaning, the only reason an engineer lays on the horn like that is someone on the tracks.
     Suicide, most likely. At least I hoped it was. The only thing worse than jumping in front of a train, intentionally, is to be blundering along, earpods screwed in, chatting on your iPhone, look up and think, "Shit a train," and bam it's over.

     Besides, most are suicides. There is that subtle hint of the ringing bells and flashing lights and lowered gates to help even the most careless avoid accidents.
     I live one block from the Northbrook Metra station. Quite intentionally. When we bought this house, nearly a quarter century ago, I wanted to live by public transportation so I could go into work without driving. Driving sucks. At least city driving. If I need to drive north, to Wisconsin, or west, to Iowa, I'm all for that. Coffee, tunes, the semi-open road.

      We can see the tracks from our dining room window. 
     Of course we thought about the noise. Those train horns. The clanging bells. And, such as Monday night, the ambulance and fire trucks that quickly arrived on the scene. I gazed uneasily out the living room window at the strobing lights. Some poor person...
     We were smart. Before we bought the house, we sat in what would be the master bedroom and waited. A train came by — a sort of gentle whoosh. We decided that we could live with that. Then we moved in, and the first freight came by, rattling the century-old windows in their dry frames. You get used to it.
     I'd taken the train downtown Monday to have lunch with a reader and his wife who bought the experience at a charity auction. They live in Kenosha. I told them, rather than go all the way into the city, we could meet at Prairie Grass —run by Sarah Stegner, the former chef of the Ritz Carlton dining room. I tried to tempt them with pie. Door County Sour Cherry. Coconut Creme. Pumpkin.
     But they wanted the full Chicago experience. So I suggested Harry Caray's on Kinzie, my go-to restaurant showing off the city. That lovely little Dutch revival building that somehow survived the ravages of time. The walls, a museum of memorabilia. It doesn't hurt that there is a photo of my younger son, on the mound at Wrigley Field, throwing out the first pitch at the Cubs/Sox game on the 3rd of July. A frozen rope to the catcher.
     Why would anyone jump in front of a train? I know the answer. Despair and sorrow and sadness and hopelessness and mental illness and addiction. Lost romance, lost job, lost hope, just plain lost. A permanent solution to a temporary problem.
     The devastated loved ones of those who perish under the train often put little white crosses and plastic flowers on the spot where the death occurred, and Metra leaves them for a polite period, sometimes for a good long while, to bleach in the sun and become faded and pitious. One, just off the platform by a tree, lingered for years, and I would eye it uneasily waiting for a train. Maybe even with a trace of annoyance — I'm sorry for your personal tragedy, but it's sobering enough to be going to a depopulated downtown to attend some meeting you could as easily conduct on Zoom or never at all. Must I consider your tragedy too? A petty thought, but you have to be who you are. It isn't very much to ask. Pause to remember this person was here.
     Monday night, the commotion lasted for a couple hours. Emergency trucks coming and going, other trains blasting their horns, loud and long, as they inched past what I assumed were recovery efforts. What I think of as, "picking someone up with a tweezers."

     Only it wasn't that. I checked the news the next day. Not a suicide — a 23-year old woman, running across the tracks. Taken to Evanston Hospital. Condition unknown.
     Running across the tracks. Jesus F. Christ. It mystifies me. Where are they going? Monday, when I returned from downtown, I got off the train, crossed Shermer, and tucked myself behind the crossing gate. Everyone else, getting off the train, stayed between the gate and the train, the better to surge across the tracks when the train pulls away. Timing their bolt from the blots so they're in motion even before the stainless steel wall of the train has removed itself. Which can be a problem if there is a train coming the other way. I've seen people start, then dance back as a train passes the other direction.
     A cautious move, on my part, to wait behind the gate. Habit. When we moved here, the boys were 3 and 4, and I realized the best way to inculcate train safety in them is to do it myself. It's very hard to be hit by a train if remain behind the gate until it raises up.
     This is not to criticize the young lady, whom I hope is alright. Maybe she was just grazed. That's unlikely. Usually, you get hit by a train, you know it. Maybe she'll reach out when she gets out of the hospital, and can tell us where she was going in such a hurry. Though I wouldn't expect that. It's got to be embarrassing, to be so careless. It's got to add insult to injury.

Culinary Artists Week #2: America's Goat Cheese Whiz

Judith Schad at Capriole Farm in 2000 (Sun-Times photo)

     This story brings up so many memories. I had wanted to trace the journey of a salmon from a lake in Minnesota to a table at the Ritz-Carlton, even went to the Chicago Fish House, trying to set it up. But doing so proved difficult, and I thought to instead spotlight one of the cheeses that Sarah Stegner was so intent upon in my profile of her, posted yesterday and thought to visit Judith Schad's Capriole Farm.

     I wanted to bring her something special, for hosting me, so went to Tekla Importing to buy a few bottles of high end wine. Owner Sofia Solomon said her father started the Solomon drug store chain, and I realized she was the sister of Essee Kupcinet, wife of the famous columnist, born Essee Solomon. I had written her advance obit. "I bet I know more about your sister than you do," I teased. She looked dubious. "Her middle name is Joan, but it used to Jane: Why'd she change it?" I asked. She looked at me blankly. I leaned in, grinning, "Mad for Joan Crawford," I whispered.

     That, and as I toured Capriole Farms, I kept murmuring, "The boys would love this." Each time, Judith Schad replied, "You have to come back with them." About the third time she said that, I raised a finger, and warned, "If you invite us again, I'll bring them, and you'll be sorry. The boys were 3 and 4. She invited us, and I brought the whole family. We had a blast; Ross became enamored of going after all the flies on a goat ranch with a swatter. I can't speak for Schad, though I got the distinct sense she was relieved when the weekend came to the a close.

    Capriole Farm, like many food establishments, suffered during COVID, seeing orders decline by 75 percent, but is still in business.

     What looks so refined on a gold-rimmed plate set on a starched white tablecloth in the gilded splendor of the Ritz-Carlton dining room begins its existence in southeast Indiana at the underside of a goat.
     Goat cheese has yet to challenge favorites such as Cheddar or gouda, but the dry, pungent curd is enjoying a surge in popularity at Chicago's better restaurants and supermarkets, part of a renewal of interest in fine cheeses.
     "We're huge on cheese," said Rick Tramanto, chef at the culinary palace Tru, where goat cheese is typically included among the array of cheeses prominently displayed on an elaborate cart at the restaurant entrance.
     As with wine, France still enjoys prominence in cheesemaking. But the French are being challenged, at least when it comes to goat cheese, by a former medieval literature scholar turned Hoosier goat farmer named Judith Schad.
     "Judith Schad is the queen of cheesemaking in America," said Sarah Stegner, executive chef at the Ritz-Carlton, as she stood in the dining room, addressing a group of 50 cheese lovers brought together to eat cheese and drink wine, with the proceeds from the event used to send a member of the Ritz staff to study cheesemaking at Schad's Capriole Farms in Greenville, Ind.
     They should bring boots. One time zone and 350 miles southeast, the queen of cheesemaking in America has pulled on her green rubber barn boots and is squooshing through barnyard muck in the pre-dawn darkness to bring blocks of hay to her herd of 307 goats, which cluster and bleat around her.
     "It's not exactly the Ritz, is it?" she says, laughing.
     Nor is it agribusiness. For an endeavor that ships out 50,000 pounds of cheese, in various forms, flavors and textures, Capriole Farms, if not quite the one cow, one horse, one chicken farm found in children's books, has a certain warmth and humanity rare in the typical dairy product factory.
     Schad's home is a pair of rustic cabins artfully cobbled together. A grand piano rests in the book-lined living room, and a huge, inviting kitchen bristles with hanging pots and a curing country ham.
     Across a pond is the ramshackle old barn where Schad's goats—all named—wander. Although they are typically milked by machine, half a dozen at a time, Schad still finds herself occasionally squatting at the hind end of a goat, milking into a metal bucket.
     There are two distinct worlds when it comes to making goat cheese—the goat part and the cheese part. One is cleaner than the other, though the goats are fairly fastidious in their habits, as far as barnyard animals go.

Goats at Capriole Farm (Sun-Times photo).

     "Goats are cats with horns," Schad said, and the animals do have a certain feline grace and deliberation; curious, in a slow-moving fashion.
     Cheese starts with milk. Every morning, before dawn, about a third of Schad's goats are directed toward the milking area, where they clomp heavily up an inclined wooden board and find a place among six empty metal racks.
     The rubber hoses of the Pulsator milking machine are attached, and the milk is pumped into a 500-gallon tank. Goat milk has a nutty, grassy taste, rich in the mouth, and is the secret behind the cheese.
     "What goat milk has is this incredibly fine texture," Schad said. "Nothing says I can't make the same cheeses with cow milk. The problem is fat composition. Fat in cow's milk has larger globules. Goat's milk is naturally homogenized, velvety, fine-tasting, smooth and creamy."
    The rest of the herd are not milked because they're resting or pregnant.
     "They need a rest," Schad said. "If you don't give them a rest, it's not as healthy, and they really make me feel bad." She laughs at the thought of letting emotions enter into the realm of goat husbandry. "A lot of this does fly in the face of good dairy practice."
     After the milk is taken from the goats, it is pumped into a stainless steel tank, then pasteurized at 145 degrees. The pasteurized milk then is mixed with a bit of the cheese cultures -- the bacteria that turn it into cheese. The cultures live in five mason jars set on a window ledge in Schad's cheesemaking room.
     "This is the mother," Schad announced, proudly showing off a jar of what looks like cloudy water.
     The coagulating mixture is ladled into —what else?—cheesecloth, and hung up to dry, the liquid slowly dripping out of rows of white globes.
     Schad got into cheesemaking in the most backward way imaginable. Burnt out on the life of a grad student studying medieval literature, Schad and her husband, Larry, bought a dilapidated farm, a return to her roots.
     "I had grandparents who were so incredible," she said. "They had this mini-farm. They did everything. My grandfather grew one of every kind of plant in the universe. It was such an idyllic childhood: planting apple trees, picking up persimmons. No child could have grown up in any more wonderful place."
     The idyll ended when she was a teen and her grandmother had a stroke.
     "I think I always wanted to get back to that," she said. "Plus the cooking. My grandmother was an incredible cook. I cooked since I was 12."
     A farm needs animals, which were acquired, including a couple of goats. The children entered the goats into 4-H contests. The milk was simply thrown away.
     Which seemed a shame.
     Schad started making chevre, the basic goat cheese. Then she added a variety of flavors and types, dubbing them with solid American names containing a hint of pun, such as Old Kentucky Tomme ("tomme" being another word for a hunk of cheese). A layering of three cheeses is dubbed "Fromage a Trois."
     Another cheese, with the simple name "Banon," for a town in France, is soaked in whiskey and wrapped in chestnut leaves which, given the blight-induced scarcity of chestnut trees, is no small task.
     Her efforts began to pay off five years ago. Her Wabash Cannonball took "Best of Show" at the 1995 American Cheese Society show.
     "Stunningly delicious," wrote cheese guru Steve Jenkins in his 1996 fromage bible, Cheese Primer.
     "I sing her praises," said Sofia Solomon, owner of Tekla Importers, which wholesales Capriole cheese. "I think she's really extraordinary. And not only because she named a cheese for me. She is a fabulous artisanal producer. She's just a wonderfully interesting person and great fun to work with."
     Schad certainly is great fun to visit. No sooner has your bag hit the floor than she has opened the wine and is out in the cheese house, searching through her trays of exotic, ash-cloaked cheeses for one of optimum ripeness.
    "Tonight, we eat cheese," she said, striding into her walk-in refrigerator, filled with shelves of wooden crates, each holding neat arrays of geometric cheese.
     She seizes a particularly ripe-looking cheese. "I kind of really love it, but I'm not sure anyone else would. I'm loving it. I love all that moldy, wonderful thing happening."
      —Published in the Sun-Times, August 13, 2000

Culinary Artists Week #1: Cookin' at the Ritz

     I'm on vacation this week, kicking back around the house. So as not to leave you in the lurch, however, I've declared this Culinary Artists Week, and am featuring some of my favorite pieces about chefs and haute cuisine over the years, starting with this profile of Sarah Stegner from 1999, when she presided over the Ritz-Carlton dining room.  Lucky for me, in 2004 she started Prairie Grass Cafe in Northbrook with her husband, Rohit Nambiar and Ritz executive chef George Bumbaris—both of whom have cameos in this story—so I've been able to keep up with her progress as a top chef, not only from a gustatory perspective, but as she deepened her passion for local, ethical, sustainable food cultivation and mindful dining. While in the process eating many, many first rate meals prepared in her kitchen. This profile is long—over 2,100 words–but I guarantee at the end you'll wishing you knew more about her. Tomorrow's post is connected: a visit to Judith Schad at Capriole Farms, which I learned about through Sarah's commitment to high quality American cheeses.

Sarah Stegner in 1999 (Sun-Times)

      Sarah Stegner is a long way from the kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where she is chef of the Dining Room.
     About 80 blocks south. Nearly 10 miles of distance, and a world away by culture, from the glitz of the Ritz, to the grit of East Englewood.
     The day is bright and crisp. Stegner gingerly steps through what, at a quick glance might look like a muddy, weedy, vacant lot. A closer look reveals a tiny garden with an ambitious name: "The 70th Street Farm." Nothing is ready for purchase, but the tomato plants are in, and Stegner wants to check their progress.
     "We might be able to bring back herbs," she says.
     The visit is as much to lock in a claim to the produce from the one-third-acre plot as it is to examine the plants. Fine restaurants are in keen competition for fine produce, and Stegner was floored by the tomatoes this lot produced last season.
     If possible, the Ritz will claim all the heirloom lettuce, beets, tomatoes, giant snow peas and broccoli. Let the other chefs drive to Wisconsin.
     She casts a covetous eye on young lettuce — perhaps she could take it back for tonight's salad? Neil Dunaetz, who runs the farm, rebuffs her: "It would be like robbing from a cradle."
     After 20 minutes, she leaves empty-handed, pressing home the point, one more time, that when things come out of the ground, he should call her.
     "Anything you have ready, we can put on the table," she says. "You have it, we'll use it."
     Back at the Ritz, the kitchen is gearing up for Friday night dinner, three hours away. Chefs and assorted staff stroll in like actors gathering at theater before a play. Everyone begins doing something: declawing crabs, boiling stock, making pasta.
     Stegner — one of the nation's top chefs, named "Best Midwest Chef" last year by the James Beard Foundation, winner of numerous accolades, including the Prix Culinaire International Pierre Taittinger — has her own priority.
     "I have to order cheese," she says, picking up a phone. "I need cheese for tonight. I'm not bad off, but I'm not sure I have enough."
     There are a thousand minor-but-important details to worry about, but cheese is special to Stegner. The Ritz menu introduces the $16 cheese course with a lengthy ode to cheese, beginning: "I have enjoyed the search and discovery of fine American cheeses. Acknowledgment needs to be given to the artisans for their work and determination to deliver consistent quality cheese . . ."
     Thus Stegner, and not a subordinate, labors over selecting that night's cheeses, appraising them like a choosy casting director. She unwraps Brillat Savarin, Hoch Ybrig, Lingot Dauphinois. Some make the cut for that evening's dinner; other cheeses are told to go home, marry the girl next door, give up this crazy dream.
     "It seems mundane," she says. "What I'm doing is checking quality. I like to do it. It needs a little bit of attention."
     A moist Roquefort, speckled with mold, blows its audition.
     "It can be riper," Stegner says. "It's still a little bit young."
     The cheeses are arranged from mild to strong. Asked if the average diner appreciates the pungent wallop of a very strong cheese, Stegner smiles.
     "They might," she says.
     Stegner is as economical with smiles as she is with fresh truffles. She'll serve one, but not without reason and certainly not lavishly, not in the wild excess of other chefs.
     "There are baseball cap chefs and toque chefs," said one of Stegner's acquaintances, referring to the tall, starched chef's hats. "She's a toque chef."
     Stegner cooks with concentration bordering on solemnity, like a cleric performing a rite. The kitchen is very quiet, except for the exhaust fans and an occasional clink of spoon on pot.
     "She's real intense," agrees friend Jimmy Bannos, the chef; owner of the two Heaven on Seven restaurants. "There's no BS when she's in the kitchen, no messing around. She's focused."
     That said, her intensity rarely explodes into anger. There is no screaming in Stegner's kitchen. Her longtime friend and mentor, Ritz executive chef George Bumbaris, says that now is common in commercial kitchens: "It doesn't work, anymore."
     Then again, few of the cliches of the star chef apply to Stegner. Despite her classical training, she avoids stuffy terms. Red rice is a "neat grain."
     She asks junior chefs if they would mind doing something, as if they might say no.
     "Would you do me a favor?" she says. "Will you make a mustard and red wine vinaigrette? Don't make a lot of it."
     When a fire flares up on the grill line, she reacts first, leading the assault to put it out. (The closest the Ritz ever came to not serving dinner in her nearly 15 years in the kitchen came when a pot of lobster bisque boiled over and set off the fire suppression system, dumping fire retardant over the grill and not only ruining everything already prepared, but forcing the entire line to be cleaned before preparations could begin anew.)
     "That was my worst nightmare," she says. "We opened, but we opened late."
     Perhaps the most unusual thing about Stegner, 35, is that in a business where chefs climb the ladder by hopping from restaurant to restaurant, she has been at the Ritz since she was 19, when she was hired on the spot to clean fish, 12 hours a day, for eight months.
     "It's physically hard work," she says. "You need a lot of knife skills. It challenges your dedication to the profession."
     Stegner met the challenge, and stayed on in the Ritz kitchen. She was, if possible, even more reserved at the beginning.
     "She started very shy," says Bumbaris. "She basically matured here, and has gotten a lot more sophisticated with the food."
     She came from food people. Her grandmother, Mary Boswell, had been a caterer in DuMont, N.J. She got into the business, the story goes, with parties raising money for a new church building.
     "I remember clam chowder — this was the East Coast," says Stegner. "They had a grill outside, and she would do venison roasts."
     Stegner grew up in Evanston, graduated from Evanston Township High School and went to Northwestern, studying classical guitar. But that route quickly soured.
     "There were nine classical guitarists when I was there," she says. "They were either really into classical music or wanted to be rock stars, and I didn't fit in with any of them."
     She left Northwestern after her freshman year and took refuge at the Cooking School Dumas Pere.
     "I wanted to work in a kitchen," she says. "I didn't know what that meant."
     She ended up a waitress at Bennison's Bakery in Wilmette, working the breakfast shift. That's when she got her first job at the Ritz.
     It took her just six years to move from cleaning fish to being named head of the Dining Room, and quickly the honors began rolling in. Like many successful chefs, as her fame grew, she responded by getting involved in the wide spectrum of charity work available to the culinary set.
     "When somebody calls you and says we need your help, it's pretty hard to say, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I have a date that night,' " she says. "If I can, I will."
     Four years ago she founded the Women Chefs of Chicago, a fund-raising group.
     Stegner checks to see if the morels have arrived. They have, and in fine form. She gives them an appreciative look, then sends them on their way to becoming a sauce for the ravioli.
     To take advantage of the freshest meat, fish and produce available, a new menu is composed each day, based on what comes in and what is good. Stegner is constantly improvising. Fifteen pounds of wonderful wild watercress have arrived, so potato and watercress soup goes on the menu for this night. There have been times when the menus were being printed while the first patrons were filing into the Dining Room.
     "Sometimes we push it to the last minute," she says. "Sometimes, right down to the wire."
     In a small, square room, with beautiful menus from special dinners framed in gold on the walls, Stegner sits with a china cup of cappuccino, intensely examining the latest draft of the menu. She takes a pen. The sheep's milk ricotta gnocchi with leeks is struck out. The julienne of prosciutto? Out. It is 3:20.
     "I want to show off the duck liver terrine," she says.
     The moment of peace ends quickly, replaced by a new mini-crisis. Little black beetles discovered in the watercress. The beetles are shown the door.
     As mealtime approaches, the entrees make their appearances. Long lines of thick pink veal chops. Deep red steaks. Stegner quizzes the other chefs.
     "Enough caviar for tonight?" she asks one.
     "What about the raviolis?" she asks another.
     "Twenty-six orders," the other chef, Chris Murphy, says.
     "I think you're going to be tight," she says.
     There are 37 radiologists at two special parties who could, in theory, order the raviolis. If the kitchen got 27 orders, they would have to prepare more dough, and that would throw a wrench in the works. On the other hand, the ravioli dough cannot be saved; if none of the radiologists orders ravioli, the 26 orders will be lost. Risk running out or risk wasting a lot of dough? Stegner tells Murphy to make more dough.
     It is the sort of spot decision, half culinary, half economic, that makes or breaks a chef and a restaurant. Stegner makes them all day long. Mistakes happen. Once she ordered 15 pounds of pea shoot tendrils, missing the fact that they cost $4 an ounce. She ended up with $ 1,000 worth of pea shoot tendrils.
     That wasn't worth it, but generally freshness is worth almost anything.
     She says that, while she was classically trained in the French tradition, she tries to retain the American focus on the product.
     "What we put in our mouths comes from the earth," she says. "People are beginning to understand that and go back to that. So if you get incredibly good arugula grown at a farm in Illinois, I'm not going to take that and twist it around and stack and hide it. I'm going to give you that arugula in its purest form, the way it tastes the best."
     Before the customers taste Stegner's food, the wait staff does. Just before 5 p.m., the waiters gather, examining the menu, and Stegner sweeps out with special items for that night, but not before touting a charity dinner.
     "Are we allowed to go to it?" a waiter asks.
     "You're allowed to work it," she says. Then she pops into the kitchen.
     "This is potato watercress soup," she says, returning with an elegant little bowl. "They're wild watercress. Yukon golden potatoes. A little bit of butter but no cream. In the bowl a little garnish, and shallots with mustard vinaigrette."
     The waiters taste and savor. Spoons click. The response is good. She hurries back to the kitchen.
     "This is the ravioli with morel mushroom cream sauce," she says, returning.
     "Where are the morels from?" someone asks.
     "Washington state."
     Back in the kitchen, Stegner, who takes great pain to credit those working under her, says she puts great emphasis on the daily pre-dinner ritual.
     "I have to make sure the wait staff understands why this is important to me, what this is about, make sure they taste it so they can go and convey this passion," she says. "They're really good at that."
     Quietly, one waiter suggests the ravioli might be saltier than ideal. Stegner herself thought they had nailed the saltiness perfectly, but she trusts her staff, and goes back to tell the chefs to keep a watch on the salt.
     "If they don't like it, I don't want to serve it," she says.
    Then the night really begins. Stegner stays until the last plate goes out.
     "I don't always stay for the kitchen breakdown," she says, almost guiltily.
     Underlying Stegner's modesty is a knowledge that all the accolades in the world mean nothing if the food isn't good, if the marinated grilled rack of Colorado lamb with Yukon golden potato and goat cheese puree, the black olive and oven-roasted-tomato lamb jus, and the slow roast salmon over braised lentils aren't well worth the price to the diner.
     "The thing about my profession is I'm only as good as the last meal that you ate," she says. "If every plate that I put out today isn't as good as yesterday, they're not going to say, 'Let's go back because last time it was great.' They're going to go, 'Oh, I'm not going back because it wasn't good this time.' It has to be good every time. That's my job: to make it good every time. That focus drives it. You have to focus. You can't let go. You can't step back and say, 'Today I don't feel like working.' "
     That sentiment defines Stegner as much as a thousand personal details — not that she is very forthcoming about those. She lives in Evanston. She has a dog, an American Eskimo miniature. She is married to Rohit Nambiar, an assistant manager at the Four Seasons. But she quickly draws the veil and refocuses on the food.
     "That's enough of that," she says. "I am private. I think the thing is, the minute you take your eye off of the passion of the food is when you end up in trouble. That's a principle I have. This is what I do. This is what I'm about. This is my gift to the public.
     "It's not me and my personality and what I think and what I believe. It's what you eat. The focus needs to be on the food. It's not me. It's the food that people come for."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 20, 1999

You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat

  
     In an ideal world, the Sun-Times archive would be online, where you — or I — could access it. But it's not. In that same ideal world, I would at least be able to explain why it isn't online, or when it might be. We don't live in that world either. 

      Though I can post favorite columns here, where people can find them, one of the many benefits of running a blog. I even have permission to do so, until that happy day when the archive is online.

     This is one of my favorite columns; I'm posting it so I can show it to people. It has an interesting back story. A chef I admire, Sarah Stegner, was coming to my kid's junior high school to make cole slaw. What I thought would be the story — the award-winning chef interacting with the school lunch ladies — did not turn out to be the interesting part. 

     What turned out to be the interesting part was the reaction of a group of 12-year-old girls I stumbled upon in the lunchroom. I was a little skittish about using them -- people are sensitive about being in the newspaper, and no parents had been consulted, no approval sought. None was needed, of course. A free press may go about in public. But I didn't want the story spoiled by aggrieved parents. So after I reported this but before it ran, I did something I had never done before, or since. I phoned the mother of the Queen Bee student I focus on, to tell her the column was coming, and seek her permission to use her daughter's name. To my relief, she didn't mind.  

     Lily Jaeger, 12, a willowy wisp of a girl, is sitting in the cafeteria at Northbrook Junior High School, picking at her lunch: a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips.
     That isn't all she brought to eat of course -- she also has two sandwich cookies and some gummy bears in a brown bag.
     "I originally had applesauce in there but I took it out," she explains.
     Neither Jaeger, nor her seven friends crowding cozily together at a table, have touched the free cole slaw set out for them.
     "Too healthy," explains Kayla Fox.
     "We like junk," laughs Maddie Caplis.
     "It's yellow . . ." says Shayna Lutz.
     "If it were blue . . ." speculates Jaeger, in a dreamy tone suggesting that, well, then it might be an entirely different story.
     The slaw is indeed yellow -- a rich orange yellow that suggests fresh peaches, which comes from the organic golden beets and roasted organic squash used to make it, along with ripe pears, apples, cabbage, honey and a sprinkling of roasted pumpkin seeds.
     The slaw has just been prepared in the school's kitchen by Chef Sarah Stegner, who spent years running the dining room at the Ritz-Carlton, and Chef George Bumbaris, her partner now in the Prairie Grass Cafe and Prairie Fire shrines to carefully-crafted seasonal comfort foods. This is "Slaw Month" at the junior high school, which has Stegner and Bumbaris coming in each week to disguise good-for-you organic vegetables and fruits as cole slaw. "Hell's Kitchen" this ain't.
     "As a chef, you are a leader in the food community whether you are conscious of it or not," says Stegner, explaining why she is here. "You set the pace for what's out there. If you can give a little bit of direction and guidance and help, you should do that."
     Receiving direction are Donna Eckles, the food service manager at the school, and her staff of three: Linda, Joyce and Petra.
     Cafeteria ladies do not have a good reputation -- popular culture tars them as mean and their food as glop delivered with the ring of a big stainless steel spoon against a metal tray. But Eckles, in her blue smock with snaps and her name on a metal tag, who received her culinary training on the job at Libertyville High School, works smoothly alongside Stegner, in her crisp white chef's tunic with cloth buttons and her name embroidered on it, who studied at the Dumas Pere Cooking School and received the James Beard Award, twice.
     "Part of this is trying to get the staff here to do the setup, to work with them," says Stegner, who found Eckles receptive to ordering and preparing the organic produce.
     "She did this, and I'm sure it was not easy for her. She peeled butternut squash and diced it up. She had to call the farmers and tell them where to deliver."
     The school scrapped its fryer years ago -- fries are now baked -- and welcomed Stegner.
     "She's really nice," said Eckles, who has cooked with Stegner before. "Sarah has come and done a chicken dinner with the whole works, broccoli slaw. We do Tallgrass burgers, and they did guacamole sauce."
     That would be 100-percent grass-fed beef burgers from Bill Kurtis' Tallgrass ranch, the only beef served at Northbrook Junior High, a choice the school explains is healthier and not too expensive, when you factor in money saved by using organic-fed chicken. Lunches here cost $3, just 50 cents more than at the Chicago Public Schools, which has its own healthy initiatives starting this year. ("We have salad bars in Englewood," says CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond.)
     Getting kids to eat slaw is another matter
     Erik Dieschbourg, 11, is first to take a sample of the cole slaw, adding it to the pizza and chocolate ice cream cup on his tray.
     "Is it good?" asks Reid McCafferty.
     Dieschbourg tries a nibble.
     "Yeah," he says, without enthusiasm.
     The consensus is that the yellow slaw looks "gross" but those who try some like it.
     Madelyn Rowan, whose hand is covered with scrawled notes, dissolves into giggles before hazarding a morsel. "It's really good," she says, to her unconvinced friends.
     "Wash it down with this," says Maddie Tatham, 11, extending a Chewable Lemonhead in her direction.
     Lily Jaeger reconsiders rejecting slaw.
     "Is it free?" she asks, hopping up.
     "She's not going to eat it," confides Shayna Lutz. "She's going to pick at it, say 'Eww' and start crying."
     Not quite. Lily returns with a cup of slaw. She holds it dramatically at eye level, examining it closely, her features a symphony of disgust. She holds it to her nose and sniffs.
     "I smelled it," she announces to her seven friends, hoping that will placate them. It does not. Goaded, she gives a shrug, then plucks up a shred of slaw between pink polished nails and raises it to her mouth, gagging as Shayna instantly brings a napkin to Lily's lips -- the way a mother would do with a child -- so her friend can spit the shred out.
     Lily trots off to the water fountain, then returns, nibbles delicately upon a salt & vinegar chip, as if to settle herself, then decrees:
      "It's actually not that bad."

                            –Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2010

Time to stick a fork in Charlie Trotter.

     When Charlie Trotter's restaurant was named "the best restaurant in the world," or something close to that, we were still living in the city, not far away. I told my wife, "I'm not living within walking distance of  'the best restaurant in the world' and never going there." So we went. The place was so pretentious it was disorienting: it felt like the floor was a few degrees off kilter. All the other diners were languid Eurotrash, like the background characters in a James Bond movie. My central memory of the evening was counting 18 $20 bills onto the table and wondering what had possessed me. 
      That informs a bit of this column, which is slated to run in the paper Monday but got posted Friday. I've met Charlie on a few occasions, and to be honest always got along well with him. The me-me-me closing last year set my teeth on edge. I've had a number of high profile chef of my acquaintance who chose another route: Sarah Stegner comes to mind, or Gale Gand, the mastermind of Tru, who steps away from the restaurant to explore other options, teaching classes, working on  a farm, without making a huge deal of it. You can be great without believing yourself the font of all greatness. 
    That isn't to say I'm not without sympathy. I have an ego myself, and it gets inflamed at times, and I feel neglected, and have to re-calibrate myself. I hope this episode leads Trotter to perhaps do the same, though it probably won't. If not, he told another reporter he was going to go the Yukon. I guess we were all supposed to blanch and shout, "No, Charlie, no!"  Me, I thought that might be a good idea, and wished him Godspeed to Alaska. We'll get on fine here without him. We already are. 

     There are two types of chefs. There is what I think of as the "Sarah Stegner Chef," so named after my first glance of Stegner, in a tall white toque, standing dignified in her kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton, arranging the artisanal cheeses she championed, quiet as beauty, still as a river, entirely focused on those gorgeous orbs of fromage, as if they were land mines she was defusing.
     And then there's the "Charlie Trotter Chef"—think of the chefs in Bugs Bunny cartoons, snarling, screaming, flailing, an inflamed, overcooked ego in chef's whites. Those chefs do well on the Food Network. They become stars. The reality, however.
     "He's gone off . . . it's weird," said an associate of Trotter, who knows him well.
     On Thursday, Trotter had some kind of ugly encounter with a group of high school students participating in After School Matters. Trotter allowed them to use his now shuttered namesake restaurant at 814 W. Armitage as a gallery to display their photographs, but became offended, it was reported, when the instructor supervising the students refused to order them to sweep floors and plunge toilets. Trotter also made inappropriate comments to a female student, suggesting she get a Charlie Trotter tattoo.
     So has Trotter gone around the bend?
     "He is . . . a . . . difficult person," said the associate, who didn't want to be named so as to not endanger their relationship. "He comes across like, 'Once you get to know me, I'm a good guy, a funny guy, but everybody hates me, I don't know why.' "
     I do, Charlie, so let me explain it to you.
     People hate egomaniacs. They see the self-regard flowing like wine and naturally want to stop it up. When you closed your restaurant — one year ago; time drags when you're doing nothing, huh? — with maximum drama, it was a curtain-clutching death scene worthy of "Tristan und Isolde," complete massive, three-part hagiography in the Tribune. The observation I bit back— why rain on the man's victory lap? — was: Closing your restaurant was self-immolation, tossing your whole staff out of work in a recession, and why? New chefs were rising, being lauded in the Chicago scene.
     Attention was straying from the only chef worthy of attention — Charlie Trotter. If other restaurants are going to be praised, then you were just going to close yours down, take your ball and go home. You said you were going to read philosophy, which made me laugh. I almost sent you the passages of Seneca where he tells us to welcome loss, because someday life will snatch back every single thing it gave to us, and so the smaller deprivations before then are reminders and practice. But I figured it would be lost on you.
     Charlie took his ball but wouldn't go home. There you were, stomping around the auction of your restaurant's effects, shutting the thing down a third of the way through. A man with any grace wouldn't even have been in the room. If you're going to close, then close.
     And Trotter's still there, rattling around your empty, shuttered restaurant, terrorizing schoolchildren. It's a scene from a tragedy.
     OK, Charlie, you and I are about the same age. And at this point, you're saying: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich, like I am?" To which I'll retort, "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" It's never too late.
     You might want to use this embarrassing public spectacle as a wake-up call; if not, there are more down the road. Trust me on that one. If you can control yourself, do it.
     A little humility might help. I asked your friend: Would you call Charlie a humble man?
     "No, not humble," the friend said. "He knows he's not a humble person. At the end of his run his perception was, 'Where did the respect go? I was the one who brought Chicago fine dining, gave it its reputation.' He kinda started a lot of it, and at the end he felt, 'What the hell, where did the love go?' "
     It goes where everything goes, Charlie. Into the Bonfire of Time. Everything ends.
     It's a shame you never read that philosophy, because it may have helped you now. "A generation of men is like a generation of leaves," Homer writes. We have spring, shine greenly for a summer. It feels like forever. Then autumn comes, Charlie, and we wither, even great chefs like you, and fall off the tree or, in your case, jump — there's a drawback of being rich, you forget that there's a purpose to work beyond making money. Work is joy, if you're lucky. You may have forgotten that.
     But never too late to remember. When Sarah Stegner tired of the Ritz, she quietly re-invented herself and opened the excellent Prairie Grass with husband Rohit Nambiar and partner George Bumbaris. Time to reinvent yourself, too, Charlie, if you can. Grab a spoon, stop talking and start cooking. The respect you seek is waiting for you there.