Weekend Cat Blogging: Look at Me Edition

As far as Sundays go, it's a good one. Up early and at Lula Cafe for breakfast with Janine when they opened. We don't see each other nearly as often as we mean to but it's like inhaling a series of cool, deep breaths every time we do. I don't know why that's the thing that comes to mind when we change topics so rapidly that a breath could easily be forgotten but it's refreshing.

I'm reminded again why that place remains one of my best brunches in Chicago ( just about tied for first with Longman & Eagle). Delicious. And afterward a lap around the Logan Square Farmers Market with the woman who, no joke, wrote the book on Midwestern Farmers Markets. That means stopping to chat with all the vendors and sampling along the way. Janine is a naturally charming person but she also asks the questions I don't always remember when confronted by something tempting. For me, it was an excellent reminder of "conscious consumption" in action. And sometimes that includes a mini cone of Cashew Crunch.

I nabbed a number of goodies to supplement my own growing bounty but a jar from the Chicago Honey Co-op and a bright bouquet from Tempel Farm Organics topped out I think.

Of course just when I start to grab a couple pictures of what is now a very happy kitchen table, I am reminded of who the star of Sunday is in reality.

"Oh a few photos? Of course I don't mind."

She was promptly shooed off the table but another reminder that Honeycat will not accept second billing to a single other organic entity in this house. What on earth was I thinking.

Farmstand Toast- I Put A Egg On It

It was a real weekend. Tonight I feel like I have been wrung out like a tea towel but I take nothing back. Not the driving day to Wisconsin. Not the Sprecher's root beer or the spit-roasted chicken. I do not take back the pounds of produce purchased in a house bearing painted mushroom murals. I don't take back a whiskeydrink, a nip of pie crust, a lobster corndog or a single second of sunshine filtered through a large straw hat.

I can't bring myself to regret the hours spent being decidedly awake and giddy when I would typically have been drooling into a pillow. It was a real weekend, filled with ice cream and friendlies and dancing in the grass. I would not take the hippiechild moments back, even though it means I've launched into full-on cat stretches and cavernous yawns throughout the afternoon and evening.

While most of the weekend was spent as a fuzzy sweatfox (caught in a near constant state of music and junk food-fueled rush), I gave myself a break on Sunday. Knowing the day ahead would be festival hours and festival food, I took a look at my foodstuffs and set to work on a simple and delicious brunch that could easily transition to lunch or dinner.

Lake Geneva- Love that this could just as easily be 1970 as 2010. Gimme my glam rock and denim shorts.

We'd stopped at River Valley Mushrooms on the way back from Lake Geneva the day before (the Mushroom Council is a client but this was not official business. In the least.). I was thrilled to see more than just an array of the shrooms themselves but a full farmstand spread including muskmelon, golden plums, peaches, cherry tomatoes- all of which came home with me.

A slow morning with a light rain and nowhere to be for a few hours- that's the break needed from a really rascally weekend fun run. I'd been gifted with a loaf a multigrain bread from Flourish and thus proper toast has been the basis for many meals this last week. Two slices tossed into their dedicated blackener and I set to work on the veggies.

One big frying pan took on quartered creminis, halved garden cherry tomatoes and angular pieces of gai laan (Chinese broccoli), my latest vegetable obsession. All were sauteed in a small amount of olive oil with a minced clove of fresh garlic until they were cooked but still bright. From there I just scooted the veggies over and cracked a fresh egg into the pan, letting the whites go opaque on both sides. Ironically, tonight's bedtime reading is actually a new foodzine called "Put A Egg On It." So far so good- thanks Tasting Table for the tip.

The toast came out hot and crunchy and was immediately spread with a thin layer of Prairie Fruits Farm goat cheese then layered with the vegetables and topped with a single shared egg. It was fresh and light and the perfect way to temper some unapologetically indulgent behavior the rest of the weekend.

Case in point: Peach Blueberry Pie, served still-warm after being cut open with a pocket switchblade and passed in-dish from person to person with a pair of shared utensils. Cheap beer chaser encouraged. Felt right to end on that.

Summer Supper: Open-Faced Banger Sandwiches with Grilled Onions, Garlic Scapes and Asparagus

That piece of poetry above is the best meal I've had at home this summer. Honestly, I don't remember outdoing it last year so I'm declaring an early victor- this is the bar against which all other summer meals will now be measured.

Maybe I should back up a moment and tell you what you're looking at. This is especially important to me because I'm pretty proud of the "where" associated with "what."


The meat of the dish was really the heart of it. On a slow stroll through the first Wicker Park Farmers Market of the season, there was a lovely English gent sampling Spencers "jolly posh British and Irish foods." Being a bit of a sucker for all things across the pond, I indulged a bite of the pork and herb banger and settled on purchasing a pack immediately.

I typically do a lap around the market before buying anything so the seconds-long exchange between my taste buds and pocketbook (and the resultant decision to snap these up) is a testament to purely stated mouthbliss. For those of you confused and/or giggling, a banger is a particular kind of pork sausage prone to splitting during cooking, the UK's version of a hot dog. Other market pick-ups included 5 pounds of ground beef from Robinson (we had beautiful burgers on Sunday), a shallot, an onion, radishes galore, baby lettuce, pretty purple scallions and some obscenely expensive tomatoes. I really cannot wait until I can pluck them from my own garden.

A few days later, I picked up the first of the CSA shares I'm splitting with Homemaker's Habitat this summer. Harvest Moon has started a pick-up right in front of our office and the whole transaction could not have been any easier. You should have seen the beaming happening in the elevator as I went back up to my office, clutching all of our fresh treasures. Among those treasures were a pound of fresh asparagus and three long and lanky garlic scapes. Garlic scapes are the flower stems that garlic plants produce before the bulbs mature- if you harvest them, the bulbs themselves tend to grow larger. The scapes are delicious- a cross between garlic and a scallion- and this was my first time cooking with them.

I also found a baguette in the freezer. Frozen bread is the gift we can give our future selves. It defrosted in seconds, was sliced and spread evenly with olive oil then massaged vigorously with a cut garlic clove. Then grilled alongside the rest. *swoon*

The compilation process was no less beautiful. The onion was sliced into rings and tossed with olive oil and one dice garlic scape before being set on the grill atop doubled up foil. Asparagus went for the same olive oil/salt and pepper treatment before being laid into its own foil nest. Later in the process the bangers were added atop the onions to distill some additional love on the layers. Just looking at that spread on the grill made me so happy.


For the sandwiches, we started with the bread then butterflied bangers atop each half. Onions were then liberally spooned over the meat before being kissed with sloppy enthusiasm by Dijon mustard. The finishing touch was a half of a purple scallion which had been grilled with the asparagus. The spears were gathered into the middle, so long that they couldn't quite be contained by the plate.

Salty sausages filled with herbs and caramelized on the outside. Bread that was toasted with blackened edges but kept a soft center. Sweet and garlicky onions and that blackened scallion on top...all tied together with a vinegary bite of mustard in the middle.

Please try this at home. Then tell me about it so I can relive it myself.

I Am Ready for (Farmer's Market) Love

If you follow me on Twitter, I'm afraid you're already aware (to a painful degree), how hard I fell for Portland while I was in town last week "for work." I have work in quotes because sometimes I need to pinch myself that this is part of what I do for a living.

I was there from Wednesday through Sunday attending the International Association of Culinary Professionals Conference. I feel like it's going to take a few posts to get through the ways my mind was a little blown but it's Saturday morning and this feels like the best place to start.

A week ago today, I fell for a farmer's market. Mushrooms of every shape and variety, chard that actually looked like a rainbow piled high on a folding table, flowers in every fattened form. I have two weeks more to wait until Chicago is in its proper market season. It was just enough time for my eye to wander. My appetite clearly followed and thus two early AM hours in the market became a pretty good representation of the full trip. All the photos in this post were shot at the Portland Farmer's Market and this post was inspired in part by a fellow attendee's post yesterday.
To be surrounded for five days by people who so profoundly love food the way I do... I slept for maybe 4-5 hours a night. I did not want to miss a single minute. It's not even that they simply love food, it's that they love the craft, love the energy that truly good food brings. And man alive...they have taken the time to get educated and are so excited to pass along the good word. I drank it in. I ate it up.My hotel (The Ace Hotel-highly recommend) had bikes for lending and every morning I got up with my own timezone to tool around a two-wheel friendly town. The Ace also housed two establishments that anchored my days- Stumptown Coffee as the sun came up, Clyde Common cocktails as the sun went down. I was a regular. I even shared my Voodoo Doughnut treasures with the bartenders. That's affection.

Everyone was so sweet. Not in a saccharine, "what can you do for me" way, but a genuine, earthy interest. Adventurers, idealists, authors, editors, idols- many times a combination therein. You know me- I talk so much. I talk so fast. Yet for so much of the trip, I just wanted to listen.

The mistresses of ceremonies were two of the most prolific women in the edible world- Ruth Reichl and Kim Severson. They were hilarious. And smart. And I'm gushing. I can't even bother being embarrassed.
We ate some of the best food that Portland has to offer. From end to end, street cart to white tablecloth. The conference itself was a string of long days but from an organization perspective, they did the best job I've seen weaving the stunning location into the daily activities. Bakery tours, brewery tours, biodynamic vineyard tours (I did this one)... memories of the conference are inseparable from the host city in the best way.
It still wasn't enough time. I could go back for a week and still leave wanting. My last night was spent with dive bars, diners and a belly dancer thanks to Doniree, in town by a serendipitous fluke. We're in the same boat, she and I. Both living in great places but easily enamored of this new one. Everything was so lush, so clean. It was an extra large village and the folks living there were proud stewards. Farm to table is actually being implemented as the norm by a city. Two separate cab drivers gave me the sales pitch.
I managed an evening with some old friends, caught in town by a small miracle before they head out for a summer on the road. As though I needed another layer to love the city through, seeing it with the folks actually living there took it just a little bit further. Streets lined with pregnant rhododendrons, bungalows with wide front porches and the outline of Mt Hood in the distance.

When I was a freshman in college I listened to India Arie's "Ready for Love" more times that could possibly have been mentally healthy. Particularly absent any sense of irony. The angst, the impatience all sitting, legs dangling at the cusp. I wanted so badly for my life to start. Its a time that's been front of mind lately because I recently unearthed my journal from that summer. The one where I lost any sense of gravity and fell in love for the first time. I'm starting to realize that its the exact sense of romantic possibility that drives my travel habit.
When I manage to have a strange, new city opened up in front of me, I get that same rush. More than two days in a new place and I can imagine what my life looks like there. Do you do that too? Do you fall for places like you fall for people? I want to know what a place tastes like, what its extremes are. I want to know the corners only its closest friends care to patronize.
I've fallen for this place. I saw a snapshot of what my life looked like there and I savored it. For now it's not an affair that requires a commitment. For a few days at a time I can return to bury my face in its lush greens and lean back on a wind that smells like snow and moss and dark soil.

So yes, this is my infatuation and the beautiful thing is that I can go back. But for the time being, I walk through my front gate into Wicked Park and I can feel that warmth swell up inside me all over again. I'll keep traveling and I'll fall in love from time to time. But after what feels like a month away, I'm happy to be home.

This is a Reggie sandwich from Pine State Biscuits. After all that sentimental produce, this is an appropriate end note because once you take down half this beautiful beast-buttermilk biscuits with fried chicken, bacon and mushroom gravy-you can't do a whole lot else. Pure romance.

Town and Country: A Farmer's Market Maven

I think it probably occurs to me that I am both city and country mouse a few times per day. Blame it on my birthday, blame it on my attention span or just nod it off to personal chemistry. I love both. I need both.

I love the neighborhoods of a city. I love the restaurants and the history and the music. I love to be surrounded by so many different kinds of people (particularly making up stories about them while traveling via public transit). I like that I can spend a whole day sans companion but never actually be alone. Just skipping from one shop or park to the next.

But even in my own private pasture in the city, with my best friend across the hall and a benevolent wood nymph for a landlord, I still get the shakes for the smell of wet trees and fallen leaves. I want to hear water rushing and buy vegetables from the hands that took them out of dark soil. I like that my time with people in the quiet feels like real time. I love that I can spend the whole day sans companion and really be alone in my superstitions and delusional grandeur.

Meeting Janine was a practice in never having to choose a camp. I met her on my first visit to current office. I was brought expressly to her by someone who is perhaps kindred in this town/country sense, knowing we would like each other. I was figuring out where I might fit into agency life and here was this completely lovely woman who was a trained chef, an enthused adventurer and a lover of windows with cats sitting in them. She has a place in the city and a farmhouse in rural Michigan. I liked her instantly.

And while we're no longer colleagues, you see her referenced here from time to time as she writes one of my favorite pieces of Internet, lovingly tended at Rustic Kitchen. Beautiful photos, recipes and just an air of calm and curiosity that is so pleasant in a person.

Janine happens to be an expert in one of my favorite topics- farmer's markets. She has a few of her own fruits trees and a vegetable garden but more often than not, she likes her veggies and her farmers to wear matching dirt. I am excited to say that someone has taken notice of this and now she is writing a book on Midwestern Farmer's Markets. While I may not expect strangers to supplement the process (though I was happy to), I encourage anyone to read through her list of pledge gifts. A perfect Friday process. I wanted them all.

And for anyone else, consider this fair warning. Jason and I had a fantastic weekend getaway to Michigan over the summer when Janine more than proved her prowess "in the field." We visited one of my favorite orchards because she's friends with the farmer. We gobbled alongside turkeys and the hens that lay market fresh eggs. We were pointed toward the farm stands with ice cream. She's a city/country mouse who knows exactly where to be.