Category Archives: Food & Beverage

The Perfect Man

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Yesterday I visited one of the major drug store chains for reasons unrelated to chocolate, but also took a look at the discounted Valentine’s Day candies. Among the supply, mostly Russell Stover, I found The Perfect Man.

Not something I’d ever seen before. There was one left, so I bought it for the reasonable price of 34 cents. It’s one ounce of milk chocolate made by an outfit called Treat Street.

The About Us page on Treat Street’s web site is one of those long on marketing and short on actual facts, but there seems to be an affiliate (parent company? subsidiary?) called My Favorite Company, which is based in Los Angeles. Anyway, the two entities’ specialty is novelty chocolate and other confections.

The Perfect Man, as you can see from this 9.5-oz. version, is wearing only boxers with hearts on them. (What, no version wearing gold briefs?) The package also says Made in Germany, but I have my suspicions that the real makers are a breakaway faction of Oompa-Loompas tired of working for that slavedriver Wonka.

The Bears’ Cookbook

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The pit of winter hasn’t been very deep this year, but on Wednesday night, snow fell and today temps have been sliding all day. As of this evening, it’s about 5 degrees F. above, with subzero expected by dawn tomorrow. That’s the classic harsh winter pattern we’ve mostly avoided so far this year, when temps have actually risen after snowfall, enough to melt most of it each time.

Then again, forecasts call for above-freezing air by Sunday. The pit still seems pretty shallow. Suits me.

One more unusual book around the house: The Bears’ Cookbook. In this case, I didn’t nab it from my mother’s house. Rather the authors, Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau, gave it to Yuriko and me as a gift in 1998. I knew Steve back at VU; in fact, I was a senior staff member at Versus magazine when he was editor in ’82-’83.

The Bears’ Cookbook was a spiral-bound, privately published effort by Steve and Jack, who produced about 100 copies. As they explain in the book:
“What could be a better Christmas gift for our loved ones, our friends and family, than a cookbook of our favorite recipes? Welcome to our table. Sit, eat, enjoy.”

And so we have over the years. Yuriko and I have used the book, especially her, but so have Lilly and Ann, as soon as they’ve gotten old enough. Just a few weeks ago, Ann made chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on p. 97.

Besides cookies, subjects include breakfast, appetizers, soup, salads, breads, pasta, chicken, other meat, seafood, vegetables, condiments, and cakes and pies. Sources — one given for each recipe — are as diverse as “Ivan, a friend from New Brunswick who now lives in Vermont,” Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, “Mayflower Restaurant in Albany, NY,” “Some men’s magazine Steve read long ago,” Julia Child, and “lost in the mists of time.”

The book actually has three covers. Flip over the first one, and you encounter this amusing, all-text cover.

A note inside the book explains: “We wound up with several covers, each with different titles, and we couldn’t decide which one to use. So we decided to use them all! Well, actually, just a few of them…

“Pick the cover you like best for a cookbook that may very well grace your coffee table, bookshelf or nightstand for years to come. Fold back the other covers (one of the few advantages if spiral binding), so that the excess covers become mere interior pages. Voila! The cover you prefer graces this lovely book.”

The third cover.

The inside cover of each of the covers includes biographical notes about Steve and Jack, such as under a cartoon of them:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau are not cartoon characters by a real flesh-and-blood couple who live high above San Francisco in an 18th-floor apartment they never call the ‘Treehouse of Justice.’ 

They’ve since moved to Palm Springs. Under a photo of them decked out in Western duds:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau — known far & wide as two of the orneriest, grizzliest old hashslingers in the West! — started out as mama’s-boy East Coast fops…

Under another cartoon of them with oversized heads:

Enormous heads like these require plenty of food! So it’s no surprise that Steve and Jack like to cook. Like to eat and like to read — and now, write — cookbooks.

I’m no judge of cookbooks, but I know this one is fun to use and fun to read.

Chicago Chinatown ’20

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One of these days, I might pop into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum on S. Wentworth Ave. in Chinatown. It has to count as one of the more obscure museums in metro Chicago, and that adds some interest right there.

But when we went to Chinatown on Saturday, we took a pass on Sun Yat-Sen and had lunch next door instead, at a newish-looking place called Slurp-Slurp. Had some tasty noodle soups there.
Chinatown wasn’t the main destination that day, but it was more-or-less on the way, and always a dependable place to find something good to eat, and things to see. Even if there isn’t a parade.

We arrived at the Cermak-Chinatown El Station and saw something fairly new, visible from the stairs leading to the ground.
Done in hand-made ceramic tile by Indira Freitas Johnson, installed in 2015.

“The centerpiece of the upper panel features Fook (Fú in Mandarin), the symbol of good fortune or happiness,” the CTA says. “According to custom, the symbol is placed upside down and against a diamond-shaped background. Within the context of the stairway Fook (Fú) may be translated as ‘good fortune arrives.’ ”

Not far from the station is a screen wall.

It looks like there had once been a small sign in front of the wall to explain it, but that’s now completely blank. Not to worry, a very short amount of Googling tells me that it’s a Nine-Dragon Wall, a miniature version of such a wall in Beihai Park, Beijing (the Winter Palace).

Wiki tells us that there are various other walls of this style, including one at the Forbidden City that I have no recollection of seeing. Then again, it’s a large place. There’s also one at the Mississauga Chinese Centre in the Toronto suburb of that name.

Besides lunch, we did a short walk on Wentworth Ave., since the weather wasn’t too bad for the pit of winter. Not pit of winter-ish at all, with temps above freezing, though sometimes winds would kick up. Wentworth is the original hub of Chicago’s Chinatown.

Chicago Chinatown Wentworth AveThere’s evidence of continuing cross-cultural pollination.

About a half block off Wentworth is St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the sanctuary was closed.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoSome distinctive Chinese features are visible outside.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoLater I learned that the church had been built just after the turn of the 20th century as Santa Maria Incoronata, to serve an Italian congregation. By the 1960s, the demographics of the neighborhood had changed enough for it to become St. Therese, serving a Chinese congregation.

7 & 17

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What’s good about February? Just that we’re shed of January, though winter so far this year hasn’t been that bad. Also, you can sense by now, even if you aren’t paying close attention, that the days are getting longer.

Ann got two confections recently for her 17th birthday. One was a pie. She asked for that, along with the question-mark candle. After all, who knows what comes after any particular birthday?

 

The usual suspects came over to celebrate and help her eat the pie.

The event was on the Saturday ahead of her birthday. On her birthday itself, her mother made her an artful creme-and-fruit cake. The pie was just a fond memory by that time.

This year being 2020 and all, I decided to look at my 2010 photo file to see what I had in the way of birthday pics for that year that I didn’t post at the time. The cake was a little different, I discovered.

So were the usual suspects, though most of them aren’t pictured here.

One thing that hasn’t changed: the essential cluttered nature of our dining table. But what’s a table for, if not to clutter it up?

Christmas Cake

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Christmas cake isn’t much of a holiday custom in the U.S., though it is more so in Japan, in as much as Christmas gets attention there beyond a modest amount of decoration and KFC. Actually, I don’t remember any to-do about KFC on Christmas in the early ’90s in Japan. Maybe it’s really a Tokyo thing — that’s often enough mistaken for the entirely of Japan by gaijin observers. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I digress. Yuriko made a Christmas cake this year.

Much chocolate, a healthy serving of cherries, and, you’ll see, a few dashes of edible gold. It’s so good it’ll hardly last until Christmas.

Everything You Need: Really Strong Coffee, Rhizomes & Pork Ears

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I avoid major retail properties this time of the year if I can. To borrow a phrase my mother used to use, it’s mob city at those places. But I still go to smaller shops and grocery stores. Business as usual there. Such as at the place selling this coffee.

Promises to be the “world’s strongest coffee,” a marketing slogan that’s the right blend of boasting and meaninglessness, so I’ll give them that. I looked up the company, which means that their ads will certainly follow me across the web for a while. Didn’t learn that much, except that its HQ is in upstate New York. More novel than Seattle or Brooklyn or the like, and that part of the state probably does need the jobs.

Moving along: food from Thailand. Calling it “rhizome” is curious, since a lot of plants have rhizomes, including “Thuggish Landscape Plants That Spread via Rhizomes,” which conjures up quite an image.

In this case, ginger rhizomes. I didn’t buy that either. Or this.

But I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2019

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December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.

Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).

Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.

This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.

Tintinabulation &c

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A classic November day outside my window today. Slate gray sky, rain in the morning, chilly but not freezing, gusts of wind pushing leaves around. At least week’s ice and snow are gone. They’ll be back. A brown Christmas would suit me fine, but I can’t count on it.

Back to posting after Thanksgiving, around December 1, after a week-long holiday from posting, but not from work this year. Still, being off on Thursday and Friday — which will include no special consumer activity on my part — ought to be pretty sweet, as always.

We will probably hit the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. Meat, carbohydrates, sweets, etc. Exact menu to be determined in conference with the rest of my family in the near future.

Here’s Phil Ochs’ adaption of Poe’s “The Bells.” Didn’t know about it until recently. Nice.

I have a big book of Poe’s work from the library that I’ve been grazing lately. Read “The Bells” again, among other things, after many years. I’d forgotten most of it. Somehow I didn’t notice when I was younger that the poem progresses from silver to gold to brass (brazen) to iron bells — from merriment to happiness to alarm to death, or at least what I take for death in poem, though not the song:

They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!

Last night I read “Hop-Frog,” which I hadn’t before. A neat little revenge story, like “The Cask of the Amontillado,” though not quite in the same horrifying league. I guessed the ending — what violence Hop-Frog was planning. No matter. Poe’s usually worth a read. The influence of even that minor story seems to turn up in odd places.

Recent Eats

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During Open House Chicago last month, we saw this.
Taste of Thai Town ChicagoNothing to do with the event. It’s a Thai shrine of some kind. Not sure whether it counts as a spirit house, but the building behind it (from this angle) is a Thai restaurant — Taste of Thai Town at 4461 N. Pulaski. Previously, the building housed a Chicago PD station. We ate lunch there and were well satisfied with the meal.

In Virginia last month, Ann and I ate at Moose’s by the Creek in Charlottesville. It’s a large diner, decorated with a couple of enormous moose heads, many antlers and other reminders of sizable members of the deer family. Had some good sandwiches there, and when I paid, the woman at the register — it might have been co-owner Melinda “Moose” Stargell herself — said she wanted to take our picture under a major pair of antlers.

For Moose’s by the Creek’s Facebook page. Lots of customers have their pictures there. She said we were free to download it for ourselves, so here it is.

Moose by the CreekI had to be careful not to bump up against any of those points. Moose’s by the Creek also gave us some stickers.

We had dinner the first evening in Richmond at Belmont Pizzeria in the Museum District, a pleasant old neighborhood not too far from VCU, so maybe students eat its pizza too. Mostly it was takeout, with the large kitchen completely visible from the ordering counter, but there were a few tables, so we sat down to eat as a parade of people came in to get their orders. It was a popular joint, full of wonderful smells, and when we got our pizza — which had shrimp on it — we found it to be wonderful too.

Belmont Pizzeria has a curious bit of wall art on the outside.

Belmont Pizzeria Richmond

Even without the art, it was the best meal I had in Virginia, though the hipster waffles were a close second and, as I said, Moose’s was good too.