Yesterday was Cathy's birthday, and as usual, we splurged on a nice dinner - this time at a place called L2O, which I guess is relatively famous around here. As expected, everything was excellent, although I always feel out of my element at fine dining establishments. I'm much more at home walking into a pub, grabbing a strong ale, and ordering food off a laminated menu. But whatever, it was all very delicious and fun, and of course, I couldn't resist taking photos of the food to memorialize the occasion. Here are a couple of the courses:
We elected to do a tasting menu which had about 10 courses, with the first big one being this: oscietra caviar, kindai toro, shiso salt. Plated to look like a fish comet.
King prawn, coconut, green tomato, uni, jicama slaw, jalapeño emulsion and some other tasty crap I don't remember.
Maine lobster, foie gras, black trumpet marmalade, some micro-chives, and a sauce I'd be willing to pound a pint of. I'm a bit conflicted about foie gras. I find it delicious but the process behind it is...troubling. Because of that, I never actually order it but I'll eat it up if it's set before me.
Lime-cucumber sorbet. It wasn't really part of the menu so I think it was generally intended to be a palate cleanser. Good stuff either way.
Yommy.
Got our first snow over the weekend.
It's around this time I start dusting off random projects that I've been neglecting. I look forward to changing it up a bit. Although honestly, I haven't been doing much lately except observing the passage of time...but no big. My go-to excuse for now is that December is kind of a transitional month anyway, as the seasons change, the year ends, it's pre and post-holiday, stuff like that. Yeah.
I went for a bike ride last weekend on the North Shore Channel Trail. It's a paved trail that runs north-south through the city and a couple suburbs, running alongside it's namesake, the North Shore Channel. I leisurely pedaled the length of it, which is about a 25 mile round trip starting from home. It's nothing amazing, but still a nice local ride.
There's a lot of random stuff along the way, including the occasional view of the the channel, which is technically a drainage canal. Now I'm not jumping in anytime soon, but it's basically a small river lined by trees and inhabited by your standard local wildlife. The best part though was that the autumn weather was perfect (for me at least); thermoregulation was not an issue.
The path runs through a sculpture park for a bit in the suburbs. Most of it was relatively underwhelming, but this one caught my attention: Directing Traffic by Victoria Fuller. Humorous.
A juvenile Cooper's Hawk, a common bird of prey to see around here. I was taking a banana break when this guy swooped down and landed on a sign right next to me. Good looking bird. They used to be an endangered species in Illinois but made a great comeback since the DDT ban. I also vaguely remember a National Geographic article stating that the DDT ban is also a big reason the Bald Eagle is not extinct, or at least nearly extinct, in the states.
Alright, that's it for now. We're flying out tomorrow, so I should probably start packing.
A slight lull in activity for now, but Cathy and I are finishing preparations for our trip to Amsterdam next week. Never been there so I'm looking forward to exploring.
I stumbled around Chicago for a couple days last week to kill time and get used to the new camera, but also because the autumn weather has been so swell.
Hancock from Milton Lee Olive Park - a really nice, but somewhat ignored, park.
Generally speaking, Cathy and I avoid really fancy restaurants. The ambiance and attitude of some of those joints make us expect the food to shoot magical rainbows and mini-unicorns directly into our brains and, unfortunately, it never happens.
Despite this, we've developed the habit of checking out some of these places on her birthday, and this year we went to Charlie Trotter's. The food was good, although there were certainly no lasers or mythical creatures flying off the plate. However, the most interesting aspect of it all was that we sat at the kitchen table, a single table that Trotter's has inside the actual kitchen. This time around, I geeked out and took some photos - however, the lighting was mixed and I was using a slow lens...do not prepared to be wowed.
View from the table. It's great because we get to watch our food get prepared, see some techniques, and interact a bit with the chefs. Being able to learn a bit more about food and cooking while eating is a nice bonus. Plus the dining room decor was reminiscent of a vomiting antique rug (at least from what I saw).
Anyway, there was a lot of food. There's no menu, they just "spontaneously" make you food - which basically turns out to be their tasting menu plus a couple made specifically for our table. It came out to a lengthy 15 courses. Some of them:
Maine diver sea scallop with fingerling potato, foamed parsley, and veal heart...
Deliciousness with Oaxacan mole sauce...
and Meyer lemon sorbet with black sesame. Sidebar: my brother used to have a Meyer lemon tree in his backyard.
A somewhat ridiculous but amusing part of the experience was that we each assisted a chef in plating a dish, as Cathy is so expertly doing here. She was asked to plate one of our desserts:
Claudio Corallo chocolate truffles with red wine cherries and thyme.
Good food, good fun.
So when the weather gets even remotely better around here, something I do for fun/exercise/training/exploration is to take long urban hikes. This usually means a 15-ish mile wandering walk through the city with a 10-15 pound backpack (containing sandwiches and photography equipment). I took one such walk a couple weeks ago on a sunny but chilly day and it was pretty routin for the most part. Most of my photos were more pointless than usual. However, at one point I got close to the lake and I heard these loud booming sounds. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the booms were waves from an uncharacteristically brown Lake Michigan that were slamming into the corrugated sea wall and blasting geyser-like columns up to 40 feet into the air.
I wish I could have put something along the boardwalk for scale since it's hard to understand how huge it really was, but: (1) there was a solid sheet of ice covering the whole area; (2) the waves were unpredictable; and (3) anything on the lower section would have been immediately sucked right into the lake from the receding water.
Wall of water.
There was a serious wind rolling off the lake and as the "geysers" erupted, the mist was being pushed into a chain link fence up on a small hill. Although it had not been cold enough deeper within the city for ice for some time, it was cold enough by the lake for the mist to totally envelop the links in solid ice. I imagine the whole fence was a solid block of ice at some point before the sun came out.
Frozen links.
Absolutely epic. It was an amazing find, and the fact that it was totally unexpected made it that much better. I spent at least an hour watching the show as I enjoyed my morning sammich, and since it was so cold/icy/misty/inherently dangerous (and a weekday), I was the only one there - which also made it that much better.
More food. Something not made by me. From Chava Cafe:
Obviously I'm biased but I like Ch'ava a lot. Great food and drinks, an all around nice spot to sit and hang out. If you visit me, you know I'm bringing you here for lunch and coffee. And of course, here are a bunch of photos:
Inside, from the south to the north. It's a roomy place on the corner of Clark and Leland. It also has its own parking lot - which is kind of a luxury around here.
We've probably been drinking way too much coffee lately...
Outside, viewing the north-facing windows of the cafe. Bonus points for figuring out how they came up with Ch'ava...
Burr grinding for an even and consistent grind.
One of Ch'ava's tables. And a 2D Ficus benjamina.
And one of Ch'ava's mugs...in Orange 021 C.
Chava window logo.
Other Ch'ava posts: here and there
Cathy's brother Eddie and his friend Rich are opening up a new cafe, Chava Cafe. Today is the mock opening and I'm headed over there in a couple minutes to sample some gourmet sandwiches and Clover coffee. Gourmet sandwiches since he's a trained chef and Clover coffee because he has this coffee machine called the Clover. It's a mysterious machine that makes the best cup of coffee you will ever have. For the rest of your life. Each and every time. For serious.
It's on 4656 N. Clark. Check it out if you're in Chicago.
I don't have any proper photos of the place yet so here are some stock-ish photos I took:
They'll be passing out sample bags of tea and coffee beans. I'll be sure to scoop up a couple...
To be brewed.
Other Ch'ava posts, here and here
For the past year or so, whenever I was riding the el I would see an elevated railway that occasionally had a person walking on it. The other week my curiosity got the best of me so I decided to finally figure out what the heck it was. Turns out it's an abandoned elevated railway that cuts through the north city.
Normally I would be in that train looking down at a strange man taking a photo and thinking, "How did that guy get there?" Oh how the tables have turned. The trail is easy to find but difficult to access - I only noticed two feasible "entrances" in a 2-3 mile span.
Same spot as above but the view to the south.
Anyway, I ended up taking my bike for a ride down the path after work the other day.
Looks like a normal trail but notice the lamp posts on the left. Since the path is elevated, you can take a stroll through Bucktown, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, and other regions with the traffic and crowds under you instead of around you. Although I definitely wouldn't hang out here at night since plenty of vagrants were already wandering around here by the early evening.
The path is pretty rough. Plenty of broken glass, plastic shards of all shapes and colors, tire-busting gravel, random car parts, broken electronics, piles of old railroad ties, an uncovered manhole, etc. Oh yeah, and freight cars. Apparently there's an ongoing effort to clean up the trail (cool) and also to transform it into some paved walkway (not cool).
Ride control.
Street level view of the walkway. It crosses over a couple dozen streets just like this. The murals I posted here are actually taken right off the walls and underpasses of the walkway. Apparently the rail company elevated the track about 20 feet to comply with a city ordinance which sought to reduce pedestrian fatalities at crossings. Yikes.
We had some crazy big thunderstorms roll through a week or so ago. I took a stroll by the riverwalk to check out the results:
The Chicago River nearly flooded out by us. What you don't see in this photo is a dock that is normally four feet above the river. Added to that, the private property sign is around head level when standing on that dock. Pretty amazing.
Found a mudbug on the sidewalk that was missing a claw and looking confused as hell. He was pretty big, probably seven inches head to tail. I think the flooded river let him crawl up the embankment too easily and then he got lost. After harassing him a bit, I picked him up and walked him back to the edge of the river.
I'm really craving crawfish right now.
