It’s a nice sunny day out, and I’m once again looking for a nice place to sit and hit at my keyboard while eating/drinking something delicious.  Truth be told, I was wanting to go to Phoebe’s Cupcakes… not that I’m dissatisfied with Molly, but Phoebe’s right down the street and brand new… so new that in fact she’s not open yet.  Mac was going to be meeting me, and since he’s not so much in a coffee mood, I suggested somewhere else: of all places, a candy store.

Windy City Sweets, actually even closer down the road than the soon-to-be Phoebe’s, has been a standard “we don’t do this often but it’s a special day” choice for us, with their wide array of candies for every person and every occasion, if a bit pricey. 

(Mac particularly likes their sponge candy. I got him some for his birthday, which was Monday.  Did you forget?  Don’t worry, he’s still accepting presents, and will be, until his next birthday.)

Anyway, I saw walking past today that Windy City Sweets had outdoor seating, which means they must serve food or drink of some kind, right?  Sure enough, in addition to ice cream sundaes and hot chocolate, they boast a line of malts, shakes and smoothies. 

I decided on one of the no-dairy smoothies, listed at the top of the right (not left) panel.  You must understand, with all respect to vegans, that the most important thing to remember about my interest in the eight different smoothie flavors labeled as “no dairy” (with a mysteriously unnamed #9) is that they were 75 cents cheaper than the smoothies advertised as having ice cream or yogurt.  Imagine my surprise then, upon ordering the raspberry smoothie (#3) when the nice but methodically slow man behind the counter asked if I’d like ice cream or yogurt.

I stood for a full six seconds (actually a long time), searching for words to express my confusion.  “Um,” I finally said, “I was just actually looking at the dairy free smoothies,” the ones, I wanted to add, that are 75 cents less.

“Ok,” he said… pause… “that would be the yogurt then.”

Now you know, and I know, that yogurt is dairy.  But the second most important thing to remember about my non-dairy choice is that I actually would’ve preferred dairy… which is why I replied, “oh, ok.”

He proceeded dump a big scoop of white stuff labeled “fat free vanilla yogurt” into my cup and blend it. 

Non-dairy frozen yogurt?

Might’ve been.  I didn’t press it, and I’m thoroughly enjoying my raspberry smoothie… but the vegans among us might want to dig a little deeper before indulging.  Something like, “but isn’t yogurt, um, still dairy?” 

As far as I’m concerned, at the end of the day, and the man behind the counter’s methodically slow approach to smoothie-making aside, this little quirk only adds to the charm of the top-class candy store we’re proud to call our neighbors.  

And meanwhile, if you happen to see Molly, there’s really no need to mention this whole Phoebe thing… thanks…

This was a good idea. 

Molly’s Cupcakes

2536 N Clark St, Chicago IL 

Get the peanut butter nutella.  Or anything.

And there’s a sprinkle bar.

Do it do it do it.

What do you think, peanut butter nutella or key lime?  Call in the next 10 minutes if you have any strong feelings either way…

You guys.

I said there were a lot of pictures.

(I said it to someone, might not have been you.)

Well.

There are a lot of pictures… though none of them are satisfying my craving for another bite of that wedding cake…

Megan Woods is a wedding cake goddess. Write it down. Goddess.

I tried uploading all the pictures here, to the blog, and it was just too many, too much… and your page would’ve taken forever to load, longer than usual, even. And I would’ve been so stressed by the process that I wouldn’t have had the mental energy for clever comments. We can’t have that! So instead, I threw the pictures on facebook, where it’s easier and where I’d also wanted to put them anyway. And you don’t have to be on facebook to see them, you can just click here: Megan Makes Wedding Cake

You know, there are a lot of decisions to make when you’re getting married, even if it’s just a big old family wedding and you don’t care about swarovski crystals or chair dresses that were shipped in from somewhere fancy to coordinate with your napkins. This was an easy one.  Mac and I are trying to stay on top of everything else, and we’re doing pretty well… no, we haven’t registered anywhere, we haven’t reserved a block of rooms at a hotel for our out of town guests, and we haven’t looked at wedding rings… we’ll get on that… next week, I think.  In all of this, it feels really good to know that our cake is in such good hands.

Think about how great a wedding cake is. Now think about how even much more great it becomes when it’s made by one of your best friends. What makes Megan a wedding cake goddess is not only her culinary genius, but her happiness at opening up her home and her kitchen while she spends seven hours making cake… for five. Next step: cake for 175. We’ll have to dig up a few more pans… and maybe a few more hours…

Shout out to Jill, who was also there to “help” (see photos) and generally share the love, and to Alex, this guy we just met.  He’s a friend of Megan’s so he’s a friends of ours.  Mostly, a big bravo to Megan, and a big, big thanks. Can’t wait for August.

Also, our lives are really saturated with good food… and really, one food focused post a week is just not enough. 

So here we go: 

Yesterday was St. Patty’s day, which means green beer, a green river, and that tastiest of Irish delicacies, corned beef.  Once again this year, Mac has undertaken the feat of cooking a giant, fatty slab of meat, and for some reason, we decided to photo document it.  Yep, that’s right… twenty full color pictures of a big slab of raw meat… in a poorly lit kitchen to boot.  Perhaps we let our anticipation and general excitement about the day get in the way of our judgement about foods that do and do not make for good photo documentary subjects… but in the spirit of the day, and of food that tastes better than it looks, we’re posting it anyway.  Vegetarians and vegans, beware…

Yep, that’s a big hunk o’ meat.  It was, of course, totally delicious. Totally.  Can’t wait til next year.

Also, as a complete aside, the boys are intensely weirded out by Mac being gone.  Rohn hasn’t been more than an inch and a half from my side all day, and Amarok has been lying alone in the dark in the bedroom for hours now, like there’s nothing worth living for anymore, except fish flakes, he did come out for fish flakes… sheesh, good thing we don’t let the boys write for Wednesday Bites…

Anyway, there are a million delicious restaurants in Lakeview, at least a hundred thousand of which are sushi bars, but book club includes people from all around the city, and tonight’s sushi extravaganza had us out in Ravenswood, just off the Damen brown line stop at Grand Katachi, 4747 N. Damen.   They’ve got a wide and delicious range of sushi options, and for a while longer (not sure how long), pretty much everything on the menu is half off.  Yeah.  Like, everything except the Pepsi.  And who wants Pepsi anyway?  It’s BYOB!  Six of us stuffed ourselves silly with Maki Rolls, California Rolls, Dragon Rolls, Spider Rolls, Manhattan Rolls, Chicago Rolls, and more wasabi than my tummy knows how to handle for $76 TOTAL, tax/tip included.  Wow! 

Their website doesn’t really exist yet, but there’s a nice picture of the front of the restaurant, along with some reviews, on yelp.  

So, Chicago buddies, go get yourselves some delicious sushi for a really good price.  Do it do it do it do it.  :)

And what I have to offer today is this: 

wow, it doesn't even photograph well

Not as traditionally “pretty” as some other things Mac has created for us to eat, I’ll agree… but once you’ve had a bite of this gooey brownish-orangish  stuff, you’ll start to believe that the sweet potato is the most beautiful thing in the world… especially the way Mac makes them. 

Mac is famous (you know, like, to me) for slow cooking sweet potatoes in a barely hot oven all day long, wrapped only in tin foil, to produce a deliciously soft, sweet and tender, fall-apart-in-your-mouth meal-in-itself.  This time, however, he spiced it up a bit (no pun intended), by coating the sweet potato in a brown sugar/butter paste, accented with some spices (allspice and cloves, I think I recall?), before wrapping it in foil and slow cooking it in a barely hot oven all day.  The result?  Oh my god.  The picture doesn’t do it justice.  Even an on-time blog post wouldn’t do it justice.  I could’ve spent all day picking the candied sweet potato juice off the bottom of the pan… is that weird?

Tuesday afternoon, I said to Mac, “Hey Mac, we’re hosting book club tomorrow, and I want to make something sweet and yummy for us to munch on.  Any ideas?”

And he thought quietly for a minute, gazing up at the snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, and then said with decisiveness, “I’ll make baklava.”  He nodded his own approval.

Baklava having been totally off my radar, I said, “well actually I was thinking something like cookies.  Do you think I should do like peanut butter or like chocolate chip?”

And he, “We’ll have to pick up some phyllo dough, but that’s ok because we need to go to the store anyway… I think we have enough honey… I might go look at some recipes, it’s been a few years since I’ve made baklava…”

Fast forward a few hours, and we’re standing in the kitchen, Mac fastidiously wrinkling the thin, delicate phyllo sheets to the appropriate level of “wrinkled” and brushing them gently with butter while I, like, hold the pot.  He has printed out the recipe that he’d written and hung it in the kitchen for our reference.  I look at the crazy, labor-intensive mess of walnuts and phyllo dough and say, “How did the Greeks come up with this anyway?”

“Actually,” says Mac, “the Greeks didn’t come up with it at all.  The very first instances of baklava come from China, of all places.  Then it kind of disappears for a while, and re-emerges in Turkey a couple hundred years later.”

I stare at him.  He keeps at his phyllo dough.  ”I wikipedia’d it,” he says.

I thought perhaps this second perspective on how baklava came to be in our house this week might enhance your appreciation of the original “Bites” posting.

Post book club follow-up: baklava was a huge hit, not surprisingly.  We do, however, have left overs… so if you’re in the neighborhood, give us a call…

Baklava! Yum yum yum...

I first made baklava in 2001 and made it several times during my time in college, but this was the first attempt I’ve made in recent years. I didn’t have the recipe I’d used before, so I compiled the recipe below from four different variations I found online and suited to my tastes and used what I could remember of previously having made the dish. If you try it out, you’ll have to let me know how it goes for you. Without further ado, here’s the recipe:

Baklava!!

INGREDIENTS

• 1 (16 ounce) package phyllo dough (if more than one size box available, get the longer box)
• 1 pound chopped walnuts (optionally, roast before using)
• 1 cup butter
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 ¼ cup water
• 1 ¼ cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¼ teaspoon lemon rind
• 1 cup honey

DIRECTIONS

1. To make the sauce, boil sugar and water until sugar is melted. Add vanilla, lemon rind and honey. Simmer for about 20 minutes. Leave uncovered and allow to cool as much as possible while you continue with other preparations and baking.
2. Preheat oven to 325° F. Depending on your oven, you may want to go as high as 350°—it’s simply a matter of experimentation. Butter the bottoms and sides of a 9×13 inch pan OR you can skip buttering the pan if you simply apply extra butter to the bottom most layers when you start layering the dough.
3. Chop nuts and toss with cinnamon. Set aside. Unroll phyllo dough. Cover phyllo with a dampened cloth to keep from drying out as you work. Place two sheets of dough in pan letting the excess half of the sheets drape over the side. Using a clean basting brush, butter the half of the sheet that is in the pan. It is only necessary to lightly brush on the butter, not saturate. The more wrinkles the sheet has in it, the better. Quickly fold the excess back over the buttered half and butter it as well. Repeat until you have 8 layers (4 full sheets, folded onto themselves). As you lay the sheets of dough, note that more wrinkles will equal a crispier baklava. At this point, sprinkle 2 – 3 tablespoons of nut mixture on top. Continuing as before, layering dough, butter and nuts in that order but only use 2 layers of dough (1 folded sheet) instead of the initial 8 until you reach the top. The top layer should be about 6 – 8 layers deep. Apply a small amount of extra butter to top layer, but still avoid completely saturating the dough.
4. Using a sharp knife cut into four long diagonal rows, creating diamond shapes. Only cut to within a half to a quarter inch of the bottom of the pan—not all the way through. This will allow for the maximum sauce retention within the layers of the baklava. You will cut the remaining half inch or so later, after it has FULLY cooled. Bake for about 1 hour until baklava is golden and crisp. Oven times can vary quite a bit—best to go by how it looks more than any other factor.
5. Remove baklava from oven and immediately spoon sauce over it. Let cool. I like to sprinkle the tiniest amount of extra cinnamon on top at this point (see photo), but I don’t think that that’s very traditional. After it’s completely cooled you can slice the rest of the way through all of the cuts you made before baking it and remove each piece carefully. Often, it’s served in cupcake papers to help contain any excess syrup but I’ve never done it that way. Leave it uncovered if possible as it gets soggy when wrapped up.

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