Recipe for a Happy Anniversary

So, this weekend, Boxer and I celebrated our one-year anniversary. Go us! We celebrated by going to one of our favorite restaurants in Chicago: Big Jones. Big Jones is a coastal, low-country, southern style place in Andersonville. We both ended up having the prix fixe dinner. Man, was it good!

For our anniversary, Big Jones picked up our drinks. Boxer had a "black pearl," which was blackstrap rum, egg, and grand marnier. I had a spring sangria which was a rose wine with seltzer and spring fruits.

First course was a shrimp mousse with fennel, pickled onion, and a crispy wafer. This was our least favorite part of the meal. It was slightly salty.

Second course was a pea tendril and frisee salad with a lemon vinaigrette. I had mine with bacon; Boxer had his without. It was accompanied by fresh Sally Lunn bread with honey butter. So crisp and refreshing. Just a really lovely intro to spring.

Main course was a sea bass with garlic spinach, a fried rice cake, and an herbed creme. Again, very delicious - nice and light, not too oily, and the fish was perfectly cooked.

Dessert was a strawberry shortcake with a homemade biscuit and orange dreamscicle ice cream. Sublime. Juicy, sweet, the berries were perfectly ripe and the biscuit was incredible.

Oh Me, Oh My

So, I went with some friends to the world's most crowded arts and crafts fair this weekend. That was fun, but the best fun came later...

We were hungry and so we went to this little place to get some burgers. Only to discover that they had an hour wait for a table. It was 4:45 and they had an hour's wait! My goodness... So as we were heading back to the car, I said, "Let's look at the place on the corner."

It was a Romanian place - Kelly's or Continental or some such. And we said, sure. And walked in.

Everyone inside looks startled. The place smells heavily of cigarette smoke. There are a great many men inside. I begin to wonder if we haven't stumbled upon a restaurant serving as a front for the Romanian mob (is there such a thing?). A very nice woman takes us to a table and brings out the menus. Everything is about the same price, pretty much. Goulash, soup, and all very pork heavy. She comes back to take our order and I order goulash. They don't have it. She tells us the specials. I end up getting the stuffed cabbage with mashed potatoes. My friends get the sausage and the bean soup with a salad.

We start the meal with a huge basket of bread. It is quite good. My cabbage is good, and seems to have been made with a pickled pork. Which was a touch odd, but tasty. The sausage was incredible, and apparently the soup was as good as my friend's granny used to make.

So, all in all, it was a good experience. Although we giggled a lot. And I am pretty sure this guy was sitting in a corner somewhere!

Some Things Should Not Be Eaten

Next week I have vacation! Even though certain someones at work don't like this, as I should spend time only raising money and not having fun, ever. Too bad! I am going and I ain't checking email and I ain't answering the phone and, although I heard rumors that a faculty member wants to submit a grant next week, they have not talked to me yet, so they might miss their deadline. Ooops. Too bad!

Nice, GG. Be nice! Nice! You raised $75,000 this last week, almost $1.2 million for the year (so far). Be nice! Kind! Go play and have fun...

Well, having fun for me involves food - shopping for it, cooking it, eating out, bringing food to other people. And since I am having visitors who have never really visited Chicago (well, I haven't visited Chicago all that much despite living just north of it), I thought it might be fun to visit some ethnic restaurants. I was noodling around the intertubes and found an interesting Malaysian place called, naturally, Penang.

There's some good looking stuff on the menu - lemongrass crab, chicken and potato red curry, chili tofu, chicken feet with black mushrooms (yum!), but there is also something that I just think should never be eaten.

What might that be, GG? Pig's head? Nope, like that. Intestines? Never had that and not likely to do so, but you want it, knock yourself out. Rather that thing that should never be eaten is a vegetable dish called, lyrically enough, kang kung belacan. Its description?

"Sauteed conscious with spicy malaysian shrimp sauce," bargain priced at only $9.95.