gnat greeks out

this year's greekstravaganza 2.0 (the greekquel) was bigger, badder, and greeker than last year's.

for one thing, this time there were decorations:

what's that you say? did i go from chicago all the way to the parthenon to throw a greek dinner party? no, that's my living room, but i can see how you might be confused.

there were celebrity guests:

of course, tons and tons and tons of food:

and TOGAS!

this time we went big on the cheese on fire - in case you need a recap of how last year's cheese on fire went down, here it is:

"a lovely little greek lady at fresh farms market told us to use sherry, but after several failed attempts to light the cheese we resorted to vodka. even so, the cheese was not as on fire as i had hoped it would be.

next time we'll use bacardi 151."

well we didn't find 151, but eileen brought me something polish called spirytus (a rectified spirit!) which definitely did the trick:

we even had ancient greek olympics,

with ancient greek olympic gold medal winners:

alright, they were silver medalists (technically they were cardboard and aluminum medalists but in this arena the cardboard and aluminum medal is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon an olympian).

it was all very exciting and very greek, and so far the best greekstravaganza yet. we'll see if i can top it for next year's greekstravaganza episode III: live greek or die hard.

(this was the first of many throwback posts, written from nor cal about my many backlogged chicago adventures. on a more current note, the first thing my mom said to me yesterday was that there were record high temperatures in chicago. the reason this is funny is that for two years she did this every morning over gchat, telling me from nor cal that it was raining in chicago as i looked out my window at clear sunny skies. well... this time i finally had to take her word for it.)

gnat finally makes it to kuma's

if i were going to write a post called "gnat's favorite burger" we all know who would win already.

duh.

however, as the aforementioned burger does not exist anywhere in the vicinity of my current place of residence, i have to get my burger fix elsewhere. longtime readers will recall that five guys failed to impress:

i've also tried epic burger, m burger, and dmk burger, the counter, the crack-donalds, and of course the billy goat (amazing), but last week i had a burger that outshone all of chicago's other burger offerings that i've experienced thus far:

the absu burger at kuma's corner.

i first heard about kuma's long before i moved to chicago, by way of diners drive-ins and dives. i knew immediately that i needed to eat there, but it's quite a schlep via the cta and the wait for a table in the tiny dining room regularly tops two and a half hours - in the last two years i've attempted to eat there and failed no fewer than four times. last week i finally made it, and boy was it worth the wait.

kuma's appears in the top five of just about every "best burger in chicago" list there is, and for good reason. all of the burgers are named after metal bands, and all of them are topped creatively and deliciously (read: ridiculously... we're talking brie and bourbon poached pears, cream cheese and chorizo stuffed jalapeno poppers, pulled pork and pancetta). mine had tomatillo salsa, avocado relish (avocado relish? what? how is this different from guacamole?), pepperjack cheese, queso fresco, and deep fried jalapeno and habanero peppers, on a super clutch pretzel bun.

i apologize for the poor quality of the photos, to be completely honest i was way too hungry to be even marginally concerned about the lightning, and too covered in burger flotsam and jetsam to fiddle much with the settings on my camera and get a better shot.

and now, i give you a collection of quotes from how i met your mother which pretty much nail my feelings about this burger:

"this burger is so good, it's like christmas in my mouth. meat christmas."
"it's like an angel from heaven landed in the kitchen of mcclaren's... where the chef killed it and ran it through the meat grinder."
"i love this burger so much i want to sew my ass shut."
"oh my god. i'm never brushing my teeth again. unless it's with a toothbrush made from this burger."
"i want to take this burger out to dinner, then maybe a movie, then take it back to my place, put on a little terrence trent d'arby and just... fool around a bit, nothing serious. take it slow."
"i want to get tiny fitted sheets for this burger, and just... crawl into the bun, get all cozy, and die there."

my stomach is begging me to go back, my arteries are begging me to stay far, far away. let's take a crazy guess which will win.

gnat does new york

guys, i am exhausted. in the last two weeks i have flown five times and slept on four floors in six cities. i'm in chicago now and needless to say i am so happy to be back at home base, sleeping on my own mattress on my own floor. (yes, i sleep on a mattress on the floor. there is a bed frame involved. it's a long story. actually, no it's not. i bought a broken bed frame on craigslist and so my mattress sits on the floor inside the frame. i swear it's very comfortable.)

anyway, one of the floors i slept on happened to be in my friend jimmy's apartment in new york city. i informed him before my visit that my biggest priority was (surprise) to try as much food as possible, and though i was only there for 42 hours i managed to eat many, many things including breakfast at tom's restaurant in morningside heights (which you may recognize),

a hot dog and papaya juice at gray's papaya (famous hot doggery),

the inside of which is decorated like a tropical pinata,

and where i discovered that i'm not super wild about sauerkraut but that i do find the hot dog/papaya drink combination strangely delightful,

wafels and dinges (dinges is apparently dutch for "things" or "stuff" as in the stuff they put on waffles),

where i had a wafel with spekuloos spread (which is seriously amazing - it's like a peanut butter but made of ground up gingerbread cookies),

koronet pizza,

where i got a jumbo slice of pizza,

which was bigger than my head and totally overwhelming,

(i'm not the only one who felt this way),

and absolute bagels,

where i had a fresh bagel with lox spread (and it was the best bagel i had ever eaten).

not pictured are a burger which was not really memorable but to which the soundtrack was a choreographed karaoke rendition of men in black (complete with costumes and props), a street pretzel, and a reuben which was technically not from a "new york deli" but hey, my time was limited. in case you weren't counting, that's eight meals in a day and a half. be impressed.

of course, i also did things that WEREN'T food related (to kill time between meals). i saw strawberry fields in central park, across the street from the apartment building where john lennon was shot (may he rest in peace):

the lincoln center,

the GE building at 30 rockefeller plaza,

(and rockefeller center right under it, although somehow i missed the statue of atlas)

and times square, which i was resistant to the idea of visiting but which i found strangely soothing after a long day... something about all of the movement and ambient noise and huge billboards flashing has a totally unexpected (and counter-intuitive) calming effect if you sit there long enough...

i also got to spend a few hours at moma, which has a spectacular collection (including many pieces i would have sworn were in europe):

van gogh,

rousseau,

monet,

boccioni,

picasso,

braque and picasso,

warhol,

rothko (not reeeeeeaaalllllly my favorite),

pollock (which i never understood until i stood two feet from one - at which point i finally got what was so exciting about it),

and my favorite, chagall. (i remember the first time i saw a picture of this painting - i was six years old. he's been my favorite ever since.)

there were a few things i missed - the painting above is the only one of chagall's on view, and although moma has persistence of memory (probably dali's most famous painting but far from my favorite) there is only one other dali - but i saw so many more exciting things than what i've put above and there were even more that i didn't see because i got kicked out when the museum was closing. 

(as a side note, i think it's strange that i was more self-conscious about looking like a tourist in new york city than i ever feel when taking pictures of things here in chicago. i wonder why that is?) 

after new york i was in la, then back to chicago, rounding out the top three largest cities in the country in a span of five days. (it sounds cool, but it was borderline miserable - when i finally got back to chicago for good on thursday i slept for 15 hours then proceeded to lie on the couch for another two days. i am only now starting to feel like a normal human being again.) many thanks to jimmy, especially for accompanying me on many of my food related new york adventures, and to everyone else whose floor i have slept on in the last few weeks. 

and now, back to your regularly scheduled chicago-related programming.

gnat's picaken experiment: a culinary feat never to be repeated

the "picaken" has been a sort of running joke in my life for a few years now. when jalees, cheex and i first tossed around the idea of making a turducken for fakesgiving 2010, one of them suggested that a pie baked inside a cake would be the perfect dessert. we all laughed it off, of course. since then, every once in a while i've gotten an email from someone with a picture of a picaken, since apparently my friends know me and my predilection for strange kitchen experiments all too well. i usually laugh and respond that i'm not really much of a baker.

the last such email came from eileen, and contained a link to the first recipe that i had seen actually call the baked good behemoth a "picaken." what was so different about this email that made me suddenly entertain the idea of following through on this stupid, stupid quest?

the subject line said "challenge."

(unfortunately), i am not a girl who backs away from a challenge easily, which is why three days and several sticks of butter later this happened:

but i digress.

the first person to whom i made my intentions known was my little sister alex, who immediately asked "what is with you baking things inside of other things?" i wish i knew, alex.

so last saturday, after extensive googling of pie flavors and cake flavors and polling really everyone about potential combinations thereof, i assembled the ingredients and equipment and cara and i began picaken-ing. you may be wondering how exactly one accomplishes such a feat. lucky for you, i have pictures.

first you bake a pie. i had never done this before, so it was an experience in itself.

we made a nectarine filling (which, if you think about it, is totally ludicrous considering it was january in chicago. on second thought, not that ludicrous in comparison to the whole rest of the experience).

then you bake the pie. bonus points if you do it in a pi dish.

if you live in a big city and can't cool your pie on a windowsill (like in tom sawyer or dennis the menace or whatever) you open your bedroom window to let in the frigid january air instead. this was surprisingly effective.

this is the point where normally you would stop. after all, you've just baked a beautiful pie. or, you could remove the pie from its dish and set it in a springform pan...

and pour yellow cake batter over it.

where did it go?

it comes out of the oven looking like this. voila! picaken.

you could also stop at this point. picaken accomplished, after all.

cara and i did not stop at this point. what we did instead was assemble another pie, this one banana. we baked it, we window-silled it, and we popped it right out of its dish.

...flipping a perfect, fresh baked pie out of its dish is something of a harrowing experience.

we put it in the springform pan,

and covered it with batter. this time, lemon cake.

we piled our two picakens onto a makeshift cake stand (an upside down cast iron skillet covered in aluminum foil) and frosted that bad boy.

then we invited as many people over as we could so that they could help us eat the thing.

after the first slice came out, i may have cried a little on the inside. the inside of our picaken was far from beautiful. the banana pie turned purple - google offers little guidance as to why this happened, except that it has "something to do with potassium." it also maybe didn't hold together as well as it could have, as demonstrated by the "slice" i am holding below.

despite its less than winning looks, the picaken was delicious. 

i won't tell you how long the whole experience took, because frankly i am a bit ashamed to admit how long we spent on it. was it worth it? absolutely - picaken challenge accepted, and totally dominated. next person who emails me a recipe is getting this photo of a double-picaken slice in response. done and done.

you may have noticed in the first picture that a blue and pink candle were inserted into the finished picaken - because how much of a shame would it be not to use it in celebration of some important event? cara and aleck blew out the candles in honor of their recent engagement (congratulations guys!).

i would like to say that i've learned my lesson about ridiculous food assembly (and my reluctance to back down from a challenge) but picaken-squared was totally worth the time, effort, and mess. that said, i'm never ever going to do it again. probably. we'll see.