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'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.

gnat's triumphant return to hot doug's

it's been almost a year since my first hot doug's sausage superstore and encased meat emporium experience. in one sausage, dubbed "the mountain man," i ate four animals: elk, venison, buffalo, and antelope. now, that is an impressive number of unusual animals and yes, it was delicious, but the return visit makes that first trip look like child's play.

it started on saturday morning when, after my previously described incident with the turnstile, i met the andrews and christine on the red line to begin our journey. hot doug's is a train, a bus, and walk away, otherwise i might go more than once a year. upon arriving we made our way to the end of the line, which was already wrapped all the way around the building at 11:15am.

while we waited, pondering our meaty options, we were given this visual aid of typical sausage fare to contemplate. unfortunately it was mostly useless as a shockingly small percentage of hot doug's encased meat offerings feature pork.

once we made it inside we completely ignored the regular hot dog menu and went straight for the specials. we selected seven (yes seven) favorites and had a seat.

our selections were as follows. apologies in advance for the horrible picture quality (and to my models who likely were unaware they would be photographed when they embarked on this field trip).

andrew holding the apple, pear and port elk sausage, with cherry-fig mustard and caramelized onion marmalade cheddar cheese in one hand (don't ask me which) and the smoked antelope sausage with black garlic confit aioli and chipotle-cheddar cheese in the other.

christine with the smoked shrimp and pork sausage with cajun remoulade and goat cheese drizzled with honey, and the rosemary and garlic smoked chicken sausage with chipotle dijonnaise and carrigaline smoked farmhouse cheese.

andrew got  the wild rice and asiago smoked bison sausage with smokey bacon sauce and garlic-cheddar spread and a repeat of the shrimp/goat cheese/remoulade.

and yours truly with the smoked portugese linguica with saffron rouille and aged iberico cheese. with a side of cheese fries, because i needed more sodium in my life. (there were also duck fat fries. i don't have a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

after typing a few of those out i'm not entirely convinced that some of those words aren't made up or the ingredients added for the sake of name embellishment. i've provided handy dandy links to the ones i was most certain weren't real.

in any case, we tried each sausage by the bite and pass to the right method, then each struggled to the end of our own. my favorite was the shrimp sausage, and not just because i enjoy the word "remoulade" so much. 

we performed admirably:

then made the somewhat painful walk back to the bus.

i don't know who secret robbie is, and while i question his claim that "encased meats" are the finest words in the english language (a pretty strong statement, when there are so many other excellent words which are frankly more fun to say, like denouement or neurofibromatosis) i do agree that encased meats are delicious and worth the trip to the undefined, faraway neighborhood where hot doug's (and literally nothing else) can be found.