gnat procrastinates

coming to you live from elly's, where i am sitting in the corner (creepily taking covert pictures with my phone) attempting to get some work done.

i am outfitted with an endless supply of decaf and bopping to the 80s pop pandora station over the speakers. send me your productivity vibes, internets!

gnat sings the praises of elly's pancake house. again.

yes, i'm coming to you live from elly's, in the seat where i spend several evenings a week desperately attempting to do productive things.

my typical vantage point:

this is where i am when i'm not adventuring around chicago. it's my favorite place to study.

thank you, elly's. i would not be able to succeed as a graduate student without you.

gnat complains

the phrase "april showers bring may flowers" has never made any sense to me. in my experience by the time april rolls around the flowers have long since appeared, the rain is long gone, everyone is in shorts and sundresses and my spring fever has kicked into high gear.

not so, in chicago! it's been 45 and raining for weeks, and weather.com seems to think it's going to go right on doing so through the end of the month at least. upon returning from california after spring break i somewhat triumphantly put my sleeping bag coat in the back of my closet... last week i had to pull it right back out again.

(side note: i always thought spring fever referred to a warm weather induced upswing in mood and crazy increase in energy, a phenomenon that inconveniently struck me, without fail, during finals week of winter quarter every year throughout college, causing me to spend more time at the beach than was probably prudent right before exams. as it turns out, spring fever can also mean a feeling of low energy and weariness that occurs with the onset of spring. in german it's called "frühjahrsmüdigkeit," which according to wikipedia translates to "spring tiredness" and which i have been attempting unsuccessfully to pronounce for several moments now.)

so, i have spring fever, and not the fun kind. this, in combination with mcat studying and subsequent attempting to catch up on all the things i wasn't paying attention to while i was mcat studying, has prevented me from having exciting chicago adventures to tell you about... sorry.

april sucks.

gnat celebrates the american pastime

do i look like a convincing baseball fan or what?

last saturday sarge, harmony, and taylor took me to my very first baseball game. yes friends, i made it 24 years without having ever been to or even watched a baseball game. what can i say, i have foreign parents. baseball is not a thing we do.

baseball is, however, a thing chicago does, which is surprising considering the cubs haven't won a world series since 1908. in fact, they haven't even appeared in a world series since 1945 - the year the curse of the billy goat was placed. according to legend billy sianis, founder of chicago's billy goat tavern, was ejected from the park with his goat murphy (for whom he had purchased a box seat ticket) because of its offensive odor. sianis, a greek and therefore a lover not only of goats but of ominous superstitious things, declared on the spot that the cubs would never win a world series again. since then numerous attempts have been made to break the curse on chicago's "lovable losers," most of them involving bringing goats to wrigley field.

well, the cubs didn't get a goat last saturday but they did get a gnat.

sarge, harmony, and taylor, all lifelong baseball fans, were extraordinarily patient about explaining some of baseball's complexities to me, as well as amused by my complete ignorance of the baseball-going experience. for example, i always thought the seventh-inning stretch was... ok honestly, as i write this i realize i had no idea what the seventh-inning stretch was, but i definitely would not have guessed it meant that everyone in the park literally stands up and stretches.

as we left i got a picture with the statue of harry caray, (only slightly less ridiculous than one i have tucked away somewhere of me with the actual han solo frozen in carbonite prop) who only now after reading his wikipedia bio do i know anything about beyond "hey! would you eat the moon if it was made of ribs?" in fact, i tried to emulate will ferrell's harry caray in this photo... let's not talk about how widely i missed the mark.

there were no peanuts and no cracker jacks, but there were hot dogs and beer and i had a great time.

since then i have been camped out at elly's (remember elly's?) furiously preparing for the mcat, which i am taking on saturday. not only do they have marvelous pancakes but they are an excellent study venue! i know what you're thinking - "gnat, saturday is not very many days from today. shouldn't you be studying right now instead of blogging?" and you are absolutely right, here i go. wish me luck!

gnat says OPA!

chicago is a huge center of greek diaspora. (according to wikipedia so are new hampshire and florida, who knew?) i'm 1/4 greek, so it's a little bit unacceptable that i've lived here for eight months and haven't been over to greektown to visit my people.

instead, because the end of the quarter was looming and i had papers due left and right, (and because you can only cook tacos so many tuesdays in a row before it gets really boring) i decided to throw a GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! on monday.

before you can throw a greek dinner party you need greek ingredients, some of which are basically impossible to find in your average run-of-the-mill grocery store. aleck (a fellow greek and chicago native) was kind enough to poll his relatives about their preferred food shopping location, and the overwhelming consensus was:

fresh farms market! way out in the northwest suburbs of chicago. lucky for me, taylor was as excited about the prospect of a grocery-related field trip as i was, so on saturday we embarked on a mini road trip to niles, IL to get all of the goodies on my list.

so, fresh farms market is my new favorite place. i'll spare you a detailed description of our time there, because odds are we will be going back and it will get its own post. despite my giddiness throughout the shopping experience somehow i managed to exhibit a tremendous amount of restraint and only left with things on my list.

...it was a long list.

my menu was pretty ambitious, so i began to prep little by little on saturday and sunday.

by the time guests began to arrive on monday, i was greeksuited up and in the last stages of cooking.

there was a veritable smorgasbord of all my favorite foods to cook and eat: dolmas, moussaka, tsatziki, greek salad, lemon chicken, spanakopita, shaareya and tabbouleh, the last two of which are actually egyptian but shhhhh.

side note: smorgasbord is a swedish word for a buffet type food situation. unfortunately, extensive google searching (and mother phone calling) has failed to turn up a greek equivalent.

the most exciting food item by far was the saganaki. saganaki is a hunk of kefalotyri cheese that's been floured, egg washed, floured again, pan fried, soaked in booze, then lit on fire. that's right - cheese on fire. saganaki isn't actually traditonally greek, but originated in a restaurant right here in chicago's greektown.

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.

also notable, although probably to nobody but me, my first truly successful baklava making attempt. it turns out the secret is to use a loooooot of butter. i won't tell you how much.

we wore laurels and togas, we listened to greek music, we wined and dined. we GREEKSTRAVAGANZA!d, that truly is the only word for it.

once the guests had gone i promptly passed out on the couch.

throwing a GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! is hard work.

the next day, because it was tuesday and there was a downright disgusting amount of leftover food, (and because i was in the midst of far less fun than GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! excessive procrastination induced paperwritingstravaganza) i had greek tacos for dinner.

don't be fooled, they may look cool but there is a reason that greek tacos are not a real thing.

one of these days i will make it to actual greektown. in the meantime, i am up to my ears in enough leftover dolmas and tsatziki to keep me fed through the remainder of paperwritingstravaganza.

OPA!

gnat and harry potter and the deathly hallows (and some other things too)

whereas a few years ago they were commonplace, in my advanced age (24) all nighters have become something of a rarity prompted only by the most special of circumstances. last week the planets aligned and the midnight opening of harry potter and the deathly hallows immediately preceded fakesgiving 2010, leading me to embark on a cross country costuming harry potter watching train plane and automobile taking dead bird disassembling extravaganza.

in anticipation of the adventure, i foolishly stayed up into the wee hours of thursday morning. i was awoken by cara (who had already been up since about the time i went to sleep) and we headed to the south evanston salvation army, which had previously supplied the pieces for my prince halloween costume.

we spent the day studying and marathoning the first six harry potter films, until later in the evening guests began to arrive. cara made harry potter snacks (pumpkin pasties and cauldron cakes) and i made harry potter beverages (the nearest approximation of butterbeer google afforded me):

we costumed up and headed to the theater. i channeled emma thompson's madame trelawney:

unfortunately my hair shrank considerably on the way to the theater and i shattered my teacup in the parking lot while climbing out of the trunk of aleck's car. nevertheless, i enjoyed the movie and the people behind me enjoyed a view unobstructed by my less enormous hair.

all of my fellow movie-goers headed home and to bed, i changed into muggle clothes and headed back out. this is what my train stop looks like at four o'clock in the morning:

somewhat comatose i took two trains, an airplane, and a shuttle to westwood village, was intercepted by my sister, and eventually made my way to laguna, where i deliriously participated in a few rounds of flipcup, sliced my thumb open while removing a turkey's spine and ribcage, and promptly passed out at 9pm. i woke up after an hour or so and rallied for the rest of the night, but man did it feel good to finally get to sleep.

team turduckie was up bright and early the next morning putting all of our deboning practice to good use, taking apart and reassembling huey, dewey, and louie (the chicken, duck, and turkey, respectively) into one large frankenbird:

worth it. he wasn't as easy to slice or eat as we thought, but he was ridiculously delicious.

also delicious during my stay in california, the one, the only...

in-n-out burger!

typically my praise of in-n-out is countered by non california/nevada/arizonans by talk of another lauded burger chain, five guys. well, since my last visit to california a five guys has opened just minutes from my parents' house! naturally, mom and i went to check it out.

guess what: five guys sucks! i would eat at mcdonald's before i'd go back to five guys. the quality of the food is comparable and mcdonald's is about 1/3 the price of five guys.

seriously how can you compare this:

to this?

it's laughable.

i'm back in chicago, briefly, for my last chicago week of 2010. i fly out to vegas on friday and won't be returning to the blustery state of illinois for the rest of the year. i'd like to say i'm going to cram as much chicago adventuring into the next six days as possible, but in all likelihood i will spend the remainder of my time here inside the apartment/corner bakery/the library scrambling to finish readings and papers before the end of the quarter. we shall see.

gnat is reminded of why the heck she came all the way out here in the first place

i just got back from class and it was AMAZING! no but seriously, it was. my classmates are amazing, my professors are amazing, the readings are amazing, the campus is amazing. i think i'm really going to enjoy this program a lot, which is cool, since that's why i'm here (as much as all of my previous entries may have made it sound as if i were here to hang out and listen to free music).

the rest of my day was less than notable, the bulk of it was spent hanging out on my bed making my way through all of the reading for today's class that i have been neglecting since i got the syllabus, oh, two weeks ago.

last night i reconnected with a friend from high school who i hadn't seen in eight years. now, i say a lot of less than nice things about facebook but if it had not been for kristin's status update i would never have known that she too was new in the city and looking for people to explore the food scene with.

in other news, roast beef sandwiches are awesome. i know, cuz i'm eating one right now.