gnat dims and sums

for a person who loves food as much as i do, there are some pretty inexcusable gaps in my realm of food experience. i took care of one of the biggest very recently with a quick field trip back to:

chinatown. somehow i made it 25 years without ever having been to dim sum. andrew had a craving and said he knew a place, so we headed to phoenix right off the red line.

usually when i write about new foods i like to do some background research first. unfortunately the only interesting tidbit wikipedia has to offer about dim sum is that it's linked with an older tradition, yum cha (tea tasting), in which tea was served with small snacks. thankfully, over centuries the snacks served with the tea took over the show and now we have dim sum. don't get me wrong, i love tea. i just love snacks more.

the photos that follow are of food, all of which was delicious. unfortunately none of the contents of anything we ate were really explained to us, everything was just set on our table with the assumption we wanted it. (this is mostly an exaggeration. i still can't tell you what any of it is.)

shrimp?

...potstickers.

dumpling. and sauce. wonderful wonderful sauce.

shrimp roll. probably.

bbq pork bun. problematic, as they gave us three buns for four people. see unsuccessful attempt to rectify the situation below.

ribs. (pretty confident on this one.)

sesame balls filled with lotus paste. i know they don't look like balls so much as wedges, that's because the woman who brought them busted out a pair of kitchen shears and annihilated them at the table.

at the end of the meal you're glad the table is covered in paper, because they've only given you one of each type of sauce and you've dripped it everywhere while reaching over all of the little plates to dip things.

while i was in chinatown i also stopped in a little grocery store to grab some cooking paraphernalia (sesame oil, mirin, rice vinegar) for mere dollars. i want to shop there all the time.

so it turns out i don't have a lot of exciting things to say about dim sum except that it was delicious. i liked everything i ate (even if i didn't know exactly what it was), i didn't spend too many dollars, and i was full but not so full i wanted to die. 

maybe next time i take pictures of food to blog about i'll write down what it is.

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.

gnat expounds on a terrifying weather phenomenon

when i was three years old, my family picked up and left sunny southern california and moved to this house in springfield, illinois for my dad's work. my parents had only ever lived in egypt and los angeles, so it's no surprise that it only took one winter for them to decide that snow and ice were not for them. as we prepared to make the move back to california, the people of springfield expressed their alarm at the idea. weren't we afraid of earthquakes?

i ask this of the midwest - how in the name of all natural disasters are earthquakes scarier than tornadoes!?

this is actually a debate i've been having with andrew (who grew up in iowa, where tornadoes are a thing) since shortly after i moved here. i firmly believe that tornadoes are way scarier and more destructive than earthquakes. the typical earthquake causes you to wake up wondering why your picture frames are slightly askew on the wall, whereas the typical tornado picks you and your picture frames up off the ground and carries you to a different state. yesterday i expressed my disappointment at having lived in the midwest for almost a year and a half and not having seen a tornado. it was my belief that they happened all the time and that surely by now i would have experienced one. in fact, the day i moved here my connecting flight out of las vegas was grounded for several hours because of a tornado watch in chicago. do i possess some kind of tornado repellant quality? andrew's response shocked me - in 26 years, he has never once actually laid eyes on a tornado. at that moment i considered the argument automatically won. in case any doubt still existed, i consulted wikipedia for some data.

in the year 2011, there have been no earthquake related casualties in the united states. there have been approximately 550 tornado related casualties, 159 of which occurred during the may 22 joplin, missouri tornado. granted, this is atypical - there have been more tornado related deaths this year than in the last ten combined. in fact, 2011 has been the deadliest tornado year since 1936. the deadliest earthquake in california history (the 1906 san francisco earthquake, 7.9) was devastating not because of the quake itself but the fires that followed it. the two deadliest in my lifetime, the 1989 loma prieta (7.1) and the 1994 northridge (6.7), killed 63 and 33 people respectively. following the northridge earthquake, massive changes were made to building codes and existing structures were retrofitted to reduce the destruction caused by future quakes.

(please note: this discussion is limited to california earthquakes. earthquakes everywhere else in the world, yeah, fine, they're totally terrifying. take for example the 9.0 that hit japan in march. way scarier than a tornado.)

in the process of compiling all of this hideously depressing data, i also discovered that there is a natural phenomenon called a fire whirl, which looks like something out of a harry potter movie. it is literally a vortex of flame. they are very rarely captured on film, in fact a google image search for "fire whirl" turned up no results that weren't disappointing. i did, however, find a video.

what are your thoughts, internets? are tornadoes scarier than earthquakes?

gnat enjoys free summer music

this morning i realized i hadn't yet posted about what is probably my favorite chicago summertime activity - evening concerts in millenium park.

regular attendees include cara,

myself,

eileen,

and sean,

with occasional guest appearances by aleck

and andrew

among others.

about once a week cara and i load up bags of snacks, wine, and blankets and head down to millenium park, where we all play card games and listen to free music all evening.

this summer we've heard everything from rachmaninoff to egyptian music to iron & wine, all from this patch of grass.

in other news, all of my pictures are going to be in hipstamatic for a while, both because i'm basically obsessed with it and because carmine II is in the hands of the geek squad after sustaining a fall. (yes, again. shut up.)

gnat's chinatown doubleheader

back in the day, when i first moved to chicago, i lived about four blocks from chinatown. because of its proximity i always intended to walk over and look around, but somehow it never happened. fast forward to more than a year later -

i finally made it! accompanied by taylor (who also had somehow never been... inexcusable considering both of us live mere steps from the red line) and sean.

you will all be shocked to hear that my primary objective upon arriving was to eat as many things as possible, beginning with a steamed pork bun:

if i look mildly guilty it's because i steered my travel companions almost immediately out of the street and into the first bakery i saw and forced them to wait while i agonized over which tasty treat i wanted.

after wandering through the shops (which i have no pictures of, because evidently i only take pictures of food...) we stopped to sample some fried things. we feasted on egg rolls, wontons, and something called mantou which is just fried dough that's served with sweetened condensed milk for dipping. yes, straight up sweetened condensed milk.

we also ate crab rangoon and potstickers:

you may notice that in the photograph above i am wearing different clothing than in the previous photos. you may also notice that i am holding my fingers up in such a way that i seem to be parodying asian tourists taking pictures. not so, friends! taylor and i are holding up two fingers because this picture was taken during our second visit to chinatown, the day after our first! what possible reason could we have had to go back to chinatown less than 24 hours after leaving it (besides delicious fried things, which are always a good reason to go to chinatown)?

sparklers.

you see, chinatown round one happened to fall on the third of july (also my sister's birthday, happy birthday alex!) and somehow none of us realized until several hours after we left that we had been in possibly the only part of chicago where we were likely to find sparklers and that we really, really wanted sparklers.

so, we went back to chinatown. sean couldn't join us, but we took andrew along for round two.

the stated purpose of our second visit was to find sparklers, but somehow i got sidetracked by more food. what can i say - we stopped in so many stores to inquire about combustible items, i lost interest pretty quickly and became focused instead on delicious snacks.

taylor, on the other hand, was undeterred, and had asked in every store but one when finally the woman behind the counter of the last shop gleefully produced a massive white paper bag full of legitimate fireworks, only $15! as tempted as we were, we said no thank you and bought some cheap dinky ones instead.

because we were scheduled to attend a fourth of july barbecue that evening, we also purchased a whole barbecued duck.

his head may have broken mostly off as we tried to wrangle him out of the box, but we put on a good show for pictures.

despite having gone to chinatown twice on consecutive days and spent several hours scouring the streets for festive explosives (which due to a lapse of judgment i just googled in an attempt to find a good synonym, having momentarily forgotten my last name... apologies in advance to cara in case the department of homeland security comes knocking in the middle of the night) we did not light any sparklers on the fourth of july. in fact, i have no idea where they ended up. i would call the excursion(s) an epic fail, but our search led me to a new part of town and gave me an excuse to sample several delicious foods, which is a definite win.

(side note: the only reason i can think of to be upset about not having lit the sparklers is that since my greekstravaganza post in february i have been itching to use the "things on fire" tag again, and this would have been a perfect opportunity to do it. apparently not a lot of things in my life are on fire. i realize this is a strange thing to be upset about.)

(other side note: i had to ask harmony, who is my resident knower of things about baseball, if it would be weird to call two things that happened one after the other but not on the same day a doubleheader. she said it was probably ok.)

gnat survives the snowpocalypse

let me preface this by saying that of all the chicago adventures i have had thus far, snowpocalypse has been without doubt my absolute favorite.

it all started on monday morning when i had the following conversation with my mother:

ma: tomorrow and the next few day there will be a blizzard storm you need to go get food to store

gnat: i went today

ma: candles there might be power outage

gnat: but the store is very close

gnat: a blizzard?

ma: i am telling you whats on the news

gnat: in chicago?

ma: yeah all over and they said chicago. the next few days worse on tuesday and wednesday

ma: just check it

ma: go to walgreen get a couple of flash lights and a lot of batteries

ma: you dont want to find yourself alone at home pitch black

ma: your stove is gas?

a quick google search turned up a story from the chicago sun-times with the headline "'life-threatening' blizzard on its way to chicago area."

naturally i did what any scared californian who had never lived through a blizzard before (and who had a fear mongering parent sending doomsday messages from the other side of the country) would do - i prepared for the worst. over the course of monday and tuesday i amassed a respectable collection of candles, flashlights, snacks, and water in anticipation of the impending snowmageddon.

what i forgot to get (and what would later prove essential) was wine. by the time cara and i realized the omission, the winds had picked up and the "falling" snow was flying horizontally. we suited up in our snowpocalypse survival gear and trudged through the abandoned streets to the nearest trader joe's.

our provisions:

we dined and caroused with our taco tuesday guests (because i wasn't about to let the end of the world get in the way of taco tuesday, and neither were they, although we ate slightly more blizzard appropriate foods) and then somewhat foolhardily headed out to experience the storm.

it was chaotic. frenzied. helter skelter. really the only word for it is apocalyptic.

the next morning (my first snow day!) we examined the aftermath of the storm. things i found buried in the snow included my street,

a fire hydrant,

and (probably) a bicycle.

we snowball fought - well, i attempted rather pathetically to snowball fight and the andrews pummeled each other with continent shaped chunks of snow,

and i made my first snow angel, which is truly as satisfying as all those little kids frolicking in the snow on tv make it look.

snowpocalypse is, sadly, over, and it's sunny and beautiful (albeit really, really cold) outside, but the streets and the sidewalks are still piled high with snow. i'm not sure how long it will stick around, the snow plows have been at it outside my window since about six o'clock this morning. thanks, assholes.

(side note: perhaps due to the sun coming in through the windows and the garbage-truck like beeping of the snow plows i woke up thinking i was on kelton, that it was wednesday, and that i was late for work. i even strained to hear if patty had beaten me to the shower.)

there's a small part of me that wishes it could be snowpocalypse every day.

well, not every day.

gnat devours four unlikely animals (in one fell swoop)

i knocked one and a half items off my january wish list today.

i know what you're thinking, "how do you knock half an item off a wish list, gnat?"

well, hockey is maybe a big deal in chicago, which to be fair i think i knew. the blackhawks won the stanley cup a few weeks before i moved here, and there were banners and lights and stuff all over the place, so i figured people must like them and they must be kinda good. still, somehow it didn't occur to me that i might not be able to find tickets to a game. as it turns out they still exist, but the games are in march and the tickets cost $400. not going to happen.

instead, i am going to watch a game at a blackhawks bar. this promises to be warmer and infinitely more terrifying (exhilarating?) than actually attending a game. there you go. half.

i also knocked a full item off the list - today andrew and i took a field trip to the famed encased meat emporium, the sausage superstore of lore, hot doug's! we braved the 50 minute schlep to a neighborhood that even google maps doesn't have a name for (let's call it west and kinda north somewhere) and stood outside in the bitter cold (have i mentioned yet how cold it is here? because it's pretty cold) in a line wrapped around the building for hot dogs. but not just any hot dogs:

the game of the week! can you read that? it says:

"the mountain man (a damn tasty combination of elk, antelope, venison, and buffalo) with blackberry mustard and goat cheese"

i had never eaten any of those animals before (i had seen them in zoos, not the same thing) and though blackberry mustard sounded questionable i am a fan of anything with goat cheese on it. pictured here with duck fat fries!

(upon checking the website just now to verify my description of this item, i found that the weekly special had been changed to smoked spicy alligator sausage with shrimp remoulade. holy crap, i need to go back tomorrow.)

delicious. totally worth standing outside and not being able to feel my toes for 45 minutes. mission accomplished... for now.