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 celebrates national taco day

it's no secret that i am basically obsessed with tacos. i wish i could remember exactly when my love for them began - my best guess is that it was senior year in high school, before my move to LA and before i learned that there was so much better out there than rubio's fish tacos. in any case, they now occupy a large, delicious place in my heart (and probably also my coronary arteries). for the last four years, taco tuesday has, in some form, been a weekly staple, and longtime readers may remember my experiments with duck tacos, greek tacos, and spaghetti tacos... yeah, that last one was a mistake.

in light of this, i'm ashamed to admit that until about 10am yesterday i was totally unaware that it was national taco day (or that national taco day was a thing to begin with), and on a tuesday of all days! evidently it's on october 4 every year. luckily eileen alerted me to the oversight and we scrambled to make taco related dinner plans. after an extensive google search of hole-in-the-wall taco joints in the area, we settled on taco and burrito palace #2, mostly by virtue of its name:

i wish i had been hungrier so i could have eaten one of each type. as it was i managed one chicken, one carne asada, and one al pastor.

by the time eileen and i got our food i had been anticipating the first bite for over nine hours. that may explain the strange giddy expression i'm wearing below... the delicious horchata on the right probably helped.

because national taco day is an important holiday to be celebrated with loved ones, i texted friends and family early in the day to go out and eat tacos and send me photographic evidence of their feasts. this turned out to be completely agonizing as pictures started pouring in long before it was time for dinner.

jalees and his coworkers visited el taco llama in the valley (and sent me several more spectacular hunger inducing photos that are not shown below):

lily, liz, and jason ate at taqueria guadalajara in davis:

sarge and my sister alex narrowly missed each other at acapulco in westwood:

my cousin neil and his girlfriend leah went for tacos (but no hot dogs) at la chiquita y el chiquilin street tacos and hot dogs in sylmar:

kieng had don antonio's in west LA:

kelly got takeout from pili's tacos, also in west LA:

taylor, who is new to southern california and was not sure she could find tacos in orange county (cute) ended up at trejo's in huntington beach:

and joey in tuscon chose to celebrate with double-deckers from taco bell:

some chose to make tacos at home. jimmy in new york:

becky and jeff in new orleans:

and my parents (who are sort of adorable) in nor cal:

we may have all been miles and miles from each other, but i feel like every one of them celebrated this, the holiest of taco tuesdays with me. national taco day - the holiday that brings people together!

gnat revisits al's (and gets it right, this time)

it's the end of the month and as of yesterday i had only completed one item out of five on my january chicago wishlist. totally unacceptable! not wanting to close the month with a dismal 20% success rate i crammed two more items from the list in at the last possible moment.

first, my triumphant return to al's beef:

i first visited al's with jalees and nicole back in august. i didn't find out until months later (thanks, man vs. food!) that REAL chicagoans get their al's beef "dipped" - the sandwich gets dunked into the vat of juice the beef was cooked in, because it just isn't messy enough to be worth eating otherwise.

so of course, i went back. i asked the guy behind the counter twice to make sure he actually dunked my sandwich this time, because it didn't look quite mushy enough to my untrained eye.

it was dunked, all right. as soon as i picked the thing up to get a picture it unleashed a greasy stream of liquid and i narrowly avoided a lap full of beef juice. the following is an actual look of shock and dismay captured by cara:

if you should ever find yourself at al's #1 beef, do yourself a favor and get your sandwich dunked.

this morning i walked down to navy pier to check out the snow sculpture competition at "snow days chicago." (see? i DON'T just write about food.) because i was feeling exceptionally touristy, i walked the scenic route along the lake. last time i was at this "beach" it was 95 degrees out... not so much, right now.

the snow sculptures were, predictably, completely awesome. i took a moment to discuss the ones i liked best with comedian bob newhart, a chicago native.

(just did some research. evidently this is his character dr. bob hartley's psychoanalyst couch from the bob newhart show.. for the purposes of this discussion i would like to pretend instead that i am on some sort of bob newhart talk show discussing snow sculpture ratings and how painful sitting on frozen metal couches can be.)

this wasn't one of my favorites but the others weren't quite as imitable as cranky captain america.

except maybe the medusa, but nobody was standing around to get a picture of my interpretation. it won first place!

my favorite was the second place winner. it's called "hommage a duchamp no. 2" and it's based on a marcel duchamp painting called nude descending a staircase no2.

i also liked this one, "that's a moray." yeah, it's actually called that.

an exhibition piece done by the team that won last year's competition. zoom in and look at the wrinkles in his face... that's all made of snow.

i'm not even certain i'm capable of putting together a half decent snowman. i haven't tried yet, but we're supposed to get a blizzard this week so there should be some prime snow frolicking days coming up.

the last two items on my list were a visit to the field museum and to go to a blackhawks game. both have been postponed (one due to a total fail on my part, the other completely zain's fault, or really zain's knee's fault) but by no means forgotten!

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.