On Sunday, we had a mostly quiet day, with me sanding our ghastly orange table (with an extremely obdurate paint) and Patrick working on a website for a band. Around the end of the afternoon, though, we grew restless and decided to go out for a long walk with nowhere in particular as a destination. We strolled east on Devon, turned south somewhere before we hit Broadway, and walked down till our straight-south line was broken by the St. Boniface Cemetery around Argyle. It was just on a whim (and the possible hopping-on to the 22 bus) that we turned west, then trod north on Clark.
As it turned out, it was a lucky turn. Just after a few minutes since we'd started our northward march on Clark, a group of about six or seven women stopped us at an intersection south of Andersonville. One of them showed us a square-shaped brochure and explained that they're giving us the ticket for an Andersonville Dessert Crawl, while the rest of the group milled around us, all of them looking cheerfully back and forth between their spokesperson and us. Apparently, a lot of the restaurants and businesses in Andersonville were offering little samples of sweets as a fund raiser for the "good cause."
Though we were a bit surprised, of course we jumped at the opportunity. Free desserts are always welcome in our book. "You have to promise that you'll do this, though," said the spokeswoman, and we graciously promised that we would. Patrick and I thanked her profusely and we parted ways. From a short study of the brochure, it appeared that we missed a few businesses south of us, so we decided to walk all the way to the south end of the area and start from there. The first destination was the Wooden Spoon, a very cute shop selling baking and cooking tools. Inside, the folks from the yet-to-open Cocina de Frida were serving strawberry and pineapple dessert tamales, neatly wrapped up in little corn husks.
After that, we tried dessert after dessert, sweets after sweets in various restaurants and venues.
Okay... this is a trifle horrifying. Did we eat all this? In an hour or so? Well, to be sure, we took home the lemon-iced cookies and pumpkin crumble bar, which were wrapped up in a transportable form, but that's still a lot of sugar and fat. No wonder I was merely an inch from getting a heartburn as we walked back home under the bright moon--out of the sheer sense of caloric duty, for our legs were pretty tired by this point. The scarier thing, though, is that the list is not in any way comprehensive.
We missed the chocolate kahlua mousse from Fireside, raspberry chambord brownies a la mode from Ravenswood Pub and baklava from Taste of Lebanon, which are all served along the Ravenswood Ave., which we decided to be a bit too out of the way for our exhausted legs. We also didn't have the tiramisu from Calo (they ran out), and didn't try the doggie treat at Scrub-a-dub-dub (for obvious reasons). Erickson's Delicatessen had Swedish candies in baskets, but we didn't get that, either. We somehow missed Anne Sather's brownies, too. So, if we'd had time, energy and stomach space for everything on offer, we'd have had 26--that's twenty-six, my dear--different desserts from the same number of Andersonville businesses in a matter of a few hours.
And even scarier than that is the fact that we shared the portions. we had only one ticket, so in most places, we got only one piece of the dessert and shared it. I can't imagine how stuffed (and eventually sick) I would have been, had we had one ticket for each of us. So, if you're thinking of joining the event next year, I'd suggest either sharing a ticket with someone or bringing a bunch of Ziploc containers so you can save for later what won't spoil too quickly. I've got more to say about the Dessert Crawl, but it's running long, so I'll save that for tomorrow.
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