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.
That might have been the unhealthiest salad in my life. Though it was called a salad, it involved few vegetables: a handful of endive and a few strings of haricots verts (green beans). More prominently featured were a nice, runny poached egg and bits of lardon, the fattiest part of pork bacon. And to complete the cholesterol-laden scheme, it was on a bed of French fries, for god's sake. But was it tasty? Hey, do you even have to ask?
The Salad Lyonnaise at La Tache was, as I said, an antisalad. There's no illusion that it's going to be good for your health: unlike the chicken fingers on a bed of nutrientless iceberg lettuce drenched with fatty ranch dressing (that some restaurants try to push into the "healthy eating" category), it doesn't even pretend to be healthy. If you weigh the thing, it'll run something like this: 80 grams of endive and green beans; 250 grams of fries and bacon. But that doesn't matter, really, because you don't go out to eat healthy. You go out to eat tasty.
This salad was probably one of the best salads I've ever had, and it also might have been one of the best fries. (This is kind of a fun thing to say, actually.) I don't know what they fry their potatoes in, but they were packed with flavor. The greasy fries were balanced by the slight bitterness of the endive and the refreshing acidity of the "truffle vinaigrette," creating such a full combination of flavors. Bits of lardon added smoky and salty punch, and the runny egg yolk held everything together. It was a fantastic salad--if I dare to call it one. The other dish I had at La Tache--a crab cake appetizer--was way too oily and salty for my taste, but if only for the Lyonnaise salad, I'd go back to the Andersonville bistro. (Patrick's quail was quite nice as well, with its wild flavor largely intact but well complemented by the fresh and dried figs.)
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La Tache
1475 W. Balmoral, Chicago, IL
773.334.7168
Our waitress informed me (after I excitedly told her how good the salad was) that it's on the Sunday brunch menu as well--that sounds like a divine idea, to start a Sunday with that satisfying salad!
One of our favorite breakfast (and late-night dessert) place is the Taste of Heaven in Andersonville. Patrick took me there early in our relationship, and there's a good chance that this place won me over for him. Joking aside, this is a great neighborhood bakery café to nurture your romantic relationship, to start the first chapter of that epic novel you've been planning to write for years, or to just have a chat with friends over a cup of coffee and tasty treats.
Between the two of us, we've tried pretty much everything on the menu, and we're deeply fond of most everything. One of our perennial favirutes us the Silverland Breakfast, a sort of a modern take of the classic biscuits and gravy. Biscuits and gravy is relatively new to me (a recent expat from Japan), and I still hesitate when faced with some of them, especially when the gravy looks mucousy and contains unidentifiable gray meat. But the Silverland Breakfast is now high on my list of Awesome American Food.
As you can tell from the photo, their gravy is thinner than most, and has a nice kick from a blend of spices. I seem to taste some tomatoes in it, but I'm not 100% certain on this. It's served over scrambled eggs and two corn biscuits, and the biscuits are truly a piece of art: they're flaky, slightly sweet, and absorb the gravy wonderfully.
A recent discovery is this homemade granola with greek yogurt. I'm not a granola person. I'm not a yogurt person, either. I'm not even a healthful woman when it comes to breakfasts. I'm more of a gluttonous eater who wants her breakfast nice and greasy (eggs, bacons, potatoes), or nice and sugary (pancakes, French toast, you name it). But one day, I was in a rare mood for something lighter and refreshing, so I settled for the homemade granola.
When the granola showed up in one of their signature blue cups (that are at least as big as ramen bowls), it looked so good I stared at it, saliva dribbling down my chin, before I started digging in. The golden-brown granolas were dotted with generous amount of dried cherries, juicy strawberries and plump blueberries. The combination of the striking blue cup, red strawberries and snow-white yogurt was beyond appetizing.
And when I started munching, it was even better. The granola's honey sweetness, tart cherries and refreshing strawberries--it was rather heavenly. The portion was a bit more than I'd wanted (they're notorious for their gigantic portions), but I finished it all. Ah, well.
Although we tend to go there for breakfast, Taste of Heaven is pretty versatile. For lunch, they have soups and creative sandwiches (though I wouldn't go for the meatloaf sandwich--I've had better ones elsewhere). For dinner, which they recently added to their operation, I love the old-fashioned beef stew served on potato pancakes, but there are other options in the comfort-food department (like sandwiches, super-popular spinach lasagna, etc.) as well. And it being a bakery, Taste of Heaven is good for light munchies as well. Though I'm always tormented when it comes to picking one from their wide array of baked goods, I'm particularly fond of their humongous slice of white cake with whipped cream cheese and lots of berries. Ahh, just writing this makes me drool all over my keyboard!
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A Taste of Heaven
5401 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL
773.989.0151
© Copyright 2007 - All Rights Reserved. Don't even think about trying it!
