Been busy with moving. I'm still tired from all the packing, carrying the boxes up and down the stairs, and most of all, deciding what to throw away and what to take along. It's amazing how much stuff we accumulate as we live our lives. Most of them aren't that essential--not that I believe in a life that's made up of only the bare necessity--but it is so hard to throw them away. Though between Patrick and me I'm the Acting Minister of Toss-It-Out, it does give me some pang of guilt to hear the "thud" of something still functioning hitting the stinking bottom of the dumpster. I've known, all along, that the lesson is not to buy stuff that I don't absolutely love and/or absolutely need, but they still seem to find ways to infiltrate my life. Grrr....

So, we used the weekend to pack and move most of the non-furniture, non-essentials to the new apartment, where the current tenant let us fill up one of her unused rooms with our u-haul boxes. I'd been planning to hold on to my kitchen stuff till the last moment in the current apartment, but early on Sunday I was hit by an urge to be done with them, and ended up packing and moving most of them. My kitchen looks very white now--no more colorful condiment bottles and sundry sacks on the shelf, no take-out menus on the fridge door, no cooking utensils on the windowsill. All the walls, shelves and countertops are exposed, and white. It's so white that it feels like a hospital room, indeed.

Till we unpack the kitchen stuff in the new apartment, we'll survive on take-out food and coffee (I'm keeping the coffee maker till the last minute in this apartment; it's our life line). For lunch, I drove out to Hong Kong Buffet, a Chinese place on Lincoln Ave., figuring that it'd be a hassle-free meal. I filled up the styloform conatiner with noodles; stir-fried veggies and meats; and a peach-shaped steamed bun (my favorite); and paid a mere $3.76 for its weight. I came home delighted.

What I soon discovered should have been obvious: there was no cultery to eat the food with. I'd packed all the chopsticks, forks and knives. Even the plastic ones we'd saved from other take-outs had been packed away. Loathing my own thoroughness, I looked around the empty kitchen and the similarly (but slightly less) empty computer room. Nothing. Just when I started to consider the pros and cons of eating the General Tso's Chicken with my bare hands (or the alternative was to use the Dunkin Donuts' straw), I remembered last night's dinner. I recalled, specifically, a plastic fork. Carelessly thrown onto a bag of just-out-of-the-fryer French fries, the fork had warped in the middle, forming a rugged half circle. A warped fork is better than a straw or bare hands, when it comes to eating utensils, so I dug into the grease-spattered brown bag from last night (which was, shamefully yet conveniently, still sitting on the table). Sure enough, the fork was still there, and my lunch and my dignity as a civilized eater were both saved.

So, the lesson is, if you can't learn the first one about not buying stuff you won't need, to say "yes" to the crutial question at the take-out counter: "Do you need a fork?"

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Hong Kong Buffet
6249 N. McKormick Rd., Chicago, IL
773.649.0888
The food was good, a standard Chinese-buffet fare. Although some Yelpers absolutely hate this place to the marrow ("yucky" "msg" "filthy" "greasy" "peking duck resembles roadkill" "no wonder they make you pay before you enter the restaurant" etc.), I didn't find it any more horrific than any other Chinese buffet. Maybe my standard for Chinese buffet is lower than it should be, but hey, when I'm paying under $4 for a full box of meats and veggies, I'm not gonna complain.

We've done our first overnight backpacking trip, and have made it back home in one piece, sometime around three this morning. But before going into the food situation on the trail, I have to talk about the lunch on the first day. On Thursday, we caught an early flight to Seattle, arrived there at 9:30 and drove to the Olympic National Park via I-5 and 101. Before setting out to the 14-mile hike (round trip) in the rain forest along the Quinault River, we stopped at the town of Aberdeen, Washington, for lunch. I'd come across a favorable review of the Mallard's Bistro on Chowhound, so it was our first aim. We then discovered that the restaurant doesn't open for lunch, and opted for a Chinese restaurant next door.

When we opened the door, I felt like walking into a Veteran's Hall or something of the sort, for it was a large, dimly lit space with the ceiling two-story high and a wrap-around balcony overlooking the dining area. Quite a few number of elaborately carved teak tables were arranged around an open space in the middle, and booth-style seats accompanied the tables. Along the green, tiled wall were a bunch of decorative Chinese furniture, statues and scrolls, some for sale, others not. The wrap-around balcony was supported by faux-Doric columns, which gave an odd sense of lost grandiosity to the space. We should have been dancing in our best 50's-ish clothes, instead of eating Chinese food in hiking outfit, it seemed.

Despite the over-the-top space and decoration, the lunch specials were reasonably priced at $5.95. My broccoli chicken came with fried rice and sweet-and-sour shrimps, while Patrick's Mongolian beef came with the same fried rice and sweet-and-sour chicken. (By the time we got to Aberdeen, I was starving, and I wolfed the food down as soon as it arrived--thus no photograph. Sorry!)

The ingredients were fresh and the seasoning wasn't too bad. The only thing that took me aback was the color. The sweet-and-sour sauce was brilliant vermilion, thickly draped around the battered shrimps. The sauce for the broccoli chicken was less exciting yellow, but quite stunning nonetheless. Fried rice looked more like Spanish rice, in its bright orange tint. The all-natural, deep green of the broccoli added the finishing brush strokes to this Gauguin-esque canvas of colors. All in all, I felt like I was eating Americanized Chinese food from thirty years ago. Here's a photo of the mostly finished, one-plate lunch--behold the Technicolor goodness.

Again, this is not to say that the food was bad. It was a decent, passable Chinese. The sweet-and-sour sauce was a bit on the sweet side, but then again, it's supposed to. So, except for the stunningly vivid colors, there was nothing wrong with the food. (I'm sure it was chock full of MSG, but coming from the additive's country of birth, I don't believe in its harmfulness.) Combined with the odd space in which it was served, the lunch in Aberdeen was quite an experience.

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If you want to know which Chinese restaurant I'm talking about, leave a comment--I don't feel like badmouthing the restaurant in an overly public manner. The people there were very nice. When Patrick asked for direction, all the servers (and the daughter of one of them) milled around our table and discussed it, and when all of them couldn't be certain which way it is, they pulled out a local phonebook to show us the local map.

When I came home around five, starving, I found two tamales in the fridge. Patrick got a six-pack yesterday for dinner, and left two for me. I boiled some water in a pot, placed a Chinese steamer (the bamboo-made ones you see in dim sum places) on it, and steamed the tamales in it. Kind of an odd way to steam Mexican food, but hey, it worked.

The place we get our tamales is on Clark Street. It's a mom-and-pop place (I suppose I should call it mama-y-papa place, though) called Tamales: Lo Mejor de Guerrero, and it only has tamales. Well, they do have some other stuff like horchata, and they do weekend breakfast (which we haven't tried), but their main thing is the tamales. When the orange-awninged place opened up last year, we were pretty excited--it's always reliable when a restaurant really specializes in something. This place isn't an exception. Their tamales are gigantic, cheap (six giant tamales for a mere $5.45), and yummy.

Their tamales are moist and the corn masa still bears some lingering sweet, nutty flavor of the corn. There are seven different varieties, costing only a dollar each: hot or mild chicken, hot or mild pork, cheese with beans, cheese with jalapeño and sweet with strawberries or pineapples. My favorite (by far) is the boring-sounding cheese with beans. I do like the meat versions, but the cheese with beans hits that soft spot for simple, comfort food. None of the three ingredients assert itself too loudly (unlike the pork and the hot green sauce, which sometimes obscure the subtle flavor of the corn dough), and the richness of the cheese blends wonderfully well with beans and corn masa.

While the tamales steamed in the Chinese steamer, I opened a bottle of Kirin Ichiban (a Japanese beer) and took swigs from it. The green leaves of the big tree outside of our kitchen window, I noticed, had turned to the real, summer green from their nascent light green. After all, it was approaching mid-May. Finally done with all the papers for the semester and indeed with my BA work, I waited for the heavy cast of stress melt in me. It felt good to be done. It felt good, although it was only a beginning of my life outside of school--a life that I may not enjoy as much as I did all the learning and thinking inside of the academia, but for now, it felt really good to have no paper to write, no required reading that I'd have to rush through.

When the tamales were heated through, I placed them in a plate, took a few pictures and wolfed them down. I probably shouldn't have eaten both--they were pretty sizable--but they were yummy, and with the help of the beer, the tamales finally managed to undo the knot of stress that I'd been feeling for last two weeks of my last semester in school. Perhaps it's not too surprising that these tamales did such a great job of soothing my papered-out brain. In the back of the restaurant, there are several Mexican grannies (presumably from Guerrero) cooking the meat in sauce and stuffing the corn husks with masa. It's the kind of place where you order a few tamales and the girl at the counter walks into the kitchen, asking her "tia (aunt)" if she still had the kind you asked for--all in Spanish, presumably with Guerrero accent. It's very homey, and that relaxing atmosphere of a family-run restaurant certainly translates into the tamales they create.

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Tamales Lo Mejor de Guerrero
7024 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL
773.338.6450

We were very glad that this restaurant managed to survive the recent neighborhood fire unscathed. The fire consumed a few stores right next to the Mejor de Guerrero, which included another of our neighborhood favorite, a Colombian rotisserie place called Pollo al Carbon.

For culinary tidbits about the Guerrero region of Mexico (and where to get their specialties in Chicago), see this fascinating Chicago Reader article.