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.

One of my favorite fast food chains is the Culver's. Predictably, Patrick was the one who introduced me to this Wisconsin-based chain. I don't remember exactly when, but ever since I've been a big fun of Culver's, especially when I'm on a road trip in areas with questionable meal choices. Granted, it's always an extra fun to accidentally find a good local restaurant when in an unfamiliar place, but it's also true that a failure could be quite miserable when you're tired of driving, hungry, grumpy with your companion, or all of the above. Then, the blue metal roof of Culver's comes in sight, and you (and your similarly hungry companion) are saved. I don't know if I would eat there more often if there were Culver's closer to home, but our trip north often involves one meal at one of their restaurants.

We (Patrick, my mom and I) ended up in one of the many Culver's after our antique hunt in Volo Antique Mall. To be precise, we didn't go there right after the Mall--we stopped at the nearby Moraine Hills State Park and took a leisurely bird walk along one of their awesome trails. The "Yellow Trail" was fantastic. The first part of the 2-mile loop meanders through a marshland, which offers plenty of wildlife sitings. Despite the fact that we were there around 2 pm (which isn't the ideal birding time), we saw close to twenty different species. About half of them we didn't recognize. Among the ones we did know, the highlight of the first few was a pair of red headed woodpeckers. Unlike other woodpeckers with a black-and-white speckled back and a poorly defined red patch on the head, red headed woodpeckers are Mondorian-like in their boldly defined color sections. Just below the dead tree where the two flew around, a smallish beaver made an awesome racket, going after his potential lunch in muddy water. Beside him was an inscrutable-looking green frog, seemingly oblivious of the commotion just three feet from him. Though the evidence of drought was visible in the marshland (dried-up canals, dead fish floating belly-up in shallow water, etc.), it still seemed to sustain an amazing number and diversity of wildlife. We even saw a school of tiny catfish--black and jelly-like, but shaped just like their grown-ups, complete with the whiskers and all!

The marshland is taken over by a forest, then runs through a large prairie. The prairie was literally run over by busy American gold finches. A few Indigo buntings perched on the top ends of bushes. The summer wildflowers were everywhere, with gorgeous butterflies sucking their nectar here and there. Butterflies were an annoyance for me (I'm terrified of them), but Patrick was visibly delighted. Then, we were in the forest again, this time infested with mosquitoes--and dozens of birds as well. A scarlet tanager boasted its beautiful scarlet, while tiny, hummingbird-sized gnatcatches jumped from one branch to the other, like busy bees. Had it not been for the mosquitoes, we could have stayed there all day long, staring at the tree tops, open-mouthed and sore-necked.

The last attraction just before the trail came to a complete loop was a common yellow throat, a kind of yellow warbler with a black bandit mask. The sinister mask seemed utterly and amusingly unfit for a tiny bird (about 5 inches at the most) with a slim, smart shape and a beautiful song. As we approached the parking lot by the McHenry Dam, an appetizing smell of riverside BBQ wafted through the pine forest, and we realized that we were starving. Our pace naturally picked up, and within a few minutes, we were back in the car and headed north to 120, where we'd seen a Culver's on the way.

From their wide selection of menu items, my mom chose an Atlantic cod dinner, Patrick got a pulled BBQ pork sandwich, and I settled on their signature Butter Burger. The BBQ pork was surprisingly good for a non-BBQ joint, and my mom's battered cod was excellent: firm and flavorful, it might be comparable to the fish and chips at (dearly missed) Marshall Field's. And just for the record, the cod dinner came with an extraordinary amount of food: two 6-7 inch-sized pieces of fried cod, a mountain of French fries (that covered more than half the 10-inch plate), a decent-sized cole slow and a large cup of green beans. (I think the server made a mistake; the dinner was supposed to come with either the green beans or the slow, not both.) That was a lot of food. My Butter Burger was okay--for some reason, I always end up getting the Butter Burger even though every time I do so I realize that other items taste better.

After all that grease-packed meal, a nutritionist-approved decision would be to leave the premises immediately (and never come back again). But who would leave a Culver's without getting the frozen custard? Not us. I didn't want a ton of it, but I did want a few spoonfuls of the creamy, sweet dessert. We decided to share a small (what good boys we were!) caramel cashew sundae. The cold custard and the hot, gooey caramel; the sweetness of the caramel and the salt on the nutty cashew; it was a divine concoction of matching and fighting opposites. "Didn't we get the same thing when we went to Culver's in Port Washington?" asked my mom, and she was right. I'm hooked to that one. Now finally satiated, we left the premise--but, to the dismay of our imaginary nutritionist, only to come back again sometime later during one of our next trips up North.

Who would want to resist the temptation?

Ma Po Tofu is an ubiquitous staple in Chinese restaurant in Japan. From dingy, family-run eateries to upscale restaurants, every Chinese restaurant seems to have this dish on the menu. The Japanese like this aromatic and spicy tofu concoction from Sichuan so much that there are a wide range of ready-made sauce mix for Ma Po Tofu available in supermarkets. As a result (?), I'm quite fond of the dish, and sometimes get craving for it.

Culinary history has it that Ma Po Tofu was first created by a common Chinese wife as a cheap yet filling dish during the Qing Dynasty. Its Japanese incarnation features cubed tofu, which is stir-fried in a thick and spicy sauce with ground pork and green onions. The signature aroma and tongue-numbing spiciness of the original Chinese version derive from two different spices--red chili (usually in the form of To Ban Djan and Sichuan peppercorn--but the Japanese version often skimps on Sichuan peppercorn to suit the less spice-resistant Japanese palate.

We spent the morning running some errands today, and when we got home a few hours past noon, I had a mild craving for the dish. Luckily, I had a package of tofu, ground pork and spices, so I decided to make Ma Po Tofu for lunch. For some reason, though, I didn't feel like eating the brown gravy (which is what Ma Po Tofu usually looks like), so I made a few adjustments to accommodate my weird temporary aversion to brownness. Because I omitted most of the brown ingredients (soy sauce and oyster sauce), the dish came out much lighter both in color and in flavor. I think this might be a good Ma Po Tofu derivative for a hot summer day. If you're interested in a recipe closer to the original Chinese dish, though, Food Network has a decent-looking recipe here, in a section appropriately titled "Budget Gourmet."

Greener Ma Po Tofu (for two mild appetites)

• 3/4 pack firm tofu
• 5 oz ground pork
• 2 green onions
• 1/4 bunch (about 20 stalks?) Asian chives
• 3/1 inch ginger
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon ground Sichuan peppercorn
• salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce, mix the following together beforehand:

• 1/8 cup chicken stock (or dissolve Chinese chicken bouillon in the same amount of hot water)
• 1 tablespoon corn starch
• 1 teaspoon To Ban Djan (Chinese chili paste)

First, drain the tofu by wrapping it in paper towel on a plate. I recommend using American-made tofu for this dish, because Japanese ones tend to retain more moisture and take more time to properly drain (plus they are more fragile). Chop up the green onions, Asian chives, ginger and garlic. Heat 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in a large enough pan (or in a wok, if you have one) and fry the aromatics till they start to emit their awesome fragrance. Add ground pork and fry till it's cooked. Season with salt and pepper.

Cut the tofu into 1/2-inch cubes. (If you get a Japanese tofu, this step gets trickier: because Japanese tofu is so fragile, it often requires that you place it on your palm and cut it by gently pushing a knife through, without forward or backward motion. Get a firm American tofu to avoid this excitement.) Add the cubed tofu in the pan and gently stir-fry for a few minutes so that you won't break up the tofu too much. Give the pre-mixed sauce a final stir (corn starch is quick to settle on the bottom) and pour it in the pan. You might want to turn the heat down a bit to let the sauce simmer to its appropriate thickness. Meanwhile, ground the Sichuan pepper. When the sauce is at the right consistency (not runny, but not blobby, either), drizzle one tablespoon of sesame oil and sprinkle the Sichuan pepper. Mix lightly, and serve.

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Spice House (with multiple locations) has excellent Sichuan peppercorns. This aromatic spice adds a wonderfully refreshing fragrance to everything from Asian cole slow to chilled shrimp noodles. At $2.09 for a small jarful (1 oz), it's worth the investment.

During the season, I get my supply of Asian chives from the organic Henry's Farm in Evanston Farmers Market, but they're also available in Asian grocery stores like my perennial favorite H Mart.

When we staggered out of the Quinault River Trail in the Olympic National Park after a 13-mile, overnight backpacking trip, we were dusty and hungry (and slightly on the grumpy side as a result). It was around 2, and we still had a few miles of drive to the B&B we were to stay for the night, so we decided to find something hot to eat in the little town of Quinault.

Across the street from a quaint-looking, shingle-covered inn on the South Shore Road, we found a promising neon sign for a snack bar. It was a little snack counter tacked in the back of a general store, and the owner had to go find the lady who runs the snack bar part of the business, but we were lucky enough to get our afternoon bite.

Patrick went for a cherry cream soda. Apprehensive, I settled for a boring glass of Diet Pepsi. On a whim, Patrick got small curly fries, on which he sustained himself in his poorer days in Florida, while I went extravagant with $2.95 onion rings (my recent addiction). We both got salmon burgers.

We took our seats in a closed-in porch and waited for the food, studying a world map with about a million pins sticking out to show where customers of the little establishment have come from. It was a pretty impressive array of places of origin: quite a few people had come from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and of course Europe and the North America. There was a pin or two even on the Madagascar Island, and I was delighted to note some standing (rather crowdedly) on the tiny islands of my home country. Beside the map was an odd "recognition of support" from a troop stationed in Fort Lewis. The framed "recognition" sported two soldiers clad in Japanese samurai armor, with their swords up and ready for a quick attack. Why in the world did they use this image instead of that of an American military figure, I do not know.

The lady kindly brought our food to the table and said we'd be ready for the rest of the day. We nodded and digged into our baskets. The onion rings were on the greasy side, but the salmon burgers were surprisingly good, considering the location and the clientele. When the burgers were gone, we licked our fingers clean, took the last sips form the soda, and headed out. My calves complained when I stood up form the chair, quite understandable after a long hike and a short while of sitting, but my stomach was quite happy with the first "real" meal after more than 24 hours.

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.

Monday was our first summer day, with the temperature in the mid-80s. The sky was blue with a few thunderstorms in the horizon. It was too nice of a day to waste indoors, working at computers. So we decided to pack a picnic lunch and spend our lunch hour at the lake.

I had a small red cabbage, half a carrot, and a bunch of snow peas (among other things) in the fridge, and I'd also wanted to experiment with cole slow with an Asian twist. Back in April, when Tom and I had an Iron Chef Battle (the not-so-secret ingredient was garlic), Tom made a fabulous Asian slow, and I had that in mind.

Recently Tom had also given me a portion of Szechuan Peppercorn from Spice House, so I decided to use it as the flavor backbone. Often used in Ma Po Tofu, Szechuan peppercorns have moderate heat and wonderfully refreshing, slightly minty aroma. This was actually my first time to see them in their original shape (I'd only seen them in ground form), and I really liked the reddish shell with subtle bumpy texture and the creamy green seed that showed between the cracked halves of the shell. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to remove the shells. Out of sheer laziness, I decided to just ground the whole thing, removing only a few conspicuous twigs from the ground peppers.

I shredded all the veggies, and made the vinaigrette:

1 table spoon of olive oil
1 table spoon of vinegar
1 chunk of ginger, minced
1 pinch of Szechuan peppercorns, ground
2 tea spoon of soy sauce
2 tea spoon of sugar

When I tasted the vinaigrette right after mixing, olive oil dominated everything else--even the Szechuan peppercorns. Since I thought the flavors might settle better as the veggies soak up the vinaigrette and the flavors from the veggies in turn seep into the dressing, I tossed the veggies in the vinaigrette and let the slow sit in the fridge for a while. Meanwhile, I baked the (frozen, out-of-the-box) battered cod in the oven and also warmed two pieces of French peasant bread. When, after about 20 minutes, I took out the bowl of cole slow from the fridge, the olive oil had been tamed by other flavors. Hooray!

We packed our lunch, stuffed a backpack with a beach towel, two cans of soda and eating utensils, and headed for the Evanston beach. It was a quiet day at the beach, and we managed to secure a park table. It might have been a bit too windy--while we ate, the tree above us kept adding its leaves and bark pieces to our salad--but it was nice to be out. A little boy raced on the lake shore path back and forth, back and forth, on his colorful training bike, while his mom read by the small mobile crib of his little sister. An older couple were having their brown-bag lunch at the table next to ours, and a young couple sweettalked, leaning on a rock. (It was so relaxing that I forgot to take a picture of the finished lunch box!)

We had to head back soon, but if we hadn't had to, we would have spent the whole afternoon there on the green grass, reading and talking. The Japanese say "I feel like my hair is being pulled back" when she doesn't want to leave, and it was one of those "hair being pulled back" moments.

I've been locked up in the apartment, writing my last term papers for a few days now. Yesterday, I skipped lunch. I was completely papered out and didn't feel like cooking anything. That was a bad idea--by the time Patrick came home, I was pretty grumpy. Even worse, I forgot that it was Patrick's birthday. (Low blood sugar can do a multitude of harm to you...it's not that I stopped loving my lovely boyfriend...you're reading this, Patrick, right?) At any rate, no lunch is a bad idea particularly for me.

So, today, not to repeat the same mistake within 24 hours, I decided to make something quick for lunch. I remembered that we had a large bag of frozen Kimchi (or Kimchee--spicy Korean pickled cabbage) dumplings in the freezer. The dumplings came from our friend H Mart in Niles, a gigantic Korean supermarket with rows after rows of frozen Korean and Chinese dumplings we have yet to try. I also had half a daikon radish and a handful of wakame (Japanese seaweed you most likely find in your miso soup), so I went for a quick dumpling soup.

Because I'm a lazy chef (especially when I'm cooking for only myself), I didn't bother making my own broth. I simply boiled some water and threw in a teaspoon of Chinese chicken soup mix (the red can in the photo). This brand isn't my favorite--this soup has an unpleasant odor of (probably) chicken, and the artificial flavoring in it tastes like, well, artificial flavoring. So I added a bit of minced ginger to tame those unwelcome flavor elements.

Then I cut up the daikon into thin, fan-shaped bits, threw them in, and while they danced in the hot water, I chopped up some green onions. I also washed the preserving salt off the fresh wakame and cut them into small pieces. When the daikon bits were close to being done, I took out a few frozen dumplings and slid them into the boiling soup. (It takes about 6-7 minutes for the dumplings to cook from the frozen state.)

Toward the end, I added the green onions and wakame bits, ground some black pepper into the pot, and drizzled a bit of sesame oil (a must for any Korean dish!). All in all, it took me about twenty minutes from the start to the end, and that includes the time-consuming photographing part, so you can safely bet on cooking this delicious soup within fifteen minutes.

The dumplings could have been a bit spicier, but otherwise, it was a very satisfying meal. My brain is up and running again, and I won't forget Patrick's birthday--only that it'll be a year from today! I'll have to keep my brain well-fed for quite a long time now...

The salmon pink of the kimchi showed beautifully through the half-translucent skin of the dumplings. Yum!

I came home from the Writing Center work early today, and found Patrick working at his computer. It was about lunch time. Since I had a few Thai eggplants at hand, I decided to make Thai-flavored quick lunch for the two of us. (The small roundish veggies with beautiful green net pattern are the Thai eggplants, available in some ethnic groceries. We got ours at the H Mart.) To the ingredients in the photo, I added a bunch of cilantro, a bit of ginger and chicken thigh. I prefer chicken thigh in stewed dishes, because thighs have more flavor--I know that extra flavor comes from the extra fat, but, hey, if you eat meat, eat the tasty part, that's my philosophy.

So I cut up the veggies and the chicken, and heated the coconut oil (the part that separates from the solid white mass in a can of coconut milk) in a pot, then threw in the ginger bits. When the oil was hot, I sautéed the chicken, added the veggies and stir-fried them until they were slightly cooked. Then I added the remaining can of coconut milk (stirred) and a generous spoonful of green curry paste. It took about twenty minutes for the ingredients to cook, which was enough time to cook the jasmine rice and brown rice. I added a bit of brown rice, just because we were low on jasmine rice. Just before serving (and photographing, of course), I added a bit of nam pla (Thai fish sauce) and a pinch of sugar to boost the flavor.

The curry turned out fine, but there was a surprise. It was my first time to cook with Thai eggplants, so I figured I would use them just as I do with Japanese or Italian ones. When I bit into the soft flesh of the eggplant, though, I noticed that it was much more bitter than the ones I was used to. The bitterness almost felt biting. Could this be poisonous? I thought. Maybe there was a specific procedure to drain of it its poisonous content, like one need to do with some ingredients. Uh-oh, are we going to have horrible stomach aches later?

I ran to the computer and looked up the Thai eggplants before we ate too much of it. To my relief, none of the entries said anything about them being poisonous or requiring some esoteric procedure to tame them. Some Japanese people like to let their slices of eggplants swim in cold water for a while before cooking them (to release the bitterness), so I figured the Thai eggplants have more of that bitter stuff than the Japanese ones. In fact, once we got used to the bitterness, it became sort of addictive. It's been only a few hours since we ate all our eggplant curry, so it remains to be seen if we'll get sick or not, but I'm pretty certain we'll be fine.

If this blog suddenly gets abandoned, maybe that's when you know you should be careful about those Thai eggplants.

For Monday lunch, we went to the Sweet Occasions, a bakery/ice cream shop in Andersonville. We didn't get one of their many varieties of the Chocolate Shoppe ice creams for lunch. (We're not that bad--though we were tempted a bit.) What we had instead was their sandwiches.

Aside from serving one of the best ice creams in town (though the ice cream comes from Wisconsin) and a pretty wide range of baked goods (which we haven't tried yet), Sweet Occasions does gourmet sandwiches. I got the French Traditional, while Patrick went for the greasy goodness of the Clark Street Mess. The French Traditional, served called, features hams and two generous, creamy slices of Brie cheese, both sitting on top of (not in between) a thin French baguette. The baguette by itself is pretty tasty. It becomes hard to beat when they slather it with French butter, freshen it with slices of ripe tomatoes and garden greens, and mount it with ham and brie. To top it off, they sprinkled scallions and freshly ground black peppers onto the brie.

I have to say that the ham and thick slices of brie do get a bit too salty after about half the sandwich. (I had to remove a few slices of ham and give a chunk of brie for Patrick's reliable stomach.) But otherwise, the sandwich, which comes with chips for $6.99, was wonderfully refreshing, bringing the sense of wholesomeness. It makes you feel like you're eating a home-made sandwich on a picnic in a spring field somewhere in the French Provence, instead of grabbing a quick lunch when working from home. Tender greens fresh off your own veggie garden, soft and creamy brie you got from the village marché, baguette baked only a few hours ago in the hearth of your neighborhood bakery, that sort of thing. For all this fantasy, $6.99 is too cheap. Right?

The Clark Street Mess, which essentially is a panini made with just the right amount of meats (ham, turkey and soft salami) between two slices of grilled Italian bread, turned out to be much less greasy than their ubiquitous cousins around town. Although I teased Patrick a great deal about going for the greasy option, the few bites he offered me proved otherwise. The bread was toasted crispy with a hint of oil, not soaked in Pam spray; the cheese wasn't overwhelming or overflowing; and the mayonnaise came on the side (a nice touch for those watching their calories--not that they should be eating the Mess anyway). The not-so-greasy panini also came with chips, and the damage was $7.99.

The sandwiches were not gigantic (unlike the football-sized ones at Perry's), but they were more than filling. Even Patrick didn't think of getting a cone of ice cream after lunch--which is a pretty rare thing for us, especially when the ice cream is of the Chocolate Shoppe variety. With other mouthwatering offerings beckoning us from their handwritten blackboard (like Italian Traditional made with Mozzarella, Italian salami and EV olive oil; and Latin hot sandwich, made with ham, Swiss cheese, tomatoes and of course, fresh cilantro), I'm sure we'll go back there before long. It's on the pricier side for lunch, but the extra few dollars is not too hard to justify when you consider the quality of the food you get (and the irresistible images of French country life that it ignites in your brain if you have an excessive imagination like I do).

Ten brownie points goes to the store guy who kindly gave us big cups of cold water (with lids and straws!).

Sweet Occasions
5306 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL
773.275.5190