Alma Mater Surprise!

I thought, upon graduating, that I would only see Lawrence when I returned for family get-togethers at our home in the university's immediate vicinity, or when I returned for reunions and other functions.  Most graduates don't expect to be reminded of their school, visually, in the months immediately following their departure, and I always thought this rule would apply to me.

I was wrong.

I was with a friend in the U of C's official bookstore, run by Barnes and Noble, when I ran across a rack displaying Jansport backpacks, the top of which is shown here.  Big deal, right?  My friend was considering getting a new bag, so she browsed through the contents of the rack while I looked aimlessly off into space.  Eventually my eyes wandered to the Jansport rack, and I gazed unfocusedly at the obviously posed photograph of young, trendy people cavorting in the leaves.

And then I saw it.  Oh.  My.  God.  What is that in the background?

I practically pounced on the display, much to my friend's bewilderment, and looked, not at the people, but at the building they were standing in front of.

It's Lawrence.  Main Hall!  LAWRENCE!

I was, to say the least, shocked.  There is was - the east side of Main Hall, which I know so well from approaching it for classes for three years running.  The stairs where the really cool Humanities people would smoke, blatantly disregarding the smoking halo, the ugly retro lampposts, the light above the door that was on whether it needed to be or not - Lawrence!

Now, it's fairly obvious that this shot has been edited, because the light on the people in the foreground is inconsistent with the light on Main Hall; the background is a fairly dismal fall day, sun behind the clouds, but the people in the foreground have direct light on then, casting shadows (look at the orange pants, and the shadow of the right leg on the left, as well as the shadow the Asian girl is casting on the guy in red's face - there's not enough light going on outside Main Hall for that to happen. Light more light, eh wot?).  But even so, here's Lawrence, in the middle of the University of Chicago, in a glossy advert!  I was a bit giddy for the rest of the day - what a surprise!

Culinary Adventures: Sol-y-Luna

I realize this makes three culinary adventures in a row, and if I had to travel to reach my "destinations" I would be seriously considering a frequent flyer deal of some sort, but I've been having a very imaginative time in the kitchen and I want to share my discoveries.  This present one is the best of all (and, to top it off, I've gotten my camera to cooperate!  No more photos that look like they were taken through a film of olive oil.)

What's for Dinner?

This lovely dish to the right I have named Sol-y-Luna, from the Spanish for "sun and moon," because when I plated it  the first thing that came to mind was an eclipse.  But let me tell you, this is one of the most delicious eclipses I've ever encountered.  Also very easy, which is a great selling point.  I chopped up about an eighth of a white onion (that is, a quarter of the half which remains after my other adventures), and sautéed it in butter.  Then, once the onion began to brown, I added three eggs and scrambled them enough to break the yolks and mix with the onion.  Then I let them coalesce (like an omelette) and added oregano.  While the eggs cooked I microwaved a pita, and, after deflating it (it blew up like a football - or a bag of popcorn during the heating process - kind of funny, I thought), I put it on one side of the plate.  Then I slid the omelette onto the other side, with the two overlapping in the middle.  I added picante sauce (not salsa - there's a difference.  You don't believe me?  It's true - picante sauce is thinner and, in my opinion, less distracting as far as "mouth-feel" is concerned), and then some shredded cheddar cheese to the top.  Very easy.

Preparation: 5 of 5
If it's not obvious from above, the prep work for this was a breeze.  A little chopping of onion, but it was so little onion it hardly mattered.  Everything else really went straight from fridge or pantry to the action (the pita excepted, since it went through the microwave.)
How to Improve: I keep telling myself to cut up the onion ahead of time to save time in the long run, but I never do it.

Presentation: 5 of 5
I don't just give Sol-y-Luna all five points because the picture finally turned out - really, I think this is a very aesthetically pleasing dish.  The yellow of the eggs pops against the tan of the pita (and the blue of the plate), not to mention the red of the picante sauce and the orange of the cheese. The triple roundness of plate, pita, and omelette taps into a sort of Holy Trinity of circular symmetrical wondrousness (yes, I am slightly obsessed with the circle, at least as far as food is concerned).  Although the picante sauce is a bit off-center (did you notice?  I only did once I saw the photo - I was too busy stuffing my face to see it any earlier), this is really what I like to see.
How to Improve: Center the picante sauce!!!

Taste: 9 of 10
The soft and fairly neutral eggs took on the oregano well, and the picante sauce is wonderful painting on the canvas of egg and pita.  What I tasted of the cheese was good, but it was fairly weak.  To my pleasure, the onion wasn't too dominant, as it has been in previous dishes (I used less, that's why).  All in all, the flavors meshed very well and I really enjoyed this dish.

How to Improve: My primary complaint is that we could have stood to see more personality from the pita.  And it would have been great if it hadn't been so tough (but, then again, I suppose pitas are meant to be bitten or torn, not cut with a knife and fork).  In any case, the deficiencies of the pita are hardly my fault, so I'll mostly ignore them.  I should have heated the picante sauce (and used more of it - it's good stuff!), not for reasons of taste (it tasted fine, and I think there's something alluring about physically cold sauce that's actually hot), but to help melt the cheese.  Also, more cheese (viva Wisconsin)!
That was way too many parentheses.  I'm sorry.


Health: 4 of 5
This is not a terribly healthy dish, but on the other hand, it's not terribly unhealthy either.  Eggs, cheese, and butter do make it somewhat high calorie, but if this is the main meal of the day (it was mine), then that's not as much of a sin as it could be.  I admit the criticism that there are no vegetables, but that could be solved by the addition of a salad (I didn't because I knew I wouldn't have room for it, but even so I think I can hear the spinach crying in the refrigerator because it feels lonely and spurned).  This is meatless, so vegetarian-friendly, but it would probably give a vegan hives from thirty yards away.  Oh well.

Ingenuity, Creativity, and Thrift: 4 of 5
An omelette isn't original, nor is the idea of pairing a spicy sauce with eggs, but both are new concepts in my fledgling kitchen, which I intend to make good use of in the future.  Thrifty?  Well, yes, if you reckon that it's meatless, but I'll admit that in this case, I wasn't thinking too much about cost.  Though eggs were $0.85 a dozen, so three eggs is only 21 cents.  Not bad.  This would probably make it into "One-Dollar Meals" without too much effort.

Overall: 27 of 30 (A)
This dish is guest-worthy!  And furthermore, we've learned the usefulness of picante sauce, a newcomer to my kitchen.  Perhaps I should use it to spice up those Pommes-de-Terres Hachées...

Culinary Adventures: Savory Pommes-de-Terre Hachées

I decided it was time to buy potatoes this afternoon, and upon depositing the 5-lb. bag in my pantry (who needs 5 lbs of Minnesota-grown red potatoes?  I do, apparently, especially since the bag was only $3.00) I began to run through all the potato recipes I knew.  This process took about 30 seconds, as I only know one, which requires boiling the potatoes before they are sautéed, which is tedious.  So I turned to my cookbooks and found, in Better Homes and Gardens' New Cookbook, 10th edition ("designed with you, the cook of the '90s, in mind") I found a recipe for hash browns which sounded like a good place to start, since I had all five ingredients readily available (potatoes, onions, butter, garlic, and pepper).  So off I went, on another culinary adventure!

What's for Dinner?

I washed one of the potatoes, about the size of my fist, and cut it into pieces about a inch long and put half the pieces into my food chopper, chopped them, emptied the contents into a colander, and chopped the other half.  Then I rinsed them to get rid of extra starch and took a quarter of that Spanish onion that I used for the Savory Chicken with Peas and chopped it in the chopper.  I put the potatoes and the onion in a mixing bowl, added garlic powder and black pepper, and stirred.  In a saucepan I melted half a stick of margarine that I had been trying to figure out what to do with ever since I generated it making cookies last week, and then spooned in the potato-onion mixture.  I sautéed it, warmed a pita in the microwave, and washed some spinach (also purchased this afternoon at $.60 for a fifth of a pound).  Once the potatoes were sautéed (I attempted a potato pancake, but the potatoes wouldn't cohere), I spooned them over the heated pita and the bed of spinach, garnished with shredded mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, and took the above photo (again, a bit more yellow than it was in real life).  So, how'd I do?

Preparation: 4 of 5
A bit of chopping was necessary, and while I don't like cleaning the food chopper (it's not a processor - it's too small), it does make chopping a breeze.  The sautéing took a little longer than it should have, and I should have melted the margarine beforehand, but altogether not too hard, and since I had the onion cut in quarters ahead of time, no tears either!
How to Improve: Have the onion chopped ahead of time so only the potatoes need to go into the chopper, melt the margarine before putting it in the pan, and make sure to use the right size pan (I started out one size too small)!

Presentation: 5 of 5
Please excuse the less-than-ideal picture - this is what I get for taking photos after dark.  But really, this is what I look for in presentation in a home environment (restaurants are expected to be flashy, but this is about what I expect from home cooking).  The whole thing is balanced, but breaking up the pita provides "action" beyond the mere circular.  The spinach is an excellent blast of bright color, and the brightness of the cheddar cheese inside the mozzarella draws your eye straight to the middle of the plate.  Just right.

Taste: 9 of 10
Crisp, fresh spinach meets the warm potato mixture, the cheese provides a little fat and the onion gives a little kick.  All of this is set against a pita, which provides a perfect blank canvas on which the other flavors can run rampant.
How to Improve: The pita is a little too dull, and should be heated more, maybe even buttered, to give it its own taste.  The potato-onion mixture could have been cooked a little longer to make it approach creamy, and tone down the onion a whisper.  Still, doing well.

Health: 4 of 5
Had this dish not had spinach, I don't think I could have justified preparing or eating it, as it would have been entirely white (save for the cheese garnish).  However, it's a completely meatless dish and, if you remove the cheese and sauté in olive oil rather than margarine, it would also be vegan, which is a pretty good.  However, it is a bit carb/starch heavy; fortunately, the spinach lightens it up.
How to Improve: We don't actually need all that potato - a higher ratio of vegetable (spinach, and maybe some others) to starch would give this meal more serious health-food credentials.

Ingenuity, Creativity, and Thrift: 4 of 5
Since I took my inspiration from a well-known comfort food and even consulted a recipe for pointers, I can't claim much ingenuity or creativity on this one.  However, I am proud of venturing in a meatless direction, and I'd not done a whole lot of cooking with potatoes before, so those are both good steps.  But the real selling point for this baby is its price.

Because it's a meatless dish, this is a really inexpensive meal.  One potato can't be worth more than a quarter, a quarter of an onion has already been determined to be worth about 7 cents, the spinach was 60 cents total and I didn't use even half (call it a quarter), and some cheese, maybe 60 cents-worth, plus a pita for 20 cents (10 in a pack for $1.99).  Really, a meal for under $2, and I only ate half of it, so $1.  Perhaps I'll write a book called "One-Dollar Meals: Cooking on the Cheap."  In this kind of economy I have no doubt that it would sell.

Overall: 26 of 30 (A-)
While not a culinary revelation, this dish only needs a little tweaking before I could serve it to a guest, even a vegan one.  Not only that, it need not play the role of main dish - the same portion I cooked tonight could be split in half and used as a side to accompany something else, like a small-scale meat entrée (pork medallions, for example), or stuffed inside pitas or other dough and baked to make an appetizer. 
So, when are you coming over to dinner?

Culinary Adventures: Savory Breaded Chicken with Peas

Another night, another question - what shall I do for dinner?  And always the same answer - throw a little of this in that pan, add some of this, try this, and there we have it - another culinary adventure!  Please note the lack of a pretentious French title for this one.  Why?  Because I don't know the word for "breaded."  Otherwise...

What's for Dinner?
Tonight's entree is a savory breaded chicken (cornmeal, garlic, basil, pepper, and non-salt seasoning in the breading) sauteed in olive oil, served over a tortilla and topped with green peas and mozzarella cheese.  Let me just say that that sounds considerably simpler than it actually was. (Read on.)

Preparation: 3 of 5 (yes, this time I'm giving prep points too)
Although breading is tempting because it's usually delicious, I'll admit right now that it's a bit of a pain in the neck, and if you've never made breading, you may have trouble with the proportions.  I'm not convinced that my breading was the best possible, for reasons I'll discuss shortly.  But anyhow, I mixed a breading, while the chicken was defrosting, then cut the chicken in cubes, dipped the cubes in olive oil, and then dredged them in the breading.  Then I sauteed the breaded chicken in a little more olive oil while I microwaved peas.  Warm a tortilla, spoon on the chicken, add mozzarella cheese while it's hot, and then the peas.  Now you've got a meal.
How to Improve: Making the breading ahead of time would be a great time-saver here, and once I have a breading recipe perfected I'll probably do just that.

Presentation: 5 of 5
This dish succeeds where Poulet a l'Orient didn't - it retains the bright green colors of the vegetables, and the yellow-gold of the chicken is very appealing.  The tortilla reinforces the idea of roundness and balance, for a pleasing aesthetic.  All in all, very good presentation.  Not revolutionary, but quite good for a single man's kitchen!
How to Improve: If we want to make this really avant-garde, we need to go for clean, strong lines and add more color.  Halve the portion size (which would be OK since I could only eat about half of what I prepared - the rest is in my fridge, waiting to be eaten tomorrow) and drizzle with a red salsa, add some colorful garnish, play with geometric patterns, etc.

Taste: 8 of 10
The chicken was not quite as flavorful as it should be - again, a flaw carried over from the last dish.  This time I blame the breading, which itself was fairly flavorful, but did not penetrate to the chicken itself (it's a breading - breadings are fairly inert, all things considered).  However, the breading did help keep the chicken nice and tender.  The tension between the salt of the mozzarella and the sweet of the peas is excellent, and should be replicated again.
How to Improve: The tortilla, alas, contributes very little, and should probably be substituted with something more assertive, like a flatbread or, better still, focaccia.  And the cornmeal breading is clumsy - try a flour breading next time, because the flour will contribute much less of its own taste, allowing herbs and spices to be tasted instead.  It will also block out less, since a flour coating would be thinner than the cornmeal equivalent.

Health: 3 of 5
The vegetables here are secondary, as in the previous dish, and aren't present in large enough quantity to really make a nutritional difference.  There is very little basic carbohydrate and too much emphasis on protein, not just in the cheese, but in the meat, which is a predominate feature.
How to Improve: Although not hugely unhealthy, the meal should be better balanced as far as the food groups are concerned (less meat, more carbohydrate and vegetable).

Ingenuity, Creativity, and Thrift: 4 of 5
Good as it is, meat's not cheap, and its share of the overall meal should be reduced, with something cheaper and lower-calorie substituted in (another vegetable, or several).
How to Improve: Several elements could be changed or added to give this dish more personality - a more flavorful base in place of the tortilla (but alas that's all I had), and a flavorful topping like salsa are the two that come immediately to mind.  However, this dish offers great opportunities - why not reduce it in side to an hors d'oeuvre, served over toasted rounds of French bread?  Or, chop the chicken more finely, add greens, and make tacos and/or a salad out of it.  The basic combination is sound, and it lends itself to other arenas fairly easily.

Overall: 23 of 30 (B+)
Again, not bad for an experiment, but not quite guest-worthy either.  The basic idea is quite stable, however, and only needs tweaking to improve it to A quality.  With so many suggestions for how to make this dish better listed above, it's only a matter of time before it - or something like it - makes it to my culinary A-list.

Incidentally, I now have a hankering to experiment with frittata...

Get Me to the Church...

Although I had very good intentions about getting up early this morning to go to the 8:30am Mass at my new church, St. Thomas the Apostle, it just was not meant to be.  I have never been a morning person and probably never will - getting up before 9:00 is unpleasant, before 8:00 uncomfortable, before 7:00 unnecessary, and before 6:00 unspeakable.  [Needless to say, when I found out that the guy I was interested in (note the past tense) got up at 3:00 every morning, I knew it would never work and dropped him like a hot brick.]  In any case, when my alarm went off at 7:00 this morning, I turned it off, looked at it benevolently, and went back to sleep.  11:00 Mass instead.

This was my third week at St. Thomas, and I'll admit that I had no idea what to expect.  It's the only Catholic church in the Hyde Park neighborhood, and when I went to scope it out a few days after I moved in it was locked up tighter than a drum - not surprising given that we're in a big city, but it would have been nice to get inside to have a look around.  Apparently it was not meant to be, so my first glimpse was when I came in for Mass the first time, three weeks ago.

At right is what I saw - a baldacchino that reminded me strongly of the Vatican, not to mention enough hardwood (pews and floor) to make a purist weep for joy, beautiful stained glass, a carved altar rail, iron grilles with gates in front of the altar to the Madonna and various other saints, painted statues, an ornamental pulpit, candles hanging above the altar...at some point I'll come to Mass very early and take lots of pictures to share (most interesting is the Moorish and Byzantine feel going on in the church - high ceilings, stucco, slightly Islamic ornamentation) - I felt guilty snapping this one on my phone a few minutes before Mass began, but I couldn't keep this treasure under my hat any longer.  More pictures - and pretentious gushing about art - to come.

St. Thomas isn't just an architectural gem, though that was what first caught my eye.  Upon picking up a worship aid I was discouraged to see it full of modern music, the bland and uninspiring performance of which I am well familiar with from my church in Appleton.  "What supreme irony is this," I thought bitterly, sinking into my pew and slipping off my vest (the blue one), "that such a beautiful space should be fouled with insipid and meaningless noise?"  But I was soon corrected, for although the music is modern, the six-person choir, with a pianist and a recorder-player accompanying it, has more life in it than several full-sized choirs I have encountered.  Furthermore, the music director very cleverly interspersed several old tunes (Lord of All Hopefulness, for example) with the new ones, using the contrast between styles to make each song - all of them well-led by the choir and well-sung by the congregation - stand out as a piece of art.  I will not say that this is musical heaven - I see they have an organ they're not using - but I must now reevaluate my opinion of modern church music.  Could it be that what has made it so revolting in the past has been the utter blandness of its presentation, and not an inherent flaw in the music itself?  Perhaps so....

I am missing out on the most important part (for shame!): the congregation itself.  St. Thomas' "catchphrase" (for lack of a better word) is "God's People in Extraordinary Variety," and they're not kidding.  The congregation has no clear ethnic majority, though the biggest group is probably people of African heritage.  But alongside them are many other groups: not just European-Americans, but also people of East Asian and South Asian heritage - three rows in front of me this morning was a family of (I think) Indians (as in the subcontinent), the women dressed in muted saris, and last week several African-American women were wearing turbans and full-length gowns of, I think, West African origin.  What I'm trying to say is that this parish is very ethnically diverse (there are also people of just about every age, from babes in arms to blue-haired old ladies of various ethnicities), and everyone seems to get along.  What gets me most is that people get out of their pews during the sign of peace and seek out others, sometimes on the other side of the church, and some simply walk the aisles giving the sign of peace to everyone they can reach.  In my former parish, that's simply not done - you don't leave your pew, and you shake hands with everyone within reach.  It feels forced.  Not so here.

Today's second reading (James 2:14-18, quite possibly my favorite biblical passage) sums it up perfectly:

14 What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Shall faith be able to save him? 15 And if a brother or sister be naked, and want daily food: 16 And one of you say to them: Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled; yet give them not those things that are necessary for the body, what shall it profit? 17 So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself. 18 But some man will say: Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without works; and I will shew thee, by works, my faith.

In short, there's something much more alive (and also more liberal - their bulletin runs social justice articles every week) about this church than the churches I've been involved with in the past.  Perhaps it's the big city dynamic - perhaps it's the ethnic diversity - perhaps it's a more tolerant atmosphere (this neighborhood is very heavily Democratic, and Illinois' 1st congressional district, of which it is a part, hasn't elected a Republican since the 1930s).  But whatever it is, people, place, or politics, I like it.  This is a church worth going to.