Eating with our noses: Fragrant caramelized onions star in a rustic pasta dish

Caramelized onions, grape tomatoes, fresh Parmesan cheese and olive oil are the only ingredients besides pasta in a hearty vegetarian meal. Recipe below.

A quick note: It appears to be all onion week at Blue Kitchen. Right below this post, you’ll find a recipe for a Sherry Dijon Vinaigrette that makes the most of the onion’s more refined cousin, the shallot.

Much has been said, including here, about how we “eat with our eyes.” That’s why we work so hard on presentation, isn’t it, arranging everything just so on the plate, maybe even giving plate rims a quick little wipe with a cloth before putting them on the table if we’re in total restaurant mode at home?

Well, we also eat with our noses. I thought about this recently as I smelled one of the coolest food smells I know. I was walking down the street and got a whiff of lots of onions cooking. It was wafting from some restaurant on a busy street, early enough in the morning that they were being cooked as part of some dish that would be served later in the day.

I love that smell. Partly, I’m sure, it’s the promise of something delicious to come. But more than that, it’s a vicarious olfactory glimpse into the world of professional cooking. It’s the same reason I like eating at the counter at Heaven on Seven here in Chicago, watching the line cooks in the open kitchen tending multiple pans and efficiently plating orders, all while seemingly effortlessly avoiding collisions with one another and waitstaff. It’s the same reason we watch the pros cook on TV—for that peek behind the curtain.

That morning, the sharp/sweet smell got me thinking about giving onions a starring role in some dish. Pasta seemed like a natural choice. Casting about for something else to add to the mix, I remembered seeing a gorgeous picture somewhere of sautéed grape or cherry tomatoes tossed with pasta. Throw in some olive oil and fresh Parmesan and I knew my ingredient list was done. Continue reading “Eating with our noses: Fragrant caramelized onions star in a rustic pasta dish” →

Quick and easy Sherry Dijon Vinaigrette: A reason to quit hitting the bottle

In minutes, Spanish sherry vinegar, Dijon mustard, shallots and olive oil become a lively vinaigrette that blows right past bottled salad dressings. Recipe below.

Mark Bittman loves his lists. In a recent article, “Fresh Start for a New Year? Let’s Begin in the Kitchen”, The New York Times’ Minimalist lists 15 OUTS and INS for the pantry—things to get rid of and what to replace them with.

I love Bittman’s lists too. Oh, I don’t always agree with everything on his lists, including this one [canned beans are OUT?—I don’t think so, and neither does über chef David Burke]. Invariably, though, something on each list makes me rethink how I do things in the kitchen, inspires me to try a new technique or explore a new ingredient.

And I’ll admit, one reason I love his lists is that invariably, at least one item on them makes me feel a little smug, because I’m already on the same page with him. This, for instance: “OUT Bottled salad dressing and marinades. The biggest rip-offs imaginable.” We haven’t bought bottled salad dressing in years. Making them, especially a simple vinaigrette, is just too darned easy to pay bottled dressing prices and get, well, bottled dressing flavor.

As an added bonus, you can generally pronounce all the ingredients in homemade dressing. Years ago, a potter friend of mine picked up the bottle of store-bought salad dressing I had just used to prepare a salad and started reading the ingredients. When he came to one multi-syllabic item in the list, he said he added that same ingredient to his glazes to help them stick to the unfired clay. Continue reading “Quick and easy Sherry Dijon Vinaigrette: A reason to quit hitting the bottle” →

Pure and simple: Roast chicken

Simple is often best when it comes to roasting a chicken. Here, we start with a good bird, use minimal seasonings and let heat do the rest. Recipe below.

These days, even the most hardcore carnivores [and yeah, that includes me] are thinking more about the meat they consume. Where it comes from, how it’s raised, how it’s processed—even how it’s packaged. So when I was invited to sample some Just BARE™ Chicken—all natural, minimally processed chicken raised cage-free by independent, local family farmers in the upper Midwest—I jumped at the chance.

Some home cooks are fortunate enough to have access to local farmers markets or CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture groups] that can provide them with a regular source for meat and poultry raised by small scale independent farmers. Many, however, aren’t. The challenge has been to find successful business models for translating better farming practices [better for consumers, the environment and the animals themselves] to larger scales to feed a larger market affordably and profitably.

Solutions are being found. Increasingly, terms like organic and free range are showing up in places like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and even more mainstream supermarkets. Often these products carry a higher price tag, but more and more consumers are showing a willingness to pay it. And that has more and more producers looking for ways to serve this growing market. Continue reading “Pure and simple: Roast chicken” →

Chicago’s Vella Cafe: It’s not just for breakfast [and lunch] anymore

The popular Bucktown breakfast/lunch/brunch spot now serves up pizza three nights a week.

Looking at Vella Cafe’s airy, inviting space, its high ceilings festooned with a dozen or more vintage school light fixtures, it’s hard to imagine the place began as a panini stand under a 10-foot by 10-foot tent at Chicago’s Green City Market a couple of years ago.

Owners Sara Voden and Melissa Yen soon expanded their repertoire by hosting a crepe brunch at Kitchen Chicago in the summer. Later, they expanded again, trading their tent for a space with four walls and central air, tucked up against the Blue Line el tracks at the Western Avenue station, offering breakfast and lunch weekdays and brunch all day Saturdays and Sundays. Vella Cafe’s menu runs the gamut, from crepes and quiche on the weekend to panini, egg dishes, pancakes, a delicious sweet potato hash, house baked pastries and coffee. There are always vegetarian offerings too. On their website, they say their goal is “to become a part of the community by providing friendly service, a comfortable atmosphere and good, affordable food.” I think they’ve already achieved that.

Now they’ve expanded again, offering dinner three nights a week [for now]. From 5pm to 9pm Wednesdays through Fridays, Vella serves up a mostly pizza menu, along with salads, mac n’ cheese and desserts. Pizzas are the definite stars, 11-inch hand tossed pies with generous toppings and big flavor. Vella claims these pies serve one or two—we found that they easily serve two, especially if you split a salad as well. But go ahead and order one per person—they’re a mere 10 or 11 bucks each, and there are worse things than leftover pizza the next day. Vella Cafe is BYOB, which makes it an even bigger bargain.

Since discovering this little gem under the el tracks, we’ve eaten there countless times for the weekend brunch [which is not your typical overblown, overpriced affair, a plus in our book]. The food is unfailingly delicious and the entire staff is wonderfully welcoming. Now that we’ve tried the pizza, we know we’ll be back for that. You should get there too, before pizza nights are as bustling as their weekend brunches. You’ll find their complete menu [minus the daily specials] on their website.

Vella Cafe
1912 N. Western Ave.
773/489-7777
Monday – Tuesday, 7am – 3pm
Wednesday – Friday, 7am – 9pm
Saturday – Sunday, 9am – 3pm
Delivery available

Where is Blue Kitchen this week?

As you can see, I’m—well—under the weather. I was up way too late the other night, reading a Donald Westlake mystery [Nobody Runs Forever, written under his pen name Richard Stark—quite gripping], so I originally chalked up feeling lousy to fatigue.

But on the way home from work, I realized I didn’t want to eat the pasta dish I was planning to cook for this week’s post. I wanted soup. And I figured out the scratchy throat was a sign this was more than lack of sleep.

Good soldier that I am, I started thinking about what kind of soup I could make for this week’s post instead. Then I realized the kind of soup I was up to making involved a can opener and a saucepan. And any interest in setting up my camera to photograph food was displaced by an interest in fluffing up pillows and hunkering down.

So the kitchen is closed this week. Sorry. I’ll be back next week with the planned pasta.

Rooting for the new year: Braised pork and cabbage

Cooked separately, paprika-seasoned pork and red cabbage with caraway seeds come together beautifully as Braised Pork and Cabbage. Recipes below.

As I said when I wrote about simple Christmas gifts last week, my maternal grandmother grew up on a farm. Even after she moved to the big city of St. Louis as a young woman, many of her ideas, traditions and even superstitions remained firmly rooted in that rural life. For New Year’s Eve dinner, she always insisted on eating pork. Her reasoning? Pigs root forward when searching for food; chickens scratch backward. In the new year, you want to move ahead. So for this New Year’s Eve post, I’m delighted to share this heavenly pork dish Marion made using humble ingredients. I think my grandmother would have loved it. Continue reading “Rooting for the new year: Braised pork and cabbage” →

Forget “Walk Like an Egyptian”—it’s time to eat like an Aztec

Ready to think way outside the bun? Chicago’s Field Museum is teaming up with more than a dozen area restaurants to give us a sampling of truly old school Mexican food, a Taste of The Aztec World. This weeklong, multi-venue celebration is part of their exclusive exhibition, The Aztec World. Acclaimed and up-and-coming chefs and mixologists will create dishes and cocktails with the Aztec empire’s cuisine in mind.

That cuisine, it turns out, has a lot in common with what we think of as traditional Mexican food. Plenty of maize [or corn] for tortillas, tamales and pozoles [soups or stews], for example. Lots of legumes, vegetables and fruits. And maguey, or agave, a native Mexican plant with broad, long, spiked leaves; it resembles a cactus plant, but it’s not—in fact, it’s related to lilies. I’ve seen these large, impressive leaves [often two feet or more in length] in produce departments of Mexican supermarkets in my Logan Square neighborhood and wondered what they were for. I’m still not clear how home cooks use the leaves, but agave nectar is a very sweet syrupy liquid that you can use like honey—in tea and coffee, on pancakes or French toast or in desserts… Agave is also used for making high-end tequila as well as mezcal and pulque, fermented maguey juice whose boozy origins actually predate the Aztecs. Seafood was also an important part of the Aztec diet, as it is in modern Mexican cuisine. Continue reading “Forget “Walk Like an Egyptian”—it’s time to eat like an Aztec” →

Remembered holiday stories and simple gifts

MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER GREW UP ON A FARM IN SOUTHERN ILLINOIS, one of twelve children. Big families on farms were common then, even necessary. You needed enough hands to make sure everything got done, and death was always a real possibility. My grandmother’s family was no different—only six of the twelve children made it past young adulthood.

Still, my grandmother loved farm life. As a young woman, she was shipped off to St. Louis to make her way in the big city. And she did, becoming a union seamstress in the city’s then bustling garment district along Washington Avenue. But whenever she started telling stories, they were invariably about life on the farm. Continue reading “Remembered holiday stories and simple gifts” →

Champagne tastes on a cava budget: More bubbly bang for your buck

Stories of the invention of champagne are many and contradictory. Some credit a French Benedictine monk, Dom Pierre Pérignon, with discovering the method of trapping carbon dioxide bubbles in wine, the méthode champenoise, around the end of the 17th century. Others say that while he developed a number of advances in champagne production, it was actually invented by the English. Having traveled the length of the UK with my brother one summer without finding a single decent glass of wine [although in all fairness, the establishments we frequented would not be called posh by any stretch of the imagination], I find this rather hard to swallow.

Dom Pérignon is also credited [apparently falsely so] with announcing his discovery by saying, “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” [I think I’m going to go on believing he said it—it’s too good a story not to embrace it.]

Whoever invented sparkling wine, there is just something festive about it, an effervescence that elevates any moment into an event. No wonder it sees so much action during the holiday season. We drink it year ’round, with the flimsiest of excuses for an occasion. Continue reading “Champagne tastes on a cava budget: More bubbly bang for your buck” →

Duck with Raspberries: Festive, elegant and easy for the holidays

Duck breasts, fresh raspberries and demi-glace add a luxe touch to intimate holiday dinners with little effort. Duck with Raspberries recipe below.

Last week was all about taking humble ingredients and dressing them up—braising short ribs in wine and serving them atop puréed cauliflower. This week, I’m starting with fancypants ingredients to make a simple, elegant main course perfect for an intimate dinner for friends over the holidays.

December is rife with occasions for food. At one end are the big holiday dinners with their attendant traditional dishes. At the other are cocktail parties with finger foods that run the gamut, from elegant little appetizers to chips still in their ripped open bags. In the middle are nice little dinner parties, sometimes with just another couple, a chance to take advantage of time off and catch up with friends we don’t see enough.

Duck is perfect for just such occasions. It’s splurgy enough to feel like a celebration, and in this dish, simple enough to pull together without spending the day in the kitchen. Duck breasts can be cooked quickly, and the sturdy flesh carves easily without shredding for beautiful presentation. The flavor is richer, meatier and more intense than chicken. While considered “white meat,” duck breasts are darker than chicken or turkey. According to the USDA, it’s because they are birds of flight, and “more oxygen is needed by muscles doing work, and the oxygen is delivered to those muscles by the red cells in the blood.”

Ducks are also notoriously fatty, particularly in the skin. This increases their bouyancy when swimming and insulates them against cold water and weather. It also makes them delicious. As I began casting about for ideas for cooking duck, I came across one recipe that began “Take duck and remove all skin and fat.” Um, no. But you do need to remove some of the fat as the duck cooks. Doing so is easy; the recipe will explain. Continue reading “Duck with Raspberries: Festive, elegant and easy for the holidays” →