I mentioned last week that I’m writing weekly pieces for the USA Character Approved blog. The subject of my column this week is New York City chef/caterer/restaurateur Melissa Chlemar, who carefully sources farm fresh ingredients from upstate New York to make all kinds of goodies for her Chelsea shop, Spoon, and her small, charmingly named breakfast/brunch/lunch place next door, tbsp. Continue reading “Serving up farm goodness by the Spoon-ful, in New York City”
Chicago’s Logan Square Kitchen Pastry Market returns with another one-day event of delicious creations by local small-batch pastry artisans, and Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand features a month of events highlighting food grown or produced within 250 miles of Chicago.
Going locavore in Chicago is sweeter than ever these days. In February, we wrote about a pre-Valentine’s Day Pastry Market at Logan Square Kitchen. Well, they’re at it again. This Saturday, April 10, the Logan Square Kitchen Spring Pastry Market will feature a day of pastries, chocolates, caramels, ice cream and more. Most of these treats are not widely available. In fact, many one-of-a-kind items will be created just for this event.
All the vendors featured at this one-day event are local food artisans, most of whom produce their wares in small batches, many producing seasonal items available for only a short time. Continue reading “Logan Square Kitchen Pastry Market on Saturday, April events at Chicago’s Downtown Farmstand”
If you want to see what’s new—and what’s coming—for the kitchen, the International Home + Housewares Show is the place to do it. Every spring, the world’s largest audience of home goods and housewares professionals—more than 60,000 in all—descends upon Chicago’s McCormick Place. Marion and I elbowed our way through the crowds, looking for interesting new tools, gadgets and ideas for home cooks. Here’s what we found.
Perhaps best known for their beautifully practical coffee presses, BODUM brings plenty of functional style to the rest of the kitchen too. These HOT POTS go from the stovetop to the table, from the oven to the fridge. They’re made of heat-resistant borosilicate glass, with flexible silicone lids that can act as both a trivet and pot holder.
You can use HOT POTS in the microwave too. The food-grade silicone lids Continue reading “International Home + Housewares Show 2010: Six great ideas for the kitchen”
Artisanal gourmet toffee, produced in small batches in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, delivers sublime flavor and gives your teeth a break.
I wish I could say it was love at first bite with toffee and me. It wasn’t. When I was nine or so, a neighbor girl’s mom took her and me to a movie and snuck in candy bars to avoid movie theater prices. At the time, Hershey’s milk chocolate was my speed. Maybe with almonds, if I was being really adventurous. What I was handed after the lights dimmed was a Heath Bar. In the darkened theater, I thought it said Health Bar, not a promising start. And it was little. Still, chocolate was involved, so I soldiered on, even though I was less than impressed.
But when I later fell for toffee, I fell hard. Even though it threatened to break my teeth with every bite. Even though, failing that, it stuck to my teeth like crazy. There was just something so buttery good and, well, grown up about toffee that I put up with its cruel dental ways.
So imagine my delight when we recently discovered Sweet Margy Gourmet English Toffee. This is toffee at a whole different level. Continue reading “Stuff we like: Sweet Margy Gourmet English Toffee”
Sweet, juicy, easy-to-eat clementines are in season and in stores for just a few short months. Come and get ’em.
Clementines are like Oranges 2.0. They’re the cute iPod version of the original, smaller and easier to grab and go. And they’re totally user friendly, with a thin skin that practically zips right off and virtually no seeds. [In fact, according to wiseGEEK, “a clementine with seeds is evidence that Continue reading “In season right now: Clementines, the orange’s cooler kid brother”
Puzzled by what wines to serve with your Thanksgiving dinner? Here’s some advice from people smarter than me on the topic.
Let me start by quoting Eric Asimov. “We all like what we like.” If you have certain wines you like, you might as well just enjoy them with your Thanksgiving dinner. Old so-called rules—”red with meat, white with fish and poultry”—are being reconsidered or abandoned altogether. 
In his New York Times wine column, The Pour, Asimov recently issued “A Plea for Calm.” In it, he calls for wine people not to get so wrapped up in certainties and rankings and absolutes. “The truth is that wine—good wine—refuses to conform to anybody’s need for certainty,” he says. “Good wines are alive. They change. They are not static, so a score today can be worthless tomorrow or next month or next year.”
That said, many of us could use a little guidance when it comes to pairing wine with what epicurious calls the “cacophony of holiday flavors.” Most wine writers agree that Thanksgiving is not the time to pull a vintage Bordeaux or Burgundy—or even a big chardonnay—from your cellar. More modest bottles Continue reading ““My complements to the turkey”: Choosing the right wines for Thanksgiving”
In a classic ’60s TV commercial, a wife asks her husband, “What was wrong with the chicken?” He answers simply, “It’s not steak.”
For years, frozen yogurt has had a similar problem. It’s not ice cream. It doesn’t have the same creamy texture and mouthfeel. Or in trying to mask the lack of fatty richness, it goes overboard with sweetness.
But trying to get frozen yogurt right is a noble cause. Making a satisfying frozen treat with fewer calories, less fat and—more important—less saturated fat than ice cream has been the holy grail of many companies. Some have come close, making frozen yogurts that aren’t bad when you want something cold, creamy and sweet 
without going crazy caloriewise and fatwise. But ultimately, at least for us, they still leave us craving ice cream. Finally, we think, Häagen-Dazs has gotten it right. Continue reading “Two frozen yogurts from one maker do two very different things, deliciously”
Seems everywhere you turn these days, you read about the benefits of drinking a glass of wine or two a day. But assuming the standard four to six ounces per glass, how do you keep the other four to five glasses still in the bottle fresh once you’ve had your daily dose?
Back in college, assuming any wine was actually left in the bottle, we’d just try to jam the cork back in the bottle—assuming the “cork” wasn’t actually a screw cap. The only problem was that, once released from the bottle, the cork would often expand, making getting it back in the bottle neck an often futile [or at the very least, inelegant] exercise.
Crate and Barrel offers some decidedly more stylish solutions. Continue reading “Stop your wining: Fun, practical wine bottle stoppers for when you’ve had enough”
These days, most of us carry reusable bags when we shop. [And if you don’t, get on it!] For everyday shopping needs, the compact, square-bottomed grocery-bag-sized jobs are perfect. They’re easy for baggers to pack and small enough to not get too heavy. But sometimes you want something bigger and, well, cooler. Blue Q to the rescue.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts-based Blue Q makes a dazzling array of durable, commodious “shoppers,” as their site calls them. The bags are about 16″ x 16″ x 6″—plenty big for farmers market or flea market runs. Designs range from fun to quirky, stylish, retro, hippie/bohemian and downright girly pretty, most with a healthy dash of subversive smartass thrown in for good measure. Continue reading ““Paper or plastic?” Say “Neither,” stylishly.”
It’s funny how you can go your whole life without ever seeing something and then once you see it, it’s everywhere. Take French breakfast radishes [or as the French call them, breakfast radishes—les radis petit déjeuner].
Recipetips.com describes French breakfast radishes as having “a crisp texture and a mild to delicately sweet flavor.” It goes on to say that “This radish is considered to be a spring radish, but may be available throughout the year.” That said, French breakfast radishes grown later in the year, when it has been hot their entire growing season of three to four weeks, tend to be strong in flavor and can turn pithy.
I first made the acquaintance of these crunchy, earthy, slightly spicy little delights several weeks ago at mado, one of our favorite Chicago restaurants. There they were served in classic French style—uncooked, trimmed top and bottom and halved lengthwise with a little salt and a generous dollop of butter alongside.
Next thing I knew, Laura over at What I Like was singing their praises and calling this simple preparation Continue reading “In season now: French breakfast radishes”