Photos in Chinatown

When we’re in Chinatown, I always seem to end up taking more pictures of my kids down the same walkway, in the same square. They love it there.

Tags: chicago, eating out, kids

A day at TeaLula

Just a regular day, sipping tea at the tasting bar.

A little too much tea for him…

Tags: eating out, kids, tea, TeaLula

Cha Chiang Mein

My mouth was watering after watching a segment on Martha Stewart’s Noodle Show.  There was this little Chinese lady standing over the cooktop with a big wok and speaking in broken English.  “We make, uh, dish, Cha Chiang Mein, uh, like, uh Chinese spaghetti.”  Awesome!  Note: We really like this dish at Yu’s Mandarin in Schaumburg.  However, the dish on television was more like home-style cooking.  Yu’s Mandarin has a sauce that’s as dark as mahogany and as thick as molasses. We’d probably be afraid of how much soy sauce is actually in it.

So, I looked up the recipe on Martha Stewart and tweaked it to how we would make it, with what we have.

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped fine
• 3 cloves garlic (I’d use more next time), minced
• 1 lb. ground pork
• 1 lb. spaghetti

Sauce

• 1-1/2 tbsp. soy sauce
• 2 tsp. black bean sauce (found in Asian stores or aisle)
• 1 tbsp. hoisin sauce (not the same as plum sauce)
• 2 tbsp. Chinese cooking wine (white wine)
• 2 tbsp. water
• 1 tsp. sugar

Cook spaghetti according to directions.

While pasta is cooking:  Prep your garlic and onion.  Mix all sauce ingredients in a bowl or mixing cup.  Should be about 1/2 cup of liquid.  Heat up the vegetable oil in your wok or pan over med-high heat.  Add garlic and onions, saute until they become slightly translucent.  Add sauce mixture and stir until heated – a few minutes.  Add ground pork and break it up as it cooks.  Continue stirring/breaking up meat until water/liquid has evaporated.  Meat should look dark/seasoned.  This will be about 10-15 min.

Serve meat mixture over spaghetti, but in my case, I had white rice available.  So now it’s Cha Chiang Fan instead of Mein.

Tags: cooking, eating, eating out, kitchen

Weekend in Chicago

Two weekends ago, we took a small stay-cation and enjoyed our fabulous city.  Without kids!

It was so nice to sleep in, have coffee, walk around the Art Institute and the Magnificent Mile.  We browsed through stores we really had no business stepping into, but it’s fun to look.  The Art Institute is so incredibly inspiring!  I love Monet’s paintings (as in the movie Thomas Crown Affair, “I like my haystacks, Bobby.”), but it’s the historical and architectural artifacts that draw me.  I could spend hours looking and studying the details.  I took so many pictures (probably too many), and we’re thinking of enlarging, framing and hanging them in our home.

Appetizers: Eno at the Intercontinental Hotel.  A wine, cheese and chocolate bar.  I didn’t try the chocolate covered bacon.  We’ll be visiting again, so there will be a next time.

Nice sushi dinner at Aria, but I think we both agree that we’ve enjoyed other restaurants more.  Otherwise, it was a weekend we definitely needed.  Thanks sis-in-law and sis-in-law’s fiance for staying with the kids!

Tags: architecture, art, cheese, chicago, chocolate, eating out, living, weekend, wine

Our Moto Experience: Picture-heavy post

I took Eastman out for his birthday (2/6) and being the foodie that he is, I thought he might enjoy the likes of Moto. It’s one of those interesting, posh, metropolitan restaurants you might see on tv (i.e. expensive, trendy, food looks too nice to eat?). Actually, I did see it on a review show and on Food Network, too. So, three weeks before his birthday I called and made reservations. I missed a phone call on my cell phone the day of our dinner. They were going to customize a dinner menu with his name on it. Just heard the voice mail today (almost a week after). Oops. We arrived at the restaurant to be greeted by all the wait staff, everyone dressed in black sleek suits.

You have a choice of two menus: 10-course (2 to 2-1/2 hours) or 20-course (4 to 4-1/2 hours). We chose the 10-course.  Service was impeccable and all the servers were fun to talk to.  Ambience?  Artsy, you might say.  Modern, minimalist, sort of?  Music was great.  Eastman asked about their playlist for me.  They pipe in satellite radio!  XM, lounge/chill. Love that!

What do they serve there? See for yourself. Sorry the pics are a little dark, some are slightly blurry. No flash photography, which is totally understandable. The only picture I didn’t take was of the menu which was printed with edible ink on a corn tortilla chip served with a little guacamole and salsa. It was cool! Wish I had written sooner. I’m sure I’m missing some details.

First course: San Francisco bay scallop served tableside with this lemon dust frozen in liquid nitrogen. The server spooned out the dust from a little pot smoking over from the liquid nitrogen. Neat presentation, and it only gets weirder.

Second course: French onion soup. Carmelized onions in a pile with an onion chip and cheese dollop. Hot soup was poured into the bowl tableside.

Third course: Buffalo chicken flavored edible paper and quail.  The paper really tasted like chicken?! Served with homemade tabasco sauce.

Fourth course: Breakfast!  The “egg white” was yogurt that set up, and the “yolk” was a curry custard, but it actually behaved like a yolk… we had pita toasts (shaped like mini-bread, so cute!) that you could dip into the “egg”.  We also had falafel tater tots with homemade ketchup.  Tasty!

Here’s the birthday boy with course #5.  “Cuban cigar”.  This was one of my favorites.  A cuban sandwich shaped like a cigar and served in an ash tray!  Pulled pork wrapped with white bread wrapped with a green and edible paper to look like a cigar band… dipped in crushed black and white sesame seeds.

Had to drink with dinner.  I started with a cocktail.  Sazerac, the quintessential New Orleans drink.  It was strrrong!  This is the Martini Library.  Drinks served in pipettes.  So pretty, and yummy.

Course six had the biggest black beans I’ve ever seen.  You might have thought they were lumps of meat.  There was braised beef and a side of “cold” slaw, as opposed to cole slaw.  Again, there was use of liquid nitrogen to keep the slaw nice and crunchy cold.

Course seven had to be one of the most interesting interpretations… duck “roadkill”.  They drew the center divider line with a puree, the “blood” was another sauce.  The duck, though pulled, mushed up, and completely unappetizing to look at, was really delicious!

First Dessert!  The beach with pineapple “dust” and a fried rice noodle that looked like coral, complete with a starfish (or in Eastman’s case, a seahorse) made of fruit puree-gelatin.  All under a little paper parasol.  Cute.

Second dessert.  This homemade caramel ice cream was soooo good!  Isn’t it cute how it looks like a crab?  It was accompanied by apple cake with souffle and apple crispies on top.

Last dessert was very interesting with a frozen cherry that burst in your mouth and tasted like cherry coke.  And an “inside-out” pumpkin pie.  That might be my favorite dessert… The cold pumpkin outer shell contained liquid graham cracker crust.  Toasted pumpkin seeds garnished the little  pie dollop and it sat on lightly torched marshmallow meringue.  It was a nice end to a very different dinner experience.

Tags: chicago, eating, eating out, family, fun, gourmet, restaurants

Sushi last December

Can you tell that food is an important part of our life? I didn’t want to forget to share this restaurant experience. Friend of ours took us to this small Japanese/sushi hideaway in the Northwest ‘burbs of Chicago.

Our friends are bonafide regulars, and as such, we enjoyed what the Chef prepared. Meaning, we did not look at or order off of the menu. We had one appetizer dish per person. That was a lot of food to begin with.

These rolls are divine, no? So tasty…

The spicy sauce was definitely hot. I think we had one roll per person also. And then came the sashimi. I’ll probably get clarification from my husband about how much food we really ate.

The fried ice cream dessert, what a yummy disaster.

But this. This takes the cake. The orange came with this weird cutout. My husband pulls out the cutout and voila! A little orange peel man violating the orange. The chef was quite pleased with himself. He even said himself, normally, he makes little boys, but this one, he’s a man. The table bought the chef a drink to end the night!

Tags: eating, eating out, Friends and Family, living, restaurants, sushi