Here we are, mid-week, and I haven’t even talked about the past weekend which was all kinds of awesome? Well, let’s fix that.

I joined genet, roho, and linnaeus for lunch on Saturday at The Firkin to celebrate Lydia’s birthday. I had a couple of really tremendous beers, a La Trappe Quadrupel and Ommegang’s Abbey Ale. When the time for lunch came, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the menu so I thought I’d order a couple of appetizers instead. The duck sausage tacos were messy and relatively flavorless, and the batter-fried asparagus with chipotle sauce, while extremely tasty, seemed ludicrously overpriced at $7.95 for ten – twelve asparagus spears. Others’ meals were similarly lackluster. I think we have come to the conclusion that next time, when the weather is better, we’ll go to The Firkin for beer, but for food we’ll walk down to The Picnic Basket and enjoy lunch in the nearby park.

After lunch we drove up to Antioch (with a stop by Antioch Liquors, where Brendan and Paul picked up a gallon of terrifyingly cheap creme de menthe for $0.99 a bottle) and went back to Brendan and Lydia’s place. takaza joined us shortly afterwards, bearing drunky food and a birthday cake. We had a lovely evening of chatting, boozing it up a bit, and playing World of Goo on the Wii, which is a tremendously fun game.

On Sunday I woke up far too early (cursed acid reflux!) and drove through torrential rain to the north side of Chicago and Lincoln Square. One of Dan’s birthday gifts to me was a class in knife skills and butchering at The Chopping Block, and Sunday was the day for it. It was a very enjoyable class and I learned a lot of new techniques. After an introductory talk about knife construction and sharpening, we cleaned up a pork tenderloin (removing the silverskin and fat), then chopped up a series of veggies to make a marinade/dressing for a Thai-flavored pork medallion salad, which became our lunch.

After this, We broke down a chicken (something I’m well-familiar with) and prepped veggies for chicken cacciatore. Next, we cut fillets off a red snapper and removed the skin. Or tried to. I ended up kind of beating the hell out of my fish, since snapper skin is very thin and I had a hard time getting it off. The fish was cooked in parchment with fennel and orange. For dinner, we had the chicken and fish dishes. The chicken cacciatore was absolutely amazing – fantastic depth of flavor, and a dish that I will definitely be making again. The fish was a disappointment – the combination of flavors didn’t work for me, and I barely had any of it. I made sure to get some leftover chicken to go, though! 🙂 If anyone would like any of the recipes, I have them in electronic form and would be happy to pass them along.

Oh, and the title for this post? I’ve been reading too much of Dean’s Comics Booth lately…