Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!

As of this morning, you can reserve at the Westin Pittsburgh Convention Center for Anthrocon 2008 (Omni William Penn reservations to come).

Read the instructions carefully! Note that a non-refundable deposit for your first room night will be charged to your credit card approximately 62 days before the convention (typically around April 25).

If you want to know why these measures were necessary, read the background here.

Edit to Add: It has been noted that the Anthrocon pages are experiencing high traffic (funny thing, that) and therefore might be running a bit slow. Also, I found that the Westin’s reservation page barfed when I tried to reserve with FireFox, but it worked OK with IE.

Why Do I Smell Like Garlic?

Well, something about being wrist-deep in garlic will do that to you, I suppose. Last night’s kitchen adventures included preparing the Asian peanut dressing for the grilled zucchini (easy enough – dump a bunch of stuff into the food processor and puree). I also made the rosemary-garlic oil for the potatoes grilled in foil, which consisted of 50 garlic cloves and 30 sprigs of fresh rosemary pureed with three cups of olive oil. Let me tell you, it’s a pain in the ass to peel 50 cloves of garlic. Still, I’m happy with the results.

Then came the main event: dinner rolls. Very exciting, no? Well, baking 96 yeast dinner rolls is a bit of a challenge. takaza was kind enough to borrow a number of muffin pans from his cow-orkers (some of which were best described as “vintage”). I made the rolls in two batches of 48 (actually 45 in the first batch and 40 in the second due to vagaries of portioning). Blessings upon Dan for reminding me that our square Cambro containers are awesome for holding rising dough and perfect for determining when the dough volume has doubled. I’ll post the recipes after this weekend, but everything came out reasonably well with only a couple of rolls getting a bit overdone and having to be eaten/discarded (most of them from one of the “vintage” pans). They’re all nicely bagged up in one-gallon Ziplock bags and ready to go; the plan is to put them into foil and briefly throw them on the grill (maybe with a quick spray of water to moisten them) so they can be served hot.

Tonight’s entertainment? A run to the butcher immediately after work to pick up 20+ pounds of New York strip steaks, then an evening spent making apple slab pies (mmm, 20 pounds of apples to be peeled and cored. What fun!).

Incidentally, if anyone is going to be at the game on Saturday, isn’t going to be playing, and would like to lend a hand, we will probably be able to put a few folks to work as we prepare dinner. Dan and I will probably be on site and setting up between noon and 1 PM. Also, note that if I understand things correctly (and I hope steviemaxwell corrects me if I am wrong), although we will still be in Madison Meadow Park in Lombard, we won’t be at the usual field (the ones at Madison and Ahrens) but at the ones near Harding and Fairfield. Here’s a map to make things a bit clearer.

70 Pounds of Produce Later…

Well, that was fun! Yesterday after work (which was, by the way, interrupted by a 4-hour power outage. For those of you familiar with such things imagine the fun of extended power outage + cGMP-compliant contained environments. Fun!) I headed over to the final Grayslake Farmers Market of the season in hopes of buying the majority of the produce I needed for the Picnic (or Steakball, as I’ve taken to calling it) this weekend.

First up: apples! For the Apple Slab Pies (I decided to make three of them), I needed 10.5 lbs each of Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples. I checked with the apple seller with the widest variety and he cut me a deal on Golden Delicious and Cortlands (which I prefer to Granny Smith anyway), $1.42/pound. If I’d haggled I could have gotten it cheaper, but OK. Alas, they were out of the monstrous zucchinis that would have made life so much easier. On my way out, I passed a vendor who had a nice variety of potatoes. A little discussion and some digging in his truck netted me 30 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes for $0.50/pound. Score! Yukon Golds hold their shape much better than Russet potatoes, and have a nice intrinsically buttery taste. Usually they’re a lot more expensive, too, so I was happy with this find.

Then it was off to Garden Fresh for the rest of the supplies, including 22 pounds of zucchini and 8 heads of garlic. I wrapped up in time to pick up takaza from the train station, and even to surprise him with a small root beer shake (his favorite). After a short break at home, I left him to work on con book stuff and struck off to Sam’s Club, where I picked up the last few things we needed (like powdered drinks and foil pans). The real find was a large pack of ready-to-roll crusts, just what we need for the apple pies, at half the price it would cost to buy them at Jewel. Woo!

So now we’re stocked and ready to roll. Tonight I’ll be making the Asian peanut dressing for the zucchini, the garlic-rosemary oil, and nearly 100 yeast dinner rolls. Tomorrow will be the really busy night, with 21 pounds of apples to be cored and peeled (fortunately, I picked up a little help for that) then making three 13″ x 18″ apple pies. Dan will be a big help with those!

It’s funny – this seems a lot of hassle, and I sometimes wonder why I put myself through this kind of stuff. Last night, though, while relaxing with the knowledge that everyhting was falling into place and things are shaping up to be as good as I hope they will be, I realized that’s the key – that sense of accomplishment. It takes a lot of effort to get there, but it’s a really good feeling.

So Tired…

As I have noted in the past, insomnia sucks, and insomnia on a Sunday night when you’re trying to readjust to a work-week schedule and went to bed late…Ugh. Needless to say, I’m dragging a good bit this morning. I have a whole lot to write about the weekend, though!

On Saturday I met neowolf2 and linnaeus at the Midwest FurFest storage locker to pick up a few things and get a feel for the state of the locker. It could use some organization, but it’s not an utter disaster. I wonder if it would be worth it to steal an idea from Ohana House and assign each department a color (Registration=red, Operations=green, etc.), with every item that department puts into the storage locker labeled with a piece of tape of that color. I’m not sure how helpful that would be, but I imagine it would make sorting what goes where when we bring stuff to the hotel a lot easier. Just thinking out loud here…

After Neowolf got the Registration server from the storage locker, the three of us had lunch at Chowpatti, a vegetarian restaurant in Arlington Heights, not too far away from the storage locker (or the MFF hotel!). The menu – all 26 pages of it – is quite overwhelming; it’s sort of a vegetarian Cheesecake Factory. I opted for the Pav Bhaji Uttapam (an thick pancake made using a batter of rice and lentil topped with seasoned potatoes, green peas, cauliflower, tomatoes, garlic, onions and cilantro, covered with cheese). It came out looking quite like a pizza 🙂 It tasted excellent, though, and the fact that it was vegetarian was completely obscured by the riot of flavors and textures. Delicious! My only complaint was that the service was a bit slow, but I would be very happy to go there again.

Afterwards, I started my reconnaissance for this year’s Restaurant Guide. I had forgotten how slow the process can be; in an hour I had only covered Algonquin Road from Arlington Heights Road to the Alumni Club, just past the Motorola campus, as well as McConnor Parkway and a small part of Meacham Road. In that stretch there’s been a couple of closings (Sal e Carvao, notably) and several new additions (including a Jewish deli, a Malaysian restaurant, and a fast-food pierogi place). I’m hoping that this weekend takaza and I can do a bit more information gather either before or after the MFF staff meeting on Sunday. After an hour of driving, the food coma from lunch was catching up to me and I just wanted to relax a bit, so I headed home. Dan and I did a bit of grocery shopping, and he grilled up some tasty steaks later in the evening.

On Sunday, perro came up to hammer out MFF programming room assignments with Dan, then steviemaxwell and magicpaw joined us not long after. A delicious meal ensued which I will detail in a later post, because it was all about testing out recipes and preparation techniques for this coming weekend’s LAFF Softball Steak Dinner. The recipes were a success, and we wound up chatting until late about con related stuff. It was an extremely productive evening, and I went to bed with my brain buzzing about plans (which probably explains the insomnia).

More anon…

Midwest FurFest: Less Than 24 Hours Remain!

Here’s a quick reminder that $30 pre-registration for Midwest FurFest 2007 ends at midnight tonight! The price will rise to $40 for preregistration and at the door after that. You can register online with most major credit cards or PayPal, or you can mail in your registration with a check or money order. Given today is a Sunday, we will accept $30 mail-in registrations postmarked October 1, but no later!

See you in November!

Duncan’s Subjective, Opinionated, Simplified Beginner’s Guide to Wine

So, a few days ago, blaireau_bougon asked a simple question with a complicated answer:
Exactly how do you train a palate on wine? I’ve had various wines in the past, and I’ve never figured out what was “good” and what wasn’t…

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert on wine, and likely never will be. But over the years I have learned how to appreciate it, so I reckon that counts for something. First off, the simple answer to the question of what is “good” and what isn’t: if you like it, it’s good. Really, that’s all that matters 🙂 That’s true if it’s a box of Franzia’s Chillable Red or a bottle of 1984 Cote du Rhone. Now, if you want to explore, to find out what you like, well, that takes us down a whole other path entirely…

Pull up a chair and let’s talk about wine…

Fall TV So Far

So the first few programs have come and gone and let’s see what the scoreboard says.

Kitchen Nightmares (Fox) – Wow. Nice way to take an amusing and interesting British series and screw it up, Fox. Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (on BBC America) has been a great show, with Gordon Ramsey showing his personable side and helping and urging on restaurant owners in difficult situations. Fox’s version is, let’s take Ramsey in his “I’m a dick” persona from Hell’s Kitchen and instead of shouting at aspiring chefs, make him shout at failing restaurant owners. What can wrong? Yeah, this Season Pass was deleted.

Survivor: China (CBS) – They say they’re in China, but for all the chintzy theming and such they could be at any of their standard Pacific island locations. I’m not seeing a whole lot new and different, and if this week’s episode doesn’t hold our interest, this may be the first season that we’ve bailed on the show completely. Keeping the Season Pass (for now).

Heroes (NBC) – Sweet. Nice to see it back. #1 on the Season Pass list.

Chuck (NBC) – There’s good possibilities here. A lot of geek wish fulfillment and some outright silliness (My comment on the now-deceased ex-roommate-spy’s derring-do: “Man, Neo did it so much better in The Matrix.”). I’ll be curious to see how it goes from here. Keeping the Season Pass.

Reaper (The CW) – This show has had great buzz, and I see why. I loved this show. Despite the sidekick’s Jack-Black-wannabe moves, the story carried it along well, and the humor was pretty darned good. Kevin Smith produces the show and directed the first episode (which, by the way, if going to be re-run Thursday night). I urge everyone to check this show out! Season Pass stays in the top five.

Still to see this week: Journeyman (my expectations are low), Bionic Woman (ditto), House (one of takaza‘s shows, I’m going to see how I like it).

Townhouses, Beer, and Heroes!

In retrospect, we didn’t really do all that much last weekend. On Friday we stayed in and were couch potatoes for the evening.

Saturday, we hit the road. takaza wanted to check out a couple of townhouses under development, and I think we finally found a floor plan that is just perfect for us. The Wilmington floor plan in NeuHaven in Antioch would be fantastic – the “Optional Extended Kitchen” means that the kitchen, dining room, and great room are all one continuous space, and that fits our style of living and entertaining very well. The downstairs family room approximates Dan’s idea of a basement enough to keep him happy; we’d just need to install a bar and an entertainment center and we’d be good to go! The salesman was annoying and couldn’t wrap his head around “January, 2009” and kept trying to sell us on a unit for summer, 2008, but they’re still building and should have some models that match what we’re looking for when we are ready to buy. And hey, we’d be about a half mile from aureth‘s parents’ place 🙂

While we were out, we also stopped by Antioch Packing House and put in the order for steaks for the LAFF Softball picnic (20+ pounds of steak. And it’s not too late to put in your RSVP!). Then it was down to Wine Knows where they were doing their Oktoberfest beer tasting. Holy cow, that was a lot of beers! After trying a couple of interesting beers from Summit Brewing and Brewery Ommegang, I moved on to the next table, where they had the entire line of Unibroue beers available. I have to admit I got about halfway through before I had to surrender – most of those were 7% – 9% alcohol, and they weren’t being stingy with their pours! All of them were pretty tasty, though. The one real horror of the tasting was the Rodenbach Sour Ale, which may be true to its style, but was truly horrible to my taste. The runner-up was the Wells Banana Bread Ale; being a homebrewer, I’m afraid I associate the smell and taste of esters in my beer to be a sign that something has gone quite wrong with the fermentation.

After the tasting, I walked out with a four-pack of Brewery Ommegang’s Hennepin Farmhouse Saison (extremely tasty!), as well as a bottle of the Woop Woop shiraz and a very tasty and inexpensive Spanish tempranillo/cabernet blend. I was feeling a bit tipsy, so Dan drove us to get some food. My first choice, The Full Slab, was closed due to equipment issues, so we settled for Bill’s Pub North. Um, yeah. As my review says, we chose poorly. ‘Nuff said. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and snuggling 🙂

Sunday we did a bit of housecleaning, then dexcat came over and he and Dan talked MFF publications stuff. I was peripheral tot he conversation, but it sounds like Dex has a lot of great ideas and can really improve on our already pretty nifty con book, pocket program, and restaurant guide. I ran tot he grocery store, then made a tasty roast chicken. The rest of the evening was spent watching The Simpsons and a couple of other programs before heading to bed (not nearly early enough).

Oh, and tonight? Oh yeah, Heroes is back!

One more thing: As of today, I am no longer a contractor but a full time employee at $employer! W00t!

Midwest FurFest: Time Is Running Out!

Not unlike the constant ticking that Captain Hook heard from the crocodile* the clock is ticking on inexpensive pre-registration for Midwest FurFest 2007! In just SIX short days, the cost of pre-registration will rise from $30 to $40, at midnight of September 30. That’s ten dollars you can save that can be used to buy dinner at one of the many excellent restaurants around the Hyatt Regency Woodfield, or to commission art from one of the talent artists in our Artists Alley, or buy that comic you’ve had your eye on in our Dealers Room. And that ten dollars would certainly be welcome at the Charity Auction (look for a great announcement about our charity very soon, by the way!).

So how do you save that ten dollars? Pre-register NOW at http://www.furfest.org; you can register online with most major credit cards, or you can download and print out a registration form and mail it in with your check or money order (must be postmarked by 9/30/07). Registration will be $40 after 9/30/07 and at the door. Questions? Check out our Registration FAQ at http://www.furfest.org/2007/mff-register.html

We’ll see you in November!

* How’s that for a theme tie-in?

(steak) LAFF (steak) Soft (steak) Ball (steak)!

So we’re a few weeks out from LAFF Softball, which is on Saturday, October 6 at Madison Meadow Park (Madison and Ahrens Ave, Lombard, IL). As many of you already know, takaza and I will be grilling up steaks (NY strip steaks, baby!) after the game. We will also be serving apple pie and some delicious side dishes as well (possibilities include grilled asparagus with a lemon-rosemary dressing, grilled potato packets with fresh herbs and butter, or something similar, depending on how I can work the budget). All this for only $10! This is going to be a whole lot of fun and even if you’re interested in playing there will be good food and good company. Yes, even at a LAFF event. Trust me on this.

So, who’s interested? If possible, we’d like to get RSVP’s by noon on Friday, September 21 (this Friday), though if you decide that you’re interested after that you can let me know and we can probably squeeze you in. If you’ve already RSVP’d to steviemaxwell or on you don’t need to RSVP again, but otherwise you can either leave a comment here or e-mail Stevie at his account at gmail.com with the username steviemaxwell@. When RSVP’ing, please respond with: attending softball or not, attending picnic or not, wanting steak or not. Any response of “N, N, Y” will earn a boot to the head. The final deadline for RSVP’s is Friday, October 6.

Appley Doux? Don’t Mind If I Do!

That was the weekend that was. On Friday, takaza and I went out after work for a quick trip to Sam’s Club to price out some shelves that he had his eye on so we could bring some order to our garage (and hopefully other areas of the house as well). We didn’t buy anything while we were there, but we had some better numbers to work with. On the way home, we decided to try one of the family restaurants in Grayslake, the Hillside Restaurant. While Dan’s meal was pretty blah, my Reuben was excellent, with some of the better corned beef that I’ve had in a while. Afterwards, we stopped by the Prairie Croissant Cafe and picked up some coffee beans (they get theirs from Metropolis Coffee in Chicago, my second-favorite roastery there 🙂

On Saturday, Dan had to go over to his mom’s place to hook up her new DVD recorder and show her how to use it. I struck off on my own and joined roho, genet, feren, lady_curmudgeon, and colliedoc for brunch at Las Vegas Restaurant in Antioch. Afterwards we walked around downtown a bit to fight off the inevitable food coma and we were joined by linnaeus. The lot of us headed north to Brightonwood Orchard, home of Aeppeltreow Winery. We sampled some of the new wines for 2007, but I wound up buying a bottle of the very tasty Appley Doux sweet sparkling cider and a bottle of Pommeaux apple dessert wine (fortified with apple eau de vie). Then it was over to the apple barn where we checked out some of the wonderful heirloom varieties. My favorite, Northern Spy, wasn’t in yet, but I picked up some Northern Greening and Gravenstein apples.

After returning from the orchard, Straif and I headed south and picked up Dan, then stopped at Garden Fresh to get some dinner fixins before returning to Antioch. Roho grilled up some delicious burgers and sausages from Antioch Packing House, then I went to work on the grill, test-grilling a couple of different things to see how they might work for the upcoming picnic. The verdicts:
Grilled Butternut Squash: Delicious, very potatoe-y when grilled. This begs the question, though, why not just grill potatoes, which are easier to deal with in quantity?
Grilled Honeydew Melon: The grilling didn’t really add much to the flavor. Maybe good for a garnish in a salad? Probably won’t pursue this for the picnic.
Grilled Honey Crisp Apples: Excellent! Nicely caramelized, very tasty. Might be a bit too expensive, though (there’s a reason the orchard nicknames them “Money Crisp” apples)
Grilled Nectarines: No verdict, since the coals were dying and I never succeeded in doing much more than warming the nectarines.

Sunday got a lot crazier than expected. First, we were surprised by a call from our landlord wanting to come in and change the furnace filter (read: “I want to come by and make sure you guys aren’t destroying my place.”) That’s cool, though – this was the first time he’s been out since we moved and, and I can understand his concern. Fortunately, we’re good tenants and he seemed happy with what he saw. We also talked about re-upping our lease and he seemed very amenable to that, so we’re covered for next year, it appears (thank heavens!). After he left, we drove back to Sam’s Club and bought the shelves we had looked at on Friday. We rearranged some of the stuff in the garage and put the shelves together, then Dan started replacing the various boxes on the shelves. Dan’s mom showed up to start work on a slipcover for our sofa, and I went to work in the kitchen making the aforementioned Apple Slab Pie. That sucker took seven pounds of apples and four pie crusts, but it came out well and I’m very happy with the results. In the midst of the chaos, luckytheevildog showed up and Dan helped him install a new hard drive on his computer. I whipped up dinner for everyone, a simple fettuccine with a modified pesto consisting of olive oil, garlic, fresh herbs (basil, oregano, and parsley), and Parmesan cheese. I cooked up some Italian sausages to serve on the side, and I was very happy with the results. The pie definitely passed muster; I’ll be posting the recipe in the next few days, since Dan’s mom wants a copy.

The alarm went off far too early this morning, and I’m dragging a bit now. Coming up this week…um, beats me. I know I have a lot of work to do for Midwest FurFest, though, so that will probably be my primary non-work focus. For now, though, I’m going in search of caffeine!

Blogs, Plans and More Plans

I’ve picked up a couple of new blogs to follow that I thought I’d mention here. I started with The Stew, which picks up has commentary that doesn’t appear in the Chicago Tribune as well as advance articles. That had a pointer to a post in Michael Ruhlman’s blog by Anthony Bourdain (who I adore!) – I liked the blog so much I added it to my daily reading. Then recently, Ruhlman was a stop on the “virtual book tour” by Adam Roberts, The Amateur Gourmet. His amusing, occasionally profane food blog went onto my list. Then Roberts linked to fantastic and funny video about making lobster rolls over at Serious Eats which sent me investigating that blog more, and I became a fan there as well (particularly since they just added Mario Batali to their list of contributors!).

As an aside, you may wonder how I keep up with all these blogs? I use Firefox and every morning click a single button that loads ’em all in tabs, using the Morning Coffee extension. This works well with blogs that are updated daily; blogs that update less frequently I add to my Google Reader page. The latter is the case for Cheese Underground, which focuses solely on Wisconsin cheese, and Megnut, another interesting foodie blog, both of which only update a couple of times a month. Oh! And I should also mention another recent addition to my Reader, Winnipeg Eats. Sure, I don’t live in Winnipeg, but it’s written by a good friend and I like her writing 🙂

Our calendar for the next few weekends is slowly filling up, as it is wont to do. It’s looking like we may make a return visit to Brightonwood Orchard this weekend (mmm, heirloom apples!), and while we’re there we’ll see what’s new at the adjoining winery. I expect a rigorous sampling of the winery’s wares and other spirits may ensue afterwards!

I’ve been reading up on various farmers markets in the area, as well as other local foods (since it is, after all, Eat Local Month) and while the Grayslake Farmers Market is fun, it’s a bit small. And yes, there’s some interesting places in Chicago, but I was looking around and I found many references for the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, Wisconsin. This dovetails neatly with my interest in finding out more about Wisconsin artisan cheeses (I even ordered a cool Wisconsin Cheese/Wine/Beer tour map!). Since I’ve been wanting to explore Madison a bit anyway, it sounds like a perfect excuse to get up that way. Some Saturday (not the coming one, but maybe the 22nd or the 29th), we’re going to hit the road early and spend the day checking the place out. Should be fun!

And then we have the big trip coming up. As some of you may have seen takaza mention, we’re going to hit the road for a weekend in late October (yeah, he couldn’t keep it a secret 🙂 Patterned after Alton Brown’s recently-completed Feasting on Asphalt 2: The River Run, we’re going to tour Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin along the Mississippi River, shunning interstates and aiming for small towns to find stuff that’s interesting, tasty, and different. We may fail miserably, and eat some of the worst food ever, but we may also find the most amazing and delightful places, too. We’ll be renting a minivan that will hold everyone and drive out to Moline, Illinois on Friday night. Starting Saturday, we’ll strike out north along the river and see what there is to see. While I have a couple of places I do want to see along the way (including Kalmes Restaurant, which AB visited – “A little bit of Luxembourg in Iowa”) mostly we’ll be relying on serendipity to help us find something interesting. We’ll spend Saturday night somewhere along the way (Maybe, Dubuque? Maybe La Crosse, if we can actually find a hotel that isn’t booked), then meander home through Wisconsin. I’m really looking forward to this trip!

Thai, Moving, Meeting, Moving Again

After work on Friday, we got a call from colliedoc: he was on his way up from his new job (yay!) until his car died and he was stuck in North Chicago, near Abbott Park. We drove down and picked him up, then proceeded over to Wine Knows where we browsed a bit and tasted some of the wines they had available. Straif picked out a Riesling, and I got a bottle of the 2005 Woop Woop Shiraz. We were then joined by roho, genet, feren, and lady_curmudgeon and we went over to Lovely Thai for dinner. They happily served our wine with no corkage fee (!) and the seven of us had an excellent dinner with appetizers that came to $90. What a great deal! the wines were quite tasty as well, I might add. After dinner takaza and I took our leave from the rest of the group and went home to head to bed.

On Saturday, after a follow-up visit with my podiatrist (everything is healing nice, thank you!), Dan and I drove down to Naperville to help the folks at Ohana House move. We got in three trips between Oldhana and Newhana (heh) before it got too late to deal with things. their new place is quite fabulous, though I think the real winner is emrldgrrl, who got a snazzy studio apartment out of the deal 🙂 For dinner we went to a Chinese restaurant near Newhana that featured amusing patrons and a hostess/waitress who didn’t speak much English but was certainly very fast! Dinner was quite tasty as well.

Sunday brought the Midwest FurFest staff meeting, which was rather productive. As we were eating lunch after the meeting we got a call from datahawk that there was a problem with the landlords of Oldhana and they might need to get everything out before the night was over. We hustled down to Naperville again to lend a hand, but the crisis was averted just before we arrived and they have another week to move stuff. As long as we were there, though, we packed a load of stuff and hauled it up to Newhana. From there we drove home (with a stop at Oberweiss Dairy, ’cause we had a hankering for tasty ice cream) then went off to bed.

Not too much going on this week except for maybe a trip down to Elk Grove Village on Wednesday for some factory testing of new equipment for my employer. And hey, we don’t seem to have much in the way of plans next weekend. I’m sure that will change between now and then, though…

Items of Note for Chicagoans

* All is not lost for mass transit in Chicago. On Monday, the State Senate will meet in a previously-unscheduled session to vote on Julie Hamos’ transit bill that the State House failed to pass earlier this week.

* In spite of the fact that the personable owner of Hot Doug’s, everyone’s favorite “encased meat emporium”, broke his leg a few weeks ago so badly it required surgery, he is coming back starting next Wednesday! From the website: “It appears that Doug’s leg is coming along nicely (and his bank account is not), so, HOT DOUG’S WILL RE-OPEN WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12. We appreciate your patience during this solemn time of convalescence and look forward to serving you a nice sausage (that’s assuming Doug can ween himself off the vicodin).” Dang, I need to find an excuse to get into the city next weekend…

* The owner of the local Krispy Kreme franchise has filed for bankruptcy and plans to close half of their 15 outlets in the Chicago area.

* The Chicago City Council approved a measure that will allow people’s dogs to dine with them at outdoor cafes. One restaurant plans to celebrate by offering beer for dogs!

* And finally, even though I don’t think anyone I know has a membership but a few do have T-shirts from there, the owner of Cheetah Gym is closing all three locations due to “employee theft and graft”.

Labor Day Weekend Wrapup

What didn’t we do last weekend? Well, we didn’t drive any great distance, or fly, or deal with hordes of people. We opted instead for a quieter (and less expensive!) approach to the holiday. As my previous short posts hinted, the weekend had its ups and downs, but it all worked out well in the end.

After work on Friday, we did some quick cleaning around the house in preparation for the weekend’s company, then grabbed dinner at Scott Dogs and did a bit of shopping at Sam’s Club and Garden Fresh Market.

On Saturday, following a trip back to the podiatrist, who did things that not everyone may be interested in reading about

I Can Has Steak!

For the record:

Chocolate Chess Pie
1 oz. Praline Liqueur
1 oz. Stolichnya Vanilla Vodka
1 oz. Heavy cream
1 Tbsp. Hersheys Chocolate Syrup

Shake with ice, then strain. Serve in martini glass as is or in old fashioned glass over ice.

1″ thick New York strip steaks are on the grill cooking. Oven fries are in the oven. Friends are having fun. All is right with the world.

Edit after dinner: I neglected to mention the 2005 Marquis-Phillips Shiraz. That stuff is heaven in a bottle. I will now go die a happy man.

Cooking Update

‘Cause in my journal, it’s all about the food 🙂

So, I had mentioned making a dulce de leche cake last week. Basically, you make a sturdy sponge cake using whole eggs, and it’s flavored slightly with cinnamon. You poke lots of holes in that and you pour a mixture of milk, evaporated milk, vanilla extract, and caramelized sweetened condensed milk over it and let it sit overnight to allow the liquid to be absorbed into the cake. Then you top it with a whipped cream icing. Sounds great, doesn’t it? So how did it turn out?

Not well. Not that there was anything wrong with the cake or the icing or even, I suppose, the milk mixture. But it was just too rich. Even the smallest piece was overwhelming, and pretty much all flavors got lost in the richness. Imagine drinking a nice tall glass of heavy cream, and you’ll be getting close to the feeling of eating some of this cake. Sadly, I had to declare the recipe a failure. I’m not sure what could fix the recipe, but I’ll keep an eye out for other approaches.

Tonight we’re going to try something else new and different, this time from the pages of Cook’s Illustrated. Since we’ve been huge fans of the chicken tikka masala at the Indian restaurant in Gurnee, we’ll be trying a recipe for that which appeared in the most recent issue. This calls for you to marinate boneless skinless chicken breasts in a whole-milk yogurt paste, then put the lot under a broiler. You top it all off with a tomato and cream sauce with some tasty Indian spices. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this works out.

I also have a bunch of cherry tomatoes sitting in the fridge that I need to use up. I’ve seen a recipe where you cut the cherry tomatoes in half, thinly slice some shallots, and roast the lot on a baking sheet for 40 minutes at 350 degrees F. Since takaza‘s not a fan of chunky tomato sauces, I’ll try pureeing the mixture; it should come out pretty tasty! I’ve got some nice cavatelli to serve that over, and maybe we’ll add some Italian sausage.

Hmm, I seem to be hungry. I wonder why?

Friends, Flooding and Furniture

Ugh. It appears that both takaza and I were afflicted with insomnia last night, during different parts of the night. That make for slow canines this morning!

The weekend was quite entertaining, for all that it started inauspiciously. On Saturday morning I had to make another visit to my podiatrist (cut for those not interested in medical details)

Well, that was fun

So last night was, theoretically, August Game Night at our place. The storms sort of caused some issues with that, though. The biggest problem was that first Metra shut down all service between 3 and 4 PM, then slowly brought things back online. takaza was supposed to catch his regular train at 5:11 PM, but it was delayed by 30 minutes…then it wasn’t moving at all due to a power line across the tracks in Des Plaines, which stopped all service on the North Central Line. His train didn’t actually get moving until sometime after 7 PM and he got home at around 8 PM, two hours later than usual (there’s more to the story, but I’ll let him post about that).

Unfortunately, because of the weather pretty much everyone but steviemaxwell had to cancel, and it’s certainly understandable. We had fun anyway, though. Stevie and I got to chat for a while, then when Dan texted to let me know he was on his train heading northbound we drove down to Jimmy John’s and picked up some subs. The rest of the evening was spent chatting, watching Robot Chicken, and playing poker, where I learned that Omaha is a pretty fun game, and I accidentally won all the chips 🙂

The good news is that all the trains are running as they should today, at least up our way. We were spared the worst of it, with the hardest hit areas being between us and Chicago. 250,000 people are still without power, though we never had any problems there. But hey, there’s more storms on their way today, so who knows what the day will hold. The good news is that we’re on relatively high ground and far away from any large water source, so flooding isn’t an issue near us. It might make getting around interesting for the next few days, though!

You Don’t Have a WHAT?

So I was thinking this morning about a recipe I’m going to be working on tonight and I was reminded that one of the steps calls for microwaving something. Well, that’s a problem. See, we don’t own a microwave. We haven’t owned one since, um, I lived in Joliet, I think. The main reason is that I’ve never really had much need of one. I used it primarily to melt butter (which takes only a hair longer on the stove) and to boil water (which takes about as long as the electric kettle we have). I’m vastly amused because our lack of this appliance seems to boggle many of our friends.

A secondary reason is that, for me personally, having a microwave encourages lazy cooking. Call it a remnant from my chemist father (“I work with chemicals all day long, I don’t want to eat them, too!”) – I tend to avoid processed food whenever possible, which means steering clear of frozen dinners, meals in can or boxes, and that sort of thing. Sure, it took me an hour and a half to make chicken and dumplings last night when I could have just picked up a package of Swanson Frozen Chicken and Dumplings and microwaved it in five minutes or less. The big difference to me is that first, there is a sense of pride of having Made Something, and second, my dinner was actually (for me) edible.

Please don’t take this as a condemnation of how others eat and cook, though – this is what works for me. I know that I’m lucky to have the time and knowledge to cook like this. One of the big influences on my tastes is the couple of years my parents spent living in France, where their refrigerator was the size of a tall dorm fridge and it was the norm to go grocery shopping every day for the freshest meat and produce. I certainly don’t have the inclination to shop every day, but I do only tend to shop for three or four days at a time.

Anyway, enough of that little digression. Oh, the recipe that I’m working on tonight? Dulce de Leche Cake (from Cook’s Country magazine). Basically, you make a sturdier-than-usual sponge cake (using whole eggs instead of just whites), poke holes into it and pour a Dulce de Leche mixture over it and let it soak for 3-24 hours, then frost with a whipped cream frosting. The recipe calls for the Dulce de Leche mixture (a combination of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream, and vanilla) to be microwaved for several minutes to cook it. Fortunately, they offer an alternative where you pour the mixture into a pie plate, put it in a roasting pan and pour boiling water around it, and cook it in the oven for 40 minutes (and apparently 80 minutes will reduce it to the thick, gooey Dulce de Leche sauce that goes so well over ice cream – we’ll need to try that too!).

Oh, you want to try some of the cake? You’ll need to come to Game Night, then 🙂

Well, That’s Annoying…

It appears that Sprint is going to be raising the price of text messages (which was just raised a few months ago from $0.10 each to $0.15 each) to $0.20 each, starting October 1. Consumerist posits that this is a basis for canceling your contract, but we’re reasonably happy overall with our phones and service except for, you know, the exorbitant charges. We’re going to need to take a close look at the costs and either get a text messaging plan or turn off text messaging completely; we’ve been paying $0.15 each because it was cheaper than the packages they offer (we don’t send that many text messages), but now…

I Don’t Think Marble Slab Makes Rogan Josh Mix-Ins…

Now that was an entertaining weekend! First off, the week was instantly made better on Friday afternoon when takaza returned from the wilds of Indiana. Of course, not an hour after he got home we had to leave again, but it was for a good cause: dinner with friends at Bombay City Indian Restaurant. We had a lot of fun seeing familiar faces and meeting some cool new folks too (who I hope we’ll have a chance to see more of!). The food was, as always, fantabulous, though I have learned my lesson: while tandoori stuff is tasty, the sauced dishes are where it’s at. Fresh naan dipped in the chicken tikka masala sauce…heaven! Unfortunately, we’ve been there three times and each time the service has been sub-par. This time we waited about 30 minutes for our check once we were done. It might be time to investigate other Indian places in the area, sadly. For dessert, we went to Marble Slab Creamery with steviemaxwell, roho, genet, and linnaeus, which was a perfect capper for the evening.

On Saturday, after a very quick follow-up visit with the doctor about my toe (it’s healing nicely, thank you), I returned home and Dan woke up not long after. I knew that I needed to go to laffsoftballLAFF Softball to drop off the badge holders for Mephit Furmeet to ramalion, but it was up in the air if Dan would be joining me. Between a couple of calls to Stevie, making some lists, and having some cool ideas for grilling, it suddenly transpired that he had talked himself into going and we were going to be grilling for the picnic after the softball game. We stopped by Sam’s Club and picked up a huge amount of food (as well as a nifty new portable table) and then headed over to the softball game. Aeto was kind enough to make a quick store run for us for a few things we couldn’t get at Sam’s Club and to lend us the use of his cooler – thanks, Aeto! We watched some of the game and chatted with the various folks who were there (too many to name!). At about 4 PM we took all of the supplies over to the cooking area and fired up the (one, very small) grill and set to work prepping the food. Dan and I had agreed that we were going to make “Jucy Lucy” burgers (sic), and we set to work making the patties. Perro and Darkwolph let us store some of the perishables in their refrigerator, which was a huge help! I learned that the grill didn’t put out as much heat as I had hoped as I limped along with the first batch of bratwurst, but once we got a handle on it (and added another chimney full of charcoal!) we got things working properly. We wound up feeding 25 people or so, and even managed to break even in costs! Dan and I are kicking around ideas for the end-of-the-season picnic, possibly including steaks. We’ll see if we can make that work, though.

After grilling, we were both drained, so we drove home and crashed. We were both silly and didn’t put on sunscreen (not too bad – we were mostly in the shade) or bug spray (bad – I’ve got multiple unpleasant welts!), so we’ve got some tokens of the day to remind us to properly prepare next time!

Dan’s sister came over Sunday afternoon and they worked on her computer for several hours while I puttered around the house doing laundry and cleaning. That unfortunately meant that Dan had to stay home to work on work-related stuff while I headed out to have dinner with Roho, Genet, chebuytkin and CAJones at Dave and Busters. The company was excellent, with much smoffage and comparisons of conventions (I like the idea of road-tripping to Minneapolis next July 4 for Convergence!). The food was surprisingly good as well, as was my strawberry margarita. The games afterwards…not so much. If you like shooting or driving games, D&B’s is the place to go. Unfortunately, shooting games have zero interest for me and my passion for driving games is limited at best. I left with credit still on my card, but the night was getting late. I got home just as Dan was wrapping up for the evening, so it all worked out.

It’s a new week now, and it looks like it’ll be a busy one at work. We don’t have much planned during the week, though at the end of the week is the Chicago Air and Water Show. Also, keep an eye out here because plans are in the works for another game night at our place next week!

Episode #14,422 of Duncan’s Exciting Life

Midweek updates are always so boring, but hey, what the heck.

I’ve been updating the Midwest FurFest registration database over the last few days, and I should be sending out the next batch of confirmation postcards in the next day or so. The dribs and drabs of online registrations have become a steady trickle, one that will steadily increase until the end-of-September cheap preregistration deadline, then it’ll stay steady for the next month and a half until only registration ends. Our numbers are looking good still; a healthy amount of growth, but nothing to cause me to freak out. Yet. We’ll see 🙂

Takaza is off in Indiana this week, crunching numbers in the heart of Da Region until at least tomorrow. Last night was pretty quiet. I watched some TV while making a quick dinner, then ran some errands before coming home and heading to bed early. After work today, I figure I’m going to change into some more comfy clothes (and get these damn shoes off) and wander around the Grayslake Farmer’s Market. My goal is to see if I can find enough interesting fresh stuff to put together a meal from. We’ll see how successful I am.

As for my toe, it’s healing up as fast as I’d hoped. After gimping around badly yesterday (enough that the limp was causing muscle pain in that leg), I’m able to walk a bit more normally today, albeit somewhat slower than usual. Walking in my Birkenstock sandals is MUCH easier and less painful, but since I work in a manufacturing environment that’s not really an option during the day.

As for other hot-button topics flying around LiveJournal these days, I’ve been thinking of a valuable piece of advice I received many years ago: “A closed mouth gathers no foot.” I suspect I’ll be heeding that for the foreseeable future.

So. Looking ahead to the next few weekends, we have Indian food on Friday, LAFF softball on Saturday (no idea what’s up afterwards, but I suppose I’ll think of something), then…something on Sunday. I don’t think we have any plans right now, but that can change. And next weekend: for the first time in years, I’m actually going to skipping Irishfest in favor of the Chicago Air and Water Show. Should be fun!

Great Grilling, and “Oh Yeah, That’s Why I Don’t Go There…”

So besides the weekend’s technological trials and tribulations, what else happened?

On Saturday we decided that since roho, genet, and colliedoc were coming over, a tasty grilled dinner would be in order. We laid out where we needed to go, but the circle slowly got wider. See, we needed some really good corn on the cob, and while Garden Fresh Market’s isn’t bad, I think the best corn around is from Stade’s Farm Market, so a detour to McHenry was added. And heck, as long as we were going that way, if we want really good steaks, we were going to need to go to our favorite butcher at Antioch Packing House. The farm stand was delightful, as expected, and we picked up some fresh peppers, beefsteak tomatoes, and some delicious apple-cinnamon bread along with the corn. And Antioch Packing House always has good ground beef and bacon, so we had to get some of those while we got the 1.5″ thick New York strip steaks. Stopping by Garden Fresh, I got some asparagus and some other goodies. Once the Tivo was up and running, I fired up the grill and I grilled the asparagus with a garlic-rosemary-lemon vinaigrette that was divine. The steaks cooked up perfectly, and the rest of the meal (as well as the company) was excellent!

On Sunday we unfortunately had to bow out from magicpaw‘s birthday shindig (we’ll make it up to you, we promise!). While we were out picking up the networking gadgets we needed, I wanted a quick and cheap lunch. Hey, there’s a White Castle! I haven’t been to one of those in over a decade. And after having eaten there, I can safely say it’ll be at least another decade, because that was just plain nasty. Once we got everything up and running, the rest of the afternoon was spent lazing around relaxing, and scheduling our Tivo to fill up with weird, random programming.

And now it’s Monday. It should be a quiet week, though it looks like Dan will be working late on Thursday and Friday. Hmm, maybe I’ll actually get around to start that Harry Potter book this week (sorry Roho! 🙂

TGIF? Yeah, Close Enough

Man, am I tired. That has something to do with last night’s late bedtime, but it was worth it!

Last night was takaza monthly Game Night. We were joined by Dan’s mom, todd_riverden, serinthia, rustitobuck, steviemaxwell, roho, linnaeus, and genet. Pizza was ordered, and we got in not only several entertaining rounds of Wits and Wagers, but also a couple of rounds of Lupus in Tabula, which is always entertaining (and also, apparently, our sofa breeds werewolves. Who knew?). Wits and Wagers is a fun game, though I think once we involve more people, to the point where we have teams, it will be much more fun – a bit more chaotic, too, which makes it all the more entertaining. Keep an eye on Dan’s LJ for the announcement for next month’s Game Night!

In other news, we got the audiobook for Harry Potter and the Giant Wads of Cash (that Amazon had originally promised to deliver on Saturday, then said, “Oops, did we say Saturday? We meant Wednesday”). Even better, Genet was kind enough to lend me her copy of the hardcover last night (even before giving it to her husband! What a great friend 🙂 so my work for the next few days is cut out for me.

A bit of bad news: last night after everyone left we noticed a high-pitched humming sound, like a computer working in overdrive. We traced it down to our TiVo, and after a bit of checking found out that it was in an endless rebooting loop. Well, hell. That’s no good at all, particularly since we have 16 episodes of Doctor Who on there waiting to be watched. Reading through the online communities, it appears there’s typically three possible culprits: bad guide data (though that typically only causes a single reboot, or occasional reboot), bad hard drive, or bad power supply. Dan and Roho are going to try swapping out the hard drive (and while they’re at it, up the drive capacity to 500 Gb or so), but I’m not sure what the timeline is on that – hopefully by the end of the weekend, though. If we lose data, I refuse to get upset. It’s only TV, and if I really want something, there are ways to get it 🙂 Besides, I seem to have a book to keep me occupied while we’re offline…

As for the coming weekend, we have nothing planned for Saturday, and I hope that we keep it that way. We’re overdue for a “cat weekend” after Anthrocon, and the idea of sleeping in (as much as I can, anyway) and lounging around at home sounds deliciously decadent. As for Sunday we hope to make it to a birthday gathering, though a lot depends on how early we can get out of bed and get moving. We’ll be in touch about that when we can.

I’m going in search of caffeine now…