1 Pill Makes You Larger and 1 Pill Makes You Small

Mushroom Soup...
I use edible mushrooms and/but I do listen to Jefferson Airplane while making this soup.  On August 17th, 1969 Jefferson Airplane played White Rabbit at Woodstock, exactly ten years before I was born.  I'd say I must have some kind of soul connection to the band.  They also played Plastic Fantastic Lover and Volunteers, two of my favorites.  As I've mentioned before I play this song during the Drink Me/Eat Me course at One Sister Underground.
The recipe:
1130 g of mushrooms.  This is about 3 and a half pounds of mushrooms (I think).  Here's what I buy: 2 large packages of white button mushrooms.  2-4 oz. packages of mixed mushrooms-usually oyster, crimini, shiitake, and 2-4 oz. packages of maitake mushrooms.
3 carrots, chopped in stock fashion
1 fennel bulb, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 can of tomato paste, 8 oz can.
3 garlic cloves
15 peppercorns
1T Kosher salt
2 bay leaves
5 sprigs of thyme
Place the white buttons and mixed mushrooms, all coarsely chopped, into a stock pot and sweat with carrot, fennel, onion and garlic in a touch of vegetable or canola oil.  Reserve maitakes on side.  Add cold water, about a gallon and a half to two gallons, bring to boil.  Add salt, peppercorns, tomato paste, bay and thyme.  Turn down to a heavy simmer and allow to cook for 4 hours.  After about two hours, I add the 8 oz or 230g of maitake to a sheet tray, bake for about 5 minutes at 350 then add to a small stock pot and cover with about 2 quarts of water, add about a 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt and let come to a boil then turn down and allow to simmer for 90 minutes.  Taste both stocks.  Make sure they have a nice mushroom flavor, adjust seasoning if needed or cook a little longer and then strain.  I discard my batch with the veggies but the maitake I save and saute in butter.  They taste not "so amazing" after this long water soak but I still love them.  Ok, so.  After both batches are strained I mix them together and then strain through cheese cloth back into a clean stock pot and reduce for one hour.  After the hour is up, I check for seasoning.  I usually don't have to add much, maybe a pinch of salt.  Once it is nice and complex, full of mushroomy deliciousness I turn it off and let it cool.  I haven't measured it at this point but I think I have about ten cups to twelve cups (closer to twelve) so once it is cool I add ten to twelve egg whites to the batch and turn back on the heat.  Using a flat bottomed spatula I gently pull the egg whites to the surface as they cook and run the spatula along the sides to make sure there is no sticking because they will scorch.  Once it reaches a heavy simmer and the soup is running consistently but gently through the egg raft I leave it alone for another hour.  After the hour is up I turn off the soup and let the egg settle.  The final straining process is run through a cheese cloth into deli containers or an airtight container where I will hold it until service. Usually, I am left with about 30 ounces give or take a few of this lovely, clarified, mushroom soup.  You can freeze it, refrigerate it, use it as a base for other soups and sauces, cook down sliced shiitake in butter with Madeira, shallot, thyme, add a little of this stock, reduce, mount with butter to thicken, serve over steak or grilled tofu.  You can do anything with it, drink it from teacups.  Cheers.

Dragon Lady Lounge

Walking into the dimly lit bar with not much of a decor, some bottles of alcohol on the shelves, nothing better than you'd find at Jewel, a poor beer selection and bottles of wine I might have bought in high school because of the pocket change price point, and of course PBR in a can, it's Logan Square after all, this seemed to be no more than your typical Chicago neighborhood dive.  I sat in fear as a douche bag with a leather Harley Davidson skull cap muscled over to the jukebox.  I knew we were in for some screeching rock music of no taste and inaudible acoustics.  My niece and I smiled and giggled when it happened, thinking the same thing.  But here's the catch, we came here because I was told by a friend who has mostly vegan and raw eating practices that this dive has an amazing Korean Vegan Buffet on Thursday nights.  I did a little research and went.  We walked past the outside twice wondering if that was it for certain and a small erase board assured us it was. 
Some of my favorites meats are not meats at all.  Some might think it's taboo that being I chef I should articulate such blasphemies.  How despicable, an abomination to the culinary world!  Well, I'm absolutely in love with Uptons and Soul Veg.  I eat at least one to two of their prepared wraps a week as a quick lunch when I'm shopping at wholefoods.  They now carry Uptons at Provenance Food and Wine and at Green Grocer too.  That being said, I was excited to eat Vegan Korean.  I love Korean food as I've mentioned before.  So I'll give you a little run down.
Aside from the douche, there was an eclectic bunch, me looking like a lumberjack/farmer, my friend Jeff smart and funny, well-dressed, my niece who as Mick Jagger would say, you make a grown man cry, and some business types, regulars, and hipsters.  Pretty scant overall.  The buffet was to begin at seven but it'd didn't start till about seven thirty when the bartender announced, "she's ready for you."  We went up to the kitchen window and paid the adorable little Korean woman dressed like a cafeteria worker, 13.50.  Once everyone was paid she stood at the front of the line and ladled rice on plates and handed them to us one by one.  The buffet was set up on a folding table and was full of so many of my favorite treats: homemade kimchi, bebimbop accoutrement, royal fern (my favorite), spicy pickled cucumber, kimbop (Korean vegan sushi), pajun, and Korean miso soup which seems to have the traditional base and tofu with the addition of zucchini and cabbage.  I was in heaven.  I had three servings and she made sure to come up to us when she saw our plates low and told us to get more.  My niece was tickled.  She had Korean for the first time when I took her late night to San Soo Gab San (another blog).  And she was so excited to have it buffet style.  Afterwards I asked her what she thought and she said it was like having all of her favorite dishes in one sitting.  Jeff was very happy too.  He has a mostly vegetarian eating practice but will eat meat occasionally if I cook it for him and when we go to places like Alinea and Schwa.  He was impressed and full.
When she came up to our table to urge us back to the buffet she also mentioned that we should spread the word.  She has had ebbs and flows of business and it is really dependent upon press and that I understand.  She told us to yelp if we could but I don't have one of those accounts but I knew I was going to write about The Dragon Lady Lounge before I even stepped through the doors.  There is no lack of quality.  It is home cooked Korean, beautiful, fragrant, solid and soul nourishing.  Thursdays 7-10pm, $13.50, 3188 N. Elston.  She's the kind of lady you want to be your friend.

Eat Your Seaweed!

Ever wonder why seaweed is so good?  Sounds like a strange thing to be so scrumptious.  Or why Parmesan cheese tastes so good on tomato sauce and why anchovy is put on pizzas and in sauces and why fish sauce is so common in Vietnamese and other Asian preparations?  These foods contain the neurotransmitter, glutamate.  Glutamate plays a role in cognitive functions because it does so much work in all those wonderful synapses and happenings that go on in our brain and nervous system (reason why you should not use PCP or take animal tranquilizers-they block glumatic acid from doing it's work and that's why hallucinations occur.  Due to the blockage our brains are not getting the right acids to get our synapses to play together in harmony).  Glutamic Acid is considered to be a flavor.  First researched and studied in German labs and then named by a Japanese researcher as a flavor called, "umami."  Kombu broth, a key player and a seaweed I use on my current menu at One Sister Underground and used in Japanese cooking for broths and stocks like Dashi, was found that when evaporated little brown crystals are left behind resulting in glutamic acid.  Umami is known as our fifth flavor following sour, bitter, salty, sweet.  When glutamate or glutamic acid is mass produced it is known as monosodium glutamate, MSG.  Not good!  Just like anything that is altered (for the most part), hydrogenated butter for example-margarine, it changes the role it plays in our systems and doesn't perform the work as it was naturally intended.  The point is that we can get this lovely taste and flavor enhancer very naturally.
This is why Caesar dressing is so good.  Why Italian grandmothers and chefs trained in Italy use Parmesan rinds in their broths and sauces.  Why we put soy sauce on food and mushrooms on meat  Supposedly methods like these date back to early empires, using dried fishes to make sauces and broths.  Try to cook a meal using these natural glutamates... add anchovy paste and tomato to your braising liquid for short ribs, add mushrooms to the finished product and top with Parmesan cheese.  You'll love it.

Picky Pick Pick!

She'll eat the tomatoes if they are ripe and fresh, but not the seeds, in a sauce but if it's pureed not chunky and it has to be savory not sweet.  She loves pickles, sour things and lemon on everything but she hates saurekraut.  She won't touch an egg or mushrooms (although she will forage for them).  She doesn't like chocolate but she loves nutella in the morning.  She doesn't like things that are "gushy," "slimy," or "jellied."  She won't touch a stew and will eat certain fish only if it's fried but likes sushi but only if it's maki rolls, not sashimi and it has to be dipped in eel sauce and then dipped in soy sauce (I really don't think she tastes the fish at all that way).  She doesn't like to eat pork because she had a pet pig but will chow down on some bacon but well and cripsy, not thick cut or applewood smoked.  Hmmm.  One of the hardest things about being a chef is cooking for this lovely, goregous partner of mine that is picky as hell.  I recently made french onion soup and I have to strain out the onions for her but I made a batch for my dinners and pureed the entire soup together and she ate it up, onions and all.  Just when I think I know what she likes she throws a curve ball.  And she's allergic to duck.  Maybe some of you can relate.  I've known meat and potato men, meat and potato women, and kids who will eat only chicken and rice and then I've also met the other end of the spectrum.  When I was young I was pretty picky but I loved canned sardines, smoked oysters, pickled pigs feet and wild mushrooms.  I tried things. 
My partner will try things which makes me happy.  In two weeks we are going to Schwa and it's crossed my mind to ask Michael to not tell us what is in any of the dishes until we eat them.  We are going for my niece's birthday, she'll be twenty-one and she eats everything.  Both of these women live with me and for the most part I cook their dinners and we sit down like a family and eat.  It seems that the more I cook food that tastes like it's from a box, the more they love it.  Here's Beef Stroganoff, tastes like a box but it's from scratch.
1 lb. fresh pasta (the recipe I wrote the other day) or egg noodles from package
1 pint sour cream
1 lb. ground beef
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
1 T vegetable oil
1 to 1 1/2 cup of milk or half and half or cream
1 pack of mushrooms, sliced
salt to taste and cracked pepper
Boil the noodles till al dente, strain and reserve on the side.
Saute the shallot and garlic in oil.  Add the ground beef and mushrooms, cook through and drain the fat.  Add the pasta, milk and sour cream being careful to stir as to not scorch the bottom or boil which will break the sour cream.  This is where I add my salt and pepper to mine and my families preferrence.  They like things a little saltier than I do so I adjust to about right in the middle of what they and I like and it works perfect.  You can add 2 oz of butter at the end to make it a little more rich.  Loosen with a little water if it gets too thick. 
I made this a couple weeks ago for them and they loved it.  I actually had some of the unpureed french onion soup made so I added some of that liquid along with the milk and sour cream for a nice extra layer of flavor.  I have to admit, it was good and it tasted a little like from the box.  Homemade "hamburger helper."

City Gardening

An irrigation system which collects rainwater from their neighbor's roof in huge drums and pumps it up two stories, about ten garden beds 6x6, some vegetables and fruits I hadn't heard of, dried strawberries on the vine that did not taste so much like strawberry but something bright, tart, leathery and berry-ish at once, Polish chickens -one named Martha Stewart.  Maybe this wasn't so much a rooftop garden as it was a rooftop farm.  I had the honor of visiting this mini farm in the sky today and it was inspiring.  Turns out this farmer, Breanne Heath, has a lot more going on than just farming, she's proficient in canning, being resourceful and is a forager.  She finds crabapples, paw paws, rosehips, mulberries, blackberries, raspberries, sour cherries basically if its a fruit you can eat on the street or in little hidden spots throughout the city she knows it.
She is currently in the process of building hoop houses for her garden beds which are awesome.  The cool thing is that they help insulate the building and the building helps keep the soil from freezing and with the hoop houses should keep it nice during the winter for heartier vegetables and leafy greens and hopefully with her permission, this winter I will have a course at One Sister Underground Dining called, Breanne's Rooftop Garden.
There is just so much we can do locally and it makes me so proud when I see people doing it.  I thought I was clever building my own garden bed.  This was by far the coolest and best garden bed/rooftop garden I have seen in Chicago.

Clarity Is Worth The Effort!

Clarity Is Worth The Effort!

In the little town of Hobart, Indiana there was a Korean restaurant with authentic Korean food right in the middle of nowhere.  My family knew this family from one of my Uncles having spent time in Korea in the 50's.  The daughter of this family, So Young (I don't know the proper spelling of her name but that's how I remember it sounded), fell in love with a man from my Uncle's platoon and she married him and brought her parents over.  Too bad the man she married lived in such a small place but it seems like it's often those guys and gals from small places that end up in deserts and jungles (but that's someone else's blog).  So she worked as a waitress in my parent's Polish restaurant for a time until her family opened their own ethnic restaurant.  I was probably three years old the first time I had a clear soup.  I remember when I thought my mother knew how to cook everything.  She was actually the chef of my parent's Polish restaurant, Jenny's Cafe, when I was in the oven.  People ask me how I learned to make pierogi and I often say, "I don't know, I suppose it was osmosis."  And it's kind of true, I just made them one day.  Anyways, I asked my mother all the time if she could make this clear soup.  She said, "It takes too long."  I asked, "how long."  She said, "real long, you have to boil those bones for hours and hours."  My mother cooked from scratch.  We always had bones bumbling around in stock pots with carrots and all those other lovely aromatic vegetables and herbs and whole skinned animals hanging from the rafters in our barn or complex layers of porky smoke billowing from the seams of our smoker.  But for some reason she would not make this clear soup.  It was my favorite.  I also loved the bean sprouts at that restaurant.  I'd order just a bowl of bean sprouts.  I remember sitting on a booster seat at a table with the window at my back, the bright neon lights of that restaurant, the cafeteria feel of it and some of the most unique and flavorful food I had put in my mouth.  I just could not understand how that flavor came from what looked and felt like warm water.  Well it wasn't until years later that I had that soup again, not the same one but one just like it at a restaurant called House of Kobe (something like a Benihana).  I was fifteen I think and then that became my favorite place to go for birthdays cause it was too expensive for anything else.  But wow.  Even now that I can make my own clear soups I have to admit I still like the soup there even if I leave smelling like a clove of garlic fried in oil.
Today I can clarify my stocks, making them nice and clean, no particles whatsoever and I can also make them close to clear, just a little shy of what they'd look like if they were distilled.  I'll briefly walk you through removing all the little imperfections from your own stock and some other time I'll walk you through turing your stock nearly clear and then even I'll tell you how to turn corn tortillas into a clear liquid, how I make my "fish taco bubble tea."
I'm going to do veal but you can use beef bones, lamb bones, pork bones it just depends on the dish you will ultimately make.
5 lbs veal bones
7 carrots- peeled and chopped
3 onions-peeled and chopped
2 stalks celery-chopped... Or one bulb fennel
1 1/2 T peppercorns (I use a mix of green, black and pink)
3 T Kosher salt
2 fresh bay leaves
Sprigs of thyme, enough that if held in hand would be diameter of a quarter
1 can of tomato paste
3 cloves of garlic
2 T canola oil
A stock pot and cold water filled to cover elements about 4-6 inches
Note: for a darker stock you can roast the bones and veggies first
First sweat the veggies, about ten minutes, then add the bones, add the water, herbs, peppercorns, only 2 T salt, etc.  Bring to a boil then turn down heat to a very gentle boil or heavy simmer.  Now let it alone for 8 hours, just stir from the bottom every once in awhile, especially if your pot is thin because the bottom can scorch.  Once the eight hours are up, strain the stock, reserving the liquid in one container, let it cool and cover placing in the refrigerator.  Then toss the veggies (I like to snack on the carrots) and reserve the bones, placing back in the cleaned stock pot, cover bones again with cold water about six inches and do the same with just the bones for another eight hours.  Once this is done, strain.  Take out the first stock, skim impurities and fat from top, strain into a clean stock pot along with the second liquid.  This is when I add about 1 more T kosher salt, just enough to feel the salinity on my tongue and to heighten the veal and vegetable flavors.  I reduce this liquid for about two hours at a heavy simmer.  I turn it off, strain it again, let it cool, skim impurities and then I place it back into a stock pot with about 1 egg white per every cup of liquid.  At this point it usually turns out to be between 8 to 12 egg whites.  I let it come back up to a gentle boil and using a flat bottomed spatula occasionally sweep it around the sides and along the bottom of the pot to help the egg white float to the top.  What this egg white does is form a raft which brings up the tiny particles of meat, veggies, etc and catches all of the left over particles as the stock gently boils over and around it.  I let the raft do it's work for about an hour then I turn off the heat, let it settle and using a ladle carefully strain the liquid through a coffee filter into a container.  Once I've strained out the liquid I discard the egg whites and taste my stock for salt.  Here I generally need a bit more.  At this point you should have a beautiful stock free of any particles.  It should be pristine.  Here you can reduce it a touch more if you'd like something a bit more potent or you can reduce it even further to make a nice reduction that will act as a beautiful sauce just on it's own with any dark meat.  The reduction should be glossy and coat the back of a spoon.  I hope you have fun with this.  It is so worth the effort.  Try it for the Holidays and blow your loved ones' minds.

Little More Classic

Going A Little More Classic

Recently as I was walking down the main artery of my neighborhood I stopped outside of a restaurant that had changed it's facade.  What use to be Charlie's Ale House is now Acre.  I like the name.  They are going with the local trend which should not be a trend at all and I hope it remains that way.  I grew up eating the vegetables and fruits from our garden, meats that we sourced locally and fish we caught, not always, but most of the time.  It seems only right to me that this is the way we try to be.  But that is not to knock anyone who gets things from overseas or elsewhere.  We just don't have certain things here and it's fun to have the variety.  Well anyways, I do a fair amount of reading and try to keep up with what's going on outside of my own kitchen, it's hard but it puts me to bed at night.  As I've been reading about the trends and curves and everything else I thought I'd go more classic with the Fall menu of One Sister Underground.  I was thinking of doing this anyways because it's been a little out there, not more than what some restaurants are doing but it's unique and I want it to be just a touch more approachable.  My last menu had brown spice cured lamb's brain that sometimes I interchanged with lamb sweetbreads, foie gras ice cream and goat's tongue.  But what really gave me the absolute push to change was that Acre had a section of their menu called odds and ends which had a lot of these offals.  So there will be no offals on the new menu (I will have the ice cream though because lots of guests have requested pints of it and it is tasty, different but tasty).  There will be more classic preparations and less use of new techniques.  I'm certain I will have a bubble here or there and maybe an agar agar set pudding, et cetera but those techniques will not be the showcases as they weren't before but they were more prominent.  I've also been reading how against the word "molecular gastronomy" some chefs are, either calling it Progressive American or Modern and so on.  I really try not to get to hung up on those labels.  It seems a little molecular to me (having quite an extensive background in chemistry) and it seems a little progressive and modern.  I think everyone might win in that situation.
This new menu will have the product which made the name for One Sister, pierogi.  Although this one you won't be able to find in the stores.  It will be smaller, to be had in one bite, filled with whipped yukon gold potatoes and specks of black truffle, topped with homemade truffled mascarpone cheese and chive.  It'll be yummy.  I'll also have a sea scallop ceviche with tomato water, lime, shallot, basil and mint; a hand-cut pasta with porcini and parmesan and chocolate souffle at the end.  Some other more twisted but still familiar items will be grilled cheese soup, French onion smores and a caramel apple apple pie "gobstopper."  I hope to see some of you there.