Three Menus Per Season=Twelve Reasons To Dine

I'd say that creating new menus takes up about 90% of my head space.  I love to make new dishes so much it only made sense to me if I were to have 3 tasting menus, then they must all be completely different and representative to the characters in Elizabeth's logo. All characters can be thought of as her totem, or my totem.   They are also reoccurring symbols from my childhood.  Either way, they make sense to me and are important.  

So since each character represents a menu this is how it works...

The Owl is the barn owl.  While all menus will focus on farm to table this menu will highlight the most seasonable, freshest products I can find.  It will be the shortest menu, ranging between six to eight presentations of food. I will work directly with farmers and the local Chicago farmers' markets.  As I do now, all salting, smoking, curing, drying, preserving and baking will be done in house.  This menu will showcase many of those methods.

The Deer is from the woods and nature.  I cannot count how many times I have been in the woods and I looked up to find a deer staring at me.  They are constantly in my path.  I love these beautiful and mystic creatures. This menu will focus on what is foraged, collected in nature or be representative of nature and the wild.  It will showcase what I've found, what I love to find, what is currently in season or what I've preserved from past seasons.  My memories and ideas will be in this menu.  It will be the earthiest and perhaps the most challenging.  It will be the mid length menu, ranging between 12 to 14 courses.  

The Diamond menu will be the lengthiest menu, ranging between 20-23 courses.  This is the menu where we will hold you hostage for most of your evening so come prepared.  Hopefully it will be the best hostage experience you'll ever have.  On this menu you may encounter items which are a little more rare and a little more of a delicacy.  It will probably be the closest to what you may have experienced in my home only heightened due to more brain and man/woman power.  It will be the most daring.

All menus will involve whimsy, traditional and modern techniques.  They will be fun and adventurous.  One is not meant to be better than the other.  My intention is not to have a "best" menu while I'm sure that there will be guests who will come to all and decide for themselves which they think is the best.  It is just my intention to create, have fun, and give my guests an opportunity to have a range in price points and length of dining time.  I want them to want to come back and have new experiences.  To feel as if they are in the same space but an entirely new food dimension.  

The way I have built my business, from the ground up, first by gardening and truly connecting with the seasons and selling products at the farmers' market and then by my dinners, I've been thoroughly connected to nature.  I have either grown, foraged or sourced through the markets all my own products on a daily basis, which forced me to remain seasonal and local.  I never had the luxury of ordering from a catalog or sheets of papers from vendors.  This was more of a blessing than I ever imagined.  It challenged me to take Midwestern items that we are familiar with and present them in a new and avante garde way.  Where the availability of items that I might have liked to use became limited, I was forced to think in a new food direction.  How can I take this perhaps "boring" vegetable and turn it into something extraordinary?  How can I make it delicious and beautiful?  Where did it come from?  How does it grow?  What does it grow with?  So on and so forth.  Every season and sometimes twice within a season my menus have flipped.  While having had One Sister dinners for two years now I do have some staples, which guests come back and expect to have and I love them to have them but I have changed the menus almost entirely 12 times.  I will remain especially true to the seasons, changing each menu 4 times a year.  I'm certain there will be a few dishes on each menu that will remain but for the most part you can come to Elizabeth and have a new experience each time as the seasons change.  Three different menus per season and four seasons in the year means that you can have twelve different experiences.

Having the dinners in my home gave me the opportunity to really talk with and become close with many of my guests.  I've made many friendships from this venture.  The dinners have been magical.  My guests have called me a sorceress, a magician, and a witch.  I think all of those have basis in fact.  Therefore it will be my challenge to recreate that feeling and setting within a restaurant.  What I'm thrilled to say is that it will be done.  Elizabeth will have no barrier between the kitchen and the dining room.  We will all be in the same space together.  It will be like dinner and show in one.  I've always pictured my dinners to be like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Elizabeth will be very much the same, full of surprises, interesting service pieces, and a warm, hospitable atmosphere.  Elizabeth will challenge to change ideas of fine dining.  

Elizabeth is named after my sister.  She died unexpectedly of a stroke when she was 39.  I was 23 at the time.  It was then that I slowly (with learning curves and growing pains) but steadily began to live life with focus.  She could not or would not conform.  I decided I would not either, never stopping to settle but to truly do what I want.  Cooking for others is certainly what I was born to do and it's what I want to do.  Elizabeth gives me the opportunity to cook for others as well as, in an abstract way, continue to cook for her.

Spring Pics/Food Porn

Spring Menu pictures by the wonderful Jennifer Moran.  Click HERE.  This last round of pictures made it one full year of her photographing my food.  I'm thrilled to have her capture it's beauty.

Turkey Hunting

My father wouldn't pull over to let me shoot the turkeys in the wide open field.  It just doesn't seem fair that we had to go into the woods, sit in a camouflage tent and wait when they are sitting there in the wide open as we drive past.  I suppose living in the City for 12 years now and hearing about drive-by shootings day in and day out it seems natural to me to just prop the shotgun out the side of the window and bam!  He says, "the  game wardens can search your vehicle with less evidence against ya than a police officer.  Shooting out of the vehicle is illegal."
So we sat, we waited, we called, they called back but they never arrived.  I have mixed feelings about hunting animals.  There is the side of me that collects the spiders from the house onto paper and gently nudges them out the back door or off the porch.  The side of me that stops for hurt pigeons on the side of the road and tries to nurse them back to health in my basement.  AND THeN, there is the side of me that wants to blow the turkey's head off.  Rip an arrow through the deer's heart.  Knock the ducks out of the sky one by one.  Two nights ago I watched "War Horse," and had serious trouble trying to contain my tears, practically weeping about how lovely this horse was and at the same time wondering what horse meat would taste like.  Well, I suppose I'm strange, fucked up, weird.  Whatever the case maybe when it comes down it in order of importance collecting, foraging, harvesting, and hunting my food is far more rewarding that picking it up at the grocery store or getting it delivered.  So that means hunting wins out. Did you know people hunt bears with Twinkies?
Well so I didn't get a thing.  Maybe it is the peace loving side of me that ruins my hunting for me.  Maybe it's that while my intention is to hunt I'm too loud and sidetracked by the beautiful flora that surrounds me.  My father says, "put that decoy in the open and then get back over here and don't move."  But on the way back over I spot a wild carrot to dig out, take note of the wild raspberry bushes, and kick the ground when I'm pissed to know how everything has come a month early this year and my REAL intention was to find morels while I was out here.
I often get asked where one can find different edible flora.  I made special note of Jasper-Pulaski if anyone wants to take the trek.  Area 13-fiddle heads, miner's lettuce, birch.  Area 7-burnt out, which means good for morels, fiddle heads, blueberries, pine.  Area 8-pine, wild raspberries, wild strawberries, wild carrots.
This game preserve is wild and abundant.  It's beautiful and peaceful, even with the gunshots ringing in the background.

Competition With Myself.

Upon leaving a guest recently commented, "Your food is so good I didn't think it could get better, but you continue to out do yourself.  How will you keep this up?"  I've been thinking about this a lot lately.  Actually, it takes up most of my head space.  Luckily I'm continually inspired by nature, the seasons, the works of others, songs, and most dangerously by plateware itself.  When a guest accidentally broke an heirloom owl umbrella holder it cracked in such nice pieces I said, "well, I guess I'll have to create a dish to serve on this."  And it's truly vicious for me to go to Chinatown, Sur La Table, or CB2.  I see something that will beautifully serve or hold food and think, that's a new dish.  These inspirations are what continues to drive the climb of my menus.
So this is what I have to do to trump myself.  I have to utilize more of my garden, more of the woods, more of myself and siphon it all into my preparations.  Here is an idea!  My father recently told me he seeds saved from vegetables he had grown in 1968 on our small farm.  He soaked them and planted them and they began to sprout.  Today I visited him and brought home some of those seeds.  The words banana musk melon and sweet Hungarian peppers were scribbled onto little browned pieces of paper tucked into the jars. Creating dishes from these seeds, which will hopefully sprout and fruit should help in this out doing myself project.  Seeds from the farm I grew up on from vegetables that grew 11 years before I was born, replanted and created into a dish to serve to my guests.  I think I will add elements to that dish directly from the woods.  We'll see if it works and if it does you can have it this summer.

Spring Menu-2012, More Accurate Rendering!

Bubble Tea

parsnip, licorice, swiss chard

Salad Sponge

honeys, homegrown, sorbets

Pierogi

yukon gold potato, truffle, mascarpone

Encapsulated

asparagus, egg, leeks

Tree Nest

squash, "eggs"

Tofu and Kimchee

1 pill makes you larger/ 1 pill makes you small

Carrots and Ramps

Scarborough Fair

Ebelskiver, cherry

Wisconsin Rice Crispy

curry, cauliflower, rose hips

Chocolate Dashi

basil seeds

Hanging

California

Built-A-Plate

DIY, sprouts, fish, puddings, gels, paint

Scallop

peas, yogurt, ham

Your Hand

Crawfish Centerpiece

Shrimp Noodles

Smelt

white chocolate, Blis products

Pho

owl mugs

Chicken Liver Mousse

clove, dark chocolate, pollen, pineau de Charantes

Wild Turkey

Jasper Polasky, foraged items

Lamb 

homemade cheese, fiddlehead ferns

Bacon Ice Cream Cone

Rhubarb

biscuits, strawberries, beets, farmer's cheese, sweetbreads 

Bites

So Lovely!

By Hunt. Gather. Love.  She talks up One Sister and Jen Moran.  Read here.

More Winter Menu Pictures

Pics by Jen Moran!