Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Logan Square Grub

I decided to dredge up some old photos. I woke up this morning, in the afternoon, and realized, with great satisfaction, that I do not actually have any essays to grade this week! Pictured above is a sausage and giardiniera sandwich, served on a bolido, with french fries I cut and fried in a deep, 3 quart sauce pot. The meal is typical of the grubbier lunches I would make when I lived in Chicago: Mexican bread, Italian suasage (hot), deep fried potatoes.

When I lived in Logan Square, I lived with my chef friend, Paul. Paul works at the phenomenal, Old Town restuarant, Old Town Brasserie, under chef Roland. This green pizza has nothing to do with that establishment. We made green pizzas one night in December or January. For whatever reason, we had an excess of celery and spinach, and we decided to get stupid with it. I sauteed the spinach in butter, with shallots, deglazed it with white wine, added the lot to some chicken stock, which I then pureed and passed through Paul's chinois to become the liquid for this green pizza dough. Meanwhile, Paul worked on the juliene of celery and the hexagonal broccoli stalk toppings. The completed pizzas were then brought to a house of ill repute, whereupon the occupants could not be persuaded away from their electronic entertainment to try a green slice.

There were a lot of pizzas in those days. In fact, the once weekly pizza night became a fixture that winter. I was a bachelor and I worked three days a week in the office of a big, landscaping contractor, doing estimates at 14 bucks an hour. Paul was a culinary student at the time, at Kendall College, so you can imagine that we had plenty of time to fuck around in the kitchen and talk about the restaurant we would open. It would be called Logan Square Pizza, thus claiming itself as the neighborhood pizza joint, and we'd serve classy but no-frills pizza, and one homemade pasta per day. Guests would sit down to complimentary olives and crusty bread. A few nice bottles of wine on offer, a wood burning oven, a buxom hostess, well, maybe not that, but you get the drift. I've got a couple more years of graduate school. Hopefully, Paul will be ready to rock and roll when I am done fetching another degree.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i am so hungry right now. also, the word verification for this post is "unbrot," which could be considered germish -- un for a in Spanish and brot for bread in German. One bread.