vw mexico

Just getting around to uploading more Puebla pictures from last year. Volkswagen has a large plant in Puebla that supplies vehicles throughout North America (our own Jetta was born there) and kept on manufacturing the old Beetles long after they took it off the market in the United States, so you'll see a ton of them roaming around there . . .

could've should've would've

Some people, when the going gets tough, find solace in meditation, the encouragement of friends, the fact that their lives aren't as frakked up as Charlie Sheen's . . . me, I find comfort in the warm, soothing glow of television. Could you tell that I've been watching Battlestar Galactica? And it's a good thing there's been Top Chef All-Stars to cheer me up every week! Well, except for that time a couple weeks ago they kicked off my personal favorite and fellow countryman Dale T. That was sadder than sad.

The week after he got pack-your-knife-and-go'd by Padma, they had an Ellis Island-themed challenge in which they asked each chef to draw upon their family history to cook a dish that tells the story of their ancestry. Oh, I cried. Dale would've totally killed it in this challenge, and Filipino food could've used the good publicity.

What would he have cooked?

Man, that would've been the best thing ever.

I've been thinking about what I would've made, and right now, I'd have to say sinigang. . . a rich and sour tamarind-based soup my mother would usually make with pork or beef, sometimes shrimp, and loaded with leafy greens, eggplant, sitaw (long Chinese green beans), and my favorite part, Daikon radish and gabi (taro). I have good memories of this dish—it reminds me of home. Very satisfying, belly-warming stuff, and I'd say a good representative of true native cuisine due to its use of the indigenous tamarind.

What would you have made?

windy city weekend

If Emily Post had it her way, we would've celebrated our fifth anniversary with the gift of wood. Or silverware. We decided to buck tradition and take a weekend trip to Chicago instead.

Friday
If you didn't already know from my constant ramblings about this, I love Rick Bayless. And if we had thought of planning this little vacation at least six weeks in advance, then maybe we would've been able to get a table at Frontera Grill. Enter Xoco, Rick's newest place, which serves up a gourmet take on Mexican street food (and is located right around the corner from Frontera and Topolobampo). Thirty to forty minutes of waiting in line might sound like a long time, but it doesn't seem that bad when you are agonizing over the menu and deciding whether to get a wood-fired torta with homemade chorizo sausage, roasted poblano, and artisan jack cheese, or maybe a caldo of crispy pork belly, toasty-tender noodles, and woodland mushrooms . . . or maybe the torta filled with braised Tallgrass shortribs and caramelized onion?? I was going out of my mind, people.

However, when I got closer to the counter I noticed there was a shrimp and elote torta special on the menu board. YES PLEASE. I cannot fully express in words how much I love elote and shrimp, and those two things glued together with chipotle mayonnaise in between two slices of crusty bread was like a match made in food heaven. TJ had the torta de cochinita pibil (wood-roasted suckling pig with achiote, black beans, pickled onion, and habanero salsa), which was also tasty, of course, and I appreciated that the habanero salsa was actually really spicy and not as watered-down spicy as it often appears in other establishments.

For dessert we ordered churros and the Aztec hot chocolate (made with fresh-roasted cacao beans ground on location and spiked with chile and allspice). If there were a churro ratings scale, it would be Costco churros at rock bottom or probably even lower, and at the top would be Xoco churros, eclipsing even the very good churros we had at the Latino festival in Lexington last month and the ones we had at the zocalo churreria in Puebla.

Saturday
I think that TJ's main goal in Chicago was to get his hands on a cemita from Cemitas Puebla. Cemitas seem rather hard to come by in the United States, and it's hard not to dream about them after experiencing this beauty earlier this year. From our hotel, we made our way to Cemitas Puebla by foot, by train, by bus, by bus again after we realized we were going the wrong way, and then by foot. The owner, who hails from Puebla, was right there to greet us when we opened the door—he was very hospitable and quite excited to mention his appearance on Triple D on the Food Network. We decided to go big and split the cemita atomica, which is basically made of three kinds of pork with a ton of Oaxaca cheese on top. Highly recommend.

We really did do things other than eat food. For the rest of the afternoon we just walked—along the Riverwalk, down the Magnificent Mile, and around Millennium Park and Navy Pier. I wanted to experiment with photographing fireworks at Navy Pier, but it was raining and I also forgot my remote shutter release at home, which would've made it easier . . . so maybe next time. But it was nice to spend the whole day out and about, especially when your regular life involves staying indoors hunched over a laptop 24/7.

We figured that we couldn't go to Chicago and not have deep dish pizza, so for dinner we made our way to Giordano's. Not sure why we picked that one—might've been the closest to our hotel? The wait was pretty crazy and apparently I look like a Laurence because that's the name they put on our ticket. The pizza was good, though—I guess you can't really go wrong with a dish that involves piles and piles of melted cheese.

Later that night we made our way to Black Dog Gelato. The guy at the counter was really patient with our indecision, and we sampled a bunch of flavors like Goat Cheese Salted Caramel Cashew, which might sound odd as a gelato flavor, but it was amazing. TJ ended up going with Sweet Potato (good if you like the idea of sweet potato pie in gelato form) and I had a combo of Toasted Coconut and Mexican Hot Chocolate (which tasted just like a frozen creamy version of the drink we had at Xoco).

Sunday
Before hitting the road for Lexington, we had lunch at Johnnie's Beef with Santa Barbara friends who had just relocated to Chicago. We arrived at the Elmwood Park location maybe 10 minutes before it opened and there was already a line forming outside. That place runs like a well-oiled machine, though—took no time at all to get our order taken and food served. We both got combo sandwiches in order to experience both the beef and the sausage, except mine topped with sweet peppers and TJ's with spicy. The fries were great (thin and crispy, just the way I like them) and the Italian ice was fantastic . . . just wish I could've gotten to all of it before it melted. Also, as I have zero friends in Lexington (this is what happens when you choose to watch eight straight hours of election coverage instead of going outside and talking to people), it was really nice to hang out and catch up with our amigos.

In all, it was a fun and tasty weekend.

retail therapy

It's official: Rand Paul is my new Tea Party overlord, Russ Feingold is no longer a senator but somehow David Vitter is still a governor, and John Boehner will probably make history as our first orange Speaker of the House. Oh, it hurts (even though we all saw it coming).

So I bought a 35mm f/1.8 prime lens! And we made Rick Bayless's Texas Sheet Cake, which I do realize is named after a state that just reelected Rick Perry, but we had all the ingredients on hand and it sounded like the most delicious thing in which to drown our sorrows at 1:00 in the morning.

I sort of take solace in the fact that these kinds of things always spin the other way pretty fast—maybe tonight's events will give a boost to Obama's reelection bid in 2012? And did John Kerry just describe Harry Reid as being Dracula AND Lazarus in his press release? And how is it that I always find myself defending/cheering on Democrats with whom I'm not terribly enthused? Oh, right—because it could be worse.

halloween tamales

Yesterday I took my maiden voyage into tamal-making for our Halloween dinner party using Rick Bayless's recipes for Basic Tamal Dough and Chicken in Green Chile Filling.

At first I was a bit squeamish about using lard in the tamal dough, but I got over it. I figured if I was going to spend a whole day making these, I should do exactly what Rick tells me because he is the master (we went to Chicago last weekend and had dinner at Xoco, the newest jewel in his restaurant empire—it was fantastic. More on that trip later). And science to the rescue: a bit of research uncovered that lard has less saturated fat (bad) and more monounsaturated fat (good) than butter, plus zero trans fat unlike vegetable shortening. (I found this data by doing a basic search on the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference; also, interesting article on the lard renaissance here.) You'll want the fresh, tan-colored stuff (not the white, shelf-stable, hydrogenated kind), which I've usually seen sold in quart- or gallon-sized buckets at Latino markets.

Being a novice at making tamales, I was worried that these would be a huge fail, but they weren't too difficult to assemble and turned out amazingly light, fluffy, and flavorful. I think the trickiest part was spreading the tamal dough onto the corn husk, and I found it easiest and fastest to use a silicone spatula for that step. The hardest part was not having enough counter space to spread everything out—I think I'll have to make these (or a variation using banana leaves) again in my parents' kitchen during the holidays.

Oh, and the strands of white on the black beans in the photo is melted Oaxaca cheese—a grand discovery at our local supermercado. I was on the phone with TJ while he was doing the grocery shopping and all of a sudden he stopped and said, WHOA. For a second I was worried that something was wrong but actually he had just laid his eyes on the cheese. A very large ball of fresh Oaxaca cheese. I think it's a new item (which they'll hopefully keep in stock) since we're always on the lookout for it and hadn't seen it there before.

on perma-xmas, tea towels, and apple

Thank you for all of your nice comments on the office and for offering help on my Airport Express networking issues. Unfortunately, the problem has been languishing—I haven't had the chance to go back to it since my last post, but I'll shoot one or all of you an e-mail soon.

By the way, the office color scheme being perma-Christmas did cross my mind, but I think the greens being more limey than piney helps modernize it and makes it less overtly yuletide. What happened is that my existing storage boxes and media console already happened to be red, and I had other boxes that were green, so it all kind of fell into place and I decided that I might as well go all the way with it.

To continue with the theme, I'm thinking of getting one of these tea towels to frame and put on the wall.

 Or maybe of these:
Or this one. Just wish the green was chartreuse.

Speaking of apples, I can't wait for the "Back to the Mac" event on Wednesday. I've tired of all this iOS talk of late,, so it's exciting that Apple is finally going back to its roots. I could really really use a new laptop, so I'm crossing my fingers for a MacBook Pro update . . .

All of the tea towels, by the way, come from the brilliantly-named ToDryFor.com. I had a hard time choosing from all of the fun designs they have available.

the corner office

One thing I really like about living in Kentucky is that you get a lot of rental bang for your buck. We're really enjoying the new apartment we moved into in August—it's definitely the nicest place we've lived since getting married. The let's-move-to-a-new-apartment-every-year game can get pretty tiring, so I'm happy that we have this place to call home for at least the next three years.

And I finally get a functional office/craft room! So nice to have a space set aside for telecommuting and sewing. I wasn't planning on posting any pictures this soon because everything is still a work in progress (e.g., cord management problems and the other side of this room is a mess), but I can't hold back my excitement about these chartreuse chevron curtains:

I made the curtains using a simple tutorial for tab-top curtains from The Purl Bee. I omitted the tabs from my version and hung up the curtains using curtain rings. Didn't want to deal with a ton of yardage, so I got just enough fabric to hit the bottom of the window's apron. The medium-weight chartreuse chevron fabric, as well as the insulated white lining, are both from fabric.com—a great deal at about $7 and $4 per yard respectively, and free shipping to boot. Not too shabby, eh?

What's next for this room: put away the rest of the mess, finish and hang a wall quilt, find some under desk storage (I like these red filing cabinets from cb2), and get the Airport Express wireless printer setup up and running. I haven't been able to get it to work since we left Santa Barbara—I've reset it and fiddled around with a bunch of settings, but the last time I tried to connect it the home network slowed to a crawl and it took about an hour to print a page. I guess I'm not the most network-savvy person out there, so if anyone knows what the problem could be (cough JohnE) let me know.