Three Happiness (dim sum)

Not much to say about this meal, in part because I don't know the proper names for everything, and in some cases it was a bit of tastework to determine what exactly the filling of things was. And truth be told, it wasn't the best dim sum ever.

RAS and I met up with Sharon at one of the two Three Happiness restaurants in Chinatown. Not that that's confusing, or anything, especially since they're - oh - right across the street from each other. RAS came with me, and we were mildly worried that Sharon would confuse the two. Happily, she didn't, though RAS and I were well into our dining by the time the traffic-slowed Sharon arrived. We caught her up with a bunch of dishes quickly. I mostly forgot to take photos, but then, most of the food was kind of cold or only moderately warm to start with and not really exceptional

A gorgeous day out, though. Warm, sunny. We walked around the neighbourhood's a bit, popping into a few stores without buying anything. Conrad is getting intermittent rain in Honolulu, poor guy, and I'm sorry he couldn't join in the fun today.

RAS loves her some CTA!

Drinking tea. I know, I know. Gay, right?

Eating chicken.

Veggies (Chinese broccoli?) with oyster sauce, chicken wings, and some little fried fish seasoned lightly with salt. They would have been quite tasty if they were at all warm.

Street scenes:


RAS is rocking the ANTM pose here. Tyra would be proud.



Views of Chicago not seen from our apartment for a change!

two birthdays

This man?
Adorable. Hot.


Well, then again....

;-)

And, I should add, taken - lucky Jeph. Above all, though, he's a year older today. Happy birthday Brett.

This man? Also adorable and hot (and not in as many photos, sorry).

And if I have my calendar up to date and correct, he was a year older yesterday. Belated happy birthday David - see you in Philadelphia?

bento boxes

Sunday is our usual night for Yoshi's, but it's hard to maintain that when one of us (Conrad, ) is traveling all over the world. He takes off for Honolulu on Saturday morning, so we dined at Yoshi's tonight. You know, it may have been the first time this month.

Ahhhh, nice night. I'm using tomorrow to work on research at home (honest, I am!), so I didn't feel a need to keep things too moderate. No running or early morning otherwise. Conrad wanted some good wine, so we decided to share a bottle. Kobe was there already, and Laura and Michael and Gil and Rakhael all showed up, too. Lots of conversation to be had.

It wasn't until our meals came out that I remembered the camera, which means I did not think to take a shot of the poblano chile, tempura style. A tasty starter. My apologies. We did get some shots of the bento box style dinners, though.

Sea bass is the main dish on the plate. The little boxes (designed for sake, in fact) held some treats, too, though. I'm not at all a mushroom person, but the oyster mushrooms with a miso glaze were a terrific salad. Lotus root slices added texture to this side dish. My favourite part of the meal, perhaps.


We enjoyed a California Pinot Noir with dinner, and then Fernando offered us glasses of a French wine, normally kind of pricey but opened for some reason and offered to us at a good price per glass. Yum. It brought me back to the memoroy of the fine wines at Citronelle, and that's a very good association to make. I ended the night chatting mostly with Michael about books and the Canadian dollar and more.

Ah. I know I've have more to drink than usual lately, and I'm a little, well, loose. That sounds not quite right, but I'm having to correct the typing on this entry a good bit.

;-)

Forgive the one open-legged pose. I am soon off to bed....

mmmm... fragrant

Conrad still isn't in the door yet, returning home from Richmond. Since I knew that his flight would be delayed, and since I wasn't intending to run tomorrow (need to rest a sore hamstring - no sense overdoing it before the marathon), I decided to take the time to bake a little tonight. This despite getting home from work at almost 7:00.

I found a nice little recipe for a buttermilk fruitcake. My fondness for buttermilk recipes is documented, of course. I also rather like fruitcakes and get miffed at lame Christmas jokes about them. They can be lovely.

This recipe called for prunes and dried apricots. Alas, while I had just enough flour, butter, eggs, and buttermilk on hand (seriously, I went right down to the end of each), I had only dried apricots. Ah well. More of them to replace the prunes, chopped walnuts to replace the chopped pecans, and we were in business.

The recipe calls for over an hour of baking, and that seemed pretty long, but I tested it at the 1:05 mark, and it was still a little underdone. Wow.

In any case, it's out of the oven, out of the pan, and now cooling overnight. I'll send it in with Conrad to his colleagues tomorrow. For now, though, it is suffusing the kitchen with a delightful aroma indeed!

not lazy

So remember what I said about being lazy? Surely the three or four of you who ever look at this blog can recall me nattering on about that last week.

Tonight I was not lazy.

Conrad headed off to the airport, heading to Richmond for a couple of nights. No sooner was he out the door than I had some fennel, shallots, and garlic in a pot, setting the stage for a dinner of fat mussels.They really were very good - I think I could have cooked them in dishwater and the mussels would still have been lovely. How nice that I had a tasty tomato broth instead.
Some salad, some cheese with walnuts and olives, some white wine. I was set. I was full. My pants will fit tight tomorrow.

Worse for my waistline? Dessert. What was that you ask? Numerous finger dippings and pinches of dough as I made two batches of cookies and two cakes.

I played around a bit with a maple walnut cookie recipe I found on Joe's blog (Joe, if you read this, is the dough supposed to be dry? I ended up adding an extra egg to help bind it, and I wonder if I somehow misread how much fat or fluid was otherwise supposed to be in it). The cookies taste quite lovely - I'm a huge fan of maple and walnuts in any case - but I think they aren't a great first attempt.
The other batch are the peanut butter cereal cookies. Again, I think not a great first effort (Joe calls for Cap'n Crunch while I used Peanut Butter Puffins, for example), though I imagine someone at work tomorrow will be glad to have one or two for dunking into coffee.

I'm not posting the cakes. Simple cakes. I started making Karen Barnaby's fresh ginger and buttermilk cake and fond myself having to improvise a little when I found I was missing an ingredient or two. The other is a lemon poundcake from a cookbook by Cindy Pawlcyn. She makes it with almond ground with the sugar, but, lacking almonds I've gone with Pistachios. It will soon come out of the oven. I think I'll cool and wrap both, freezing them for later consumption.

Ugh, I think I've eaten too much sugar tonight.

Happy birthday Allison!

Wow, Allison (or, as Conrad knows you, AllisonAllisonAllison!), have I really known you for 9 years now? Way back when we were young idealistic liberry school classmates? That long since I lived two floors above you on Guilbault, and we would go to "Cat Frur" (to quote Jenn W's pronunciation) or get noodles or see great films (and some dire ones) at Cinema du Parc? Nine years ago tomorrow (Friday) that I made you a batch of white chocolate chip cookies and brought them to class?

Hunh. Time flies. I'm sorry we don't get up to TO as much as we should, but I've managed to see you at least once a year since our time in Montreal, or so it seems.

Happy birthday (and safe travels to Greece to the two of you!)!

And for those who don't know Allison quite so well (and really, you should, because she, like CG, totally rocks), I present Allison in the 21st Century:

2001, one Chicago visit from her and one TO visit from me


2002, in Chicago


2003, two trips to TO for me! Hey, and how did Brenda sneak into one of those shots???





2004, in Michigan for Darth and Heidi's wedding

(We did get to TO in 2005, honestly, but we forgot the camera. Oh wait, was that actually in 2004? Hmmmm.)

2006, here in Chicago

2007, in Auckland NZ

what to call a dish

Conrad asked me tonight if the dinner I'd made had a name. Was it called something? Did some cookbook author assign a description to it?

No, sorry. It was one of those dinners where I start out with a few things and just kind of think, "Hmmm, that might go with it." The serendipity of browsing in the fridge, right?

But no name for this. Three layers of food. Green lentils on the bottom, cooked in chicken broth. Atop that, some lightly caramelized fennel and garlic to which I added some little grape tomato halves, salt, pepper, and a bit of sherry to sweeten it a tad. Atop all that was a chicken "cutlet", fastened with toothpicks (during the cooking) around a filling of crumbled pancetta, more tomatoes, green onions, and toasted bread crumbs. The remnants of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc completed the meal.



A fog, meanwhile, has rolled in off the lake.

You know, I will miss the dramatic storms of summer, I admit. Just the same though, is it too early for me to start playing Christmas music?

return to cooking (halibut)

Conrad was gone for, what, 10 days? And that's when my dirty little kitchen secret comes out:

I'm lazy.

Really lazy.

Can I toss it together in a bowl and have it ready to eat (from the bowl) in less than 10 minutes? It's dinner!

Can I put it all in one skillet and walk away until I can dish it up? It's dinner.

I think it a very good thing I couldn't find the other camera while Conrad was gone.

So tonight I had to blow the dust off my meager cooking skills and prepare dinner for the two of us. It's not pretty, but we treated it as if it were, setting the table up for the two of us.

Halibut with a coating of seasoned cornmeal, served with red onions soaked for a couple of hours in lime juice. Tasty, though, again, not as neatly plated as I'd like. Watching Top Chef makes me insecure at my own cooking, perhaps. Gah, if Dale goes home tonight, I will be distraught.


I didn't make the dessert. It's a leftover piece of apple pie that CG made for when I was over at her place on Sunday. I have to say, that woman has some way with pastry (oh, and filling, to be sure!). It held up fine for tonight, and I hope she will not mind that I shared it with Conrad when the piece was kind of meant for him.

;-)

glimpses from Bucharest

Conrad got home last night after just over a week in Bucharest for work (followed by a few days visiting his cousins in Sweden). Must be nice to be such a world traveler. Or something - I think if you ask him, you'll find that he's a wee bit jetlagged and he's suffering from a miserable cold. Poor guy.

He showed me some photos from Bucharest last night. It's hard to know what to make of the city, not having visited it. I gather that it's not as well-preserved as some other European capitals. That may be euphemistic in some cases, judging from some photos. But they are only photos, and Conrad was there for work and, therefore, had a limited perspective on the city.

Rather than post a range of photos that may or may not suggest a city in the midst (perhaps) of renewal, I want to post a handful that caught my attention. first up, grave stones that have been found in excavation work.




Beautiful, and no, I'm hardly a goth or morbid type. Conrad noted a few unfamiliar languages among them, including what appears to be Greek. It would be fascinating to know what the text tells of.

He also took photos of a few pieces of terra cotta that had been excavated. The detail on the pieces hints of how remarkable the whole of them would have been.


I talked to him almost everyday while he was over there. His meals with colleagues were interesting, or so it sounded. Red wines were served colder than he expected. Meals were very meaty. And then there was the day where he sent me the photo below and wanted to know what the heck it was that had appeared at their meal. Something in aspic, I think? Not sure, not having tasted it.It sounded as though the people at the table were a wee bit afraid of it, and those (including Conrad) who took polite tastes were not big fans. Ah well, different cultures, different dinners....