Suburban nostalgia

I ended up at the Bears/Eagles game Sunday, thanks to my boss's season tickets. Beforehand I tailgated in Soldier Stadium's south parking lot with a co-worker's grandfather, a long-time butcher from a Chicago suburb who's been hauling the largest-motherfucking-grill-I've-ever-seen to Bears' games for the past thirty years. I ate: steak, lambchops, corned beef sandwiches.

We had fantastic seats and I drank too much overpriced beer and cheered on a team I don't know much about and which, of course, lost. It was really fantastic. I rode home in a bus filled with people wearing the same colors and felt that occasionally recurring nostalgia for Friday night games and wood-paneled basements.

About that CSA

Every Tuesday night, a woman from a farm 45 minutes outside Chicago sends me an e-mail about what's been happening that week. She tells me about the deer that are eating the leaves of her beets, the difficulty getting plastic coverings on the greenhouses, the best way to cook carnival squash. She includes, at the end of each e-mail, a list of vegetables I can expect to pick up the following day.

On Wednesday, I (or one of two friends with whom I am splitting this CSA) trek up to the most bizarre restaurant in Chicago, a "raw foods" place in the middle of nowhere, and pick up a box of vegetables that were delivered that morning from the farm. I then have six days to try and cook and eat my way through the vegetables. On the seventh day, a new batch arrives.

Now, I happen to have this fear of the kitchen. I've had it for a good four years or more, and it has resulted in a number of small disasters. I also used to be one of the pickiest eaters of all time. These factors combined are turning this CSA experience into a bit of a comedy.

This was week one. I had never eaten half of the things I received: kale, kohlrabi and wite satin carrots were all new. So far, I've used up the kale, the carrots, the onion and half of the sweet potatoes.
I made sweet potato fries first, which are super easy and one of my favorite fall foods.

Next I made a pasta with the kale and some ricotta cheese. I forgot to cut the kale into small strips before braising it, which means it was less of a sauce and more of a chunky addition to the spaghetti. Despite this, it was pretty damn good.

I also made a carrot soup with the white carrots. I'd show you pictures, but it looked like brown sludge and, unfortunately, tasted a little too sweet for soup. Maybe this is typical for carrot soup in general (I don't really know, honestly), but I'm glad I made such a small batch because it definitely wasn't worth keeping.

Despite still having the alien kohlrabi and a bunch of apples still in my fridge, the next batch came today.There were also brussels sprouts, but we cooked them up with some gnocchi before I even had time to unpack.
This will be my first time cooking with beets (though I've had my share of salads with sliced beets), and I'll probably stain all my cabinets purple, but my kitchen could use some color. The rest of this week's batch is a bit more familiar (except for the crazy squash, but I'm finding that all squash taste alike, to some degree). Figuring out what to do with a dozen apples might be the bigger challenge.

Also, that kohlrabi is still sitting in the fridge.

I lied. A lot happened.

I am intimidated by all the things I've been meaning to say, but haven't. So:

This is a picture of the backs of people who, obviously, sat in front of me. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry spoke at the UIC Forum for the opening of the Chicago Humanities Festival last Thursday. They were light and easy to swallow and I laughed very hard at their banter and their comics and I enjoyed myself and that felt very nice.

These are the backs of more people. Saturday I did a back-to-back culture vulture session, brought to me, again, by the kind people of the Chicago Humanities Festival. First was Ian Frazier who, as you can see, spoke at a church. In fact, it was the Chicago Temple on Clark and Washington, which is a fantastic place and houses the United Methodist Church on the bottom and top floors. The minister who introduced Frazier gave a nice little history of the building, including a joke about how the floors in between the church are filled with lawyers' offices and Clarence Darrow worked there back in the day. "We claim him," he said, "but he never claimed us." (This was maybe funnier in person.)

Regardless, Frazier was very funny. Did I mention the Humanities Festival's theme this year is "Laughter?" This might help explain why everything was so entertaining and nothing was boring or dull. He read passages from some essays and was kind of exactly what I expected of someone who has been contributing to the New Yorker for thirty years. Unfortunately, he did not read from Travels In Siberia, though someone asked him about it in the brief Q&A that followed and he mentioned that the two part series is being turned into a book (I suspect this was its original intention). I am excited for that.

The next stop was a panel discussion on alternative comics. I walked over with a very nice couple from California who come into town every year for this festival, which I found kind of unbelievable, mostly because the weather around here tends to go to shit in early-mid October and the idea of leaving a warm coastal city to come to Chicago past its seasonal expiration date, particularly for a lecture series, is ridiculous. Then again, when I am retired I will probably do seemingly unreasonable things and will hopefully enjoy every second of it.

Matt Groening and Lynda Barry were back, this time with Jules Feiffer and Chris Ware. This was kind of mind blowing. First of all, it was moderated by Michael Miner, who writes for the Chicago Reader and who seems to be a few years short of ancient. His main purpose, in moderating, appeared to be convincing the four cartoonists next to him that the death of alternative newspapers meant the death of comics. They didn't agree as easily as he, I suspect, had hoped, and this created some entertainingly polite miscommunication.

Jules Feiffer was hard of hearing but full of good stories of the Good Old Days, Groening was teased for his super-succesful, possibly-sell-out status in the alt-comics community, Barry was nuts, in the best way, and Chris Ware was so self-deprecating you wanted to hug him. He also finished off the panel with a touching presentation of all the others' work and how it inspired him, etc etc. I really like Chris Ware. He's horrible on stage, but so charmingly awkward and his comics are good.

I meant to go to a Jonathan Lethem lecture on Sunday, but decided instead to sleep in and then sit on my porch and read the newspaper. I don't really like Lethem and it was sixty degrees outside. I think I made the right choice.

I have spent a lot of the past week cooking. I came out of my angst right in time for the start of a weekly CSA, which is turning into a competition to use one batch of vegetables before I have to go pick up the next batch. But more on that later.

Because nothing really happens here

I have been in a rut the past couple weeks-- I've been doing that thing where I come home from work and pour a big glass of something strong and then hide under the covers and stress over small things to distract myself from the big things, like Making Ends Meet or What Am I Doing With My Life. Instead I think: how long will it take the dirty dishes to get moldy? will the mold smell? will my landlord evict me for the sink full of dirty dishes? will I still have to clean them if I get evicted, or can I just leave them behind? what if I never change the light in the bathroom? what if I never change any of the bulbs when they go out? will my electric bill go down to $0? or will they still charge me for simply being here? why doesn't anyone deliver liquor here? if I keep not answering my phone will someone show up to check up on me? will they think to bring me some wine? how will I know they're here if the buzzer doesn't work? and I don't answer the phone?

But really I'm just melodramatic in my anxieties (and everything else) and I am still Functioning and making it to work everyday, even if I'm incapable of getting there on time and require an embarrassing amount of coffee just to start answering the phone. I see people, sometimes, outside of work--and I went to a party! on Halloween! I socialized! But mostly I watch rom-coms on netflix and bite my nails and avoid the kitchen, which is difficult in a studio apartment. Avoiding anything is difficult in less than 400 square feet of space.

Anyway, something clicked on Wednesday and I finally cleaned the sink, took out the trash, picked up the all the dirty clothes and even changed the sheets, did a load of laundry and finally went to change the bathroom lightbulb that blew over a week ago only to realize that the screw to the fixture was stripped and I couldn't get to the damn bulb. Of course, the fixture is glass and it's a good ten feet off the ground so because the chance that I would break it trying to get the screw off and end up stuck on a step stool, barefoot, surrounded by broken glass all over the floor and a fine from my landlord for breaking their shitty light fixture was very high, I decided to instead make the most embarrasing phone call of my solo-living fourteen months and ask the janitor to change my lightbulb. I told him I felt like a fool and he said "I know," which certainly didn't make me feel any better, and then he came Thursday morning when I was out. And then he broke the fixture. And replaced it.

That was a big event for me, this week.

Fall is best for seasonal ales.

I think brewery tours are a much better "Fall Activity" than apple or pumpkin picking. Why go through the hoax of picking pumpkins, usually already cut from the vine, in some picturesque pumpkin patch when you can get them on the side of Fullerton, next to Domino's, from the back of a Vietnam Vet's RV? It's not like you're really going to learn all that much about growing squash by walking up and down the rows of said patch with a group of urbanites (or suburbanites) indulging their kids in an hour long jaunt in the countryside.

Two Brothers was fantastic. I ate a delicious lamb burger with sweet potato fries, drank about seven different kinds of ale, went on the kind of tour that's packed with information and led by someone who knows what the hell they're talking about, bought a couple of growlers to bring home, and then enjoyed some sunlight while sitting through traffic on the ride back to the city. A proper countryside trip. So today, in honor of fall, I cooked a Beef Beer stew (with Goose Island--I'm hoarding my growlers) that's got my entire building smelling like heaven. My poor neighbors.

On culture vultures and poorly conducted interviews.

I was sitting a couple rows behind a pair of loud women on Wednesday in the lecture hall at Harold Washington and listening in on a conversation between them and an older man a few seats away about free “cultural events” around the city. “We’re such culture vultures!” the chubbier of the two women said, and you know—it was the first time I’ve actually thought about that term as more than just a NYMag blog title? Also, it was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone describe herself proudly with a phrase that includes “vulture,” which, for me, only brings back Disney’s token dark scene in the Jungle Book.

Life’s stagnant and dull and I’ve decided to start going to these “Cultural Events” to try and keep myself busy and remind myself that the 9-5 ends at 5 (usually) and my free time can involve something more productive than the dive bar down the street or the videos streaming on netflix. I started Wednesday with Michael Chabon giving a reading as part of Chicago's Book Festival. He read from his new essay collection, Manhood for Amateurs, which helped earn him a double whammy in the NYTimes last weekend. Topics covered included: outer space, Carl Sagan, women's lib, circumcision, his penis, marijuana, sci-fi--suffice to say, I enjoyed myself. He was particularly good during the Q&A that followed--very witty and quick to answer, and mostly avoiding the kind of bullshit "I don't really know what to say about this" answers.

Thursday night, however, was much more...intense. Sherman Alexie came (the Library did good--he too had a positive NYTimes review this week) for an interview with Victoria Lautman, who does some sort of podcast/radio broadcast of author interviews, which is surprising because she was one of the worst interviewers I've ever heard. She embarrased the hell out of herself early on by citing something that turned out to be false and he, understably so, since the soundbites will be attributed to him, called her out on it. She spent the rest of the interview in a huff, making petty remarks like "I guess I'm ignorant and poorly researched, but I'll ask this anyway." It was hysterical to watch this woman make such an ass out of herself, and I'm waiting for her to post the .mp3 on her site to see if she'll edit the hell out of it or not.

I'm attending a lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation this week about the future of railroads. You know how I feel about trains.