Posts from — August 2008

Even though today is my official birthday, Saturday celebrations began with breakfast at Meli Cafe in Greektown/West Loop, which, conveniently, is located on the main street of that neighborhood, right where the Greek Festival would be taking place that afternoon and night.

As we walked up from the bus stop, various vendors—of all things from knock-off designer purses and canned preserves to souvlaki and meat grilled over huge beds of coals—were setting up beneath rows of blue-and-white tents.

Meli Cafe was crowded, but we were seated right away. Inside, the blue, white and yellow color scheme fits perfectly with its setting and feels like a bit of the Mediterranean. The menu offers every breakfast you could want—pancakes, French toasts, crepes, eggs of every make and ingredient combination. Meli, the Greek word for honey, is a well-chosen label, as most of the signature dishes at this restaurant use that classic ingredient as a prominent feature. While I typically go with carb-heavy breakfasts, Saturday I chose the Asparagus & Gruyere Omelet topped with hollandaise. It comes with a generous side of baby red, oven-fried potatoes and two thick slices of toast.

Not surprisingly, I went nuts for the savory potatoes, which were seasoned and browned for maximum flavor. The eggs were also very good, though a little tough in the center. And to top my toast, the waitress brought two small glass bowls of fantastic jelly, as well as whipped butter.

All in all, a great breakfast that left me stuffed for three hours of walking (and sweating—gosh, it was hot!) all around Chicagoland. I highly recommend trying it for yourself.

Meli Cafe
Website: http://www.melicafe.com

301 S Halsted
Chicago, Illinois 60661
Phone: 312-454-0748
Fax: 312-454-1397

Hours of operation:
Monday thru Sunday: 6:00AM – 4:00PM, kitchen closes at 3PM

A little over two years ago, about to stand up for a friend’s wedding, I agreed to make homemade biscotti for the favors, to be placed in perfect little white drawstring pouches and given to guests at the reception. There were something like 200 guests—or 100, and each bag got two?—and I’d never made that many biscotti before. I’d never made food for anything so important before, either, so this was a serious undertaking.

I was then, luxuriously, only working part-time while attending grad school two nights a week. My schedule was my own mostly, and so I planned to make some cookies ahead of time, to ensure I’d get everything done. There were three kinds: chocolate-chip anise, double chocolate and lemon pistachio. In the end, the pistachio is what nearly put an end to me.

The memory is crystal-clear: my dad and I sitting on the couch, he with a bowl of shelled pistachios, I with a bag still to crack, a garbage can on the floor between us. We were slowly, methodically working our way through the massive bulk-purchased bag, trying to achieve however many cups of shelled nuts I needed for the batches at hand. I learned a few things that day: cracking and scraping skin off hundreds of pistachios will give you blisters; only inexperienced amateurs would purchase the nuts shelled for that very reason; and, mostly, my dad is the nicest man I have ever known.

Surprisingly then, I did not recoil when I found the following recipe, a new biscotti to try: chocolate pistachio. Can you believe I still had pistachios from two years ago, which had not gone bad? That very same massive bag, the one we’d labored through for hours, had not yet come to an end. I almost threw them out—it had been two years after all—but I tasted a few before baking, and they were delicious. This may garner me criticism, but I figured the heat of the oven would cook out anything else I didn’t notice.

Sitting at the counter, alone this time, I cracked shells and rolled nuts between my hands to remove the dark skins coating the bright green nuts. It was slow. It was laborious. It was symbolic in all the ways you don’t appreciate when your hands are red and tired. Two years ago, I was still a student, a child, and my dad was helping me; now, I’m a graduate, a manager, an independent. I was alone, working through an unpleasant task by myself.

After at least an hour of this, I was done. I didn’t achieve a cup of pistachios as the recipe requested, but I would make do. As in life, one learns to work with what’s available.

The result, after baking and double-baking the dough: a container filled with beautiful, delicious biscotti, with a refined, more subtle flavor than previous batches I’ve made. The pistachios, which filled only half of my total lot, give the cookies a slight salty flavor that works beautifully with the chocolate. These desserts are so easy to make, really, that I always feel a little embarrassed when people praise them. You make biscotti? they say, as if I’m some sort of gourmet. Look, I want to respond, Can you make cookies? If so, you can make these. I promise. They are forgiving and delightful and impressive. Try them.

Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti
Adapted from Martha Stewart’s Cookies

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup pistachios, with shells removed
1/2 cup milk chocolate pieces

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt. In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar on medium until light and fluffy. Add eggs; beat on low speed until well combined. Add flour mixture—you may need to use your hands if the dough gets too grainy/dry—to form a stiff dough. Add chocolate chips.

Transfer dough to baking sheet; form into a slightly flattened log, about 12-by-4 inches in size. Add pistachios to half of the log. Bake until slightly firm, about 25 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes, and reduce oven temperature to 300 degrees.

On a cutting board, using a serrated knife, cut biscotti log into 1-inch thick slices. Arrange, cut side down, on baking sheet. Bake about 8 minutes, until cookies are slightly soft in the center but overall crisp.

Cookies can be stored in an airtight container for up to one week.

In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, he tells the story of in his childhood, going to bed while his parents were throwing parties, unable to fall asleep, waiting for his mother to come say good night to him. Sometimes he’d still be awake when she’d come, and she’d give him a madeleine, that sweet cookie becoming the last thing he’d taste before drifting into dreams. So powerful was the memory of those madeleines, that years later, tasting a bit of one, it was as if he were transported back to his bed chamber, sitting with his mother before bed.

I’ve had my own Proustian moments—you probably have, too. Once, someone in the store was wearing my mom’s perfume, the one she’d worn when I was a child. And just then, in moments, I was at someone’s funeral, waiting for my parents, remembering someone who’d died.

The thing about these involuntary memories is that they hit you without warning, when you’re not expecting them or planning for them. For me, last weekend, they came in the form of a new recipe for chicken.

My grandma was a brilliant home cook, so skilled that she baked stacks of cookies for friends every Christmas, finding her food more appreciated than any other offering. She even ventured into catering at one point, creating tall wedding cakes of impressive beauty. She, like many stay-at-home women of the 1950s and 60s, clipped recipes from newspapers, magazines. She hand-wrote suggestions in her cursive penmanship. And when I visited her, she always cooked for me.

Many of her meals were memorable, but there’s one, her barbeque chicken, that especially stands out. It was tender—so tender—and packed with flavor. She served it with white rice, on clear glass plates, while my brother and I sat on her sofa and watched I Love Lucy.

When she died, my family inherited everything she owned, which wasn’t much: old clothes, boxes of newspaper clippings, a few books, photographs. And, importantly, a few card-sized boxes of recipes. They’re like a biography of a life: the clusters of delicious, unhealthy ingredients transforming into low-cholesterol finds as she developed high blood pressure and other problems. I’ve gone through them all, even organized them with neat dividers, but I’ve never found a recipe for her barbeque chicken.

Until. Last week, I was reading online about the Next Food Network Star contestants, and on Kelsey Nixon’s website, Kelsey’s Kitchen, I spotted a four-ingredient recipe for “Coke Chicken.” The directions couldn’t be simpler: dump these four ingredients (Coke, chicken, BBQ sauce, ketchup) into a slow cooker, and put it on medium heat for 3 to 5 hours. That’s it. Always inspired by the easy, I decided to try it.

While the ingredients baked in the crock pot, I started to notice something wafting into the upstairs hallway: it was the smell of my grandma’s house, it was her barbeque chicken, I was on the sofa watching TV and she was bringing me a clear glass plate.

I know this isn’t her recipe. For one, she didn’t have a crock pot. For two, she didn’t cook with Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, this easy, easy, could-not-be-simpler, impossible-to-mess-up chicken is the spitting image, I’d swear up and down, of my grandma’s dish. Eating it Saturday night was like eating with my grandma, which, when I think about it, was a remarkable gift.

Coke Chicken
from Kelsey’s Kitchen

Ingredients:
Four boneless, skinless chicken breasts
20 ounces Coke
1 cup barbeque saue
1/2 cup ketchup

Directions:
(As promised:) Dump the ingredients into the slow cooker, and cook it for 3 to 5 hours.