Task bar – Page 3 – Lauren Warnecke

Old Town Gets a Fresh New Neighbor

Photo by Bret Grafton, http://photografton.com/

When I was first invited to the grand opening of Plum Market, I pictured a small cafe / grocer much like Panozzo’s or the once lovely City Provisions, which closed earlier this year. I got dressed up to meet new blogger friends from the Chicago Blogger Network under the assumption that I’d be spending a leisurely hour or two perusing, schmoozing, and sipping on free coffee.

Boy, was I wrong.

In spite of massive thunderstorms that moved through overnight I arrived at Plum Market’s inaugural Chicago branch to find a line hanging out the door of a relatively massive grocery store. More akin to Whole Foods than City Provisions, all of Plum Market’s 27,000 square feet of organic goodness were packed to the gills. I never found any of the bloggers, I never got a free coffee (for fear of running out of my free hour of parking waiting for it), and wondered the store in somewhat of a culture shocked daze after spending three weeks in unpopulated Wyoming.

After securing my bag of “blogger income” (i.e. free samples) and navigating the store, a few key points came to mind:

Grocery stores can be very beautiful. Aside from my obsession with piles of fresh food, Plum Market goes a step beyond in it’s stunning design elements, bountiful hot and cold bars, and specialty areas.
People other than hipsters enjoy organic food. I love Whole Foods as much as the next person, but sometimes being waited on by a disinterested dirty hipster is a turnoff. The staff at Plum Market are clean cut, friendly, and very helpful. If they can keep it that way I’m totally sold.
What’s good for Old Town is good for me. Just north of Division and Wells, Plum Market is in an ideal location bordering hoity-toity-ville, gross bar-ville, and homeless-man-hanging-out-by-the-red-line-ville. This market will easily satisfy the residents of Old Town, is walking distance to the Ruth Page Center for the Performing Arts, and hopefully will give the miserable Jewel at Clark and Division a run for it’s money. Though grocery stores don’t necessarily make for great tourist attractions, Plum Market extends Old Town’s charm a little further to the South then the average visitor would be apt to walk, and provides a lovely stop to grab a cup of coffee and a break before turning around and heading back.

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Experience Plum Market for yourself at 1233 N. Wells St. Store hours are 8am-10pm; free parking for 1 hour with validation. For more information, visit www.plummarket.com or @PlumMarket on twitter (#PlumMarketCHI). Plum Market is also on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Low Country Boil on the High Plains

Of the many good moments I’ve had here in Wyoming, perhaps one of the best was this meal. In honor of Father’s Day and Julie’s birthday, our excellent home stay family (and, coincidently, very good friends) created a full-on New England boil. The last time I had a boil was circa 1989 when a bunch of relatives shipped live Maine lobsters for a family reunion to California. In Wyoming a boil is less seafood-y for obvious reasons – quality seafood is not easily found smack dab in the middle of the country. Confidentially this was better (sorry, Grammy).

Low Country Boil

(recipe courtesy of Mandy Love)

3 halved lemons
1/2 tin Old Bay
3 bottles of dark beer
Small potatoes
Kielbasa
pearl onions
Corn cobs, halved
Crab legs
Artichokes
Shrimp (deveined, uncooked)
Mussels

Instructions:

In a massive stock pot, fill about 1/2 or 2/3 with water and add lemons, Old Bay, and Beer to the pot. Bring to a boil.

The quantities of each of the ingredients is somewhat up to you, and how much room you have in the pot.

Cooking times are as follows:

Potatoes, Kielbasa and onions: 10 minutes
Corn, Crab, Artichokes: 5 minutes
Shrimp and mussels: 4-5 minutes

Drain, dump, and dig in. The only thing that makes this more delicious is a dipping bowl of melted butter

Don’t buy “cinnamon coffee”, put cinnamon in your coffee.

Flavored coffees have always bothered me. I don’t mean coffee with flavored syrup – I mean coffee that has some mysterious chemical layer of something-ness that infuses coffee beans to somehow taste like cinnamon, or french vanilla, or pumpkins.

You know me…. I’m a girl who likes to keep things au naturale.

But I get it. Sometimes I don’t just want a plain black cup of coffee either. Instead of buying cinnamon flavored coffee, just add some cinnamon to your coffee. Grounds, sprinkle of cinnamon, brew, enjoy. It works for a french press; it works for a drip brewer. And yes, it’s really that simple.

Ok, cinnamon seems simple enough, but what about those other flavors? Here are some popular flavors, and my solutions for infusing your coffee instead of coating it with chemicals:

Cinnamon: Duh, we already covered this… add powdered cinnamon, or a fresh grated cinnamon stick

French Vanilla: Pinch of raw sugar and a whole vanilla bean

Hazelnut: Grate a few hazelnut shavings into the grounds

Pumpkin: Sprinkle of pumpkin spice

“Christmas”: Mulling spices (go easy on them… a little goes a long way)

I’m all ears for other ideas…

What do you do to add pizzazz to your daily cup?

Creamed Corn is Actually Delicious!

This post comes from my Mom, Cheryl, who I’ve finally coerced into giving up her recipe for creamed corn. I know what you’re thinking… Creamed corn? But there’s nothing quite like this. It’s a staple at my family’s holiday table, and perhaps you’ll add it to yours this year too…

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A little history on this recipe:

When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area my Dad had a favorite restaurant called Gullivers. He would love to gather the whole family there as often as budget and time allowed. It was a meat and potatoes place and designed along the lines of King Arthur’s court. It was a huge beamed room with wooden tables and benches and everything was served on pewter dishes. They served the best prime rib around. All the servers were dressed in period costumes and the food was awesome, the atmosphere loud and bawdy and it was a great fun place to go. As we got older and our family grew, we went to Gullivers less and less simply because it was too hard to get everyone there at the same time and no one had the money. We were all starting our families, buying houses etc. So my dad got the idea to create Gullivers at home!

He could do the prime rib and the Yorkshire pudding and the garlic mashed potatoes, and serve the wine, but he simply could not recreate the best side dish ever. Gullivers made a creamed corn that was to die for. My dad tried and tried and it just wasn’t the same. So he went back to Gullivers and simply asked for the recipe. The manager claimed that they could not give it out. My dad did not give up easily once he got something in his head. So, my dad being my dad, simply charmed one of the female servers and she gave him the recipe!

It became a Clements family tradition that every Christmas my dad served prime rib, garlic mashed potatoes, and Gullivers corn. When I moved to Colorado and wasn’t near my family for the holidays, I asked my dad for the recipe so that I could continue the tradition for my own family. All these years later, it is still a staple at our Christmas table and is so popular that it even shows up at Thanksgiving alongside the turkey. I have now passed the recipe along to my children so that they can continue to carry on the tradition. Literally, every time I make it, I think very tenderly of my dad! I hope you will enjoy it as well!

Gullivers’ Corn

Ingredients:

20 oz frozen corn
8 oz whipping cream
8 oz milk
1 tsp salt
6 tsp sugar
pinch of white pepper

ROUX:

2 tbsp melted butter
2 tbsp flour

Mix corn, cream, milk, salt, sugar, pepper in a sauce pan. Cook on LOW heat until bubbly.
Watch carefully so it does not boil. Cook about six minutes. Longer is ok as long as you keep the heat on LOW.
Make the roux and add in small batches.
Continue to stir to mix in roux and keep the heat low until the mixture becomes thick and creamy.

Makes about six good size servings. I don’t know if it freezes well because I have never had any leftovers!

Thirty pounds of tomatoes was not nearly enough

As I climbed the step stool and stored jar after jar of tomato sauce on top of the cupboards in my tiny kitchen, I gave myself a serious pat on the back:

Well, Warnecke, you’ve done it. You preserved enough tomatoes to make it through the winter, and next spring too. Well. done.

Not really.

A pasta dish and a couple of homemade pizzas later and I’m about half way through my stash before the first snow. I’ve been yearning for the full experience of eating and living seasonally, and seriously want to make a pizza in February without buying a mealy tomato from Mexico. I thought this might be my year, but, alas, it seems not.

I realize that my quest to live like Laura Ingalls Wilder is somewhat impeded by living in a twenty-first century metropolis with 8 cubic feet of outdoor space…

It’s a process, but I’m determined to do it, and this year is apparently part of the learning process in what I actually need to do to get through a winter sans the produce aisle.

Next year I’ll be upping my game. I’m thinking, instead of thirty, I should really be canning more like 130 pounds of tomatoes.

Where Your Food (i.e., your turkey) Comes From

The food chain, by nature, is a brutish, nasty beast.

Bearing witness to it up close may not be something that is for everyone, but for me it was an important rite of passage.

I was a vegetarian for 10 years, vegan for 5, and, for me, I eat meat today for many of the same reasons that I stopped eating it in my late teens.

I will spare readers the soap box for now and make a long story short by saying that I’m delighted that this year’s turkey feast comes not from the Jewel down the road, but from my farmer friends Nick and Becky at Midnight Sun Organics.

I saw these guys while they were babies over the summer during a work-share shift, and since I haven’t been on the farm in several weeks I was slightly surprised to see fully mature turkeys following their master down the lane, like the Pied Piper. Kids these days… they grow up so fast.

I agreed to help “dispatch” this flock because I feel a sense of obligation to participate in where my food comes from, and, for me, that extends beyond just vegetables if I eat more than just vegetables. Knowing that these animals were cared for, had open space and real food, and were raised by my friends, means that they lived quality lives and, as my Mom put it, only have one really bad day.

While I wasn’t able to really help with *every* step of the process – a process I’m deliberately leaving out unless you ask me personally – looking back on the day I’m most distraught about the fact that I’m not really distraught. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard for me to desensitize from the whole thing and just get the job done.

But this is not really that unusual. Everyone who eats meat is, to a certain extent, desensitized. It’s just easier to do when you buy something in a florescent-lit showroom on a styrofoam platter. When your meat doesn’t resemble what it used to be, it’s easier to not think about the violence that occurs before it ends up on your table. Vegetarians make a habit of visualizing where meat really comes from and how it ends up on the plate, and this is often how I stayed diligent…. because, let’s be honest, meat is delicious.

Maybe for you this is not the way you’d choose to spend a Saturday afternoon: driving an hour to a farm to shuck garlic and slaughter turkeys. But the crisp, fresh air, time with friends, learning about my food, and 20 pounds of deliciousness in my freezer made for me, a perfect day.

Photos by Julie E. Ballard

Late Night Catechism… and by catechism, I mean pork roast

Old Faithful strikes again….

Working in the arts often means keeping strange hours. Lately I’ve been getting home from work between 10:30 and 11:30pm. The typical nightly ritual of nine-to-fivers who come home, eat dinner, watch some TV, and go to bed is pretty much out the window in my house since by the time I get home I’ve already eaten dinner. If I’m lucky, I have enough energy to drink a beer and fall asleep on the couch to the first 15 minutes of Project Runway on the DVR… Anyway, my co-worker Tony was gloating on Friday about his ingenuity in reshaping the theater schedule to include more home-cooked meals.

Enter, once again, the magical slow cooker.

I’m all about multi-tasking, and what better way to multi-task than to cook dinner for tomorrow while you’re sleeping! So, instead of the aforementioned 15 minutes of Project Runway I threw the typical meat-veg-liquid combination in the slow cooker and this morning I’m greeted by this:

Friday nights just got a little crazier in my house. I might be doing this often…

Overnight Pork Roast

Ingredients:

Pork Shoulder (with or without bone)
Vegetable of choice (something sturdy like carrots, potatoes, onions, and celery), cut into big chunks
Liquid (water or broth)
S & P, or, a seasoning mix like Adobo

Loosely place the veggies on the bottom of your slow cooker and rest the meat on top. Rub salt and pepper or spice mix onto the pork shoulder and cover with liquid. Set cooker on low to cook overnight and grab a beer.