Anyway, in an effort to fight off the illness we both can't shake, we have been eating a LOT of chicken soup in this house lately. Like 3 big batches in the last week and a half. And though I do adore the tallasiandude's recipe for chicken vegetable soup, there's apparently only so much I can eat at a go. So I decided I would make chicken pho for the next batch, and see if I could pull it off.

I googled (thanks to Andrea Nguyen's post for the correct Viet characters which I shamelessly copied and pasted, and to Steamy Kitchen's post for the recipe I followed), ran out for ginger and bean sprouts, and had at it while I was working today.

It came out OK, but it wasn't even CLOSE to flavorful enough. It smelled absolutely dreamy, but the taste wasn't anywhere near that heady, strong, savory luxury that I love in pho ga.

I could maybe put in more onion, but really I followed the recipe almost exactly. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't hack up the chicken with a cleaver, therefore depriving my broth of all the bone marrow. Steamy Kitchen makes a point of going on at some length about the marrow and what it adds to the broth. But to be completely honest, I am not the most coordinated girl and I am scared of cleavers. I get the willies watching the guys in the Chinese market hacking stuff up, and those guys know what they're doing.

Maybe I can get a really sharp cleaver, and hold down the object to be cloven with a long meat fork or something.

Because even though it was certainly edible and warming with lime and sriracha added to it, the pallidness of my phở gà just made me sad. Something has to be done, at least until someone opens up a Vietnamese restaurant within 5 miles of my house. Anyone? Anyone?

But the dark underside of all this sunny joy is the food one eats while at such an event. We brought some hardboiled eggs and some dried cherries and almonds, but that's about all we could manage on short notice and without checking luggage. We had no car, so we were limited to what we could walk to in between classes, which was basically a Walgreens and a constellation of chain restaurants. There were lecture-style classes during lunch, so there wasn't much option to go out for lunch if you were interested in the class topic.

We bought some Wonder Bread, Skippy Natural and Squeezable Smucker's Strawberry at the Walgreens, so we could have PB+J for breakfasts along with the eggs. The PB had palm oil and sugar added to it, and the J had hi fructose corn syrup in it, and the squish bread was basically just a puffy cushion to keep the sticky stuff off your fingers. Between all the extra sugar and the total lack of fiber, these PBJs tasted OK but made us feel kind of icky. We supplemented with milk, eggs and/or that trail mix, but it wasn't enough.

We ate hotel food, hot dogs and cold ham sandwiches for lunches, and one buffet breakfast of fruit, juice, pale "wheat" toast and bacon. Not much better, frankly, especially when one is dancing for hours on end burning calories like a maniac. The gala dinner buffet is just wretched, and I need to remember next year to email friends ahead of time and plan ahead to skip it and go out to the Thai place hidden away in the nearest strip mall instead.

And then in the airport, I needed to eat a full meal so as not to feel barfy on the airplane, which meant that against my better judgement I ate a chicken quesadilla and a buffalo wing. There was supposed to be beans and corn, but there were about 5 of each wedged in with the vast chunks of spongy industrial chicken. I was full enough to fly safely, but I felt so nasty the rest of the night. I couldn't even eat the delicious pea pod stems and dried scallop fried rice we bought on the way home from the airport.

The point of all this is to say that we both became highly aware of the way we felt physically after even a few meals of completely industrial, commonplace American food. My position on such things is primarily intellectual and hedonistic, generated from equal parts desire for maximum deliciousness and desire to have clean, healthy inputs. I am no food snob, I love me some Kraft dinner and flavor-crystal-encrusted potato chips. But usually I eat those things once and then revert right back to what I usually eat. This weekend there was no respite, just meal after meal of it, and it felt BAD.

It brought home the reality of the present food supply in America, and exactly why public health has gotten to the state it has. It wasn't just my intellect aware of this, it was my whole body telling me that it was displeased with the fuel it was getting.

I have plenty of access to unquestionably good food, some of it from my own back yard. I have a car and enough money. I travel. That's nice for me, and nice for the rest of the comfortable folks in Newton who love the farmer's markets and Whole Foods. I'm glad my access to organic foods, especially meats, is increasing, but the real trick is getting actual FOOD into the hands of people who for whatever reason are trapped in the mainstream supply chain.

I should be able to buy unadulterated peanut butter in the Walgreens. I should be able to get vegetables and unantibiotic-ed beef at Red Robin. And the chicken in my gala hotel dinner should not have the texture of cotton balls.

This morning in my inbox I found a few different links about just this sort of subject. There's a new movie out, Food, Inc., which hopefully will get a mainstream buzz like some of the global warming ones did a few years ago. Michael Pollan is making the rounds, and some legislation is being introduced focused on school lunches. And it's these school lunch issues that are the scariest to me. I knew that there was a bunch of junk being served in cafeterias, and I knew that kids prefer junk foods, but I didn't realize that the latter was at this point driving the former. I knew that kids didn't know how vegetables grow or where hamburgers come from, but I didn't realize they couldn't recognize lasagne as something good to eat.

That's TERRIFYING.

Onigiri = rice ball in Japanese, and for some reason the word musubi also means the same thing. Why there are two words i have no idea. For equally obscure reasons, people in Hawaii mostly use "musubi" especially for the spammy ones. ANYWAY. I have been making rice balls like a maniac lately, I think out of longing for the warm shores of Hawaii.

I make my rice according to JustHungry's instructions, and I will say that you should follow these instructions to the letter. I tried a couple times to be lazy and just make short grain rice the same way I make jasmine rice, and it came out a grotesque sticky mushy mess. Be ye warned. If you sprinkle in a 1/2 tsp or less of salt per cup of rice, you can be lazier about salting the rice when you make the rice balls (see below).

The spicy mayo salmon filling I made up based on a similar spicy-tuna recipe in my Hawaiian recipe book, and is something along the lines of: 1 can salmon (ideally wild for best omega 3 nutrition), with condiments to your taste -- about 1 dollop of mayo, a big squirt of sriracha sauce, a dash of chile oil, and a large sprinkling of japanese red pepper powder (could probably substitute cayenne or hot paprika). You can always make it spicier, so start small.

If you have a rice ball mold, it's easiest, but you can do with any teacup or small bowl. Look around on justhungry.com or justbento.com for instructional post. I made mine in the tops of these adorable little things, which both makes perfect onigiri and fulfills your daily requirement of Cute with a capital C. Thanks to Maki for finding the boxes! Basic idea is line bowl/cup/mold with saran wrap, dip your fingers in a bowl of water and spritz the wrap, then sprinkle a little bit of salt (skip if you salted the rice and are lazy). Put in about half the rice you want, enough to loosely cover the bottom of the vessel. Spoon in some filling -- not too much, or it won't be fully enclosed by the rice, but I do use more than commercially made onigiri do, and i spread it around the whole width of the rice ball, leaving about 1/4" border. You can press down on the filling and rice a little bit with the spoon at this point to start compressing it. Add the other half of the rice on top. Wet your fingers to keep the rice from sticking to you, and pat the rice into shape. Cover the rice with the edges of the saran wrap and compress it into a tidy shape. Sometimes the best thing to do is gather the edges and twist, to tighten up the whole works at once. In any case, you are now done.

You can leave it wrapped up and take it that way for lunch, or you can transfer it to a cellowrapped piece of nori and tape it closed and carry it that way. Whatever. If you like the nori, but can't find the fancy pre-wrapped stuff, just buy sheets of it, cut to size if necessary, and bring it along in a separate baggie, or tucked in outside the saran wrap, and wrap the rice ball in it when you are ready to eat it. It will only stay crunchy about 20 seconds after being in contact with the rice. (Sometimes nori is labeled laver, especially in white-folks markets.)

You can do them in lots of shapes: round balls, flat rounded triangles like I did, logs, etc. -- just mush the rice around inside the wrap into shape. 1 cup of sushi rice made according to justhungry method made the 3 filled balls + 1 smaller ball that I brought last night to our chip tasting party.

Other fillings: tuna salad, ume/shiso paste, pickles of any kind (pat dry), canned fish of any kind, salted fish (even lox pieces), or pretty much whatever is soft, dry and flavorful enough to go in there and not make a mess. You can also mix in dried or small stuff directly to the rice, and just make a ball out of that rather than filling plain rice -- you can mix in furikake, or peas, or finely chopped vegetables or spice mix, whatever.

Of course I made some Spam musubi too. The recipe in that link is pretty good and quite detailed, but bear in mind that you don't need the furikake unless you like it, and that you can put the Spam on the bottom, top with rice, and then wrap in nori the way I did (and the way it is on Kaua'i). Also the teriyaki sauce is optional, it can be just fried Spam.

And I do suggest salting the rice while cooking for this application (1 tsp kosher salt per 2 cups rice). 2 cups sushi rice & 2.25 cups water, made according to the justhungry method, will be the perfect amount for 1 can of Spam. No need to saran wrap if you're gonna just eat it on the spot, but to transport, wrap in saran wrap, smooth off the corners, and eat within the day. If you put extra in the fridge, just microwave for 45 seconds to un-harden the rice. The musubi mold does make this really easy, but if you don't have one, use same principles of compress-rice-through-saranwrap as above to get the general log-shape. Or try using the Spam can, as one of the commenters suggests on that instruction post. My Spam musubi above is cut into four slices, for serving as an appetizer at a party.

For the pickles, slice cucumber and radish (daikon is good if you have it, regular radishes tint everything a pretty pink, you can do cuke alone, radish alone, or whatever... carrots are nice with radish if you feel like it, etc.) and sprinkle with kosher salt so that every piece gets a little salt. Then stuff 'em into a container, shake 'em around and let 'em sit for a while. If you're in a rush, you can just add the vinegar right away, but i think sitting for 30 mins with the salt makes them nicer. Anyway, pour rice vinegar into the container so the veg are almost covered. Let sit 30-60 mins. After that, good to eat and will keep in fridge for at least a week. To vary, you can add a tsp of sugar and/or chili pepper and/or 1 or more sliced garlic cloves to the mix.

Go forth and eat delicious Japanese lunches!

We both seem to have developed a preference for lychee + liliko'i + li hing mui syrup on the ice, with vanilla ice cream underneath, or mac nut ice cream if it's available, and azuki beans too if the mood strikes.

Aoki's on the North Shore of O'ahu is so far the absolute pinnacle of the shave ice arts that we have tried. Holy cow. Absolutely perfect in every way. Superfine ice, really fresh, true-tasting syrups, good quality ice cream. yum yum. Someday when I have a couple of extra hours I am sure I will slog the line at Matsumoto's next door just to try it, but there's really no point. I can waltz right up to the counter at Aoki's and be drowning in yum before any of those poor suckers get through the door at Matsumoto's.

At Aoki's we had vanilla ice cream, azuki beans, and liliko'i, lychee and li hing mui syrup. NOM NOM NOM.

And lo, it was good.

Sweet, chewy, chocolatey-bitter, and solid in both heat and salt. Hell yes. YUM.

So this morning, when I found myself with the remains of a roast chicken in the refrigerator, and a gray, rainy, cold spring morning making me shut all the windows and think happy soup thoughts, I thought maybe I could make a chicken-based pozole instead of the traditional pork-based one.

I consulted Rick Bayless's recipes for ranchero chicken soup and pork pozole rojo, and came up with the following method.

Pick the chicken carcass, saving the meat for the soup later, and put it in the stock pot with one onion (peeled but left whole and thrown in also), some peppercorns and a teaspoon of Mexican oregano, then bring to a boil and simmer as usual for the few hours it usually takes.

Put the posole corn into a pot with about 4 quarts of water (I used my larger saucepan) and a head of garlic, cloves peeled and halved. Bring this to a boil, then reduce heat for a low simmer, partially covered. Rick says 5 hours for dried corn, so that's what we'll do. (Actually it took more like 7 or 8, but whatevs.)

Soak the guajillo chiles in hot posole water until soft, then puree... strain into corn and liquid, then put in broth, add salt, and simmer 1 hour. Put the pulled chicken in. Top with radishes, cabbage or lettuce, chopped onion, tortillas or tortilla chips, lots of lime to squeeze in, and maybe a li'l guacamole.

The way all this relates to food is that little Mr. Ball-of-Fire also loves to eat. When he's not playing, he's crying in hopes we'll give him some more food. But he's a little bit, how should we say, well-upholstered already, and the shelter folks said we should put him on a diet to keep him healthy.

So we bought the light kibble, and we're giving him only the amount it says for weight loss in a cat his size -- which of course means he acts like we are starving him to death at all times. His bowl is always empty, because when food goes in, he macks it down as fast as he can. If we drink milk or eat something meaty, he's all over that like white on rice.

And I totally feel his pain, because I know just how much dieting sucks when you love to eat.

But the one good thing about it is that by being in charge of keeping our little tons-of-fun on a diet is that it keeps me in mind of my own need to show a little restraint. And that coinciding with the onset of spring and the return of vegetables may just be good for me. Let's hope so!

The place in question is Flat Patties, a spot in the Harvard Square Garage that appears to be run by the same people who run Felipe's Taqueria, which I've heard good things about but never yet tried. The folks behind the counter are friendly, and the burger is good, but in our highly unofficial head-to-head competition with Four Burgers in Central Square, they went down hard.

No contest. That Four Burgers burger is pretty damn close to In-N-Out, actually, and has tons of burger flavor. I didn't even put ketchup on, and I ketchup the hell out of burgers as a general rule. I have no idea what J. Kenji Alt was smoking that day, when he called it flat and flavorless.

In fact, that was the main gripe I had with the otherwise perfectly nice Flat Patties burger: it lacked flavor, even with Swiss and avocado and "special sauce". I ketchuped the thing, then put on relish.

Given that Four Burgers also had better fries, Coke Zero in the fountain, AND sources their meat from crunchy granola safe-meat farms, it's a no brainer for me: the superior burger can be had at Four Burgers. If you're in Harvard Square, by all means have a Flat Patties, but for the closest thing to In-N-Out, you gotta go one more stop inbound on that Red Line.

Anyway, I was hungry and had a car and couldn't think where to go, so I thought about it for a minute, to try and remember what I really, really missed about Chicago food that was a) not Perez, b) not Blackbird, and c) vaguely might be sort of near or on the way to Skokie. And then I remembered my last trip to Hecky's on Halsted, which wasn't really a Hecky's despite the desperate baldfaced lies to the contrary from the manager.

The One True Hecky's is now the one in Evanston... a 10 minute drive from Skokie. Yay!!

I just finished off most of a half chicken and some cole slaw, and it was as dreamy as I remember it, just as spicy and tangy, the meat just as moist, and perhaps even smokier than the Halsted shop's. I scored a bottle of the sauce to bring home, to tide me over till the next visit -- hurray for having to check luggage anyway!

And I think I might head back tomorrow night, to get some rib tips... the adorable cashier kid at Best Buy busted into the hugest grin when I told him I was headed to Hecky's, and told me that the rib tips are at least as good as the chickens. I personally have never gotten past the chickens, so I think it's worth a second trip while I am trapped here in the northern burbs. In the name of scientific research and the greater good of humanity, of course.

(Update: the rib tips are pretty good. lots of bone and connective bits, with little nibbles of meatiness and the usual sauce. perfectly worthwhile, but I still prefer the extraordinary chicken.)

Kaua'i is perhaps the most awesome vacation spot on earth. I didn't expect Hawai'i to be like this; I had all the usual stereotypes of Waikiki in mind, and the mostly-rural but insanely-perfect vibe of Kaua'i surprised me when we were here in 2008. We loved it, of course. And once we took a surf lesson we loved it even more and couldn't wait to come back.

This trip we were surf-focused from the get-go, and we surfed every day except for the day we arrived, the day we flew interisland, the day we hiked Na Pali, and the day tallasiandude was down with the 24-hour flu. We are still noobs, but we are a lot better than we were when we started -- we are surfing on 10' 2" epoxy boards instead of the 12' soft-tops, so we are all proud of ourselves and stuff.

But you people want to know what we ate.

Kaua'i has some amazing food, and some that's less amazing. I was less dazzled by it all this trip, and have faced the fact that lots of Kaua'i's restaurants are simply OK... but that doesn't change the fact that I love island-style food in general, and will always go back to Kaua'i with nothing but joy.

Here's the rundown.

As is now our habit, our first stop was Hamura's Saimin. Having now eaten saimin in several other places, we know for sure that this stuff is worthy of its reputation. We got the special saimin with all its goodies -- won ton, egg, roast pork, veg, spam, kamaboko -- plus a couple bbq sticks and a slice of liliko'i chiffon pie. The chicken stick beats the beef stick by a nose, and that pie is nom nom nom with its crispy crust, cool whip topping and whispering passionfruit foam.

Another night, we tried a pho shop in Kapa'a, in the same little mall as the Long's and Safeway. Decent pho and bun, nothing crazy good, but light and enough to scratch the viet-food itch.

After our first day of surfing, we made tracks immediately for Duane's Ono-Char Burger in Anahola, and ordered the same exact thing we had last trip: a Local Girl burger plus an Aloha Special for me and an avocado-cheddar burger and a vanilla shake for tallasiandude. A Local Girl burger is teriyaki sauce, mayo and a pineapple slice, with melted swiss. An Aloha Special is possibly the most refreshing beverage in creation, being papaya-pineapple-banana plus crushed ice.

We hit up the Kapa'a farmer's market and scored some tropical fruits: ice cream bananas, scarlet papaya, rambutan and mangosteen. The ice cream bananas are supercreamy and mild, and the scarlet papaya (i am pretty sure i have the name misremembered) was much sweeter and less funky-smelling than regular papaya. The rambutan and mangosteen were not as good as the ones we got in Hilo last trip, not as sweet and the rambutan didn't peel away from its seed properly so every bite had icky hard stuff on it. We still ate it all up happily.

We went back to Genki Sushi in the Kukui Grove mall. It wasn't quite as awesome as I remembered it, but I think that's because we were definitely there at a weird off hour and they weren't making much fresh stuff until we started asking for it from the waitress instead of plucking it off the conveyor. The garlic salmon and garlic ahi are still completely nom, and we had a hot-dog maki that was actually hilariously great with its dyed-red dog and egg filling and furikake sprinkle, just one of many local foods that should not be delicious but IS.

We also noticed that the Kukui Grove mall has mangosteen trees growing at the end of every parking lot row. How awesome is that?

Every morning on the drive up to Hanalei Bay to surf, we stopped at the Menehune gas station quickie-mart and bought spam musubi and a coffee for me, because I couldn't bring myself to cope with the cottage's coffee maker. These musubi were not as transcendent as the ones we used to get on the south shore, being much less teriyakied, but they were still pretty good and I have to tell you that rice+nori+spam is one of my very favorite ways to start a day. Any rice ball with filling, really, will do the job, but there is a beautiful everyday poetry to what spam becomes in this context. Just make sure you buy them before 10am (before 9am on a weekend) or they're gone for the day.

We tried out the Korean BBQ place just north of Wailua, and found it to be pretty good, not the sort of traditional Korean food we're used to but a distinct island-flavored variant. There was macaroni salad, though it was hard to find any actual macaroni amid the potato and mayo. There was also something called meat jun, which is thin slices dipped in egg and pan fried. The kalbi was a bit sweeter than I'm used to. It was all tasty and tallasiandude had a butterfish with stir-fried vegetables that really hit the spot. My combo plate also had a very nice fried mandoo and some tempura shrimp that were crispy enough but not the freshest shrimps ever.

I got some ahi-limu poke and spicy ahi poke at Dolphin Fish Market in Hanalei, and some tako (octopus) kimchi poke at the Foodland in Princeville. The tako was tangy and good, and the ahi pokes were also good but had a weird whiff of chlorine about them. Not sure what to make of that.

One day we were surfing later than usual and were too hungry to go off looking for a restaurant, so we took Nephi's advice and got kalua pig tacos from Pat's Taqueria truck parked near the beach at Hanalei Pier. Damn, that's a hell of a taco. Moist smoky pork shreds (theoretically baked in a pit but I don't care if he used a crock pot, that shit's delicious) with some cabbage and tomatillo salsa and guacamole on a couple of corn tortillas. Life does not get better than eating one of these on a surfing beach with a cold guava nectar or passionfruit orange drink.

We got some shave ice at Wishing Well's truck in Hanalei. Tallasiandude tried some condensed milk on top of his here instead of ice cream, which was nice but I think if I am going for a dairy experience with my ice I'd rather have the ice cream. Wishing Well had really good mac nut ice cream, and we enjoyed our treats, though I think that some of their syrups taste a little fake. I think I had liliko'i + coconut + li hing this time, and the coconut was what really seemed chemically to me, especially when compared with some other shave ice we had on the trip (*cough* Aoki's *cough*). But that's a different post.

I walked over there from the hotel -- I almost didn't even go for dinner because by 8:30 I had only the barest imaginings of hunger after the yummy carne asada plate I had for lunch at Perez (wooooo!). I had what seems to be my usual table, 4 or 5 in from the window along the wall, and I had a very congenial waiter, willing to indulge my nerdy questions and goofy enthusiasm.

The amuse-bouche was half a shrimp, topped with a mix of queso fresco and chives, in a very mild cilantro cream and topped with a fried shaving of trumpet mushroom. I liked the mushroom, and could happily eat them by the handful if they were sold as a snack, and the shrimp and toppings were good too, if not as exciting as some amuses I have had at Blackbird.

My starter was a duck tartare with dried strawberries, A1, and tater tots. I think there was supposed to be celery but I didn't notice any. Apparently they cook the duck at 104F for 4 hours, then mix it with a duck-skin aioli, which gives it a creamy effect so it sticks together like real tartare. The A1 sauce was gelatinized so it would not pool out on the plate, but rather stand up in little piles. There were reconstituted dried strawberries and freeze-dried pink strawberry shards, 3 tater-tot cubes, and a strewing of microgreens. (For some reason, the mania for garnishing with microgreens bothers me not at all, while the 90s-esque garnishing of plate edges with chopped whatever makes me homicidal. Go figure.) This dish sounded so off the wall that it had potential to be awesome, and who can resist a tater tot?

The tots were indeed excellent, and the duck was delicious alone and with the strawberries, and with very small bits of the A1. Too much A1 nuked the taste of the duck, but carefully deployed it did work with the flavors of the rest of the dish.

But it was the rabbit and turnips that really blew the doors off. It was billed as roast rabbit with blood sausage, baby turnip, sourdough, pickled ramps and mustard. Very nice for spring, delicious when well executed, and just the thing for me, who LOVES turnips and ramps. Sounds like a straightforward Germanic-American sort of dish, yes?

And so it seemed at first glance, and even at first bite. The turnips were shaved on a mandoline and served with a braise of their greens. The mustard was presented as a dried, crispy tuile stuck into the slices of rabbit. But then I noticed that the microgreen garnish, which had been innocuously flavorless on the duck, was in this case micro-shiso, giving a distinctive floral twist to things. And then I noticed that the exquisitely delicious sauce soaking the bread had a familiar flavor to it... something I'd eaten recently... and then I realized the sauce was based on dashi. And then it all fell into place: shiso, dashi, turnips, pickles, mustard -- all of these are iconic Japanese ingredients, even while turnips and mustard and pickles are also standard mittel-european ingredients. The whole thing had been reimagined as a Japanese-flavored dish.

And it was perfectly done. Every bite was delicious, every combination of flavors worked, everything serving together to create a perfect, harmonious whole, made just that much better by the wit of the presentation and the genius of the idea.

I was so giddy over this that I ended up ordering dessert too. I'd been tempted by the pear-cider donuts with hazelnut ice cream, and distracted by a pineapple-rhubarb sorbet with dark-chocolate hazelnuts, but I got talked into the banana cremeux with Gosling's rum/milk chocolate and molasses ice cream and a few bits of crisp-caramelized banana. I didn't regret it.

(yes, that is dill as the garnish, and no, it didn't work with the flavors. i tried, but it just looked pretty.)

FAIL.

OMG, I haven't had a restaurant meal this bad in years. YEARS. Shudder. I am eating Trader Joe salty chocolate almonds right now to get the taste of old, stale, jarred garlic out of my tongue.

Breadbasket consisted of a pretzel roll and a sesame roll, which seemed promising, but they were both pretty bland and probably either parbaked or industrially sourced. Oniony butter wasn't too bad. Both were about what I was expecting, to be honest, and so I wasn't prepared for the next two dishes.

A roasted asparagus salad with shaved parmesan and a roasted-garlic lemon sauce had nice enough asparagus, fresh and tender and not too charred, and a boatload of cheese and chives, but the sauce was somehow off. I couldn't quite place it, but it tasted funny and detracted from the otherwise perfectly acceptable asparagus and cheese. In retrospect it was probably the garlic...

...because the second dish had the same problem, 10 times worse. A tepid, faintly gelatinous braised veal cheek without much flavor was on a bed of "caramelized cauliflower puree" -- which should be delicious -- that was so nasty I couldn't bring myself to eat it. Not only was it reekingly sharp with the stale jarred garlic flavor, but it was strangely pasty and runny at the same time, overprocessed to a deranged smoothness. There was a "parmesan broth" that didn't manage to make much of a dent in the overall effect of EEEEEW.

I finished the salad, leaving as much sauce behind as possible (and those of you who know me know that i will lick sauce from plates at the least provocation), and I finished the veal but couldn't do more than a few forkfuls of the cauliflower, and that honestly only to make sure I'd accurately identified the nature of the ick.

Good grief. This place has been open well over a year, I can't imagine how they can still be this far beyond the pale. At 7:15pm on a Monday, the place was deserted, and the handful of diners were all hotel guests from what I could overhear. No wonder, really, given that Chicago has plenty of good restaurants and lots of them even within walking distance -- but I figured at worst I'd be getting a pedestrian but adequate meal, not the unmitigated horror that arrived. How can it stay open?

We also ate a lot of tacos.

We didn't really know the city and we really didn't know what was good nor did we have much time to find out. And we didn't want to eat big heavy meals right before jumping on the dance floor. So we went with Adalberto's Mexican Food, on the highway en route, which looked appropriately open and divey. Everything was good, though the horchata was almost certainly out of a bottle or a mix, but the carnitas taco was a treat. They just scoop out refrigerated carnitas straight onto the griddle and ladle over a little oil... and it comes out succulent and crispy, ahhhh. And the taco is huge, full of pico de gallo and lots of unexpected guacamole and overflowing with meat. The adobada is also worth a try, in a taco or a torta. Yums. Cheap, fast, yummy and open late.

The last afternoon we had a little free time, and I finally remembered that San Diego is famous for FISH tacos, which I love when properly executed. So we did a little googly-moogly and found a recommended place not too far from our hotel.

El Zarape is right smack in the middle of a gentrified strip of University Heights, but fear not, them fishy tacos were very very tasty. The scallop taco was OK, interesting and good once you put on a bunch of lime juice, but the fish taco is for sure the draw. Super-crispy batter fried fish with shreds of cabbage and a light creamy sauce. Stays crunchy till the very end! Excellent alone, or with a spritz of the lime, or with a li'l droplet of the avocado-cilantro salsa. That salsa was awesome, and I drank the last bit out right out of the cup when I ran out of things to dip into it. Don't bother with a plate meal, the rice and beans are meh at best -- get chips and guacamole and as many fish tacos as you feel like eating. Just the ticket to fuel a drive up to Balboa Peninsula and a night of dancing to one of the best swing jazz bands in the land. Wheeeee!

(pictures coming -- i left the cable in the car and we won't have intertubes while on kauai... i'll post 'em as soon as i can!)