Two Fridays in Chicago

And various cooking adventures.

The last full week of September, so like a week and a half ago(ish) we spent Thursday and Friday partially in Chicago. Thursday was Mark’s birthday and his present from me was go to Chicago, see Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me in the Studebaker Theater, and stay in a nice hotel. Get a nice breakfast in the morning and see a Chicago Symphony that we already had tickets for, and go home. So that’s what we did.

Here’s the show we saw, recorded on Thursday and they played it the following Saturday.

We stayed at a Kimpton and that was a nice antidote for the AirBNB in Toronto that needed a little love. Thick towels, nice sheets, spacious room with a closet and drawers for our clothes even though we needed that less with a one-night stay. High ceilings, marble in the bathroom, sparkly floors. It smelled good. See the grand staircase as the overleaf.

We got checked in and went to XOCO for dinner.

In the morning we took the EL up to Damen and went to Dove’s Luncheonette for breakfast. People had been telling me I needed to go there pretty much the last 10 years. After we ate Mark said, “You know the friends who told you to go there? They were right.”

So dinner was part of the Rick Bayliss empire, and breakfast was Paul Kahan.

It was a nice concert too, the soloist was Alice Sara Ott, who plays barefoot, and is doing some big thing with Bryce Dessner and Isabelle Huppert in December. 

Saturday I gad to go to a Willy St Board strategic planning all-afternoon meeting but it was surprisingly not terrible.

Sunday I taught a cooking class at Orange Tree Imports. It was cooking with fall fruits and caramel. The plan was to arrive with an apple caramel upside down cake and a pear tarte tatin, that people could taste, and then they’d make mini cakes to take home. There were supposed to be eight people but we only got five. That made for a pretty relaxed and chill class, though, so I didn’t complain. I even demo’d a caramel fail; the first batch that was supposed to coat their mini pans crystalized and wouldn’t caramelize, so I did it over.

Tuesday Jane P and Steve came over for dinner, longtime Madison residents who moved away right before pandemic, visiting from Oregon. Jane was my boss at iSchool for about 10 years. When we first planned that they’d come for dinner, I thought oh I can roast a chicken and make those good apple mashed potatoes and gravy, really autumnal. Instead, I made a dinner that could have been high summer: pounded chicken breasts sauteed on the stove, corn and green beans roasted with lots of garlic earlier in the day, and spicy Asian noodles. The most fall thing was the pumpkin spice latte bars.

Wednesday I had Jasper and Thursday was Yom Kippur, but I didn’t celebrate, or I suppose in the case of Yom Kippur that should be observe. I did get my Covid and Flu shots, though.

And Friday we went back to Chicago again. We had pizza for lunch at a new place, Zarella’s Pizza, part of the Boka Group that includes Stephanie Izard’s restaurants. I didn’t take any pictures but we had their vodka sauce pie and it was really good. Mark said we could take John and Megan there because it had so many many vegetarian choices. Evidently they tried to walk in one time but it was a 3-hour wait. So maybe we can go back sometime, all of us, with reserves. I didn’t think it was as good a concert – “Pergolesi’s sacred masterpiece, the Stabat Mater, is filled with gorgeous, spine-tingling music that explores the nature of grief, hope and healing. These emotions also course through Barber’s sublime Adagio for Strings and Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers, a high-spirited tribute to Beethoven. CSO Piccolo Jennifer Gunn solos as the mercurial protagonist in Thea Musgrave’s Piccolo Play.” I liked the modern piece by Carlos Simon, and although I didn’t expect to like Stabat Mater because it was 41 minutes with a soprano and mezzo-soprano, but it was surprisingly pretty. The piccolo was well-played but not my instrument – probably too many years of hearing the piccolo player on library mall – and Adagio for Strings seemed inserted oddly with the other stuff.

Saturday was farmers market in the AM, then we went to see Roger McGuinn. It was a fun show of songs and stories, similar to this setlist from Oct. 1, with a few differences. He did Rolling Down to Old Maui much earlier in the show, and closed with May the Road Rise to Meet You. And he did Joni Mitchell’s Dreamland, that he actually recorded before she did, because evidently he wrote the music. It’s from Joni’s not-very-good in most people’s opinion album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, where she appears in blackface for the album pictures, her alter ego Art Nouveau. But that’s all Joni and we were talking about Roger. I would have liked more Byrds songs but afterall it was Roger’s stories not the Byrds. Stu Levitan’s photos are better than mine because he paid the big bucks for a front row seat. And Atwood Music Hall is nice and spacious when it’s not a standing only sold out show.

It’s still 77° at 6:30 PM and getting dark and I just heard the AC come on. But tomorrow it should be cooler. Going to go watch PBS shows and ignore the news for awhile.