Birthday at Home

I flew home to Chicago last Thursday to spend the weekend at home for my birthday. I ate a lot and caught a bad cold. Let's mostly talk about the food, ok?

Straight from the airport Mom and I went to Los Barrilitos, a taqueria we already knew served spectacular tacos al pastor at rock bottom prices. Best tacos al pastor east of the Mississippi!

I had read about another place right down the street from Los Barrelitos called La Chaparrita, so went down and had a look. And a bite. Delighted to find the establishment very much dedicated to Santa Muerte, the official unofficial Mexican saint of death.

But this isn't just a taqueria interior decorating blog! It's important that we talk about the tacos at this taqueria. As you may see from squinting at the menu, most of the taco meats at Chaparrita are off cuts—brain, tongue, sweet breads, tripe—even in my strongest moments, I'm still a little cowardly about those sorts of things. But I had read and read about how great the crispy tripe was at Chaparrita, so I got one (and an al pastor, and a cesina) and GUESS WHAT. It was the BEST TACO I've had all year! So, so crispy, like the edges of a smashed burger, with bits of fat here and there. It only tasted delicious and I'd eat a dozen more! Other tacos were very good, too. 

That night we had chicken curry casserole for dinner. A classic.

Friday Mom and I went to lunch at this place Quiote in Logan Square that has clearly got Rick Bayless's Xoco in its cross hairs. We over-ordered (that's all I did on this trip) and got the torta ahogada, a mollete, a pair of tacos, and a bowl of pozole. Leftovers were finished on Sunday.

Back home to Oak Park, we went and saw the Lost City of Zed and even had time to walk to the theater.

That night we had dinner at what we had been calling "Dos Urban Cantina" but was actually probably "Dos (urban cantina." The waiter let me order way, way too much food. I don't know what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking! But a number of the dishes were awfully good.

Trio of dips, the pumpkin seed hummus was the stand out to me.

Deep fried tamal bites

A raw scallop dish. I didn't check the tables temperature on raw scallops. I ate 90% of this dish myself.

A chorizo tlayuda. Good.

Esquites. Great.

Sweet corn tamal, great. Very great.

Carnitas. Good.

Mushrooms with mole. Great.

Carne Asada with mushroom pico de gallo. Very great.

Saturday, in no condition for lunch, I took a trip to the Art Institute courtesy of sister Emily. I hadn't been there since before it had opened its new modern wing.

But before the modern wing, the old stuff. Starting with the Tiny Rooms.

I went into the big paper weight exhibit as a laugh

But joke was on me when I saw this one of flowers and bees

There was an exhibit about a Brazilian guy

In it there was the room made of rooms with colors?

Here we are inside the yellow/orange room. There was complimentary orange juice in there, too.

A statue of a statue inside a statue

Looking out the window

Lucky me

Then I walked through a pretty decent Chicago rain, past our Chicago outdoor art, up to Gibson's, where we were having dinner that night.

This was my dinner. the 22oz WR Chicago Cut. It was great, but I tried a piece of Mom and Dad's strip, and was like "ooh, I think this has a better char on it" but Mom had a piece of my steak and said "That's what I thought about yours." Just goes to show that the char is always darker on the other side of the table. There was other food on the table, like vegetables and potatoes and shrimps, but let's just keep the focus on the beef.

Then we saw My Fair Lady at the Lyric. The lobby was a panic, the show was good. Henry Higgins was a spaz.

Sunday. My birthday. I blew out all the candles! And look at this great card from Emily.

I was supposed to fly back to New York Sunday night but my cold was so bad and my flight was delayed so I just rescheduled for Tuesday to try to get a little better before I traveled. And to take advantage of being in a house with multiple rooms to go between and do laundry and such.

Tuesday Mom and I stopped at Jarabe on my way to the airport because this place is a quadruple-fire emoji rated excellent restaurant. 

Chilaquiles. This photo throws off the scale, or maybe it's the giant crema squiggle. This is actually an unfinishably large plate of chilaquiles.

A machaca breakfast taco and a steak breakfast taco. The machaca was bomb.

Mollete. Can't take the Quiote mollete seriously at all once you had this.

And then there I was at Midway, on my way back to New York, where I saw a Wheaton service dog. So now I've seen it all.

March & April 2017

Nothing says "Blog Content" like going through your photos for any good or interesting pictures you might have from the last month. Or two. This isn't everything that happened, but it is everything that I took a picture of and thought : "Hey, not such a bad picture."

On March 2nd I went to the opening of the then new Ryan McGinley show with Patricia.

On March 4th I went to the stake youth fundraiser. The theme was "Candyland", but my theme was eating my friend Arthur's mom's taquitos.

On March 6th I went to the first Ignite night in a couple years. Took them a while to recover from my presentation on the Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

On March 8th I ate a taco in my neighborhood. Here ends an exciting period where something happened every two days.

A week later, more or less, Greg and Becky came to New York. Greg went home first. Then Becky was stuck in the city because of the snow. On the day of the big snow we went up to my roof to shake out my rug. Hey, we did a lot of fun stuff on our snow day!

For weeks I had it in my head to try cooking a kimchi stew. By the time I could, it wasn't super cold and spicy stew friendly. I mean, still liked it a lot. Very proud of myself. Then next you'll see a dinner I whipped up with some Korean leftovers.

Cannot remember the circumstances where I was with all these Minions.

I was on this job for a while in March and April downtown where there was a mysterious empty break room in the basement where I could go in the afternoon and read because the made us take hour breaks.

March 30th was Ace's birthday. I hadn't seen him in nearly 9 years, but had been interacting with (or just reacting to?) his virtual (Facebook) form steadily for a while, so we arranged to celebrate his birthday in Chinatown. He lead me down Lafayette looking for a particular restaurant...turns out there's this one where he had been a regular customer and all the staff remembered him. We shared noodles and chicken wings and talked about old times.

After three years, the Whitney Biennial is back. It's funny to have lived in the city long enough to have been to so many Biennials. I definitely remember my first Biennial in 2004 and then the one in 2006—and I remember two Biennials that were very ho-hum, and I think I might have missed one or two, but it's always good to know the Biennial is back and even better to make it. This one was pretty good, the museum was a packed circus, I'd be interested in seeing a lot of that stuff again without having to wait or shove.

Just a few second before I took this picture there were a ton of pigeons there.

Street style blogger at work

Here's some neighborhood walking around pics

Remember Allison? Seems like a while since we've seen her around here. And, well, it might be a while before we see her again, because she's taking off for Utah, so because of that I am glad I traveled out to the Brooklyn Bridge Shake Shack for her going away party (even though we live less than 5 blocks away from each other in East Harlem). Allison and baby photo followed by Brooklyn walking-around photos.

Then April 26th I went to see 21 Savage and Young M.A. at Irving Plaza. I wasn't familiar with Miss Young M.A.'s work, but the crowd sure was. 21 Savage came out in a Jason Vorhees get up, did a micro set of his "older" (not that old) stuff, left the stage and his DJ just played popular songs for fifteen minutes, and then he came back out and played all his popular songs. The most popular songs he just did over and over 2 or 3 times. I think I got my money's, and my night out's, worth.

And that's it for March and April. I'll see you again soon about a trip to Chicago.

California Things That Were Not Disneyland

Well, if I'm going to pay for this website, I ought to be posting.

Ok.

When last I blogged, I posted all about my two days at Disneyland with family. Now I would like to post about the day before Disneyland and the days after.

Got a nice early flight out of JFK over to LAX where Kristen and most of the kids picked me up. We went right over to El Huarache Azteca for a little lunch.

And then we passed a pleasant afternoon at Grandma's. The sun began to set dramatically and a great big rainbow came out and Kristen, Rachel and I went on a walk.

Kristen's main job was trying to get pictures of Rachel jumping midair

OK, now, insert here the two days of Disneyland.

Woke up Saturday morning not terribly Disney-hungover and put in some pool time before we drove up to lunch at Mom's Tamales before spending an afternoon post-Disney crashing. Or that's what I think we did. If there's not a photo, I don't remember what happened! No, wait. Now I know what we did. We had dinner at Twohey's. 

This was our mess before even ordering

Sunday night I went and watched the Oscars on the west side.

Monday morning I drove Cory and Dad and Blake to the airport and we followed one of those cars that's in disguise because it's still just being tested out before being released. We absolutely could not figure out or even make a good guess at what kind of a car it was.

Mom and I took a walk to CalTech. Sorry, no turtle pictures.

That night I met up with Keith and we went on a Westside to Eastside taco tour of LA, hitting up places of deep taco-meaning for Keith. It was for an episode of my taco podcast, you can find that episode here. First we went to the cultishly beloved Titos, then a truck near LAX called Mariella's and then finally Taco Zone, so innocently parked in front of an empty Von's parking lot.

The next day I had to get back to New York, but not before getting lunch with everyone, plus Collin, at the Tam O'Shanter. Last time I went to Tam O'Shanter I didn't appreciate it. But now I'm grown, and I appreciate it.

Big things are coming to LAX. I'll be back soon.