Pączki

Happy Pączki Day! 

Are you aware it's pączki day? Are you Polish? If so, of course you are. If not, too bad for you, eh? Pączki are Polish pastries eaten on Fat Tuesday, or lent eve.

When I was growing up my whole family would go to my Great Grandma Jenny's house in East Chicago, Indiana, for pączki day. She made giant platters of them that only the kids were allowed to dust with sugar. We would eat too many of them as a last hurrah before we couldn't have soda or gum or whatever we had given up for the next 40 days (when you got older it was all sweets).

Nowadays a lot of bakeries would like you to believe that pączki are just classic yeast donuts without holes, probably so they can use their regular donut dough and call it a day. But Grandma's were different. Her pączki were a bit breadier and eggier, like a cross between a yeast donut and challah. We also did not eat them filled. Here in Chicago I have yet to find them unfilled (and some bakeries are getting a bit crazy with the fillings, like strawberry vodka or mocha), so I had to make them myself. Also, we pronounce them "poonch-key." Not "panch-key."

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brown butter vanilla rice crispy treats

I'm just going to act like it's been one week since I updated this blog and not over six months.

A lot has happened in that week. I moved back home to Chicago! There just weren't enough shootings in Boston, you know. I already miss the oysters. And the people. Hi Danielle! Hi Daphnie! Especially the ones with "D" names. And the witches in Salem. Hi witches. I'm sad I'm going to miss the blizzard this weekend, to be honest.

But it's great to be back near family again. I spent a weekend cooking with my Aunt where we made two racks of lamb, shrimp, scallops, tuna, two types of aioli, pita salads, roast chicken, and alligator. I had alligator on a stick at a fair years ago and would you believe it was not so delicious? This time it was amazing, like a cross between chicken and catfish and very juicy and tender. Eat it. We made all of that for the two of us. For one dinner. Like I said, it's good to be back.

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vanilla blueberry pie

Where to live, where to live.

So, now that I have graduated, I have been searching for jobs. It's finally time to answer that question people have asked so often over the last two years: "So what are you going to do with that degree?" I have been applying like crazy. If you are hiring, let me know!

And when I tell people I have been applying, they always ask, "Where?"

On the one hand, I think anybody can learn to live anywhere. It's surprising how you acclimate to places. A few years back I lived in a small town in Iowa while working on a political campaign. People invited me into their homes, made me dinner, let me sleep in their guest bedrooms. They let me camp on their farms and invited me to parties. They donated chairs, desks, and food to our office, let us pass out candy on Halloween on their front porch, and bought me a pork tenderloin and a beer for breakfast. 

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fancy food show

When you say you've eaten so much cheese that you can't eat any more cheese, people don't believe you. "That's not a real problem." "I can't imagine ever not wanting cheese." "I could eat an infinite amount of cheese and still want more cheese." That's what people say.

And then you go to the Fancy Food Show. You can't fathom how big the Fancy Food Show is. Try to imagine it and then add a second level. If you eat only one thing at every single booth, you would be eating nearly 2,500 different products. But of course each exhibitor has multiple products - the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT), which organizes the show, estimates there are over 180,000 products being exhibited. That's like eating every single thing in your local supermarket over four-and-a-half times.

The kind people at NASFT provided tickets to a group of us in the Boston University gastronomy program to see what's going on in the world of fancy food, talk to producers and eat all of the cheese. We spent a day at the show, held in Washington DC this year, and I'm here to report back on the world of fancy food. Normally I don't believe in shilling for companies that throw a free bag of chips your way, but in this case we tried about a million things so I can be choosy and only write about the good ones.

Because, at a show this size, it takes a lot to stand out. I had no idea how many companies were putting fruit purees into squishy, squeezable containers. And you start to get the feeling that some companies won't rest until they've covered every nut in existence in some type of flavor powder. Also, a surprising number of producers told us how their foods could be mixed with alcohol. 

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little baby crème brûlées

Do you sometimes wonder what the plates of the future will look like? What am I talking about, it probably keeps you up at night. I'm not talking about the plate itself, those will be holograms, but the plating style. How a chef puts the food on the plate. Remember when it was weird pointy things rising from the plate? A few years ago The New Yorker described them as "small towers of something wrapped in something--with the tops sliced at an angle; crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge." You saw it everywhere. Then it got to the point where Applebees was cutting their BBQ egg rolls or whatever at an angle and placing them every which way on a bed of slaw and it was time to move on.

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