Chicago

Halbach Baconfest

/ Shane / 8 Comments

Around November or so, Nate “Bacon” Halbach gave me a call.

“You’re never going to believe this. There is a bacon festival in Chicago. On my birthday.”

It seemed like fate. Tickets were a bit on the pricey side (V.I.P. presales were over $100), but we knew we had to be there.

“No problem. We’ll buy you a ticket for Christmas / your birthday. Pack your bags my friend.”

Nothing could stop us from going. Nothing, except for the fact that the tickets sold out in less than 10 minutes.

In the end though, this turned out to be a good thing, because it spawned an idea so awesome, so epic, that just the thought alone stunned me in my tracks. I give you the first annual Halbach Baconfest.

It took Chicago Baconfest 10 minutes to sell out their tickets, but ours sold out in 1 nanosecond. Take that Chicago Baconfest!

I knew if we were going to do this thing, we had to do it right. Planning and preparation were required. I think Nathan expected that we’d just cook some bacon and call it a day. I think he was impressed several times throughout the day at the seriousness with which we approached Halbach Baconfest.

The night before we presented him with his Halbach Baconfest tee-shirt, so he could wear it on Saturday. It should be noted that, not knowing there would be tee-shirts, he brought his own bacon attire. But we needed the official items with the official logo of course.

So Saturday morning we started the day with piggy-shaped pancakes. These didn’t have bacon in them per say, but I think they were in the spirit of baconfest, and sort of set the tone.

We didn’t actually have any bacon with breakfast, which might seem strange, but breakfast rolled immediately into the bacon taste test. So there was bacon to be had. We tried to buy fancier or more exotic bacons than you would regularly buy for your daily use (read: no Oscar Meyer). There will be more details on this portion tomorrow, but this was really the only time we had straight up bacon all day.

After the taste test, we played “Pin the Tail on the Piggy”. Evie did phenomenally, although she had a height advantage in the sense that the tail location was a little low for an adult. I guess I can’t really use that as an excuse though, since I missed the easel entirely and put my tail on the wall. I wasn’t the worst though, Nathan put his partially up the stairs (I’m not really kidding!). Evie loved it and is dying to play again. I think she also enjoyed making all the piggy tails (she did the cutting and some of the curling).

Finally, it was time for the big feast (well, I’m fast-forwarding through hours of making food, including over an hour-and-a-half of straight bacon making. 54 ounces of bacon had to be cooked!

Our feast included Blue Cheese Coleslaw, Cheddar, Bacon, and Fresh Chive Biscuits, Bacon Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Blue Cheese and another set with Feta and pecans inside, Bacon-Balsamic Deviled Eggs and finally a Maple Apple Bacon Cake with Maple Glaze. Overall, everything was very good, but I have to say that most of the things didn’t seem to be that improved by bacon. For example, I couldn’t help but think that the cake would have been improved by the (::gasp::) removal of bacon. Still, for Baconfest, it was a good mix of things that really went together. I think we all agreed that the Blue Cheese Coleslaw was the standout, but the dates were pretty tasty, and certainly the most interesting. The Blue Cheese Coleslaw was the one thing that we had before, so we knew that one was good.

Finally, it was time to enter into the final phase of Baconfest: Kevin Bacon. That’s right, we had a copy of Footloose and we weren’t afraid to use it. Footloose was one of a handful of movies we had on VHS when I was little, and we watched it to death. I have to say, Footloose totally holds up! It was just as good as I remember it being. Kevin Bacon is an American treasure.

Watching it as an adult though gave me a totally different perspective on the movie. Those kids were totally out of control! I don’t know whether dancing would necessarily make them act worse, but it probably wouldn’t have helped. So I guess now I’m kind of on the side of John Lithgow. His daughter man…she should have been locked up.

The plan was to have some bacon-salted popcorn while we watched the movie, but nobody had the stomach for it after the earlier bacon feast. However, we weren’t too full to do some Footloose dancing…

Everybody cut Footloose!

Good News! All crime in Chicago has apparently been solved!

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Good news, folks! Apparently there is absolutely nothing for the police to be doing in Chicago.

Yesterday I got pulled over on the highway. Warning only, no ticket, and it’s a good thing! My speed? Going 60 in a 55.

Officer: “Do you know why I pulled you over?”
Me: “I honestly have no idea.”
Officer: “Do you know how fast you were going?”
Me: “No. I was just keeping up with traffic.”
Officer: “You’re operating a motor vehicle and you have no idea how fast you were going?”
Me: “I could take a guess…but no, I couldn’t say for sure. If I was passing people, I would have looked, but I was just keeping up with traffic.”
Officer: “What if I told you you were going 80?”
Me, thinking: “Oh crap, I was going 80?”
Me: “Well, I would be surprised, but I was just keeping up with everybody else.”
Officer: “Well, you were going 62. But I’ll put down 60 so I can just give you a warning.”
Me, thinking: “I was only going 62??”

First off, I think we can all agree that going 5 over is pretty standard anywhere in the country. Second off, if you’re going 55 on the highway around Chicago, you are a hazard to traffic and you’re probably going to die. Without question, the average is somewhere around 70 mph or so. Everybody goes 70, every day, right past cops and nobody bats an eye.

“But you were technically speeding,” Sara gleefully points out. Okay, I suppose. But why was I picked out, out of the hundreds of cars around me going exactly the same speed? I have a theory.

Usually, one is very aware of where all the cop cars are at any given moment. In this particular case, I didn’t notice he was behind me until he was *right* behind me. So I think that he was trying to go very fast (speeding if you will), and I didn’t get out of his way fast enough. So he thought to himself, “This guy must not be paying attention, I’m going to pull him over for something.”

There is no way someone can justify to me why I got pulled over for going 60 mph on the highway.

R.I.P. Backstory Cafe

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Well, unfortunately, my favorite coffee shop the Backstory Cafe is out of business.

From their website:

BACKSTORY CAFE IS NOW CLOSED FOR BUSINESS.

Backstory would like to thank all our valued staff and customers for your support over the years.

Several factors contributed to the decision to close the cafe including a serious financial blow in the spring of 2010. In short, a variety of resources required to run the cafe have been depleted.

While the many people involved over the years were growing a business, we were also engaging in what is best described as a “hopeful human endeavor”. So although the cafe is now closed, hope remains that this quiet corner of Woodlawn will be home to a new initiative when the time is right.

Peace-Backstory Cafe.

I don’t know exactly when they closed, but I think it must have been a while ago. I saw when they took their sign at the corner down, but I thought maybe it was due to the ongoing construction there. I never in a million years would have thought they were going out of business. It always seemed busy in there. I guess the above paragraph sort of implies that there were financial circumstances that weren’t necessarily related to the actual profitability of the cafe itself.

I feel very sad that it is gone, but on the other hand, we never went there. It probably closed months ago, and I didn’t even notice. So in a way, I guess it was kind of my fault that they’re gone, and I can’t really complain. It’s kind of strange but, even though we never went, it was comforting knowing it was there. It was the only thing close to our place, and having a coffee shop in the neighborhood made it seem…more like a real neighborhood somehow. I know we still have Robust, but I liked Backstory better, and it was closer.

Oh well, I guess that’s what happens when you don’t vote with your wallet. Another victim of my cheapness! 😦

90 Miles Cuban Cafe

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I like to try all different kids of food. When you do that, you sometimes pick something you like, and sometimes you strike out. That’s just the way it goes (although I think there are a lot more wins than losses…I’m not very picky). However, there seems to be one kind of food that never seems to disappoint, and that’s Cuban food. Maybe its because they make ridiculously good sandwiches, and I’m a sandwich kind of guy. Maybe something about the pseudo-Spanish spices are just on my wavelength.

Anyway, all of this is just to explain why I found myself at the 90 miles Cuban cafe last weekend, the long odds it was up against, and how I ultimately wasn’t disappointed.

The cafe is very small on the inside. It’s more of a take-out kind of place. So when we showed up with the whole fam, we basically took up half of the available space. There’s only a high counter with bar stools, so it’s not exactly kid friendly, but they do inexplicably have high chairs.

Since everything sounded pretty good, we ended up ordering a metric ton of food. We were kind of sheepish about it, but A) we spent less than $30, and B) we ate all of it. So I guess it wasn’t so ridiculous! There wasn’t a single thing I didn’t like. The consensus winner was the chorizo and goat cheese empanada. We split on the yuca con mojo, but my cubano sandwich was amazing, and Sara’s bistec was equally good, if very different. There was much, much more (though they were out of shakes).

I even like their slogan, “Taste the Forbidden”. It makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. And gobbling down delicious empanadas also makes me feel like I’m getting away with something.

So, long story short: recommended!

The Blizzard of 2011, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the thundersnow

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So the great blizzard of 2011 came and went, and everybody survived, more or less.

My boss called Tuesday morning and told me to work from home. Last time there was a bad snow, it took me 3 hours to get home from work, so I wasn’t going to argue. I took the kids to daycare like normal and worked from home until about 2:30, when the snow and wind started to pick up. Then I picked them and Sara up, and we settled in for the night.

This thing was being billed as hell on earth, so I was actually pretty excited about it. It wasn’t snowing that hard, but the wind was blowing something fierce. I don’t remember a time in my life ever where the wind blew so hard, for so long. It was so windy that the snow didn’t really have time to settle, it pretty much just blew horizontal the entire time. The street lights were shaking, the power lines were shaking, and it just looked really nasty. The power flickered a few times, but never went out.

Our sidewalk was clear when the whole thing started, and when I went to bed it was still clear! The cars were clear too. Obviously the snow was building up, especially in places where the wind was leaving drifts, but I was a little disappointed because there had been all this hype about how much snow we were going to get. But the lack of snow should in no way take away from the impressiveness of the storm. The wind was whipping the snow around so hard, that it would have been impossible to get around in. I would have rather killed a man than had to go out into that storm.

One very impressive thing was that Metra kept the trains running through the storm. I can’t imagine what the wind must have been like up there on the elevated platform. I just think of that long train taking a full gust right to the side. It seems practically suicidal to be running up there, but I guess people were probably grateful to be able to get home. Plus it made me feel a little better: if those train operators felt safe enough to keep the trains running, then how bad could it really be down where I was?

Definitely the best part of the blizzard was the “thundersnow”. I had heard the phrase thrown around and I wanted to be a part of anything that awesome sounding. I had seen some lightning-snow, but I hadn’t yet heard any accompanying thunder until late Tuesday night. Totally made the blizzard! I will admit, there was some fist pumping. (Side note, someone get me a thundersnow parody to ACDC’s Thunderstruck, stat!)

In the morning, I rushed to the window to see how much the snow had built up. Pretty much the same as the night before! Again, a little disappointing. The cars to the left were drifted in, but to the right the road was clear. The sidewalk was still clear. “So much for this crummy snowpocalypse,” I grumbled.

However, sometime Wednesday morning, something like 17 hours after it had originally started snowing, it really kicked it up a notch. (All of the pictures, including those above, were from after this final hurrah.) We ended up with 22 inches on the ground when all was said and done, although, like I said, all the wind made it extremely patchy.

I had the honor of seeing a snowplow get stuck trying to plow the street. That was definitely the first time I’ve seen that one before. It’s nice to know that when a snowplow gets stuck, he just has to try to go forward and back until he gets out, like the rest of us. Eventually he drew a crowd and they got him out with shovels.

I have to say, it’s pretty cool to go through a storm of that magnitude and basically watch it all from the security of our warm house, and then shrug and say, “Goodnight!” I guess we’ve gotten to the point where the weather is somewhat irrelevant.

But did we stay in our nice warm house? Of course not! We took the kids out and played in the snow, and even got a few trips down the sled hill on the Midway. The snow was over my knees in a couple of places, not counting where the plow pushed it up deeper. Snow is kind of a mixed blessing for kids. It’s fun and out of the ordinary for about 10 minutes or so, and then it’s just too cold and wet and hard to walk. Oh well, we still had a good time. I pulled Evie in the sled running as fast as I could, and I thought I was going to hyperventilate and die.

So that’s it! SnOMG defeated. Been there, done that, rode the sled hill.