Category: Life

I would have liked to have had posted this message while I was still in Chicago, but time was short and, even more important, Internet access was shitty. You’d expect different in a big city like Chicago, but I had a hard time getting a free wireless connection, even at a Panera’s that promised it. It worked one day, kind of, the next day fine, and the third day not at all.

Anyway, in brief, here’s what I did on Wednesday, which was more or less my “day off” before my part of the conference activities began in earnest:

After spending a fair amount of the morning grading essays for my online class, I hiked down to the Tribune Tower to see my friend Bruce, who works there. He and I have known each other since freshman year in college, which I guess was 22 years ago now. Jeesh, that’s depressing; I was a freshman before most of our current first year students were born.

Anyway, we had a lovely lunch at a sort of yuppie Thai restaurant in that sort of yuppie/touristy neighborhood near the Trib Tower and the Magnificent Mile. I had a Pad Thai with some kind of fish that was pretty darn tasty. But hey, what do I know about Thai food, other than I like it and, because Annette isn’t so fond of it, I don’t tend to eat it that much. We talked some business, we talked some sports (Bruce is crushing me in the NCAA Basketball tourney as far as picks go), we talked family, etc.

On my walk back to the hotel, I went through Millenium Park, which is right off of Michigan and just north of the Art Institute. I can’t remember the last time I was in Chicago, but this was new to me, and pretty darn cool. If you follow the link above, you can see the real photographs, but I have two here from the camera phone that turned out pretty good if you ask me.

This is a picture of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate,” what the web site describes as a “110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above.” It’s pretty cool, but I was a little disappointed to find that the bottom part of the sculpture, which you are supposed to be able to walk under and such, was closed off– you can kind of see it in this picture, I think. The blue line on “the bean” (as it is popularly known) is tape, and underneath it is a crew polishing the thing.

This is “The Crown Fountain,” which was designed by Jaume Plensa. Basically, it’s two big glass towers which project these enormous video faces. “Weather permitting,” as they say, water comes spitting out where the mouth is. Also very cool, and it looked even more cool when I ended up taking a cab ride by it at night.

I went back to the hotel and did some more grading, and then it was time to meet up with my friends Troy and Lisa. I picked Troy up at his downtown office, and let me just say that driving around downtown Chicago (really, any very large city) is a bit like an elaborate video game. Judging by some of the quasi-illegal/questionable things I did, it appears to me you get three lives.

Anyway, we went out to their house, which is on the Chicago-side of the Chicago/Oak Park line. A really neat neighborhood with lots of “Chicago Bungalows,” a house style I hadn’t heard of before. Troy and Lisa don’t have one of these, but their house is brick and of a similar 1930’s era. We went out for my second Thai meal of the day, one decidedly different from the yuppie-fied lunch. This place was clean and no frills, and while I think you could get Pad Thai, we all ended up with selections quite a bit different from that– crispy omelette (which was shockingly orangish-red), a soup with coconut milk in it– I believe it’s called Tom Ka Gai– spicy chicken and beef, little egg roll-like things, etc. Very very tasty.

Thanks again for the hospitality, folks.

As for the rest of my trip: it was conference/work stuff pretty much all day on Thursday (that’s “official blog” stuff), a bit of conference stuff Friday morning, and then back home. Despite the fact that I was out until well after 2 am on Thursday, I am up this early after not being awake off and on for the last couple of hours.

I have always heard old people need less sleep….

Anyway, happy birthday to me. To wrap up my birthday week, I’m hanging out with Will today (while Annette gets caught up on school stuff) and then we’re all going out for fancy Italian tonight.

Slight Update:

Troy emailed me to let me know the restaurant we went (and that is just down the street from them, too) is Amarind’s and here’s a review.

I’m in Chicago right now– for work, the Conference for College Composition and Communication– and I need to get ready for my full day of conference activities in a few minutes here. But before I head over to the conference and give up my free internet connection at Panera’s, I thought I’d post a bit about the “fun part” of my trip so far.

We (meaning me, Bill H-D and Steve B) drove into town on Tuesday. After spending several hours in the car (literally) going over a tit-for-tat/crazy email exchange I had with some one at work, we checked into the Congress Plaza Hotel, which I would describe as a lovely dump of an old hotel. Not elegant, but it works for us.

Dinner Tuesday night was at Frontera Grill, which is one half of celeberity chef Rick Bayless’ restaurant empire (the other half if is the much more expensive Topolobampo). Basically, it’s high-end Mexican food, and oh yes, it is very good. We began in the bar, where the three of us and three other folks (two from work, Heidi and Linda, and one from Australia, Clair) shared a table about the size of a large hubcap in the bar. We started with some appetizers there, including some excellent tamales. Then Steve and Bill and I ended up with a table. Here’s Bill and me eating (sorry about the sad quality of my camera phone):

Bill and I both had “small plate” orders of Ceviche; in addition, I had Enchiladas de Pato, which were duck enchiladas, and Bill had Huaraches de Huitlacoche, which the menu describes as “grill-seared, corn masa flatbread topped with black beans, Tracey’s huitlacoche (corn mushroom), roasted winter vegetables, tangy tomatillo salsa, sunflower greens and homemade fresh cheese.” By “corn mushroom,” they mean this moldy stuff that grows on corn. I tried a piece of it, and I have to say it was excellent– very earthy and mushroom-y like.

Here’s Steve B:

He had the special for the evening (and arguably more manly meal), ribs.

Oh, and the celebrity chef himself, Rick Bayless, was wandering around the restaurant. He was surprisingly short and skinny, if you ask me.

All in all, a great dining experience, and, considering what it was and how much we ate and drank, it wasn’t even that crazy expensive.

I’ll have to update some more Chicago fun later; now I gotta work….

Well, here is is, real beer, the homebrew that I had a very modest part in. Actually, I first opened one of these babies late Wednesday night after we got back home after a long flight home from Florida. I mentioned it in an email to brewmaster Bill and fellow beer watcher Steve B., and Bill asked “Well, where’s the blog entry?”

Okay, here ya go.

A few more details, at least a rating according to this stuff on ratebeer.com:

• Appearance: As you can see here in the picture, damn, it looks like beer. Real beer, the kind you might buy at a store and everything. When I opened it, it had a satisfying “thwack” sound when the cap popped off. Nice color (a wee-bit cloudy), nice head, and yes, the carbonation worked out great.
• Aroma: Yep, smells like beer. A nice hoppy IPA, straight-forward though not over-powering at all.
• Palate: I’m a little fuzzy on the directions for this category, but I guess I’d say smooth and gentle, full, rich, ah, beer-y.
• Flavour: Who are these people at ratebeer.com, Canadians? Brits? What’s with the “u” in flavo(u)r? Anyway, it very much reminds me of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, which was the goal of the recipe that we bought oh so long ago. There’s a sort of subtle sweetness there, and again, a pleasant richness.
• Overall: Darn good beer, a brew that not only tastes great on its own terms, but it has what I would describe as a satisfying freshness. And hey, it doesn’t hurt that it’s homemade.

We’re having a party here in a couple of weeks, and it’s going to be touch and go to see if there is any of that beer left. Hmm, beer….

You Are a Glazed Donut

Okay, you know that you’re plain – and you’re cool with that. You prefer not to let anything distract from your sweetness. Your appeal is understated yet universal. Everyone dig you. And in a pinch, you’ll probably get eaten.

(Kind of a so-so quiz; I stumbled across it while commenting on a student blog and it distracted me and….)

How is the beer making going, you ask? Well, I am reminded of one of the audience call and response bits in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There’s a part where Frank-n-furter is adding weird chemicals/food coloring to the vat where his creation, Rocky, is being, ah, created. Half the audience calls out “Is it soup yet?” The other half responds “Not yet!” This goes on until Rocky’s head is revealed, at which point everyone yells “It’s soup!!”

So, is it beer yet? Not yet! (but almost).

We went through the last step in the process this past Sunday at Bill H-D’s place– the last step besides seriously drinking, that is– which is bottling. Here’s a run-down of what happened:

First off, this is it, what has been sitting around for about a month now: this, my friends, is beer. At least it’s beer still in the carboy (that’s what you call the big jar) with all the hops and other miscellaneous “stuff” floating around in there– again, think flavor crystals– and before bottling and subsequent additional aging (and carbonation). The little doo-hicky at the top is the air lock, which allows gases to escape (conveniently preventing an explosion) and yet prevents air from getting in.

Now, the first step in bottling is cleaning and sterilizing the bottles.

Here’s Bill getting bottles out of the dishwasher.

And here’s the sanitation assembly line. I handed a bottle to Bill (seated), who filled it with the food-grade sterilizing solution (which is in the same container we will later use to fill the bottles with beer), and he handed it to Steve B.

Man, I love to sanitize!

After we were done sanitizing (and thus we now had an empty and sterilized bucket), it was time for bottling. In this picture, I am adding the “priming” mixture (I believe just disolved corn syrup and water) to the bucket. The idea here is that the remaining yeast in the beer will be reactivated in the bottles, thus producing carbonation and more complete beer-y goodness. In the background, you can see Bill holding the siphoning apparatus.

This is where gravity comes into play: Bill has stuck one end of the siphoning hose into the carboy with the beer. Connected to the hose is a long plastic tube which has a filter on it (the hops and other flavor crystals have done their job) and which reaches to the bottom of the carboy. In the hose, Bill has added a bit of water. He dropped the hose with a bit of water into the bucket, that started sucking out the beer, and thus beer started moving from the carboy to the bucket, as seen here:

I feel I look especially fat and stupid in this picture, but I thought it was useful to a siphoning photo, and I look even more idiotic in this picture. The point is that with our friend gravity (it’s not just a theory, it’s the law), the carboy was empty in a matter of minutes. Keep this in mind if you have to siphon gas or something– much more pleasant than sucking on the hose.

Here’s Bill working to suck out every last drop, though I think we still ended up with a good five bottles worth of beer stuck in the sludge.

So we sampled a tad of beer to test the alcohol content with the hydrometer (around 7% alcohol, if I recall)….

… the color of the beer is admired…

.. and the beer is sampled. Actually, I kid with this look where I was going for a sort of pirate-like “ARRRRGGGG!” It’s very very tasty beer, much like Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, as was promised by the recipe we picked out. And of course we get to taste the satisfaction of the home-made brew.

Then, it was bottling time.

Basically, it was pretty much a repeat of the sanitizing process: I hand Bill a bottle, he fills it with beer, and he passes it to Steve B. There was one additional step though:

The bottles were capped. On Alton Brown’s Good Eats episode where he makes beer, he poo-poos the capping thing in favor of those Grolsch-styled bottle stoppers that attach to the top. Maybe, but I have to say the capper is pretty cool.

The old hops/brewing spooge was dumped out of the carboy, some things were cleaned up, and:

Beer.

Steve B. and I took our individual cases (really, about 16 beers I think– we ended up with a little less than expected), and then it was time to (what else?) go out and have some beers and lunch. The whole process took us about 2 and half hours, considerably quicker than it took Bill the last time he did this all alone.

So, was it worth it? Will I do it again? Well, I don’t think it’s worth it for me to go out and buy a kit of my own. But it is a pleasant-enough social activity, and Bill and Steve B. and I are already talking about another round of brewing (this time at Steve B.’s house since he has a bigger kitchen), perhaps a lovely wheat ale. In the mean-time, it’s a couple of weeks in the bottle and then drinkin’ time.