My Damn Good Chow Day

GWiv wrote about his fine chow day last Saturday. I've rather pressed with irks, real and perceived, to get to my damn good chow day, but here is is.

The chow day part of the day began when we parked our car near the Zim house and caught the aroma of Hecky's just begging to gurgle. Oddly, when the Hecky's stuff first gets going, it smells a lot more like bacon than anything. We did not eat any Hecky's, but it put us in the mood for good food to come.

We shopped the Evanston Farmer's Market with Ms. Zim. It was my first ever visit to this market often cited as the best in the area. Guess what. It's not. If I accessed the markets on the following factors: community feel, availability of fresh donuts, Hayes coffee, specialty produce, organic produce, meat, overall selection, and donuts, well I got to pick Oak Park. It was still a great market. We got award winning, odors not contained in the plastic provolone cheese, Michigan asparagus, rhubarb, and radishes. I admired the morel mushrooms at not one but two vendors, and also envied Green Acres from Indiana that has stuff not found in Oak Park. Still, I missed my donuts and Hayes coffee. Really, in my view, the market also seemed a bit disjointed, a bit less community like, but maybe that was 'cause I ran into no neighbors.

From the market we had some home-made chai from Zim, who made the tea too weak because of bad influences from his mother. We then had a very fine lunch at Thai Home Made. Thai Home Made has nicely translated its menu, so there is no risk of not know what to get, and all of our dishes were heady with fish sauce, so I thought we got it pretty good. After lunch, however, the waitress told me that they did not really make the food Thai style for us. That if they did, it would have been spicier. I guess if the food we had sucked, I would have been pissed, but as the food did not suck, how much could I care. Pork shoulder salad, Chinese broccoli with browned bits of garlic, satay, chicken laab, chive dumplings, bamboo shoot salad--a very green version, different than Thai Avenue's, fried chicken wings. Nothing stood out as much as Spoon Thai, but everything tasted fine nonetheless.

I looked at the some interesting plates of food at Cafe Montenegro next door. Zim warned me and then we split.

The VI family ended up on da'bomb. First stop was actually off of Devon, on California. Acardia is one of those mysterious Brigadoon type of places [Brigadoon is the place that shows up every 7 years right?]. It is pretty much never open when we walk by, and I really thought it just out of business. Not on this day. An older Russian lady sat, rather sad looking. It looked like no one was eating her food. Set up near the cash register was her entire output for the day. One mad dash through the kitchen, leaving an array of things for people to buy and take away. Language issues precluded us from fully knowing what everything was, but we sure took enough of it. Potato latkes stuffed with meat, ground chicken patties, kasha, blintzes, a stew of chicken and potatoes. We ate it later in the week, and it tasted exactly as it looked. Conceived by someone who wanted you to be well fed.

We took two versions of tea on da'bomb that afternoon. Strong Turkish tea in tiny glass glasses at the Turkish place and strong milky tea, the best I've had in ages, at Tahoora Sweets. We got a great deal on strawberries at Fresh Fruit Market and another one of those yeasty round breads from Argo.

We finished the stellar chow day at Tufano's with the lemon chicken, not quite as great as usual, and a bowl of worms, a/k/a cavatelli in red gravy.

I'll dig up addresses later.