We celebrated the release of The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook in style at the Hideout on September 10, and that same week I appeared on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to talk about the book. You can watch the whole feature, and read Sheila Elliott’s essay on Garfield Ridge here. On September 1 I also went down to … Continued
I’m on vacation but by the time a friend texted me this morning to see if I’d seen the news, I was already all over the latest devolution of the Charlie Trotter Story. You know the one I mean. The one in which he reportedly ordered some high school photography students to clean the toilets, … Continued
[I am neither an actor nor a playwright, and yet somehow I have wound up in a theater company full of actors and playwrights. I wrote and performed this for Theater Oobleck‘s 25th anniversary bash June 19, staged at Uptown’s beautiful National Pastime Theater as part of the Pivot Arts Festival.] I come before you … Continued
Not exactly breaking news, since it hit the streets October 6, but for the record here’s what I’ve been working on for the last month — a feature on the agonizing bureaucratic odyssey of the shared-use Logan Square Kitchen. I have to confess here that when I hit send on the last round of revisions, … Continued
I spent a several weeks this summer hanging around with Sarah Kavage, creator and executor of Industrial Harvest, an elaborate — and supercool — project aimed at sorting out and making manifest the intimate relationship between the commodity futures market, the city of Chicago, and the food we eat. And then I wrote about it, … Continued
I have a piece out this week in the Reader’s annual These Parts edition on Azerbaijani-to-Wisconsin transplant Sofya Hundt and her excellent blog, Rich Food, Lean Times. If you’re in the market for a recipe for venision-blue cheese stroganoff, step-by-step instructions for pickle soup (pictured), or just some tips on tender pelmeni, she’s your girl.
Back in January I was having dinner with a friend when he launched into a description of the performance he’d attended earlier that day. The performer was a mutual friend of ours — a writer and critic who had, in the great tradition of underemployed journalists across the land, gotten himself a job in a … Continued
I just spent a very long three days at this year’s FamilyFarmed expo, “live blogging” it for the Reader and, g-d help me tweeting it to boot. You can read the results over on the Reader blog, where I weigh in on the sad saga of shared-use kitchens, whole-beast cookery, urban chickens, and bunch of … Continued
I have a piece in this week’s Reader — a special issue devoted to all things Hyde Park-Kenwood — on the ongoing hoo-ha surrounding the U. of C.’s plan to use the lot long-occupied by the 61st Street Community Garden as a staging area for construction of the new Chicago Theological Seminary at 60th and … Continued
Out today in the Reader‘s food issue, I bravely interview local chefs and find out that . . . they all really, REALLY love Paul Kahan. Stop the presses. A more gripping read, IMHO, is Mike Sula’s fascinating and eloquent account of following his mulefoot pigs to slaughter. And then eating them. Vegetarians across Chicago … Continued