Cooking without compromise?
Gluten-free cooking in Chicago without regrets?
Regrets about what? Regrets about what you had to eat. If you have Celiac or some other allergy or food sensitivity, that's a limitation on your life. To regret it a little, in the sense that if you could get rid of that limitation, you would, would only be common sense. This is not like the limitations posed by Kashrut or those encountered by Muslims whose food is always halal; there the limitation is part of something that gives structure to and enriches one's life, connecting one to something greater than onself. The only thing Celiac disease connects one to is the toilet and maybe a bottle of aspirin, if one disregards it.
But limitations can and should be a spur to creativity. Consider the Jewish prohibition against mixing milk and meat. This has lead, among some of my more assimilated brethren, to such culinary abominations as sauces lightened with nondairy creamer, a clear attempt to imitate Parisian sauces without the Parisian cream. The results are ghastly. Instead of accepting the reality that one must create something new in response to the constraints one is placed under, in this case by religious law, one attempts to slightly tweak something old, and what one ends up with is a second rate version of somebody else's dish.
Much the same has been the case with a lot of cookery designed for those living with other dietary limitations, ones more a matter of physiology than faith, leaving those so limited with the idea that they have to settle for second class fare, if they don't want to get sick and stay sick. But that just simply is not the case. A more imaginative Jewish cook, honoring the traditions that have grown out of the injunction "thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother's milk", might ask himself what purpose the cream serves in Western sauce making. The answer is that it is a buffer that mellows out some of the harsher flavors, turning that which would be sharp into something that is merely flavorful, but a little more subtle. Looking toward the Middle East and Mediterranean, one find that there are, in fact, very interesting alternatives to the use of dairy foods for this purpose. There are red pepper pastes, of a variety of degrees of hotness. There are onions, gently sweated down, there are ground almonds, or grinding more finely, nut milks. None of these are intended to fool the diner into thinking that he is consuming milk, but each can play a role in a dish analogous to that played by cream in nonkosher French cookery.
Cooking without compromise?
Gluten-free cooking in Chicago without regrets?
Regrets about what? Regrets about what you had to eat. If you have Celiac or some other allergy or food sensitivity, that's a limitation on your life. To regret it a little, in the sense that if you could get rid of that limitation, you would, would only be common sense. This is not like the limitations posed by Kashrut or those encountered by Muslims whose food is always halal; there the limitation is part of something that gives structure to and enriches one's life, connecting one to something greater than onself. The only thing Celiac disease connects one to is the toilet and maybe a bottle of aspirin, if one disregards it.
But limitations can and should be a spur to creativity. Consider the Jewish prohibition against mixing milk and meat. This has lead, among some of my more assimilated brethren, to such culinary abominations as sauces lightened with nondairy creamer, a clear attempt to imitate Parisian sauces without the Parisian cream. The results are ghastly. Instead of accepting the reality that one must create something new in response to the constraints one is placed under, in this case by religious law, one attempts to slightly tweak something old, and what one ends up with is a second rate version of somebody else's dish.
Much the same has been the case with a lot of cookery designed for those living with other dietary limitations, ones more a matter of physiology than faith, leaving those so limited with the idea that they have to settle for second class fare, if they don't want to get sick and stay sick. But that just simply is not the case. A more imaginative Jewish cook, honoring the traditions that have grown out of the injunction "thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother's milk", might ask himself what purpose the cream serves in Western sauce making. The answer is that it is a buffer that mellows out some of the harsher flavors, turning that which would be sharp into something that is merely flavorful, but a little more subtle. Looking toward the Middle East and Mediterranean, one find that there are, in fact, very interesting alternatives to the use of dairy foods for this purpose. There are red pepper pastes, of a variety of degrees of hotness. There are onions, gently sweated down, there are ground almonds, or grinding more finely, nut milks. None of these are intended to fool the diner into thinking that he is consuming milk, but each can play a role in a dish analogous to that played by cream in nonkosher French cookery.
The very fact that these aren't perfect substitutes, or even very good substitutes for cream can, from some points of view, be seen to be a virtue; each has its own unique character, which the dish must be built around. Thus the irony of kosher cooking, in this case - what seems to be a limitation ends up increasing the diversity of dishes, because it forces the cook out of a comfortable rut and forces him to experiment. Complaining that the aforementioned red pepper paste won't give the same kind of smoothness to a sauce as creme fraiche, then, ends up being something akin to protesting the fact that tomatillos don't taste much like red tomatoes and make for a lousy pomadoro. Perhaps so, but they make for a wonderful pipian verde, which can be appreciated on its own merits.
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The recipes on "Cooking without compromise" will be both kosher and gluten-free and no, one doesn't have to be Jewish to enjoy them. I won't offer any promises that the restaurants reviewed here will always be kosher; yes, I know, I'm slipping, but we all have our indulgences and this is mine. Even in my fallen state, however, I can still take time to honor my background.
I'm not going to make any attempt to cover the entire world. One can do a few things well or a lot of things poorly, and I'm opting for the former. The recipes will, like myself, be partially French and Spanish; aside from this mishling's tribute to his own heritage (with the Irish contribution pointedly ignored for reasons to be discussed later), there will be some Carribean and Latin American recipes, which again tie into the French and Spanish thing in a semi-derivative kind of way.What you see on the site will be the final, polished product. What you see on this blog, in recipes, will be me stumbling along and occasionally honestly admitting to having fallen on his face, but that's OK. We learn from failure as well. The wicked, wicked restaurants you see reviewed will not, in general, be Jewish ones, in large part because there are so few of those in Chicago.
Mysteriously so, because I think that the average Chicagoan would find a lot of the food very much to his taste, especially in the dead of winter when its soothing quality does so much to drive away the chill. What you will see a lot of, as my budget allows, will be reviews of Chinese restaurants - yes, I know, Jewish boy eating extremely nonkosher Chinese, live the cliche - Asian food, in general, I tend to like, but for some reason much of it in Chicago is greatly in decline. Poor value for the money, the meat stretched to the point of invisibility with the addition of cheap, bland vegetables, but I'll keep looking. You'll definitely be seeing mentions of the Indian food along Devon - one of Chicago's strangely undiscovered treasures. That, and a lot of Mexican and other Latin food.Because I am poor, you probably won't be hearing about a lot of French or Italian places in Chicago; I just can't afford them, as inexpensive Southwestern European dining seems to be a foreign concept for Midwesterners in general - except when they're preparing it in their own homes. These places will not, in general, be kosher, as I've said, so while the recipes on the site itself ("Cooking without compromise") will always be kosher, the ones on this blog won't always be so - some of these will be attempts to recreate dishes I've had, and those attempts will be done honestly (and in seperate cookware, bubbe).
I'm about to travel and the sun is about to set, so more later.
