Photo: Akke Monasso

Made from the distilled sap of agave, a cactus the Aztecs held sacred, tequila gained popularity north of the border in a series of waves, starting with the Mexican movie boom of the forties and the postwar cocktail craze of the fifties. It is perhaps best loved as the driving ingredient in the margarita. In ’42, according to legend, a bartender named Pancho Morales got a drink order he didn’t recognized and made up something, a tasty concoction involving tequila, ice, fruit juice and Cointreau. His bluff went over better than he expected. Pancho had accidentally engineered one of the great summer cocktails.

Yes, it’s a hit with aging sorority girls at Bon Jovi karaoke night who want to get housed but also want smoothies. But some saucehounds mock the margarita without ever having enjoyed a real one. If your tequila isn’t 100-percent real agave (as many lower-shelf bottles are not), it’s rum. If it’s not from the Mexican state of Jalisco, it’s technically mezcal, not tequila. If it ain’t real scorpion honey in your glass, you’re not getting that extra kick that kept the Aztecs and Spaniards at each other’s throats for so many years. And let’s not mention those blasphemous “blended” slushy deals. Rocks and salt, period. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Green City Market

By Elias Cepeda

Jerry Heward didn’t know a thing about flowers growing up as a city boy in Northern Indiana. Yet he is surrounded by and selling purple lilac look-alikes on a sunny Wednesday morning in Lincoln Park. Heward is one of more than fifty vendors at the Green City Market.

“I was never really interested in this type of thing when I was young,” Jerry says. “My son actually got us started, my wife and myself. When he was in high school he worked for a farmer, a local farmer who lived in the city, and he would bring home these beautiful flowers and plant them in our backyard. Each year they’d get bigger and bigger. Our backyard ran out of room and so we said that we’ve got to move out into the country, buy some acreage and that’s how we got started.”

Today, Jerry and Jill’s Stoney Run Fields farm is a ten-year veteran of the Green City Market. The market itself has grown from a sparsely attended tiny alley operation next to the Chicago Theatre in 1998, to having more than 80,000 annual visitors a decade later.

All of the produce, meat, cheese, bread, flowers and more sold at the Green City Market are produced locally and in sustainable manners, in adherence with the market’s guidelines. Though Jerry, a retiree, says he does not depend on his flower business for income, he says the market does play a “big role,” in their overall sales.

Every Wednesday and Saturday he wakes up near dawn in order to pack up his flowers, make the trip to Chicago and set up his booth at the market by the 7am opening time. As a reformed city dweller turned farmer, Heward is patient with his mostly urban customers, and quick with a folksy axiom. Read the rest of this entry »

If there was ever a summer for DIY ice cream, this is it. With a new generation of cheap, efficient ice-cream makers readily available during a time of serious scrutiny in personal finance, it turns out that a $40 ice-cream machine pays for itself shockingly quickly. It’s also incredibly easy; most machines on the market simply consist of a bowl you freeze before adding ingredients and mixing, no ice or salt required.

Then it’s just a matter of getting the proportions right. Your simplest ice-cream recipe has, by volume, a ratio of about one-part milk to two-parts cream, with a little less than one-part granulated sugar. The basic ice cream recipe I use for my one-quart ice-cream maker is one cup whole milk, two cups cream (you can substitute light cream/half and half), and three-fourths cup granulated sugar, with a splash of good vanilla extract. In all cases you want to heat the dairy and the sugar until the sugar dissolves before pouring the cooled mixture into your ice cream maker.

My most successful variations to date have been, somewhat surprisingly, the simplest: cinnamon ice cream (add about 2 tablespoons of cinnamon, which is far more than you’ll think you need, to the basic recipe); and avocado ice cream (add one diced-and-then-crushed avocado to the mix when the ice cream is almost totally frozen). In fact, my friend Colleen and I have been talking about making an ice-cream burrito from red bean, avocado, tomato and sweet corn ice-cream wrapped in a sugared tortilla. I think we’re both afraid of trying it out for fear that life afterwards would be all downhill. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer in the suburbs was sweet. On a half acre sheltered by towering oaks and dense shrubs we could perform whatever outrages we wanted and never see a neighbor without a formal invitation. Our daughter would sunbathe topless on the veranda roof with impunity, our errant son would hold drug-infested raves in the far back that the police pretended not to notice, and our artsy friends would commit abominations all over the lawns and porches free from public scrutiny.

When we moved to the city summer changed. Now we have a deck instead of gardens and terraces—a large deck, granted, but encroached on every side by other decks and porches and balconies, leaving us exposed and vulnerable. On one flank barely twenty feet away a sexy twentysomething sunbathes topless while her aging potbellied boyfriend wears an obscenely skimpy Speedo. On another side consultants from Chelsea Clinton’s firm host multinational MBAs with little in common but their True Religion jeans who chat with us across the void rather than face each other.

Deck etiquette challenges us daily. Do you greet your neighbors when they are relaxing five feet away, or respect their privacy and ignore them? Can you sit out in your pajama bottoms to read the morning paper? Is the bottom of a two-piece bikini adequate cover-up for women of a certain age? Do we introduce our guests, and do we need to muzzle our more outlandish ones? Do neighbors’ wind chimes assaulting our ear drums constitute a justifiable condo association grievance? Can I shoot my neighbors’ garrulous father-in-law, Cheney-style, when he peppers us with reminiscences of his life as a Houston orthodontist? Just because our deck offers the best views, does that mean the neighborhood kids are entitled to invade for every fireworks display and air show?

It’s trying for everyone. A fast-track young exec and his gorgeous girlfriend have to share an atrium patio with a family that includes two ADD boys under eight. A techie abandons his patio to his pugs, leaving angry neighbors retching. A misplaced social conservative across the alley emails me that we are all bound for hell.

I wish I could offer solutions, but there’s no Emily Post for decks. Navigating deck etiquette, like much else about summer in Chicago, seems just another trade-off for the excitement of living here: what you like most about it is also what you like least about it. (Burt Michaels)

By Michael Nagrant

Summer in Chicago is a food-porn dream.

At the Green City Market in Lincoln Park, a dewy sheen glistens on the tips of nubile spring onions and piles of bulbous Morels with more nooks and crannies than a Bay’s English Muffin spill from wooden barrels. Tender stalks of young white asparagus shoots splay about the farm tables. Verdant fields of leafy greens, bushels of arugula, spinach and mesclun mixes flay open in the morning sun. Rippled heirloom tomatoes burst with striped protuberances. Curlicues of frisee and fresh-cut vines flutter in the summer breeze. Bushels of jeweled apples compete for ocular affection with golden rivers of artisanal olive oils, tarragon vinegars and tubes of creamy ripe goat’s milk cheeses from Capriole farms. An ever-present mineral tang of earthy soils mingles with sweet tomato sauce and the smoky crust of the wood-burning pizzas and freshly grilled panninis. The oat-encrusted loaves of Bennison’s hearth-baked breads cast a yeasty aroma into the mix. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday mornings through October, for the sixth year, Lincoln Park reverts to farmland, or at least to the fruit of the land. The grassy expanses host an intimately scaled town square, Chicago’s Green City Market, a not-for-profit group whose goal is to support fresh, local and sustainable products.

Founder Abby Mandel’s supervised the operation as chairman of the board of directors for six years. “And I make organic plates every single Wednesday so come by and have one.” Read the rest of this entry »

As Chicago lurches toward summer through seesaw temperatures and torrential thunderstorms, chairs tentatively appear, and tables, upended, await the city’s contact sport of the season, alfresco dining. Despite Chicago’s newfound cosmopolitanism, it’s never been mistaken for the Paris of the Midwest—climatic chaos can swiftly thwart those partaking of a leisurely outdoor repast. But in those lilting moments between formidable thunderheads and sauna mugginess, urban oases do appear for a bucolic nosh and tipple. Read the rest of this entry »

By Christine Badger

Back in the nineties, Doug Sohn and three of his friends went seeking the truth. A truth that many of us have pondered—what makes a good hot dog? Over the span of two years, Doug and his cohorts ventured to a little over forty hot dog places. “It became very self-involved,” Sohn says. “You know, we’d grade it and write a little review and it was funny to us, referencing other places, referencing what happened at lunch and so forth.” Out of this wiener madness, a light bulb went off in Doug’s head. He knew what worked. He knew what didn’t. Bing! Why not open his own place? Thus begot Hot Doug’s, his two-year-old gourmet hot dog stand.

Nestled in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, Sohn’s shop appears small and unassuming. But when you enter his world. the yellow-, red- and blue-painted walls strike you. The pictures of Elvis—young Elvis mainly, Britney Spears, Madonna, Cubs memorabilia, and the Morrocan tiled tabletops reel you in. There’s a fun, almost carnival feel to the place, like you’ve just entered summer. Toss the ball and you win a prize. Read the rest of this entry »

By Keir Graff

If you’re like me, the last meal you ate outside was a hamburger. Seated on a wall, the carry-out bag ripped open to accommodate the spill of fries, red dots of ketchup slowly gluing bag to cement. The Coke cup anchoring the whole raft against a steady, chill spring wind. In five or ten minutes you snarfed the lot down, balled and deposited the trash, and were on your way to the next engagement. Hardly a picnic.

Picnics are a dying art. Like drive-in movies, the other American summer pastime, we lament them but don’t do them. Convenience is all, and each generation loses a portion of the genes or training that allowed our elders the patience necessary to organize an outing. I’ve seen snapshots of a picnic my young parents had, in the sixties: in the woods, perched on a boulder, a group of clean-shaven, short-sheared Youth Fellowship types clowning around, looks of delight unmistakable. They had guitars and wine, for crying out loud.

Picnics, when mentioned, seem to bring a distant gleam to the eye, and a faint, noncommittal, “That’d be fun.” Perhaps it’s visions of Victorian garden parties, replete with games, semi-formal wear and intricately executed dainties on silver trays that scares people off. Could it be that, in spite of popular metaphor, a picnic is no picnic? Read the rest of this entry »

Before you can say “cold front” it’ll be September and you’ll be wishing you hadn’t spent all summer watching reruns on TV. There’s a whole world around Chicago, and for three months, it’s not as icy, bitter and unforgiving as a jilted lover. The sun glistens of the concrete, steel and glass menagerie we call home. But since it’s such a pain to find out what’s going on, and to plan things, NewCity did the work. From hot air balloons to Binti the ape who save lives, we tell you where to go to make you want to sing like Brian Adams about the Summer of ’97. Read the rest of this entry »