Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I’m in Chicago for a conference, a users’ group for the software that U of Wisconsin (and lots of other people) are using to deliver their online courses. As a theme, because we’re in Chicago, they’re calling it “Architects of Education”. I’ve been thinking it’s really the first non-librarian conference I’ve gone to in a long time – maybe ever? I’m sure because the conference is put on by the vendor of the software, a computer company, it’s a younger crowd. There’s also lots more food than at librarian conferences – breakfast & lunch everyday, and always coffee and water outside all the program rooms – and snacks in the afternoon.

I took the train down from Harvard IL, and when I was walking to the conference hotel, marveling at how empty and quiet the Loop was at 3:30 on a Sunday afternoon, I went past some flowers by the roadside, nicely integrated into architectural features.

On Sunday I didn’t do any conference stuff – I went up to the North side of Chicago, to Welles Park, for an international and folk music festival put on by the Old Town School of Folk Music. I met one of my Chicago Historical Society friends there – one of her friends, who’s an instructor at Old Town, was playing on the staff stage. We got a beer and watched them – they played a fun combination of old rock & roll – “Good Lovin'”; viper jazz – “Minnie the Moocher”; and Chicago-connected songs – Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy”. Then we went to watch one of the bigger name bands, Red Barat, kind of bongra & soul – but it started raining so we went to get a burger at a corner bar – the benefits to me of hanging out with a local.

I made it back to the hotel after only missing the first 20 minutes of vampires – it was surprisingly easy to get there and back on the EL. I waited up till the 10:30 repeat of the vampire show – and I managed to NOT fall asleep until after the 20 minutes that I’d missed. I’ve had some good food – more later on that.

I have this taste memory of some kind of prune bar that my Grandma Mollie made. We didn’t like much of her cooking, it was too different from what our mom fed us, but I loved her cheese blintzes and these bars. They were square bars that she stored in a tin, and in my memory, anyhow, they were a pretty basic prune crumble bar – I think they had a little hint of lemon, but no spices to speak of. And I think the exotic flavor, to my 8- or 9-year old palate, was butter – my mom cooked mostly with margarine, Fleischmann’s original salted – her method of low salt cooking, to please my high blood pressure specialist doctor dad, was to cook with salted fat, and not add any extra salt.

The texture that I remember is not what you get from a typical crumble bar cookie, where you make the streusel part, pat half into the pan, spread on the filling, and then top with crumbs – Mollie’s prune bar was cakier. I am pretty sure that the right type of thing is a crumb cake, or kuchen, where you make the crumbs, reserve some for topping, then add eggs and milk to the rest to make a batter. I think the batter needs to be on the thick side, and then spread in a thin layer. I have a Maida Heatter apple kuchen where the batter part is about right, but the topping is completely different, so years ago I printed out a very plain crumb cake that I found online someplace, and noted – “try for Mollie prune bars” on the top.

Today I finally got around to trying it – and I knew in my heart when I read the recipe, that it was going to be too cakey, produce too much batter, and I really should reduce the milk, and probably use one less egg – but I didn’t. And, since I was making the cake for a mixed group, I made pineapple filling instead of prune – and I knew when I read the recipe for that, that I shouldn’t put in as much water as it said – but I did.

So I ended up with a fluffy and soft pineapple coffee cake – the crumbs just sank, there was so much liquid – so I made a little cream cheese drizzle glaze to improve the looks of the top. It’s a nice cake, but it’s not the prune bars. But I think it’s a step towards the prune bars, anyways. I’ll be sure to let you know when I get there.

So the last conference food event was the OCLC President’s luncheon, always on the Monday of ALA – they herd several hundred people into a dining room in one of the hotels. The speech is usually a bit of a repeat of some of the things we hear at the update breakfast on Sunday, but it’s good hear it again, and sometimes there’s a show, or hijnks anyhow – maybe someone in a gorilla suit, puffs of smoke, something. Since this is a budget crunch year, the funny stuff was limited to a video envisioning information seeking in the future – it was sorta cool – it was like building a multi-format online information map to Albert Einstein – but there was a scuff sound – the slides sliding in – that was way too loud.

Since it’s in a hotel, it tends to be a rubber chicken kind of lunch – last year, it was really kind of horrible – Usually, you get there, and the rolls, coffee, desserts, and salad are all on the table. It’s got to be the kind of meal that can be plated for like 500. The waiters started bringing out covered plates, and I said, “where’s the salad?”, and Mark said maybe it’s all in one – economical for budget crunch year. And he turned out to be right – it was a plate with couscous salad with dried cranberries and cherry tomatoes and a bunch of watercress spraying out the side, and they came by and added a chicken breast – the kind with a little bit of the wing still attached.

BTW, I only took iPhone pictures of food the whole conference (well, I tried to take some teeny tiny camera pictures at PS7 but they pretty much sucked) – and yesterday I looked at Ruth Reichl’s blog, and that’s what she’s doing too. I guess I am in good company.

Last night we had dinner at the great tapas place, Jaleo – but I didn’t take a single picture.

We had a largish group, 5 of us, so we got to sample ten tapas – we each ordered two:

1. potatoes cooked in tomato sauce, with super garlicy aoli
2. shrimp in garlic
3. gazpacho x2 – so I guess we really only had nine tapas
4. quail-I didn’t want the meat, but the sauce was yummy for dunking bread
5. salad of roasted peppers & eggplant
6. Salad with beets & goat cheese
7. asparagus wrapped in serano ham
8. onions roasted with Rosemary
9. A grilled sausage with white beans

Today I got a Box lunch from OCLC – but I tried to go easy because we’re going to dinner. There was a portobello mushroom-goat-cheese-tomato sandwich, so I ate about 1/3 of one of those, and some tabouli. And some chips and the good gooey center parts of a chocolate chunk cookie. Some people had  a Cobb salad, with a lemon Dijon vinaigrette – that’s what the labels on their boxes said – don’t know how I missed it, but I would’ve preferred it.

Not to mention the two receptions I have this afternoon. This is the food at the LITA one – I just had some cake:

At the library school reception, there were mushroom fried wontons, giant fried shrimp, mini crab cakes, several types of meat on sticks …. I had a beer, one of the mushroom things, and a couple of shrimp.

posted from my iPhone

I had a hot dog & fries for lunch, but I didn’t take a picture, at a place called the Billy Goat Grill & Tavern (named after the one in Chicago) – they didn’t have Chicago dogs with all the trimmings – the dog I got was plain, but nicely grilled – but they had hamborgers & cheezborgers, and there was a sign on the door for the official Chicago Cubs Fan Club – World Cup soccer was on TV. And they had all the usual condiments, including my fave for hot dogs, sweet pickle relish – only yellow mustard, so I abstained, but I was able to give my fries a shot of Tabasco in addition to the ketchup.

I’m in a cataloging rules workshop, and I sneaked out and got a drink as soon as they brought out the afternoon snack – and good thing too, because the catalogers fell on the food like a plague of locusts – first the line was too long for me to take a picture, and when I came back nothing was left. I think there were chips, cookies & fruit. There was also tea, and lemonade, so I made a mix. But it must’ve been sweet tea, because the mix was so sweet I couldn’t finish my glass even after I dumped most of the water from my bottle into it.

posted from my iPhone