Month: March 2006

My coworker JG got some lunch today at Hecky’s and its delightful aroma wafted into my cube and I was forced to investigate. She had a half chicken there nestled in the foil and styrofoam, covered and glistening in a red coat of bbq sauce. She ate all the dark meat and licked off her fingers, and told me she usually got too full to eat the white meat, which she didn’t like anyway, so she threw it out. I gave her The Look, whereupon she said she’d put it in the fridge for me. 🙂 She’s awesome that way.

And just now, after a really irritating bout of data cleanup for a client that should have done it themselves, weeks ago, I went and got that chicken breast and ate it and was happy. “it’s the sauce” is what it says on the menu from Hecky’s. The chicken’s fine, moist enough and so on, but the sauce really does make the difference.
I’ve never had a sauce like this, fragrant and frankly quite sweet — which usually I don’t like, but this is tempered by a strong vinegar tang and spicy heat that seems like a combination of a solid dose of Louisiana style hot sauce and cayenne powder. It’s fantastic stuff, worth licking off all your digits and eating with a spoon if you get the chance. Yum.

I was oot and aboot yesterday in Humboldt Park, riding my bike, when I grew peckish. I came upon a likely-looking place that said Jibaritos and Lechon Asado in big letters in the window, and when I peeked in, the place was mobbed, which I took to be a good sign. There’s takeout in the front, so at first I thought I had to wait in line, but there are two dining rooms, one to the left and one to the back, and I got a table right away. It’s a little divey, but homey and full of families and young people and old people — lots of people, eating lots of food, speaking lots of languages (or at least spanish and english). This is Borinquen Restaurant.
There are some cool looking appetizers — i saw a skewer of meat and a big fried ball of something (plantain I’d guess) going to another table — and mixed plates, but I got the headline dish, the jibarito with lechon asado. I’d had a jibarito at Rudy’s Taste, which I found hard to eat and ultimately disappointing, so the fabulousness that arrived on the plate here was truly heartwarming.

Imagine some nice flavorful roast pork, in a sandwich with lettuce and tomato, glued together with a bit of cheese whiz and a generous dollop of mayo. Now imagine that instead of bread, there are two toothsome slabs of plantain, smashed flat and fried crisp in — wait for it, this where it gets really good — hot oil with so much garlic in it that globs of garlic stick to the outside of the sandwich. The garlicky goodness wafted up to me immediately, and I started thinking happy thoughts about the world and everyone in it (those of you who know me know how uncharacteristic that is). I am so grateful for all of the different kinds of people in the world, each of whom figures out these amazing and wonderful new things for me to eat. I mean, who thought this thing up? It’s brilliant.
It comes with a big pile of yellow rice, studded with beans and bits of ham and chorizo. Usually the rice in these situations is pretty dull stuff, just there to fill space, but this was really delicious. Happily, there’s a recipe for it on the website of the restaurant. 🙂 And they have Hawaiian Punch, for which I have a soft spot a mile wide, and I have to say, it goes really, really well with a savory treat like this jibarito.
It’s not on Metromix, which strikes me as bizarre, but that’s ok — we don’t want too many more people to find it, or we won’t be able to get a table.

There don’t seem to be too many food bloggers in Chicago, for whatever reason, but one whose blog I like a lot does live here, or at least occasionally she lives here, and last week I reached out of my usual reclusive misanthropic shell and met up with my first real live food blogger, Cindy from foodmigration. She’s awesome, and we made friends (yay!), and selflessly *ahem* explored the shanghainese offerings of Moon Palace, the only place I’ve been able to dig up that has anything on the menu remotely resembling what I’ve gotten used to at Wing’s in Boston.
We had xiao long bao, soup dumplings, which were delicious — they are bigger than usual, with a thicker wrapping, and with way more meat than soup, so they’re not in contention with top-notch soup dumplings, but they taste good and frankly a tasty nonstandard soup dumpling is better than no soup dumpling at all. Cindy’d never had any xiao long bao, and she loved these, so I can’t wait for her to get out to California and have soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung in Los Angeles. (WATCH OUT: The link plays music. Sigh.) She in for a TREAT. 🙂
The dumplings were the starter, along with some spare ribs steamed in spicy black bean sauce wrapped in a lotus leaf — good, but in no way spicy. We were distracted by trying to get to know each other and cross-examine the menu at the same time, but eventually we got ourselves sorted out enough to order more dishes.
We’d heard that Moon Palace had a braised pork shoulder, and from the photos on LTHforum it looked a lot like the dish at Wing’s that I call Pork As Big As Your Head. We ordered that, which Moon Palace calls braised pork thigh, along with rice cakes with pickled vegetable and bamboo shoots, and some clearly fried shrimp. The shrimp weren’t on the menu, and I had to try and explain what I wanted because I couldn’t remember the chinese words for it, but once we had established that the dish i was after was a) free of vegetables, b) not spicy, c) sauteed, and d) in a clear sauce, they knew what I wanted and told me i could have it. Yay! Cindy’d never had rice cakes, either, so I was thrilled to share my love for the chewy white pucks of joy, along with my recipe for cooking them with kimchi. Heh. The pucks here were delish, in a yummy dish of pickled salty veg, bamboo shoot slices, and pork, because no vegetarian dish is complete without pork, right? And the clearly fried shrimp were good too. The shrimps are regular shrimp, bigger than the special type of shrimp that you get on a good day at Wing’s and every day at Mandarin Chateau, and the sauce is somehow thicker and more visible, but I ain’t complaining — they were yummy. Tallasiandude says that I’ve been spoiled by starting out with the creme de la creme of the dish, and that most other versions of clearly fried shrimps come with that thicker sauce.
And the pork as big as your head? Perhaps not quite as big as my head, and it didn’t fall off the bone as soon as you glance at it sideways, but it was succulent and fatty and full of that lovely brown savory sauce, and we both liked it very much. Cindy had just made a big pot of veal stock and wasn’t up for more along the same lines, so I took the bone home and am going to make soup out of it, probably this weekend. (which i did – here’s a picture of it:)

So it still remains to be seen if Moon Palace passes the tallasiandude test, but so far it’s the best there is in these parts, and I will definitely go back — sometimes a girl just has to have soup dumplings and rice pucks and a big braised brown pork shoulder. And it’s nice to have a new friend in Chicago. 🙂
[photos are coming — camera pictures are hard b/c sometimes my download tool doesn’t work, and i am too cheap to pay 25 cents or whatever per picture.]