Back to basics

I've been going a mile a minute recently. Between the new exhibition opening at the museum, my new gig for chicagoist and general life as a young person in a city, I've been going full force for the past few weeks. Until I got sick.

Thursday morning I woke up feeling a bit tired, a bit congested, but I figured it was my general morning disposition and could probably be fixed with some coffee. After a few hours at work, I threw in my hat and went home. And then stayed home all day yesterday. It was the first time I had ever taken a sick day from work and it was a strange feeling. When I was in school, sick days simply meant not going to classes; friends and roommates were still around for constant entertainment. I probably watched four hours of TV yesterday. In its own way, lounging around and resting was exhausting!

Anyway, around 9:00 last night, I decided that it was time to cook something. But what to cook? Something wholesome, nutricious, and easy. I'm guessing my inspiration actually came from an episode of Check, Please that I watched right before (they went and visited Milk and Honey) and I decided to cook up a quick batch of granola.

I looked for a couple of minutes for a recipe, but then decided to sort of invent my own.



Laura's simple granola

ingredients
3 cups raw oats
2 cups almonds, chopped
1/2 tspn salt
1 heaping tspn cinnamon
1/3 cups honey
1/3 cup corn oil
1 tspn vanilla
1 cup raisins

directions
Cover a baking sheet with tin foil and grease the tin foil. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Mix together the dry ingredients -- the oats, almonds, salt and cinnamon. Set aside.

Mix together the honey, oil and vanilla. Heating the honey for 10 second or so in the microwave makes it easy to mix with the oil.

Combine the wet ingredients with the dry, and spread over the baking sheet. Bake for around 20 minutes, stir in the raisins, and bake for 10-20 minutes more.

This is where it gets a little tricky. The granola will harden as it cools, so how crunchy it is as it bakes is a bad test for doneness. I like my granola crunchy -- really crunchy -- but some people probably don't like that well cooked taste. It is really up to you, but my recommendation is to try it and see if you like the taste -- the crunch will come later.

Sometimes I even amaze myself...

One sunday morning, a couple of weeks ago, I woke up and decided to make bagels. I'm not sure where the inspiration came from. I generally am too impatient to cook anything with yeast, and I'm pretty sure that bagels, like sushi and tacos, just taste better when someone professional makes them for you. It was 9 a.m., and I decided to go for it. Five amazing hours later (haha) I had my delicicious bagel breakfast and lunch.

As far as recipe goes, I'm just going to post the link here. I didn't stray from it at all for a couple of reasons. One, as stated before, I am a yeasty-baked good novice, so I didn't know where to stray even if I wanted to. And two, I'm sort of scared of the lady who wrote the recipe. Example:

Begin forming the bagels. There are two schools of thought on this. One method of bagel formation involves shaping the dough into a rough sphere, then poking a hole through the middle with a finger and then pulling at the dough around the hole to make the bagel. This is the hole-centric method. The dough-centric method involves making a long cylindrical "snake" of dough and wrapping it around your hand into a loop and mashing the ends together. Whatever you like to do is fine. DO NOT, however, give in to the temptation of using a doughnut or cookie cutter to shape your bagels. This will pusht them out of the realm of Jewish Bagel Authenticity and give them a distinctly Protestant air. The bagels will not be perfectly shaped. They will not be symmetrical. This is normal. This is okay. Enjoy the diversity. Just like snowflakes, no two genuine bagels are exactly alike.

On this point: I tried both the loop-centric and hole-centric method, and I am definitely in the hole-centric method camp. I didn't find that the loop stayed together well in the boiling stage, and was extremely dissapointed when some of the bagels were not unified circles as they should be, but circular shaped "snakes." I can't understand what the fuss is about - the hole-centric method is clearly superior.

I followed her exact recipe, and I'm proud to say that the bagels came out exceptionally well. I think a pictorial will help people understand the extent that making bagels is a HUGE pain in the ass. But, it turns out, they aren't that difficult to make, it just takes a long, long, long time.

In the pre-boiled hang-out stage


The bagels boil for about 3 minutes on each side
Getting coated with onions, garlic, salt and sesame seeds

The finished product!

Trendsetting in a bad way...

When I took Economics my senior year of high school, I had this dot-com millionare turned high school student teach as my teacher. Steve Sandis was his name, I believe. Anyway, he was a big Starbucks addict, and being in high school, I too enjoyed Starbucks. We would, from time to time get coffee before working on the school newspaper (or maybe it was instead of working on the paper...)

Steve introduced me to the best and cheapest Starbucks drink for the summer - the poor man's latte. All you have to do it order a shot of espresso over ice, take your drink over to the milk/condiments section, and voila, you have an iced latte that only cost the price of a shot of espresso - about $1.50 I believe. Though I have forgotten most of what I learned in that econ class, I took this little trick for cheap iced lattes with me and have happily used and abused the free milk provided.

Well, it turns out I'm not the only wise guy. Apparently, helping yourself to the free milk in a real problem for Starbucks, which has to deal with those of us who enjoy "bootleg lattes."

The manager at that store -- who asked that her name not be used -- said about 5 percent of customers order a doppio, that is, a double shot of espresso and then put a twist on that order. Rather than the 8-ounce cup the doppio would usually command, they ask for the coffee to be put in a 16-ouncer, leaving about three fourths of that cup empty.

These customers take their cups to the condiment counter where various milks, half-and-half, flavorings, etc. are laid out for free use. They pour enough milk into the cup to nearly fill it, then take it back to the office for a zapping in the microwave.

By creating such faux grande lattes, these customers are saving $1.45 ($1.75 versus $3.20 before tax). What they don't get is milk foamed by the barista, but in a side by side taste test, tasters noted that the two were virtually the same.

I don't really see how this is such a problem for Starbucks. One, Starbucks employees don't makes tips on the price of purchase, so that can't be the compaint of the people working there. Two, if needed, the milk could be behind the counter, like it is at Dunkin' Donuts. There, if you want milk, you ask for it and they pour it into your cup for you. And three, Starbucks is still making a killing on these people, as my sense is that the price of Starbucks products comes from paying the baristas, not from the milk or other ingredients.

I still occasionally will go into a Starbucks and order the poor man's latte. But these days, I much more content to enjoy my coffee, made just the way I like it, in the comfort of my own home.

A Brief Hiatus

My beloved computer, "McPuter," seems to have some sort of problem that no genius at the Apple store has ever seen before. Alas, poor McPuter has gone to the Apple hospital to be fixed, and so posts will be far and few between until it returns.

Fortunately, I have been accepted as a writer at Chicagoist, and my first post is up! It was posted by Erin, who is the Food Editor, so it doesn't say it is by me, but in the future, my posts will have a byline. Anyone who has good ideas for cheap North Side restuarants to review should pass on their names to me.