Image Credit: Swap It Chicago.

Please join miLam at Swap It Chicago: Food & Product Exchange this Sunday, 3/9/2014 from 2 to 4 PM.

Swap It Chicago: Food & Product Exchange

Jump to SpritzBurger Review

A fellow Chicago Food Blogger (The Hungry Learner) invited miLam to Swap It Chicago: Food and Product Exchange. Swap It offers a place for home cooks, local artisans, growers, and general “DIY-ers” to get together and exchange specialty foods and beverages, body and home products, and arts and crafts.

miLam doesn’t plan to bring food – fun as that sounds – but if that changes, we’ll update this post. (We’re leaning toward changing our minds.)

UPDATE!

We’re going to bring some kick-ass cookies.

3/9/14

The main reason

Spritz WTF Burger

We’re going to the swap because we want to see Chef Gale Gand. We dig that chick. She founded Tru, judges Top Chef, is a James Beard winner, and a partner with The Hearty Boys on their new SpritzBurger joint. The list of her accolades is endless.

We at miLam are Hearty Boys fans. A partnership between them and Gand sounds like yeah. Take a look at the drink menu. We’re curious to find out how many of these cocktails we can fit into one nite. The dinner menu looks good too, but fuck, we live in the age of immediacy and we want dessert now. Whatever happened to “dessert for dinner”? I thought that was a thing, man. Why not order up a different dessert with each cocktail and then just keep it up until we exhaust the menu? Then maybe we’ll do a little write up of the best pairs – if we’re not too dizzy. We’re going to definitely need the whole staff for this one: Randy the randy IT Consultant, Keith the Aesthetics Adviser, and Kristen the End-All Be-All on Everything Cocktail, because Jeff the Chef can’t drink all those cocktails himself. (Who are we kidding. He can. He shouldn’t.) Hey and what about Boozey Mike, miLam’s Fitness Coach? I think he’ll want in on this. And, uh, maybe a male vegan, for contrast.

UPDATE!

I did follow up on this idea. You can read about our Spritzburger excursion at the end of this post, or you can skip to it now by clicking here.

3/9/14

Swap It? Where?

Orangetherapy Fitness Center • Physical Fitness • Gym 2800 Central St, Evanston, Illinois 60201

How? Go to Swap It Chicago’s Facebook page and search for “get tickets,” on the left-hand side of the page. It’s free, but they ask that you print up a ticket so they know what size crowd to plan for.

Wake Up Smell Bacon

A bacon-scented alarm for your iPhone. At last! But bacon’s just the beginning. Imagine waking up to new car smell, the scent of your grandmother, pot, cigar smoke, brand new tires, a Sharpie, cows in a pasture, baby needs a diaper change, Ted Cruz after a filibuster, Keith Richards the morning after, guys who wear way too much cologne, tacos, kimchi, the aroma someone has after working a full shift at Burger King, Miley Cyrus.

EPILOGUE: Swap It3/10/14

We’re looking forward to doing this again.

I thought I’d write a few notes to tell you how the swap went. This is the first time miLam has gone to a swap. Before we were invited, we hadn’t even ever heard of such a thing. So, we had no idea what to expect. To find out what a food swap is, and how it works, check out Chicago Food Swap.” Here are our notes on the experience:

What we did:

• We brought cookies: 10 lbs of chocolate chip and ~3 lbs of oatmeal.
• We packaged the cookies in simple plastic wrap, 1-lb units.
• We brought a small bowl so that we could break some cookies up into pieces and offer them as samples. That’s not only helpful, it’s the norm.

What we didn’t do:

• We didn’t do the “bid sheet” thing. Although from what we understand, it is customary, Swap It was informal, and we just swapped on the fly. I think I swapped with just about everyone.

What we wish we had done:

• We wish we’d’ve brought an ingredient listing. This is important to people who might have food sensitivities and other people who just need attention.
• We wish we’d given more thought to presentation. Although we really want to stress that that in no way do we feel that we were expected to. We felt nothing but welcome! It’s more to say that we think it would be fun to work up a nice presentation. We’re going to put Keith, miLam’s Aesthetics Adviser, to work on this.
• We wish we’d brought more cookies. We traded nearly all the cookies we brought – which is awesome. But we’d like to have a bit more next time, in case someone wants to trade for, like, a Rolex or something.
• Our cookies drop-dead kicked-ass. Thank you Jacques and Junior League. Next time, we’re going to do something original, like cranberry-orange  muffins, super-cool chocolate-raspberry-secret-ingredient cupcakes, or oatmeal-raisin sandwich cookies.
  

EPILOGUE: Spritzburger3/12/14Eat It Like a Man! 2nd ed.

Spritz Squirrepmunk

SpritzBurger Review

Let me start out by saying that I love Spritzburger and recommend it wholeheartedly. You’ll have fun, and you’ll eat great food.

Squirrepmunk. That thing SpritzBurger has painted on its wall (and on its website) is a squirrepmunk. We executed our SpritzBurger excursion last night. Here are the results:

Drinks:

• Gale’s Root Beer: I drink root beer almost every day. My palate is deeply conditioned with root beer expectations. With that in mind, Gale’s Root Beer is intriguingly more complex than I expected, and refreshingly less sweet than I expected. That its pedigree is root beer is obvious, but its spice profile … well, imagine if root beer lived back in the day when the only way to get around the world was by boat, and it spent a decade travelling first to Mexico, then to the southern^[1] and eastern parts of Africa, eventually finding its way back to Philly (root beer’s ancestral home), “changed” by its experiences. Feared by those whose equilibrium is tethered to an iron-clad grip on the norm. Embraced and celebrated by the rest of us who see difference as oxygen in an increasingly carbon dioxide world.
• Ginger Negroni was the highlight of my alcoholic evening. Deeply subdued undertone of peppery spice, like a ghost of ginger; a sweet start with a mildly bitter finish; light, refreshing – a lot like fresh grapefruit; potent. Beautiful color.
• Sabai Fizz … I don’t know, it made me think of what it might be like to drink pickle juice if the pickles were not quite ready yet. Yeah, I didn’t love every one of the drinks – but that is no reflection on their quality or creativity as it simply is on my tastes in drinks.
• Port in a Storm: the combination of port and cherry is so nice that I can’t believe I’ve never fallen face-first into it before.
• Salted Caramel Egg Cream: have you had a flavor-changing gum? Well, this is a flavor-changing drink. It starts out as a wheat beer, but as soon as you’ve swallowed it, you have a very forward blush of pancake batter. It’s like a parallel universe where the VonTrapp’s nanny wound up being Mrs. Butterworth.
• Tequila Old Fashioned: a genteel way to drink tequila
• Malort Shot … OK, what the fuck? On the menu is says “because we can,” when it ought to say “although we shouldn’t.” I’m not going to bother dreaming up words for this … atrocity. Just watch this video, and you can just turn the sound off if you want to. It’s all in the visuals.
• Smokey Mountain Rickey: thank god I ended on a high note. Don’t let the moonshine component make you think of dueling banjos. This drink is so light and refreshing I could have one for breakfast. In fact, I’m going to.

“Those are the drinks,” is how the sentence begins. It either ends with “we had” or “I had.” I can’t remember. Just kidding. Of course I didn’t have everyone of those, but as a group we did. So, a handful were mine and the other I got a chance to sample.

Spritz Poutine Burger

Food: OK, now this part I do remember. “Poutine” sounds like something that respectable girls from New Orleans don’t discuss in mixed company, but actually, it’s really good french fries with melty cheese and gravy. It’s like the Thanksgiving of french fries. I had a Bay Ridge burger, which takes the flavors of pizza and puts them up in a penthouse somewhere in the Gold Coast of burgers. I liked it. But Randy and Keith both had the Patty Melt, which trumped my Bay Ridge burger by a wide margin. It was fucking amazing! It’s so gorgeous that I wanted to plunge my face right into it as soon as they set it on the table (although that could’ve been the Malort talking). It sort of makes sideways references to a Reuben in your mouth, but it’s not a Reuben … it’s like a patty melt who sometimes hangs with Reubens, but doesn’t want to be one, because it already knows what it is and it’s fine with it. And I was fine with it, too. Should you go When you go to SpritzBurger, I strongly suggest you have the patty melt. Truffle Fries: hell yes.

Desserts: in true miLam fashion, we ordered them all. Gale Gand (and from hence forth, we’ll always append her name with “Oh yes, we met her.”), at the Food Swap, suggested that if we were to order two tasting trios, we’d wind up with a taste of all the desserts. You don’t have to say something like that to us more than once. Here are the standouts:

• Blueberry Ginger Hand Pie with lemon glaze: OK, I want this in regular pie size. And I want to take that pie out of the pie plate, and hold it in my two hands, and just chow on it. I could not get enough of this foodgasm!
• Lemon Meringue Pie with blackberry paint: totally fantastic. Lemon is such a great flavor. This was beautiful, and the portion was perfect. It was a gratifying, satisfying, so worthwhile, so appetizing an example of what it should be: thick, rich, tart, substantial, slightly sharp, rather bright, as comforting as a baby blanket but as sophisticated as leather pants … you can’t keep from smiling as you eat it.
• Butterscotch Pudding with salt & pepper peanuts: this was the most unexpected of them all. It was delicate and nuanced – not like the butterscotch pudding I make at home, which doubles as caulk for the kitchen counter backsplash.
• Rice Krispie Treats with salted caramel dip & chocolate fudge dip. I’ll admit to you that by this time of the evening, I would’ve enjoyed anything dipped in caramel. But Rice Krispie treats are an socially acceptable medium for it.

The service was fantastic. From the knowledgeable, patient, and agreeable bartender; to the clever, pleasant, highly competent, attentive, Texan of a waiter who seemed to seamlessly anticipate our needs and whose attitude set the tone for a really lively dinner; to the Dan-half of the Hearty Boys, who chatted with us at our table; and to the staff in general, who went way beyond the call of duty to help us celebrate a friend’s birthday: THANK YOU.

See This:

Umami Cheeseburger
Illinois Bar and Grill
Sunflower

♠

Notes:

Stay Tuned for Our Next Post:

Learn to make these medicinal wonders at home. Some of the ingredients – well, one of the ingredients – can be hard to find. We’ll discuss possible sources. No toothache? No problem! Cocaine Toothache Drops make a great pick-me-up! Two of them with a cup of cold-press coffee: you won’t believe how much shit you’ll get done!