Living High on the Hog!

To live high on the hog generally means to eat the best cuts of the poor unfortunate pig; like most word histories, this is an oversimplification*, but the idea is sound.  I mention it as, thanks to a recent visit by my dear friend Keith (30 years we’ve been friends!) and his partner, Victor, I have been living high on the hog.  Keith is what I would call a “foodie” (probably an out-of-date word, like most everything associated with me), and Victor is a maitre d’, so they know food.  And while visiting here, they wanted to try some of our better restaurants.  I led them to a variety of diners, my idea of gourmet eating, and they showed me a side of dining I have rarely seen.  I’ll talk about the menus at three restaurants we went to.

First was Yoshi, not too far from here.  After a delicious cocktail, we began with grilled radicchio salad, served with pumpkin seeds and Canadian goat cheese, and topped with a white wine and walnut oil vinaigrette.  This was actually one of the best things I ate: delicious and somehow the grilling reduced the bitterness of the radicchio.  The main course was grilled tofu with portabello mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant, red pepper, green beans, asparagus and curry raisin couscous, served with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar reduction.  And yes, it was a lot of food.  There was also wine and dessert.  I won’t presume to comment on the wine; I left that selection up to Victor.

The next night was the upscale vegetarian restaurant The Green Zebra.  I started with grilled Werp Farm baby lettuce, a ‘perfect’ farm egg, crispy potato tots (three!), and sherry vinaigrette.  Werp Farm is in Michigan; Keith tried to explain how the egg was probably cooked, some exotic method, but it was beyond my ken; however, it was delicious.  The soup course was creamy Illinois sweet corn soup with confit yukon potato, roasted red pepper, and black truffle, very rich and quite wonderful.  The main course was eggplant and tofu dumplings with sweet chili sauce, poblano pepper, and Savoy cabbage.  All served with wine and followed by dessert, of course.

And the final evening, after a performance of Million Dollar Quartet at the Apollo Theatre, was Boka, the only one of the three to rate a star from Michelin.  After the usual cocktail, I began with a salad of red Inca quinoa, fresh garbanzo falafel, baby cucumbers, dried fruit, Za’atar (Middle Eastern herbs--I looked it up) yogurt, and charred eggplant. The main course was fregola sarda (a Sardinian pasta made in little balls) with caramelized fennel, pattypan squash, sun-dried tomatoes, pepita cracker, and goat milk (which, through some chemical process, or maybe it was magic, was encased in little balls which opened pleasantly when bitten into).  We also had two sides, one of cucumber, grilled watermelon, shiso (an Asian mint), and ricotta salata; the other a mac “n” cheese with edamame.  And a couple of desserts, one complimentary since I found long hair in my salad!  Hey, even the best restaurants sometimes have little hitches. 

And somewhere along the way (I don’t remember with which course specifically or which restaurant), we had a delicious red pepper sorbet.  All that exotic food became kind of a blur--a delicious blur, to be sure, but so exotic to me it's hard to keep it all straight.

These meals were delightful and wonderful and I will always be grateful to Keith and Victor for allowing me the experience of eating like the 1%.  Now, it’s back to my diners and my own cooking.  Definitely no Michelin stars there.


*http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/high-on-the-hog.html

Meanwhile, Back in 1707

I love the way events--history, if you will--appear and disappear, changing in ever unexpected ways.  Such is the case with George Frideric Handel’s comic cantata Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno: Cor fedele in vano speri ("A faithful heart hopes in vain").  Handel wrote this piece in 1707 when he was quite young and living in Italy.  There is a record of its existence, but no record of it ever having been performed, although it surely would have been.  As a cantata it’s possible it was never staged as an opera, but the early Italian love of theater makes it likely it was staged as well as sung in a concert.  Other than that one record of the work being written, it disappeared from history, leaving nothing but a fragmentary manuscript score at the British Museum. 

And then, wonder of wonders, in 1960 a musicologist announced he had found a complete score in a collection at Münster.  It’s the only score in existence, now published, and we can hear this delightful piece in its entirety--a piece of formerly lost history, if you will.

Which brings me to Chicago’s newest opera company, The Haymarket Opera.  This last weekend they staged, for the first time in Chicago, Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno.  And what a delight it was, too!  Haymarket tries to reproduce, as closely as possible, Baroque performance practices, including costumes, sets, choreography, and even hand movements.  The orchestra uses period instruments, using, in this performance, the harpsichord, the recorder, and the beautiful archlute (image below), performed by the renowned lutist Michael Leopold.

There are only three vocal parts, two being “pants roles,” roles sung by women acting as the shepherdess Clori’s suitors.  The story is the slight and mostly silly, but one doesn’t go to a performance like this for the story; Aida it ain’t.  One goes for the music and this was excellent.  The Haymarket performs at the intimate Mayne Stage in the northern suburb of Rogers Park, and sitting in this 300 seat venue it’s hard not to imagine that I was watching a performance much as Handel himself would have seen it done over 300 years ago.  History indeed!