Cordero con frijoles y arroz at D'Candela My good friend Mike Sula, the intrepid food reporter for the Chicago Reader recently told the story of D'Candela, an Irving Park Peruvian joint. It reminded me that I had an incredible meal there last year, but never wrote about the place. The touchstone is their charcoal roasted chicken, a golden crispy skinned number, juicy with brine and more secret spices (15) than the Colonel's bird. Save for the chicken at Papa's Cache Sabroso in Humboldt Park, I've generally been disappointed in Latin-flavored spit roasted birds. They always end up with dried-out, over-roasted breast and limp lifeless skin. D'Candela, however, is one of the best around. My favorite dish here though is...
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The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read her past market missions here. The Argentinean housemate is the one who introduced me to the magic that is creamy sweet dulce de leche. She doesn’t judge me (nay, encourages!) when I whorl the stuff liberally on animal crackers with a sprinkle of sea salt—my go-to snack and instant gratification take on the decadent alfajores her grandmother indulgingly mails from Spain. And she risks life and limb by making the caramelized milk goodness in a pressure cooker with me—despite being convinced the cans will explode and we’ll be maimed for life (plus have to clean burnt milk off half the...
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Matt of MattBites shares his memory of sopaipillas, a dessert that always takes him back straight to his childhood: "Made by my grandmother, the tender warm pillows of fried dough were sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and drizzled with honey and always disappeared within minutes. She would encourage us to eat them immediately while they were still warm, but it was always said with a wink in her eye – she knew we couldn't keep our hands off them until there was an empty plate of grease-laden cinnamon-scented crumbs."...
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Great great story by Kim Severson in the New York Times today on how grocery chains have begun customizing their stores to target the increasingly affluent Latino shopper: Although there is no one typical Hispanic shopper, some generalizations are driving the design of the new Latino-theme stores. Many have wider aisles because, research shows, grocery shopping is often a family outing. Hispanic families tend to be larger, and more people cook from scratch, so produce and meat departments tend to be bigger and better stocked. And loyalty to brands from the home country is strong. At Rancho Liborio, Tide is almost an afterthought. Mexican brands like Ariel dominate the shelves.But the generalizations end there. The term Hispanic applies to people...
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