Girl and the Goat is the West Loop brain child of Stephanie Izard, thus far the only woman to win the title award on TV’s “Top Chef.” Leesa tried to get snag us reservations there last year, but her efforts were futile, so this year, I tried to book a few months in advance using OpenTable. When I had no success with that (it kept telling me I was trying to book too far in advance), I e-mailed the restaurant and found out that while OpenTable imposed a 90-day-early policy, they booked up to a year in advance (!) by phone! So, needless to say, I called immediately and signed us up for what would either be a very early (5:30) or very late (after 9) dinner; we opted for the early.

Take in mind, it was pretty easy for me to get a dining time because we were flexible, but apparently, this is not always the case! I have heard several people since say that they have had to wait for months to get a table. Granted, we booked three months in advance, but I have no idea how successful (or not) we would have been if we had tried to book something more immediate when I made the reservations back in October, so it seems like either way, we totally lucked out.

So, did Girl & the Goat live up to the hype? Was it worth the wait? Two words: Heck, yeah!

First, they have a rotation of breads. A rotation. You know how so many places have one signature bread? Well, G&TG rotates in three per night:

They may not look like much, but the night we went, we had these three: the Squish Squash (a squash-based loaf) served with apple purée and pecan butter, the pretzel loaf served with honey mustard butter and 1000 island and the Chicken Little (a chicken noodle-based loaf) served with chicken liver butter and carrot sage oil. If that doesn’t get your mouth watering, you must be one of those anti-carb people. And even then . . . you know you secretly want it.

The rest of the menu is divided into sections by main ingredient type: vegetable, seafood or meat. I couldn’t tell you which items necessarily came from which menu section, as I believe the following came from the meat section:

Ham frites, people. Ham frites with tomato aioli and beer cheddar dipping sauces. The beer cheddar packed a lip-smacking punch — and who doesn’t like a good aioli with their fried carbs? So good. I’m not exactly sure where the “ham” came in other than that maybe the potatoes were fried with some bacon-like deliciousness. It was straight up fried goodness. Everyone at the table enjoyed these.

Pretty much anyone from Hawai‘i could identify these by their signature flat bone cut:

These Kalbi-style ribs were done with the authenticity you’d expect from any Korean restaurant. Todd liked them for their simplicity, especially among the cacophany of flavors and exotic offerings on the menu. (Yes, this is a “safe” dish for those who may not be into taking too many culinary risks.)

The more adventurous among us enjoyed a few other dishes, as well:

Spaghetti squash provided the perfect textural complement to these blue prawns. The peanut-pork ragout was like a richer version of a Thai-inspired peanut sauce. I never would have expected such freshness of shrimp so far inland, but the salty flavor of the ocean was perfectly preserved in these perfectly cooked crustaceans. A definite winner.

The goat, pork and veal sugo with pappardele was delicately seasoned with rosemary (which can be too strong if you’re not careful) and cape gooseberries. I’m not really sure how the flavors all balanced out with this one, as none of these are ingredients I would normally cook with (except for maybe pork), but we really liked this dish, too. I think I picked it because of the berries in the description, and the gamble really paid off.

Finally . . . THE PIG FACE!

Leesa was relieved when she learned that we would not actually be presented with an actual pig’s face (which, if you’ve ever been to a Chinese restaurant or a Filipino party, you know they can do). In fact, as you can see from the photo, you can’t even see the pork (wood-roasted pig cheek) pretty much at all until you move the egg aside. The way this dish works is, you break the egg and mix everything on the plate together. It looks completely unattractive at that point, but once you taste it, you don’t care. The main ingredient is fork tender and melt-in-your-mouth delicious, seasoned with tamarind and cilantro, with potato sticks providing just the right touch of crunch.

Girl & the Goat received a 2011 James Beard nomination, and Stephanie Izard was named Food & Wine’s Best New Chef of 2011. Why these awards are hanging in the dark basement hall, I couldn’t tell you, but they are well-deserved in a city that takes no culinary prisoners.

Oh, yeah . . . and I totally dig the napkin-holders:

We’d definitely dine there again! G&TG is a welcome addition to the mandatory Chicago dining experience.

I came across this linked recipe for Chicago pastry chef Mathew Rice’s Gooey Butter Cookies one day on Pinterest. I’d asked Todd for a stand mixer for Christmas — I even picked out the exact one I wanted (the cheapest KitchenAid one, 4.5-qt, white) and Wish List-ed it on Amazon — but I didn’t really have a particular recipe in mind to make with it until I found this. I’m a sucker for a nice, chewy cookie, and this looked like it would fill some kind of holiday dessert void.

The recipe for a lot of butter, a lot of sugar, a ton of flour (not literally) and half a real vanilla bean (which, let’s face it, you can only buy whole), so it definitely isn’t the cheapest cookie recipe in town — but it is well worth the “extras.” With all you put into the effort, you do get a lot out of it: One batch yields at least six dozen cookies (it’s actually way more, but I lost count) if you use a teaspoon-sized scoop, and everyone you gift these cookies with will be your friend for LIFE. The gooey butter cookie completely fulfills the promise of its name in terms of taste and texture, and it tastes amazing whether it’s consumed warm, refrigerated or at room temperature. Bless your friends with these, and you will definitely bring smiles to their faces; after all, really good cookies with pure natural ingredients are hard to come by these days!

And so, without further adieu, I bring you the recipe for possibly the most fabulous cookies on Earth.

—

GOOEY BUTTER COOKIES

Recipe by Mathew Rice of Nightwood Restaurant
Source: Tim Mazurek, Lottie + Doof (reprinted with permission)

Ingredients

• 4 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 pound cream cheese
• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 1/2 vanilla bean, scraped [How to Scrape a Vanilla Bean]
• 3 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Confectioner’s sugar for rolling and dusting

Directions

Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Set aside.  In the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, cream the cream cheese, butter, vanilla bean seeds, and sugar together until fluffy.  Add the eggs and vanilla extract.

Incorporate the flour mixture.  Chill for at least 30 minutes.  Scoop roughly 1-ounce balls and toss in the confectioner’s sugar.  Place on a baking sheet, lined with parchment, a couple of inches apart.  Bake at 325° F until they spread and puff slightly, about 12-16 minutes.  They will be really soft in the center.  If they start to brown, they’ve gone too far.  Cool to room temperature.

—

Crissy’s Tips:

• Seriously, do not skimp on the ingredients. Tim thinks the vanilla bean is optional (“but important”), but really, I think if you’re going to go through all the trouble, go big or go home.
• You will use lots and lots of confectioner’s sugar. That is why there’s no set amount: It’s just a lot.
• The longer you refrigerate the dough after prep before you roll it into balls, the better the shape will hold up. This is true for most cookie recipes, but it is especially important here.
• You should also keep the dough (rolled or not) in the refrigerator whenever you don’t need to have it in front of you (i.e., while each cookie sheet is baking).
• Cookies can cool on a plate in the refrigerator. Yeah, it’s ghetto compared to cooling racks, but when you’re lacking for counter space, it works, and it’s fast.

If you are a friend of mine within reasonable geographic distance (i.e., you live on Oahu), please don’t steal my thunder and give these away for Christmas. . . . But otherwise, you know, enjoy!

Ingredients

• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
• 1 tsp. olive or canola oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (I used the one in the jar — yes, we cheat at my house)
• 3 Tbsp. chili powder
• 2 tsp. cumin
• 1 Tbsp. sugar
• 15 oz. tomato sauce
• 1 cup water
• 1 tomato, seeded and chopped
• 1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs, chunked
• 2 cups “Mexican blend” cheese (usually cheddar and monterey jack)
• 1/2 cup minced fresh cilantro
• 12 (6-inch) soft corn tortillas
• cooking spray

Directions

1. Use oil to sautee onion and jalapeno in a large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring often, until softened (8-10 minutes). Stir in garlic, chili powder, cumin and sugar (30 seconds), then adding tomato sauce, water and tomato. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer until slightly thickened (5 minutes).

2. Cook chicken pieces in sauce until chicken is cooked through (internal temperature should be about 160˚F), then transfer chicken to a separate container to cool.

3. Use a collander to strain sauce liquids into a medium bowl, to be kept separate from the sauce solids (onions, etc.). Transfer sauce solids into a large bowl.

4. Shred chicken and mix with the sauce solids (onions, etc.), along with 1/4 cup of the sauce liquids, 1 cup of shredded cheese and the cilantro.

5. Preheat oven to 425˚F. Use cooking spray to grease a 9″ x 13″ baking dish.

6. Stack corn tortillas on a plate and microwave for 60 seconds to soften.

7. Spoon 1/3 cup of chicken mixture evenly down the center of a tortilla. Roll the tortilla around the filling as tightly as possible (watch out — they break easily) and place in baking dish, opening side facing down. Repeat with remaining filling and tortillas.

8. Lightly spray top of enchiladas with cooking spray. Place in oven, uncovered, for 7 minutes, until tortillas brown slightly.

9. Remove enchiladas from oven and pour remaining sauce liquids over top, then sprinkle with remaining cheese. Reduce oven temperature to 400˚F. Cover dish with foil and bake for 20 minutes.

Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

Sorry.

Still here, just busy. Went to Boston for work and met up with friends and took in a Bruins game. I will post about that soon, and also about our Florida trip. No more traveling for me until Christmas!

As you can see, it is not the worst thing in the world. It is not even all over my lungs; in fact, my doctor was clearly able to point to certain “clean” areas and say “This is what your lungs are supposed to look like” then point to the spider web looking stuff and go “not this.” Uhhh, whoops.

I have been getting a lot of weird questions and looks from people ever since my diagnosis. I’ve actually been sick for over a week, the symptoms stemming all the way back to our flight home from Florida, at which time I had a sore throat. It was not pleasant, and I took some time off from work but mostly wrote it off as a cold, even though my nurse friend, Gina, tried to tell everyone I had SARS. I used up several boxes of facial tissue. It was undoubtedly gross, but I refused to go to the doctor because I figured I could just get over it. I let a week pass, and when the color of my phlegm progressed from yellow to a shade of green, I put in the call.

My doctor ordered a series of X-rays, which I hated because I hate hospital gowns and waiting rooms — oh, and radiation, which is why I’m totally not going to Japan this year (though now I may as well have). And you saw what we got. There’s also a “negative” X-ray of my skull, once again confirming that there’s nothing there. Ha ha.

People have been treating me really weirdly, like I’m dying or something. I guess you don’t usually hear people saying they have pneumonia unless they’re old and/or in the hospital. But it happens! It just does. If you Google it, you will see that you can inhale a lot of stuff, including bacteria and virii from other people, but most of the time, your immune system does battle with it, and you’re fine; apparently, my immune system took a day off. And now I vascillate between being fine and coughing up all kinds of stuff, being fine and being exhausted, being fine and . . . not being fine. But I got two days’ worth of Rocephin (antibiotic) injections, an injection of cortisone (steroid) and prescriptions for Levaquin (more antibiotics) and prednisone (more steroids). So far, I can’t say I’m feeling a lot better, but I hear it will happen at some point. My doctor’s objective is to keep me out of the hospital, which sounds good to me.

So, see: Not totally OK, but not dying. I better not be, ’cause I already paid for my AACR conference registration and my flight to Boston in a couple of weeks, but I don’t think my employer will reimburse my account if I die, even though I turned in my travel advance request weeks ago. Not to mention my hockey tickets.

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
- to Pepsi’s John Sculley, 1983

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
- WIRED, February 1996

“It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
- Fortune, November 1998

“That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’”
- Fortune, January 2000

“It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it!”
- Fortune, May 2003, re: iTunes (For the record, I thought he was nuts, but the mp3 player I had before iTunes and the iPod was terrible, and the combination really was life-changing.)

“We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great!”
- WWDC keynote, June 2004

“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
- Stanford commencement, 2005

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
- Stanford commencement, 2005

“. . . And one more thing.”

Sad to say there won’t be any more “one more thing”s. But thanks, Steve, for all the ones you gave.

Steve Jobs, creator of Apple, died today after a long battle with (and probably because of complications from) pancreatic cancer. We have known for a while that he was sick. We have known for a while that this was probably how he would die. Since he gave up the reigns at Apple in late August — something he said he would do when he felt he was no longer capable of leading the company — we knew that it was serious.  The accolades started to pour in, which perhaps is a good thing. Often, we don’t say what we mean to say about someone until they are gone, and they never get to hear all the nice things we have to say about them.

I figured Mr. Jobs probably had enough good things being said about him between the Wall Street Journal and MacWorld and WIRED — and probably a share of catty remarks by those who should really think about how they want to observed publicly upon their deathbeds (I know, it’s a free country, but I’m just saying) — so I didn’t put my opinion in at the time. But now seems like as good a time as any.

I’ve owned over a half-dozen Macintosh computers (only one of which actually “died”) since 1987 and have seen “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” and read the stories, so I have no delusions about Steve Jobs being an awesome guy. He was a person. He had his faults. But there is no doubting that the man was a visionary and a creative genius. He knew what we wanted before we even knew we wanted it, from the first graphical user interface to a phone that’s questionably smarter than the person who operates it. He imagined Apple, and he brought it back from the brink of collapse after the guys who kicked him out couldn’t keep things together anymore.

Perhaps now we have more of those people in this world — more people who “get it.” But I bet a lot of these people would be a whole lot of nowhere if it weren’t for Steve Jobs. I know because I’m one of them. Sure, I haven’t done anything fabulously creative . . . yet. But I have, nonetheless, been inspired by the cocky dude in the black turtleneck. (I tried the turtleneck thing once, though, and it didn’t really work for me.) In addition to being crazy creative, Jobs was also known for what people might kindly refer to as his micro-managing style. Sure, some people might not see this as a positive characteristic, but have you BEEN to an Apple Store? They’re “if my Mac could be a store . . . ” thematic. They’re intuitively what you would expect a store that sells Macs and iPhones and iPads to be. Guess who supposedly designed every aspect of those stores, down to the tethers that hold expensive products to the tables? It’s because he was passionate about what he did: Those of us who are enthusiastic about what we do sometimes can’t help ourselves, and we get a little carried away at times. You’ll have to excuse us. We’re just out to change the world — what are you doing today? Idealistic? Perhaps. But idealistic people make things happen.

You can’t help but wonder how far Steve Jobs might have taken things had cancer not taken his life. I’m sure he had more ideas left; hopefully, he shared some of them with people who will give them wings. ‘Til then, Steve Jobs, we salute for you for thinking different and for making sure 1984 . . . wasn’t like “1984.”

EDIT: Looking back on this entry a mere 18 hours later, I perhaps could have stated things a little more clearly. By no means did I intend to imply that I am one of those visionaries who does really cool things and whose work is as impactful as Steve Jobs’; rather, I meant that I greatly value the acceptance he seemed to gain for those who “think different” and who, like him, perhaps get a little too caught up in the nitty-gritty because we care so much about what we’re doing that we want to do it well, not just “well enough.” Thanks, Steve.

It occurred to me that, unless you’ve actually had acupuncture, you probably don’t know what it looks like: It’s not one of those procedures that’s often featured on TV (although I’ve seen it on “Private Practice,” which I no longer watch, so I don’t know if it’s featured a lot) or that you’d run a Google Image search on if you didn’t need to. At least, I know I hadn’t really looked into it until I went in for a treatment myself. It’s even less likely that you’ve seen this allergy elimination technique pictured at all. Well, wonder no more. I took this picture using my iPhone yesterday:

The red rod is the grip end of the acupuncture needle — you can just barely see the needle itself at all. I tried to tilt my hand a little bit so you could see the vials in them. The vials I’m holding in this picture are the ones for corn and corn syrup. According to a couple of websites I looked at, the substances themselves aren’t actually contained in these vials at all; in fact, the vials just contain distilled water and an “energetic signal” of some sort that corresponds with the vibe given off by whatever the contents would have been. It sounds kinda bogus that way, but who knows. All I know is, my arm for real was not able to resist pressure when certain vials were placed into the hand on my opposite arm under single-blind conditions. So, whatever . . . We’ll see. Yes, I’m still a skeptic — but again, I’m a skeptic who has not seen results from Western medications that have helped thousands, maybe millions, of people.

So, basically, I’m off corn, corn products and corn syrup-containing products until 7 p.m. HST on Thursday. I didn’t even see this page until now and realize that a lot more food additives than I could ever imagine are derived from corn, so I apparently have not been following the 25-hour avoidance in the strictest sense. Hopefully my efforts have been more than good enough, though.

A lot of people have asked whether I am still having migraines. The answer is yes. There is no way to sugar coat it. But, they have been more reactive to medication: Even though the Relpax takes over an hour to kick in, it has been working, which had not always been the case previously. Does this mean the treatment is working? I don’t know. I still need to be treated for at least nuts and artificial colors/flavors, if not also other, less common sensitivities, so we’ll just have to see what happens. I get really annoyed now when I have a migraine, because I’m trying to be patient, but I’m super fed up with these migraines already. I think I’ve reached the tipping point, so hopefully these treatments will work!