Remembrance of Valentine's Past


Marcel Proust dips a madeleine in a cup of tea and cranks out the world's longest novel. I see madeleines and think Valentine's Day 1996.

At the time, I had been "dating" my now-husband Dave for about six weeks. I say "dating" because we lived in different states and during those six weeks we had seen each other exactly once, our relationship built less on dinner and a movie and more on phone calls and letters (ah, those quaint pre-email days; 1996 sounds like Victorian England). He had traveled to Chicago in January and for Valentine's I reciprocated with a visit to Ohio. And I have no idea why, but I thought that baking him a batch of madeleines would be the perfect way to convey that he was The One. I guess they delivered the message successfully because by the next Valentine's Day, we were engaged.

I don't think I've made madeleines since--in the pastry canon, they're about a gazillion notches below anything with chocolate--but sweets have factored into most of our Valentine's celebrations, whether it's a candy jar filled with conversation hearts or a red velvet cupcake. This year we kicked things up a notch: Fritz Pastry announced a pop-up dinner that would feature five to six dessert courses. Seriously? Dessert for dinner. Why has no one thought of this before (besides me)?

Because man can not live on lemon granita alone, the meal started off with fennel soup and a salad sandwich, followed by a vegetable ragout encased in phyllo. (A fellow diner provides far better photos than I was able to snap.) Having duly consumed our recommended daily allowance of vitamins and fiber, the granita cleansed our palates of all that wholesomeness and it was time to get our sugar buzz on.

Two fruit courses followed, which I would never order in a restaurant because, hello, boring, but I relaxed when I saw that we would be finishing with two chocolate desserts. I have to hand it to the folks at Fritz, this menu was extremely well planned. The emphasis was on flavor and texture as opposed to rich and heavy. Don't get me wrong, I like my rich and heavy as much as the next gal, but not for five courses. Gastro distress was not high on my Valentine's wish list.

Fruit One was a dreamsicle vacherin--orange sorbet, vanilla ice cream, vanilla meringue, whipped cream, candied orange zest and clementine. It reminded me of the dreamsicle ice cream we had at a roadside stand in Rochester, or possibly Syracuse, New York, on our way to the Adirondacks. One of the best soft ice cream cones I've ever eaten, and I've eaten plenty. If you're ever in Rochester, or possibly Syracuse, you totally have to find this place. You should also check out this spot in Wisconsin that serves pretty much an entire pint per cone. Or this joint in Wyoming, where they sell locally-made hard-serve that comes in flavors like cabernet. Overheard: "You'll find this in all the five-star restaurants in Wyoming." Customer: "How many five-star restaurants could there be in Wyoming?" Ben & Jerry's factory and scoop shop in Stowe, Vermont, is a no-brainer. (The tour of the factory is a total dud but, bonus, free samples!) If this sounds like we've criss-crossed the U.S. eating ice cream, we have. That includes Zion National Park, where we were enjoying a cone while the sun set over the glittering canyon walls when a pack of wild turkeys descended and chased us off the grounds. You don't get that at Dairy Queen.

Fruit Two featured a refreshing pineapple sorbet--it's not like you can't get fruit in Chicago in February but pineapple kind of disappears after August--and tapioca. I can't say I was super-psyched about mushy pudding to start with, and when our waiter delivered the detailed description, I remembered why I usually avoid fixed menus. Because the chef will always include something you hate. If there's one thing I've learned about Dave, it's that he despises coconut. If there's one thing he's learned about me, it's that I abhor cilantro. Chef Fritz, not being married to either of us, had no clue, and put both in the tapioca. Imagine your hairstylist shaving your head and dying your scalp blue--it was that level of disaster. Except that it wasn't. Honestly, I couldn't taste any cilantro and Dave couldn't detect any coconut. Perhaps this was the new molecular cuisine everyone's been raving about and the ingredients were present in sub-atomic levels. Fritz should do us all a favor and pass this technique along to every Mexican restaurant as part of a "save salsa from cilantro" campaign.

Next came Chocolate One, a black forest chocolate cherry crepe souffle, all sweetness and light. We were starting to feel positively European, what with the meal already clocking in at well over an hour and not including gigantic portions of meat and potatoes. We've only actually been outside the States twice, once to Ireland and once to Canada, which normally I wouldn't count as a foreign country except that we went to Quebec. The Quebecois are serious about not being American or Canadian. They're French, goddammit. To prove it, they say things like "bon jour" instead of "hello." We became so adept at this greeting, people started mistaking us for locals. "Bon jour" we said to our waiter at a creperie in Quebec City. "Voulez vous, couscous," he responded, or something like that. "English?" we begged, panicked. "Ah, your bon jour was so good, I thought you spoke French," he replied. Lesson: When in Rome, do not do as the Romans do unless you're prepared to speak French.

Chocolate Two was a chocolate semi freddo (ice cream-esque??) with chocolate creme anglais and chocolate covered chocolate cerieal. You could try this at home with Cocoa Puffs, Edy's chocolate mousse slow-churn style and Hershey's syrup. In fact, I think I might.

The grand finale, "mignardises," re-imagined the four preceding courses in bite-sized portions. (Think mini raspberry macaron with chocolate filling as a version of the black forest crepe.) The meal itself proved something of a mignardises, taking us through all the years we've spent together, all the memories we've shared, how much our lives have become intertwined. I think about all of the places we've been, all the things we've done and, yes, all the ice cream that we've eaten, and I can't imagine any of it without Dave.

As the server handed us our bill, she put the cherry on top of our sweetheart's dinner. Fritz' parting gift to all its Valentine's diners: a bag of madeleines.

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Dibs Wars

A couple of years ago, the San Francisco Giants rolled into town to take on the Chicago Cubs. We had tickets to the game, which promised to provide more drama than usual, given the presence of the much-reviled Barry Bonds in the Giants' lineup.

As the disgraced slugger stepped to the plate for his first at-bat, the crowd came to its feet. And booed.

The raspberries rained down on Bonds, each one pelting him with the verdict of cheater. Because even though he's yet to be convicted of a crime, we've all pronounced Bonds guilty of abusing steroids.

I didn't join in the razzing, partly because of a strong contrarian streak--the more everyone else does something, the less inclined I am to take part--but also because I didn't feel it was my job to judge Barry Bonds. Of course, plenty of other people felt that it was. Plenty of other people felt secure that, under the same circumstances, they would have just said no to drugs. They would have acted with integrity. They would never cheat to gain an advantage over the competition.

Bullshit.

We all have a little bit of larceny in us. As evidence, I point to the side streets of Chicago, currently littered with chairs and buckets and, in one curious instance, a Casio electronic keyboard. I speak, of course, of dibs.

Dibs, for the uninitiated, is a quaint Chicago tradition of holding your parking space following a snowstorm, using whatever castoff garbage you can find around your house. As a result, our streets currently look like a cross between an open landfill and a contemporary art installation. The point is that after you've allegedly spent hours digging out your car, you have a right to claim that strip of public pavement as your private spot. To which I again say, bullshit.

Though the mayor himself has tacitly endorsed dibs, much as he has cronyism and corruption, the practice has plenty of detractors--some have even likened the subject to abortion, Sarah Palin and "Glee" in terms of the polarizing reactions it produces. I would call that an overstatement, except for that I participated in a heated comments-section war on the Internet a few weeks ago and emotions regarding dibs do indeed run high.

The trouble with dibs is that, just like steroids, it's ripe for abuse. Plenty of people set out their placeholders in spots that they didn't personally shovel. I've seen one con artist on our block drag what looks to be a portable toilet for a disabled person from space to space. (I do NOT need to know what's going on his household with that particular piece of equipment taken out of commission.) Wherever he finds an opening, he marks his territory. Then there are those who will call dibs under the flimsiest of circumstances--if two inches of snow falls, they're out their with their chairs and buckets, despite not having so much as needed to shovel a single flake. In the absence of any regulation or oversight--Is there a time limit on dibs? Nobody knows--and what with the mayor and his minions essentially turning a blind eye, people can twist dibs to suit whatever purpose they want, for however long they want. In short, they cheat.

The real issue, of course, has nothing to do with snow and physical exertion and everything to do with the fact that there are too many cars in the city and not enough parking spaces. Our condo building has 26 units, so factor minimally 26 cars. We can't all fit in the handful of spaces on our street. If you don't snag one of those cherished slots out front, you have to park around the corner or around the block, or around the block from around the block. Admittedly, this sucks, especially when it's cold out, or late at night, or raining and you've just brought home a shitload of stuff from Costco or Ikea. But that's part of the charm of living in the city. We don't have garages and this allows us to feel superior to people in Naperville. It's a trade-off.

Then along comes a snowstorm and people suddenly use dibs as an excuse to get what they've always wanted, a guaranteed parking space. An advantage, much like steroids, over every other poor sap with a car. Once one person does it, more are sure to follow. Because if you don't, if you clear your spot but fail to "own" it, you'll find it filled with some other vehicle whenever you arrive home from work or dinner or whatever activity you deemed more important than holding onto your parking space. Just like you would any other night of the year. Normally you'd move onto the next opening, but courtesy of dibs, they're also taken--by a cardboard box, a ladder or a pair of folding chairs. (I must say, I do appreciate the whimsy of people who face their sets of chairs toward each other, as if passersby will stop for a chat at this makeshift street-side cafe and share a cup of hot cocoa.) So you circle and circle and swear that the next time it snows you won't be such a chump, next time you're calling dibs.

Kind of how if everyone else were doing steroids, you would be tempted to take them too--just to level the playing field. When the rules of the game shift--they go from non-steroids to steroids, from non-dibs to dibs--you either get on board or you get left behind. It doesn't matter whether you think the new world order is wrong, or even illegal, because holding onto your ideals won't help you keep your place in the lineup or find a parking space.

Personally, I think dibs is crap. I not only think it's selfish, I find it galling for people to think that by setting out a Casio keyboard, they can somehow claim ownership of a public street. If I shovel my sidewalk, can I tell you not to walk on it? Mostly I hate that dibs is indicative of an every-man-for-himself mindset.

A mindset I was sorely tempted to give into. Last week, it took me an hour and a half to shovel the two feet of snow entombing our Honda. While I was out laboring, I watched a steady stream of cars drive down our street, searching for a place to park. All the openings were claimed, natch, some by cars and some by portable toilets. I knew that the second we moved our car, one of these vultures would swoop in and benefit from my hard work.

"We are so doing dibs," I told my husband. I was about to retrieve a pair of plastic lawn chairs from storage when Dave stopped me. He'd been talking to a couple of neighbors from our building, all of them likewise digging out their cars, all of them likewise opposed to dibs. One guy even went so far as to walk across the street, take the chair holding a space, and chuck it into the facing yard. (What keeps other people from doing this? Fear of retaliation. If you appropriate a dibs spot, who knows what vengeance the "owner" will take on your car.)

So now we were being pressured to do the right thing, instead of the wrong. Dammit. If Dave had come home five minutes earlier or five minutes later, we would have felt perfectly comfortable participating in dibs--because everyone else was doing it. Once we learned otherwise, the decision became more difficult--cave to the mob and give ourselves the same advantage they had no problem claiming or stick to our principles and find ourselves screwed. I imagine there's a point when Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa faced this same dilemma. Just like everyone who calls dibs, they took the easier path. Think about that, ye dibs proponents, the next time you're tempted to boo someone for being weak.

For our part, we compromised. Instead of putting out plastic chairs, we've yet to move our car. It's like we're still in the game, but sitting on the bench, waiting for the rules to change back to normal.

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How I Spent the Day After Snowpocalypse

When we'd had our fill of local news coverage of Snowpocalypse 2011—they pre-empted "The View," for crying out loud, and what's the point of a snow day if you can't wallow in craptastic daytime TV—we decided to venture out to see for ourselves what havoc the blizzard had wrought.

It was as spectacular as promised, no small feat given the hyperbolic predictions. Our street had yet to be touched by a plow and glistened in the glare of the short-lived sun. We checked on our Honda and then, like most people we encountered, decided to have a little fun before digging out. Fun being a relative term and consisting largely of walking down the middle of Lawrence Avenue.

Where major arteries had been cleared, sidewalks were still thigh-deep in drifts (mad props to Harvesttime for shoveling down to bare pavement), leaving pedestrians to take their chances on normally bustling thoroughfares. Given that most cars were buried, and that most drivers were still suffering PTSD from what will go down in history as the Horror on Lake Shore Drive, Lawrence, Western and Lincoln were all but deserted of automobiles.

On Western, we saw a convoy of plow-salt truck-plow blow through the intersection, passing up a CTA bus struggling to free itself from a snow bank. In Lincoln Square, there were plenty of gawkers, but few businesses open. The Davis Theater, normally an excellent refuge for those afflicted with cabin fever, is closed until Thursday, with snow piled up against the theater's shuttered doors in case anyone got it in their head to rush the popcorn machine. No need to watch "True Grit," anyway, we're living it.

Trekking down side streets, it was impossible to determine the rhyme or reason of the city's snow plowing efforts. Wilson clear, Sunnyside impassable. A few hardy souls were shoveling out their cars, but unless they went all James Bond and turned into airplanes (O'Hare, by the way is open, we learned at this morning's press conference, it's just that there are no flights), it was hard to see where anyone thought they were going.

So where were all the kids? Given Chicago Public School's astounding closure—with a lame duck mayor and an interim school chief, clearly the inmates are in charge of this asylum—I expected to see more than a few little people running wild and building snowmen. But a hike to River Park produced sightings of a lone cross-country skier and a pair of snowshoers—all adults. "They have these things called video games," my husband reminded me of the youngsters.

Have duly borne witness to nature's mighty power, we headed home exhausted. I had insisted on walking through drifts instead of around them, because why not, and I promise you it's the best cardio blast, butt-and-thigh firming workout you'll get all year.