Category: food culture

  • International Zine Month Day 28: Food Zines!

    Cook with a recipe from a zine or cook zine! Come get ’em here!

  • Winter Solstice With Paper Moon Pastry 12/21

    papermoon

    Make the darkest day of the year a little brighter with baked treats from Paper Moon Pastry. On from 1-5 p.m. on Saturday, December 21, a.k.a the Winter Solstice, Ana from Paper Moon will be offering a slew of festive treats from the one and only pastry wagon. Pick up gingerbread, dulce de leche cookies, cupcakes or signature baking kits. You can even pre-order vegan and gluten-free goodies in advance. Papermoonpastry.com

  • Off-Site: Quimby's sells Marijuanamerica by Alfred Ryan Nerz at Jerry's Sandwiches

    Cover_marijuanamerica

    Quimby’s will journey down the street to Jerry’s (the Wicker Park location, at 1938 W. Division) to welcome Alfred Ryan Nerz and sell his book Marijuanamerica: One Man’s Quest to Understand America’s Dysfunctional Love Affair with Weed. What BoingBoing called “a fascinating and entertaining snapshot…it reads something Hunter S. Thompson might have written in his Hell’s Angels days, had he laid off the hard stuff and graduated from Yale.”

    Alfred Ryan Nerz is a Yale-educated author, journalist, and TV producer. He’s also a longtime marijuana enthusiast who has made it his mission to better understand America’s long-standing love-hate relationship with our favorite (sometimes) illegal drug. His cross-country investigation started out sensibly enough: taking classes at a cannabis college, hanging out with a man who gets three hundred pre-rolled joints per month from the federal government, and visiting the world’s largest medical marijuana dispensary.

    However, after connecting with a mysterious friend of a friend, his journey took an unexpected turn and he found himself embedded with one of the largest growers and dealers on the West Coast. He quickly transformed from respectable journalist into an underworld apprentice — surrounded by pit bulls, exotic drugs, beanbags full of cash, and trunks full of weed.

    While struggling to navigate the eccentric characters and rampant paranoia of the black market, he maintained enough equanimity to explore a number of vital questions: Is marijuana hurting or helping us? How is it affecting our lungs, our brains, and our ambitions? Is it truly addictive, and if so, are too many of us dependent on it? Should we legalize it? Does he need to quit?

    As entertaining as it is illuminating, Marijuanamerica is one man’s attempt to humanize the myriad hot-button topics surrounding the nation’s worst-kept secret—our obsession with weed—while learning something about himself along the way.

    Alfred Ryan Nerz is a freelance journalist whose pieces have appeared in Esquire, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York. In addition, he has written for NPR and produced television shows on Spike TV and the Biography channel. He lives in Brooklyn. He is also the author of Eat This Book: A Year on the Competitive Eating Circut.

    Marijuanamerica: One Man’s Quest to Understand America’s Dysfunctional Love Affair with Weed
    By Alfred Ryan Nerz
    Abrams Image / April 2013
    U.S. $19.95
    ISBN 978-1-4197-0408-6
    Hardcover
    272 pages

    Please note this event IS NOT at Quimby’s. It’s at Jerrys Sandwiches (the Wicker Park location) at 1938 W. Division, 773.235.1006.

  • Matthew Gavin Frank Reads From Pot Farm 9/7

    In Matthew Gavin Frank’s new book Pot Farm (The University of Nebraska Press), he talks about his work on a medical marijuana farm in Northern California. Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farm’s cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.

    ” Investigative research coupled with personal reflections on a controversial arena of American farm production.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “Pot Farm is the curious and compelling tale of a hazy season spent harvesting medical marijuana. The cast of characters rivals those found in the finest comic fiction, except these folks are real, and really peculiar. Pot Farm is smart, sly, revelatory, often laugh-out-loud funny, and entirely legal. —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

    “Sex, politics, intrigue, crime, adventure, life and death—it’s all here, in a strangely compelling hybrid of action flick meets postmodern philosophical meditation meets Cheech and Chong. This compulsively readable exposé from a self-proclaimed ‘unreliable narrator’ has it all, including a cast of outcast characters who simply jump off the page.”—Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies

    Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Pot Farm, Barolo, Warranty in Zulu, The Morrow Plots (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), Sagittarius Agitprop and more. Recent work appears in The New Republic, The Huffington Post, The Iowa Review, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Gastronomica, and others. He currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.  This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream.

    For more info: matthewgfrank.com

    Fri, Sept 7th, 7:00 pm

  • Call for texts: Mash Tun, A Craft Beer Journal

    Introducing…..

    Mash Tun
    A Journal about Craft Beer

    The Mash Tun is a paean to craft beer. It follows the pleasures and aesthetics of craft beer and how it intersects with food, culture, and society.

    The Mash Tun will feature interviews and profiles with brewery owners, beer lovers, brewmasters, beer distributors, scientists, industry impresarios, coopers, bottle makers, bar owners,  home brewers and anyone who loves and is part of the process of making beer. There will features about figures in the industry as well as historical narratives. Short and long form entries will be interspersed with recipes, comics and photography featuring participating breweries, bars and restaurants.

    The  Mash Tun will be a four-color, 120-160 + page, perfect bound publication that takes the from of a journal and it will be published by Public Media Institute (PMI), producer of Lumpen, Proximity, Materiel and other periodicals. PMI is a non profit arts organization that produces publications, festivals and host cultural events in Chicago and sometimes elsewhere. Its home is in Bridgeport.

    Volume 1 Issue 1 will launch during Craft Beer Week.

    If you like writing about beer then you should participate. Send them a one paragraph pitch, a writing sample or two, and email edmarlumpen (at) gmail.com  There is room for a few more pieces.

    The deadline for texts on Issue 1 is March 1, 2012.

  • Martha Bayne Discusses The Soup & Bread Cookbook 2/9

    Everybody loves soup. But why?

     

    Sure, it’s nutritious, affordable, and infinitely variable. Soup can be a rustic meal in a bowl or a dainty palate cleanser. It can showcase the pure flavors of fresh spring peas or provide a last-ditch use for tired celery and the stalest bread. From borscht to pozole to udon, it’s the hallmark of home cooking across cultures. It soothes the sick, it nourishes the poor–and it can trick children into eating their veggies. And, alone among foods, a pot of soup can be a powerful tool to both draw people together and help them to reach out to others.

     

    The Soup & Bread Cookbook, inspired by author Martha Bayne’s Soup & Bread series at Chicago’s Hideout, aims to explore this social role of soup, in the midst of a collection of terrific, affordable recipes from food activists, chefs, and others, providing a quirky exploration of the cultural history of soup–and its natural ally, bread–as a tool for both building community and fostering social justice.

     

    The social functions of soup don’t stop at the soup kitchen door. Everyone’s familiar with the “stone soup” fable — the tale of a hungry town that feeds itself when every citizen contributes something to the pot. But have you heard about Re-Thinking Soup, a weekly free soup lunch started in Chicago by Sam Kass, the Obamas’ personal chef? Or about Empty Bowl, a nationwide grassroots effort to raise money for hunger relief by partnering with local arts groups?

     

    Soup has a powerful effect on how people gather, eat, and share. A few years ago in Seattle, Knox Gardner had a brainstorm. Eating your way through a pot of soup day after day can get boring–why not get together and swap some with friends? The idea took off like chicken and noodles, and now neighbors across the country are getting together regularly for home-based “soup swaps,” with a date at the end of January annually designated (by soupswap.com) as National Soup Swap Day.

     

    In Chicago, the arts collective InCUBATE uses soup as a microfunding tool. Each month since the Sunday Soup project launched in 2007, the group hosts a casual soup dinner for members and likeminded friends; the proceeds to go fund a different art project each month. And of course, soup can be a political statement: The radical volunteers of Food Not Bombs have been providing free vegetarian soup to the hungry as a protest against war and social injustice since 1980.

     

    These are just a few examples of the stories Bayne wraps around a collection of delicious, accessible and tested soup recipes, the diversity of which epitomizes the wide-ranging potential of soup as a community building tool. “Celebrity” chef contributors share the pages with food activists, farmers, writers, soup geeks, and regular folks involved in grassroots food projects around the country.

    For more info: soupandbread.net

    One of the top ten essential cookbooks for fall 2011.
    -Time Out Chicago

    Beautifully written, generous and honest, the book looks at community building through lenses as various and diverse as the country has to offer. Bayne finds people of many kinds – immigrants, nuns, urban farmers, artists and activists – each using soup to bring people together and knit up what has become unraveled.

    -Eiren Caffall, Tikkun Daily

  • The Beat Cop's Guide to Chicago Eats Release Event 6/14

    Join Sgt. David J. Haynes of the Chicago Police Department, and his partner-in-crime, blogger Christopher Garlington on Tues, June 14th at 7pm as they talk about the places where they take a bite out of crime and also bites out of donuts, polish sausage, fried chicken, enchiladas, and omelettes. Peppered with outrageous stories from working cops, Chicago cop lore, and even a few recipes, The Beat Cop’s Guide To Chicago Eats takes you on a gustatory journey through all five Chicago areas, including some of the toughest neighborhoods in the nation.

    Sgt. David J. Biscuit Haynes has spent the past 15 years dodging bullets and chasing down gang bangers on the city’s West Side, running Chicago’s first ever Homeland Security Task Force, and supervising squads in the 19th District at Belmont and Western.  Christopher “The Bull” Garlington is a blogger and author, known for his stories of raising highly intelligent (devious) children published on the blog Death by Children. His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Another Realm, Bathhouse, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and more. Together Haynes and Garlington have hosted the radio program The Dave & Chris Show! since 2007, during which they cultivate and maintain a long-standing argument about…everything. From politics and video games to the importance of cool nicknames and secret societies, they cover it on their live weekly broadcast from cigar stores, bars, and other manly locales around Chicago. Their show first aired on WJJG and is now broadcast online on blogtalk radio.

    The book retails at $15.95 and includes $34 in coupons. It’s like being buddies with your alderman. For more info: lakeclaremont.com

  • ‘Za the Pizza Zine Release and Pizza Party at Quimby’s 11/10

    As spicy and sassy as a stick of pepperoni, ‘Za the Pizza Zine is a compilation about, what else, the wonders of pizza. Still, it’s about more than simply reveling in pepperoni prose for creator Nicki Yowell and her baker’s dozen of bi-coastal contributors. The Chicagoans are plenty and include Ramsey Everydaypants of List, Eric Bartholomew of Junk Drawer, gore poet Mason Pierce and Dining with Words’ Caroline Liebman. ‘Za combines fiction, essays, comics, illustration and photography to create an all-out snack time explosion. Come for the reading of eloquent odes to ‘za and stay for the pizza party, featuring actual pizza.

    For more info: zathepizzazine.wordpress.com

  • Matthew Gavin Frank Reads From Barolo

    Barolo

    After a childhood of microwaved meat and saturated fat, Matthew Gavin Frank got serious about food. His “research” ultimately led him to Barolo, Italy (pop. 646), where, living out of a tent in the garden of a local farmhouse, he resolved to learn about Italian food from the ground up. Barolo is Frank’s account of those six months.  At once an intimate travelogue and a memoir of a culinary education, the book details the adventures of a not-so-innocent abroad in Barolo, a region known for its food and wine (also called Barolo). Along the way we meet the region’s families and the many eccentric vintners, butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs who call Barolo home. Rich with details of real Italian small-town life, local foodstuffs, strange markets, and a circuslike atmosphere, Frank’s story also offers a wealth of historical and culinary information, and musings on foreign travel, all filtered through food and wine.

    Matthew Gavin Frank worked for over fifteen years in the food and restaurant industry in positions ranging from dishwasher to sous-chef, server to sommelier, menu consultant to catering-business owner, farmhand to janitor. A visiting assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University, he has published essays in Gastronomica, Creative Nonfiction, and Best Food Writing 2006.

    “Aaahhh . . . ! Here are all the joys of being young and exuberant and passionate and in love with women, and life, and better yet . . . in Barolo. This remarkable and enchanting tale makes me want to set the clock back many years and to book passage to Italy and to the sips of the world’s greatest wine, and to be inspired by all the things that make life such a wonderful journey! Kudos to Matthew Gavin Frank for reminding us what really makes life worth living!”—Charlie Trotter, chef, author, and host of PBS’s The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter

    “Suddenly you are in Italy, suddenly you are in love, suddenly you are picking the delicate Nebbiolo grape under a burning sun—and in a moment Matthew Gavin Frank has captured your unwavering attention, with a firm grasp that continues for all three hundred pages of this delightful and incisive book.”—Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine and author of Almost Human: Making Robots Think

    For more info: http:// www.matthewgfrank.com