April 24, 2005
when diners fail
So today I ducked into the Marquette Inn on Madison for coffee to stave off an increasingly evil withdrawal headache (caused by ATM failure, which in turn caused failure to acquire caffeine this morning due to NO MONEY), and while I was in there I figured I'd have a little soup for lunch since it was starting to SNOW. Stupid snow. I'm only just a little bit bitter that it's snowing and freezing though it's almost May, and I would just like to say that Chicago has a bitch of a windchill. Especially near the lake -- I am glad I am looking for apartments well away. So anyway -- the cream of chicken rice soup arrived, and the first warning sign was that it jiggled. Like jello. Eeew. It was so solid that the saltines rested lightly on its surface, sinking not at all. And sad to tell, it was pasty and bland and in no way delicious. And to describe it as hot would have been generous. Sigh. At least the coffee was okay.
Hi Foodnerd - I thought this was your entry for IMBB, it kind of looks orangey... I'm sorry it wasn't as good as you hoped, it looks delicious to me nontheless! I didn't know that it snows in Chicago in April, although we have sometimes here in the UK too.
Posted by: keiko at April 24, 2005 07:42 PMHi FoodNerd -
A few things:
1) Welcome to Chicago!
2) Your blog is great and I'm excited that it's going to be Chicago-based now, because at present I don't know of many others around here (I'm sure they exist, I just haven't looked much)
3) That soup looks groooosssss. It got me thinking about cream of chicken rice soup in general. Does a yummy version even exist, or are they all processed and gelatinous now?
4) Supermercado Morelia is pretty far north on Clark - near Howard.
Anyway, glad to make your acquaintance!
Cindy
Posted by: cindym at April 30, 2005 10:35 AMThanks! It's nice to make your acquaintance as well. :-) Plus your blog is awesome. I was wondering about chicago blogs myself -- there's Fuck Corporate Groceries, but that's more a resource site than a blog as such, and I haven't noticed any others that are truly Chicago based. Or maybe I'm just high on crack again and forgetting what they are. Maybe people will tell us.
As for cream of chicken rice soup, the thing that springs to mind is avgolemono soup, one of my favorites, which is thick and creamy but not gelatinous or nasty. That's eggs and lemon doing the thickening (again with the citrusy broth soups, hmm). It can't be that hard to do the same with a bit of butter, cream and flour for a plain-vanilla chicken rice soup. Or hell, leave out the flour altogether and just use cream. And maybe a potato pureed and stirred in if you want it thicker. Maybe we should issue a food blogger challenge and see what recipes people come up with: who's got the most asskicking creamy chicken rice soup?
Posted by: foodnerd at May 1, 2005 11:10 AMi like the asskicking cream o chicken rice challenge. my grandma just alerted me to a rather asskicking chicken store in glenview (a suburb near where i am currently living ...with my parents ...it's a long story), so i am looking for excuses to make chicken-related dishes.
and you're totally right about avgo. soup - very delish.
by the way, not sure if you've already found it, but the LTH Forum is a nice addition (or alternative) to Chowhound for food-related Chicago discussions.
http://www.lthforum.com/bb/index.php
I had to laugh reading this post because I came to it after seeing the one from just over a week later where you describe eating on the roof of your office building - welcome to the wonderful wacky weather of Chicago!
In answer to some of the other comments about Chicago blogs, ours is a group blog half-based in Chicago. My partner in crime Barrett posts quite a bit about the Chicago scene. Myself, I left Chicago a dozen years ago for Europe (and don't miss the weather at all)!
Hope you enjoy the city - I appreciate it more now that I'm no longer there!
Posted by: Meg at May 6, 2005 09:40 AM