Happy Birthday To Me!

Today's my 40th birthday!

I'm not one for big blow-out type birthday celebrations; I usually just work on my birthday and don't make a big deal of it. Today I'm packing up the family and going out for breakfast at an old-fashioned diner I've been meaning to try, and then heading over to the Kane Country Flea Market. My wife hates going to antique stores and flea markets so I try and drag her to one on my birthday, when she can't protest or complain about it.

Later, we'll all go out for dinner with my parents and the plan is to follow it up with a visit to Margie's Candies for some of their amazing ice cream, which, for me, is far superior to cake.

On days like this, I'm just happy to spend time with family, appreciate the fact that we're all healthy, relatively happy, and in a position where we can spend quality time together.

Thanks to everyone for the kind birthday wishes. And, since forty is "the new thirty" (or so I'm told), I'm not at all worried about being old. (Yeah, right!)

Easter with da Frittats

People all over Italy have widely varied accents and often speak regional dialect from back in the days before Italy was a unified country (which didn't happen until about 1870 or so). So when you travel around, not only will you hear unrecognizable dialect in places like San Gimignano and Siracusa, but you'll also hear Italian spoken with vastly different pronunciations.

Sicily is a prime example. They often change the 'o' sound on the end of a word to a 'u' sound--so lo Siciliano, which is the proper Italian for "the Sicilian language" becomes lu Sicilianu. To make it even harder on those of us with a passing knowledge of guidebook Italian, locals will often switch back and forth mid-sentence between dialect and "proper" (read; Florentine) Italian.

Local dialects are an incredibly insightful window into the history of a region. Siclian dialect is peppered with words derived from Arabic, Greek, Spanish, French, and even a little German thrown in, reflecting the many inhabitants the island has known over the years. Up north, in Trentino-Alto Adige, for instance, the influences are primarily from Austria, and along the northeastern border of Italy, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, you start hearing Eastern European and Slavic influences in the dialect.

Here in Chicago, however, we have an Italian dialect all our own, which I sometimes refer to as Caputiano, in reference to Caputo's, the well-known Italian produce market and deli on Harlem Ave. in Elmwood Park where any real Chicago Italian worth their salt goes to do their shopping.

An informational aside: There are now many grocery establishments calling themselves Caputo's. The original Caputo's are now known as Angelo Caputo's Fresh Markets. The other chain--Joe Caputo and Sons--is decent, but it's not as good as the original, and then there's Caputo Cheese Market in Melrose Park, which is noted to be "Owned & Operated by Wiscon Corporation. Not affiliated with any other Caputo".

Anyway, Caputiano is a unique dialect of Chicago area American-Italians in which the last letter of words (and it's usually limited to names of foodstuffs) is dropped entirely. O's also change to U's, reflective of the Sicilian heritage of many Chicago-area Italians.

So mozzarella becomes mootzarel, scamorza become scamorz sometimes even smooshed down into skmorz, and sopressata, puzzlingly, becomes supersott.

The more you listen, the stranger it gets. Hard 'C' sounds are softened, to the point that they start to sound more like a 'G'. So capicolla sounds like gavigool. Throw in all the nicknames, hand gestures, and typical Italian non-verbal sign language, and you've got something really fun to be a part of.

Which brings us (finally) to the topic of this post. My family is blessed enough to know an Italian-American family who generously includes us in the annual Easter blowout they hold at their home. In typical fashion, they go all out for this party; bunny and chick-shaped candies are everywhere, there's a lamb-shaped cake, big Easter baskets and stuffed animals for the kids, a mad-dash Easter egg hunt out back promises plastic eggs filled with half-dollar and dollar coins (along with the occasional one filled with dirt!), and, of course, a massive spread of great food.

The main event and centerpiece of the Easter blowout, though, is Big Mikey's frittat.

A frittat is, basically, a frittata, of course. But it's oh so much more than that. It's the frittata to end all frittate. It's the frittata that ate Melrose Park.

Big Mikey (in typical Italian-American fashion, "Mikey" is about 6'7" and 280 lbs.) is a pro at this by now. He's got a special pan he uses just for the frittats, which is the biggest, deepest sauté pan I've ever seen in my life. The day before, he loads up on imported salseech and salumi--soopersatt, gavigool, mortadell--cheeses like fontina, scamorza, and ricotta, which gets drained through cheesecloth, and a case of eggs, and then on Easter morning, he gets down to work.

Big Mikey occupies his corner of the kitchen all morning, cranking out one frittat after another while talking, greeting guests, playing with the kids, eating, and yanking people's chains a little. He likes to play up the fact that I'm a chef and ask me if he's "doing it right", confident that he's in his element and, in his kitchen, I'm the novice. Of course, I give him his respect and bow down to his frittat skills.

This shows just how big the frittat pan is. Look how it dwarfs the burner.

It's a great, raucous affair. There are always tons of kids running around stuffing themselves on candy, there's a really interesting mix of old-school Chicago Italian-Americans, Polish and other more newly-arrived Eastern European immigrants, and a Jewish contingent as well, so the buffet runs the gamut from lox and bagels to cannoli to hot, garlicky borscht. The guys usually have a few TV's on, tuned to the Hawks game or the Masters, talk business, and will step out side to smoke cigars at some point. The women dote over the kids, catch up on gossip and push everyone to eat more, and a good time is generally had by all.

Our family is truly honored to be included every year, and it's really great to see how thrilled our hosts are with our kids. They shower them with gifts and Easter candy, but, even more meaningfully, with attention and genuine affection. Italians, in general, have a really deep appreciation for young children. As a parent who sometimes gets fed up with the day-to-day drudgery of raising two kids, it's a refreshing reminder of where my priorities and focus should be.

It's one thing to prowl the neighborhoods of the Chicago area, eating in restaurants, shopping in ethnic markets, and doing the legwork to discover unknown delicacies and food traditions, but it's another thing entirely to be invited into someone's home to share in their family's personal culinary culture. Every family, regardless of region and cultural history, is different, and does things their specific way; a substitution grandma made along the way due to her personal preference, or adjustments made due to limitations of a specific kitchen, equipment, or what's available at the time often become codified and manage to stick for generations.

So it's a rare honor to be included in a family's Easter feast. It's become a tradition for us; we go every year now and, although we don't usually see Big Mikey, Grace, and their family much during the rest of the year, they treat us as if we'd just seen them yesterday and there's never a hint of that awkwardness that sometimes goes along with seeing people only occasionally, for the big holidays.

Once the kids' faces start showing a flush from running around after having eaten too many Peeps, we know it's time to head home. We say our goodbyes, give and receive kissses on the cheek and hugs, and Mikey packs three or four massive slabs of frittat onto a foil-covered paper plate for us to take home. Usually we're so loaded down with gifts, Easter loot, and leftovers, have to make two trips to the car, and then the hugs and goodbyes start all over again.

So, humorous Italo-American Chicago-style slang (aka paisanics) aside, Easter, for us, is wonderful opportunity to be a part of another family's traditions and enjoy friends, family, and Big Mikey's frittat!

March Madness

This week's Thursday night out was all about watching NCAA basketball. My friend Mitch got some good news this week, so he picked the venue and we ended up at Finn McCool's in Schaumburg for a night of beer, bar food, and basketball on big TV's. Not my native habitat, but it ended up being pretty good.

Unlike some of the other sports bar-type places that we considered, McCool's is not a national chain. It's local. They have three locations, and from the look of their menu and the food, they're doing some scratch cooking in the kitchen. Or, at least, about as scratch as you're going to get from a place that offers diners the option of buying something called a "beer tower".

From where I sit, expectations are pretty low for places like this. McCool's served up fairly fresh-tasting pints of Guinness, the bartenders were friendly, efficient, and competent, no matter which way I turned my head, there was a huge TV showing basketball, and my burger (their Hickory Burger with bacon, cheddar, BBQ sauce, and fried onion strings) was really quite good.

That's it to the right. I ordered it medium and, as you can see, that's a pretty damn-near perfect medium. Pretty good for a bar where, for most patrons, sports, alcohol, and bartender cleavage are probably much higher on the priority list than food.

A couple more interesting notes; they have something on their menu they're calling a "phatty melt", which is a burger that's served between two grilled cheese sandwiches in lieu of the bun. This seems like a nod to this new trend where people are wrapping everything in bacon, batter dipping and deep-frying things that aren't normally deep-fried, stuffing meat with meat and then wrapping it with bacon, and just generally trying to jam so much fatty decadence into things that they border on (or cross over to) being totally disgusting.

The more original novelty item on McCool's menu is the "inside out grilled cheese". I love the sound of this, and although I didn't order it or even see it, I am already figuring out how I'm going to go about reverse engineering my version of this. If I figure something out, I'll blog about it.

All in all, it was a very fun night out with old friends, we watched some good games, my final four is still intact (go Villanova!) and I have a (slightly) less negative attitude about sports bars, thanks, in no small part, to the smoking ban.

Valentine's Day Sucks

Ok, just let me preface this by saying that I'm happily married and not entirely unromantic. I like love. Love is nice. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, it does.

Valentine's day, however, isn't about love. No, despite all the hearts and cupids and sexy innuendo, Valentine's day is about selling you stuff.

Most holidays are, these days, of course. But at least other holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas have some substance beneath the crassly over-commercialized surface. With Valentines' day, there's just no there there. At least, not anymore. The whole thing used to be kind of cool; back in the pre-Roman empire days when it was referred to as Lupercalia. But the cutesy teddy-bear laden, bouquet-bearing current incarnation has strayed so far from its roots that it has rendered itself unrecognizable, doomed to be discarded as a hollow, empty exercise in pressuring people to buy stuff, boosting the sales of greeting cards and cheap chocolates, and filling the reservation books of restaurants during an otherwise flaccid February.

But before it became the fuzzy feel-good Valentine's Day, this Hallmark holiday was a pagan fertility festival known as Lupercalia, where men donned goat skins and employed whips to spank women in hopes of increasing their virility. The festival was traditionally kicked off by a ceremony which included a sacrifice of male goats and dogs, whose blood was used to anoint the foreheads of young men. These men would then strip down naked, covering themselves only with the freshly-skinned pelts of the sacrifice animals, fashion whips out of these same skins, and run around town, delivering lashes to young women who would line the parade route, in hopes of receiving the ceremonial spankings, which were said to prevent sterility and stave off the pain of any future childbearing.

Damn. Now that's a party. Today, we get fondue by candlelight and Whitman's samplers.

As with many pagan holidays, the fun ended when the Christians co-opted the holiday and cleaned it up. The Romans did away with the trappings of the pagan craziness around the fifth century, and somehow the whole deal got latched to some guy named Valentine, a priest who reportedly flouted a law imposed by Roman Emperor Claudius II, which forbade young men to marry, thinking that single men would make for better soldiers. Valentine broke the law, married young couples, and, once this was discovered, Claudius ordered him to be put to his death. The church eventually bestowed him with the "Saint" tag, and the rest is history. Or lore.

Awwwww. Isn't that sweet? Makes me want to go spend a lot of money on mail-order lingerie and cute teddy bears. NOT.

If the whole thing was just about getting a card, a box of chocolates, and having a nice quiet romantic dinner somewhere, it would be bearable. But it's not. It's become this massive industry--Americans will spend about $15 billion this year on V-day related stuff, despite the poor economy--that aims squarely at our insecurities and baser instincts as a means to separate us from our hard-earned cash.

Have you seen (or heard) some of the ads these companies run? One that I've seen repeatedly this V-day season is run by a company in Vermont that sells teddy bears (I shan't link them) and the commercial is so chock full of cheesy gender stereotypes that it almost feels like an SNL skit. The virile-looking, cubicle-dwelling guy pumps his fist after ordering up the $70 stuffed bear that will surely enable him to score! The gaggle of women ooh and ahh over the cute widdle teddy bear as the trampy-looking lucky recipient lasciviously brags about how her man will be getting a "special surprise" later that night.

The cheaply-produced minute-long spot has been running on cable news channels all this week and, frankly, it left me feeling like I needed a shower. Men are all and only about getting laid. Women are all and only about using their sexuality as a means to getting gifts. Not to mention the whole infantilization thing that gifts of sexy leather-clad teddy bears conjures up. Gross.

Our culture already puts enough pressure on us to meet, mate, and reproduce without these companies using this impulse to sell schlocky made-in-China garbage. Although, who can blame'em, I guess? They're just doing what they can to make a buck. The real problem is our "I'm so special" culture which sends out repeated signals that we must all compare ourselves to celebrities and royalty. People watch these gossip shows and read People magazine and see what Brad gave to Angelina for V-day and feel compelled to try and measure up. And the media and advertising agencies are willing, enabling accomplices.

As a married guy with a spouse who agrees with me about this, it's easy enough for me to turn my back on it--the most we do is buy cards and I make a nice dinner. But the folks I really feel bad for is those who are single on days like New Year's and V-day. The buzz over these couple-centric holidays becomes so pervasive in the weeks leading up to it, that it really makes people feel bad about being solo, so it ends up just being a big stressor.

And for couples this is true as well. Expectations are so built up, and there's so much pressure to be lovey-dovey, that what actually happens is inevitably a let-down. Break-ups and fights are all too common. A bouquet of a dozen roses and a few chocolate-dipped strawberries would be a wonderful surprise on most other days, but on V-day, many guys would be seen as not going the extra mile if this is all that they came up with. Too cliche. Yawn. Not enough effort or thought put into it. She just watched on TV about how Tom gave Katie a rose-petal-strewn, chocolate-covered Bentley that releases doves when she opens the moon roof....

Even if things do live up to the hype--what then? Life goes back to its un-romantic, humdrum, bleh normalcy the very next day for the next 364? What kind of weirdness is that? It seems so strange to somehow distill all the symbolic romance and sexiness of our relationship into one officially-sanctioned day where we are forced to compete with all the other couples' relationships and strive to measure up. Wouldn't it be better to spread it out over the longer-term? And to go to the romantic restaurant on a Tuesday night in June when they're perhaps not so crammed full of nuzzling two-tops?

Even worse is the strangeness of selling this adult holiday to children. My kid's pre-school is having a V-day party and has been making construction paper hearts for the last week. What is that about? He's four, fer Chrissakes! Does he really need to be getting messages about romance and love from his school? I realize that adults find it cute to see four year old boys giving cute little chintzy paper valentines to four year old girls all dressed up in their cute little red velvet outfits, but I find it freaky to be pushing these kind of messages about love, coupling, and (implicitly) sex onto four year olds. And I'm not even going to address these creepy daddy-daughter dances people go to. Whoa. I mean, I love my daughter. Just not that way.

Is there a name for someone who's this Grinch-like and Scroogy about Valentine's Day? If there is, I'm it. I don't know if I'm coming off as curmudgeonly or just generally misanthropic, but it is what it is. Think of me what you will.

Our go-to V-day tradition has, in past years, been the heart-shaped pizzas over at Barnaby's Family Inn in Niles. You don't even have to ask for it--all pizzas sold that day are heart-shaped. I happened to stumble onto this one year and we've tended to do it every year. They don't charge extra or anything and the dark, spooky-feeling pub filled with screaming kids running around is somehow a perfect anti-V-day setting that suits me just fine.

That's where we tend to go for V-day, although maybe there's something to be said for trying to get back to the roots of the holiday and embracing the whole Lupercalia gestalt. We'd have to get ourselves some goats, I suppose. And it might get a bit too messy, what with the sacrificing, and the blood ritual and all.

On second, thought, maybe instead of sacrificing a live male goat, we'll just go get some birria, and instead anointing myself with blood, I could, uh, smear some of the broth all over my chest or something. Probably best to not even bring up the whole spanking thing to my wife.