Friday May 28, 2010

I attempted to go to Hot Doug’s for duck fat fries and hot dogs but luckily someone on Twitter informed me that they were closed for the weekend. D’oh! We were stuck in rush hour traffic on a Friday before a holiday weekend and turned around to hit Lou Malnati’s for some deep dish Chicago pizza instead. I was pretty bummed about Hot Doug’s but I guess it’s just another excuse to go back to Chicago in the future.

Enjoying a beer and pizza with a guy who I met through Twitter named Bobbie and his friend Harvey Walker.

Sausage deep dish pizza yummmm (thank you Mike for recommending this place to me!) Their pizza is awesome because under the sauce is literally an entire layer of thick delicious sausage, not just small pieces.

And here we go again…. dinner at Moto! My friend Derek was supposed to be in town on Wednesday to go with me to Alinea but had a last minute meeting out of town so we had made plans to hit Moto tonight. Should we do the Grand Tasting Menu: 20 courses with wine pairing? OF COURSE WE SHOULD! The executive chef and owner of Moto is Homaro Cantu and they recently shot a TV series about the place called Future Food… it was shot in the fall but is airing now on something I have never heard of called Planet Green. I will have to figure this out and check it out. Onto another fabulous night of molecular gastronomy!

My foo-foo cocktail made of watermelon and ginger ale and you can’t see the frozen watermelon chunks because I had already eaten them. The menu had the 10 course listed on one side and the 20 course listed on the other side. Also on this plate is spinach puree and artichoke.

The menus were made of flatbread…and…edible!

CO2 GRAPEFRUIT: whitesteel with grapefruit, tobiko roe and carmelized sunchoke perfumed with vanilla bean and soy milk. The sauce was excellent and the grapefruit was just the right zest and tartness. The fish? meh.

 BUBBLE TEA: chilled watermelon and ginger soup with thai basil, saffron and little scallop chunks that found their way up the giant straw with great force and speed. That means they were in the back of my throat upon first suck. Tasty little dish but still hard to grasp scallops with a chilled sweet soup.

RED BULL PAELLA: albacore, dehydrated jasmine rice (yes it looked like maggots), saffron paprika pepples and some sauce that they poured out of a Red Bull can for some strange reason. This dish was terrible. The fish was overcooked and dry and we actually sent it back to the kitchen without eating it. They did not replace it. Rude.

40MHZ PHEASANT: funnel cake pheasant, sauce made of stock and fat (mixed by sound waves because normally stock and fat do not mix. huh? try googling that one), and pheasant breast.

Looks like a candle, right?

CLAM BAKE: lobster, clams and scallops served with potato gnocchi, sauteed corn, shallots, tarragon….and that candle was the butter drizzled over the dish! This was delicious and looked remarkably like we were playing a game of Battleship. “G7! You sunk my battleship!”

YELLOW SNOW: a palate cleanser of green curry and lemon pudding over diced pineapple, with powdered meringue and a lemon zest sweet sauce.

CUBAN CIGAR: Cuban pork sandwich with a braised collard green as the tobacco leaf, with smoked red pepper coulis and the ashes were made of black and white sesame seeds and cumin. It’s very strange rolling something in an ashtray and then putting it into your mouth! Derek really liked it but it was a little on the dry side to me.

FORREST ROLL: This appears to be your normal sushi roll but it’s actually poached rabbit loin with mushroom paper, sesame risotto, all spice aioli, beet soaked radish and the green ball that is supposed to resemble the wasabi was dried English peas with brown butter. This might possibly have been my favorite of the savory dishes.

MIATAKE NUACMAN: pork belly carmelized with ginger and lemongrass, Chinese broccoli with miatake mushrooms and miatake mushroom puree. Ok, wait, this might have been my favorite savory dish of the night. Hi Derek.

DELI-STYLE PASTA: this was a little tiny Reuben sandwich lasagna. I am really missing the pasta part of the dish now that I look back at my notes and the photograph. The thing sticking up was a homemade potato chip I think, but yeah, no pasta on this plate.

SHABUCCINO: on the right in the coffee cup: fermented garlic and soy served over raw Kobe beef prime rib, Asian veggies, edamame, potato, carrots. On the left in the “creamer container” you have mushroom bisque with potato foam and the “sugar cube” which was made of white truffles. It was slightly salty and lucky for me I watched Derek fuck up and put all of the foam in his coffee cup which did not taste that good. I poured a small amount and enjoyed my delicious cup of shabuccino. (They even gave me 4 of the white truffle cubes to take home which are now smashed in the bottom on my purse in a little plastic bag.)

A palate cleanser made of lime foam topped with a lime and tequila drizzle. The little eyes and face are salt nuggets. (ugh with the sodium intake this week)

DUCK & MOLE: cannoli made of corn tortilla, duck confit, powdered jalapeno, sour cream and topped with candied pepitas. It’s very strange eating something that your mind tells you is one thing and tastes completely different once it’s on the buds. Excellent dish though!

CREPES THAT ARE CHEESE: raspberry puree, smoked gouda with Grand Marnier and apricot chutney, and blueberry puree.

PINA COLADA CEREAL: coconut milk with rum, liquid nitrogen, puffed rice flakes with dried pineapple.

RAINBOW SPRINKLES: cupcake made of foie gras mousse, pistachio icing and the sprinkles are lentils…the sauce on the plate is blueberry and sherry vinagrette and the thing at the bottom of the plate is seared foie gras.

PAD THAI ESQUE: orange mango cream, peanuts, coconut…the lime is made of sweet lime gel and the rind is sweetened cilantro and coconut milk. Strangely enough even though it is made of mostly sweet items it tasted just like pad thai!

And we have a winner! The LTP Award goes to “Pad Thai Esque”

BANANA SPLIT: custard with banana ice cream and 3 flavor syringes to add as much or as little to your dish as you like. Chocolate, caramel and maraschino cherry.

I swear to you if I could have an IV of caramel for the rest of my life I might just give up sex. Well, maybe in a few years once I pass my sexual prime.

ACME BOMBS: melted down graham cracker ice cream in a chocolate ball with a toasted marshmallow wick. Liquid S’Mores!

CHOCOLATE, TRUFFLES: white truffle mousse with beet mousse, folded together and rolled into a chocolate ball, rolled in coco nibs, topped with hazelnut and beet sorbet and orange sorbet. (It was sweet, and sadly I couldn’t really taste the white truffles at all.)

ROOT BEER FLOAT: root beer and packing foam. No really, the white thing is edible packing foam made of cornstarch. The waiter told us that during an episode of their show Future Foods they went to the post office to ship something fragile and they were using these peanuts made of vanilla, brown butter and liquid nitrogen. They began eating the peanuts in front of other people while being filmed. I have to see this show!

Derek and I had a great time but he was hungover and we were both in food comas so we said our goodbyes instead of hitting the town. I went back to the Hard Rock Hotel to see what kind of debauchery the gays were getting into and stayed up talking with Tommy and Howard and some others til we shut the bar down. I’m tired and full and have a pretty early flight tomorrow.

 

 

 

Thursday May 27, 2010

It took me close to 3 hours to blog about Alinea yesterday so I was stuck in my hotel room for the better part of the day after I woke up at 11:30 am! What a waste of a day! I went out for some coffee and then went upstairs to Howard’s room at the Hard Rock Hotel to see what kind of trouble the gays were getting into. I am here in Chicago for a number of reasons and one of them is to hang out with all of my gay porn star friends that are in town for a gay porn awards thingy. Anyways when things started getting weird (poor maintenance guy!) I went to my room to get ready for my dinner with an old high school friend named Kent who lives in the ‘burbs.

Most of my sightseeing this trip has been from the back of a taxi as you can see here.

We met at Old Town Social, the place that my friends Chris and Dex own. (The ones who own Quality Social in San Diego with the pickle back shots.) It’s a cool venue that coins itself a “luxury dive bar”… the down-to-earth elements of a dive bar but decorated nicely and without the pretentiousness of a nightclub. They also have a great menu and tons of good beer.

I hadn’t seen Kent since 1989 when I went to visit him in Claremont where he was attending Harvey Mudd College. He reminded me of how a story when I locked my keys in my car when I went to visit him, which of course I barely remember since I can’t remember what I wore yesterday. The things that I remember about that trip were that in the middle of night we went to a place called The Hat to eat chili cheese fries and that his dorm had a beer vending machine where sometimes you got a shit beer and other times you got real lucky. Neither of us remember anything else about that weekend.

We found each other on Facebook of course so we knew a little bit about the other but we had 21 years of catching up to do. A few months ago he put two and two together when the Tiger Woods nonsense happened and he recognized the Naughty America logo from a photo that he had seen on my Facebook page. After a few hours of researching (and presumably “researching” the Naughty America site) he realized that I worked in porn. We hadn’t really connected until I got an email from him in January asking me to find this real life doll thing at the AVN convention and take a photo of it. (Basically a robotic sex doll.) So here we are several months later catching up in person.

After Harvey Mudd he went to Cornell and got his PhD in physics and is now working as a rocket scientist or something. Well not really, but it’s funny to say that. He tried explaining what he does and he pretty much lost me once I heard “gamma rays” “anti-matter” and “E=mc2″ in the first 5 minutes.

We (and by “we” I mean “I”) ordered the charcuterie and cheese board… chef’s selection of a bunch of different items.

Sausage and waffles! You know how I love Roscoe’s!

Mini hot dogs…Chicago style. The manager came over and asked if I was Laura and said that Dex told him to come find me. He comped our entire bill! What a nice thing to do! Thanks Dex

The music started getting so loud that we couldn’t even hear ourselves so we went to an Irish pub down the street. We talked about past relationships, his parents, where he has lived, travel stories and I soon learned that he has a thing for Asian women. It was great to see him and I do hope we stay in touch.

Would you please look at his fucking phone. It looks like one of those walkie talkie things you put in a baby’s crib for Christ’s sakes. Come on Kent get with the program. I am surprised it evens allows you to text message.

After we said our goodbyes I headed over to a gay club called Hydrate. (I didn’t think I should bring Kent into that part of my world just yet.) My monkey, however, can handle anything. Oh hello Brandon Lewis! What a nice Southern boy.

The one and only Chi Chi LaRue!

And one of my very favorite gays…Brandon Baker!

I had a few too many lemon drop shots with Jason Sechrest…

… so I decided to call it a night and took my car home.

Tuesday May 25, 2010

I got my ass out of bed at 5:45 am to go to Bikram yoga again. I know I will feel good after I’m done but it’s still hard to get up out of bed at that hour to get in the car to go to a place where I will be knowingly tortured. My instructor today was a real big militant prick that Lauren hates. She hates him. He hates her. She avoids his class like the plague and now I know why. I started having a little anxiety today during the class about my appointment with the cardiologist this afternoon. I was tripping out that maybe this was bad for my heart because I felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest and across the floor. I was super dizzy and it felt hotter in there today than ever before. People were dropping like flies. In Bikram yoga you do each posture two times. I laid still for an entire posture and when I was laying still for the next one to get ahold of myself he said “Miss please do the second one” to me. Fine. I got up and did it. The very next one was too much and I walked out of the room. This is our conversation…

Dickhead: “Are you OK?”

Me: (gentle nod yes as I walk towards the door)

Dickhead: “If you are OK then why are you leaving?”

Me: “Well obviously I am not OK.”

I mean come on dude, what does OK mean? Am I going to die? No. Am I feeling like I need to get up and get some cool air? YES THAT’S WHY I AM LEAVING THE FUCKING ROOM. The strange part was that there were other people that go there all the time who are clearly better than me sitting postures out and walking out the door. What was his beef with me today? I swear to you, it does not make me want to get out of bed to continue this horseshit. Isn’t being mean and getting me upset the OPPOSITE of what yoga is all about? I called Lauren after class and she said that he is super rude and runs his classes like a goddamn drill sergeant. She also told me that the Old Town studio prides itself on being hotter and stricter than the other studios. wtf grrrr. I guess one way to look at it is if I can make it through their classes it won’t be any harder anywhere else I might try.

OK onto my appointment with the cardiologist. He said I was totally fine and that I can continue eating whatever I wanted and I should definitely drink more and maybe do some cocaine. Alright, alright … that’s not what he said. I need to do a blood test for cholesterol, kidneys and also thyroid. My blood pressure was fucking sky high (150/90) and I need to buy a cuff and test at home during normal activities and moods, try to cut out more salt and of course keep excercising and lose that last 10 pounds. He wants to see me in a month after I monitor my own blood pressure at home and then we will discuss putting me on meds if it’s not down. He didn’t seem too worried about me dying this week nor needing a valve replacement anytime soon so that is good news. I will be going in to do the blood work next week when I get back from my trip to Chicago.

Which brings me to my next topic! I am leaving in the morning for Chi-town for the weekend and I am about to burst at the seams because I am eating at none other than Alinea, L20 and Moto. If you know anything about molecular gastronomy you have definitely heard of Alinea and Moto. L20 was recommended to me by Dex who owns Quality Social in San Diego and Old Town Social in Chicago. Apparently L20 is Esquire magazines #1 restaurant of the year. Here’s the thing. I was on the wait list for Alinea for Wednesday night but it was not looking promising so Dex put me in at L20 on his hookup for Wednesday BUT Alinea called me to tell me they had a cancellation! I was in a meeting (yes an actual business meeting that I can’t exactly talk about yet) when they called and when I called them back they were not answering because they are not open on Tuesdays for dinner and their offices were closed with the time change. I mean Christ they gave me 15 minutes to call back before they closed. I swear to you if I end up losing both of these reservations because of my juggling act I will flip my lid. If I end up eating at some shithole while I am a culinary heaven like Chicago I might just jump off the Sears Tower. If I make it to all of these places I can assure you that I will be doing all of their tasting menus and then “Laura On a Budget” will come back in full force next week. Like I said, I pick and choose this budget thing. Did I mention that I actually used a coupon last week? lol

Someone on Twitter sent me this blog today about a new food show called Future Food. Looks pretty fun!

Check out this video from Moto…

I went over to Sigrid’s to hang out with her and the baby and Kim and we ate dinner had a glass of wine and watched the first part of the Bachelorette before I got annoyed and left. I have a super early flight out tomorrow…