A Jabbo Dinner Special

We've made a few tasty meals lately. Since the Irish Invasion posts are still in the works, I thought I'd make a quick post about dinner.

Polenta Pizza
Polenta is Italian for grits. This peasant food dates back to the Romans, typically made from millet until Columbus invented America and corn became the preferred ingredient. Polenta has become popular in the past few years as a fancy dish. Move over peasants, we're in your diet, gentrifying your food.

To make polenta, you bring a pot of water to a boil, stir in coarse ground cornmeal, and simmer it for 20 minutes.

It has to be coarse ground. The fine ground corn meal you're used to seeing has been bleached and degerminated: the taste and texture will be all wrong.

I poured the polenta into two pie pans and cooled them in the fridge for an hour so the polenta would set. After an hour it has the consistency of really dense cornbread. In Italy, they eat it grit-style with sausage and lentils. You can eat polenta like grits if you want, but after it has set you can grill it, fry it, or use it as a pizza crust.

We made pizzas. Polenta gives you a gluten free pizza crust, if you're into that sort of thing. You can top it with just about anything, but we mostly followed the recipe from the Forks over Knives Cookbook by Del Sroufe. I used Buitoni Pesto mixed with Nooch (Nutritional Yeast), caramelized onions, boiled potatoes, and savoy spinach. Caramelizing onions is something I've only started to do recently. Scientists aren't completely sure how it happens, but you cook them until the sugars bleed out and turn brown, giving the onions a caramelly flavor. Savoy spinach is something else we've come across recently. It's a crisp, crinkly form of spinach sold loose in the produce section. It has more flavor and nutrients and stays crisper longer than flat spinach, which is the kind they stock in the freezer section.

I know what you're thinking. There's no meat in that picture. It's alarming, I know, but while the corn is lysine-deficient (like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park), the potatoes have high quantities of lysine, giving you a complete amino acid profile. The spinach has Vitamin C, Vitamin K, and Calcium and the Nooch is high in B Vitamins. So you could pretty much live off of this. If you hated variety.

I garnished it with crushed red pepper and parmesan cheese. Totally delicious.

You can find it online, last two recipes on the page:

http://www.forksoverknives.com/recipes-for-super-bowl-xlvii/

Baked Sweet Potatoes
I've wanted to try a baked sweet potato for a long time. I used to think you could only eat sweet potato in pies or in casseroles topped with syrup and marshmallows. Then Brooke started making sweet potato fries and I thought, I wonder what else you can do with sweet potatoes.

I thought, I bet you could bake them and eat them like Russets. You can. Turns out, I wasn't the first person to try this.

After scouting the interwebs, we came up with an entree loosely based on this one from SkinnyTaste:
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/12/loaded-baked-sweet-potato.html

I sauteed black beans and yellow corn with onions and garlic and piled that on top along with cheese and salsa. As a healthy alternative to butter, we used some homemade yogurt we found sitting around and added garlic, onion, chili powder, salt, pepper, and cumin.

For dessert, we ate some blood oranges we found at the store. I had heard of them, but I hadn't tried one before. They were sweet and had a slight raspberry flavor. This is my new favorite orange.

Chicken Vindaloo
We've also been trying a few Indian recipes. They require a substantial investment in time, but they taste so good. When the Portuguese visited India, they brought a dish called Carne de Vinha d'Alhos which they made with wine and garlic (obviously). After substituting the wine with vinegar and adding hot peppers, the residents of the Goa region changed the name to Vindaloo and the rest was history.

I started by toasting and grinding all the spices. This smells awesome. Try it. If nothing else, just toast some cumin seeds. Best smell ever. Well, I think so. Aine says it smells like body odor.

I added the ground spices to vinegar and garlic and ginger and other stuff to make the paste, which I mixed with the chicken to let it marinate overnight.

I know I'm missing some picture steps here, but I then caramelized two large onions, added garlic, ginger, potatoes and the chicken and cooked it for about 30 minutes. I put it on some Brown Texmati Rice from the Republic of Texas and ate it with flatbread. Most delicious. Aine liked it, but she likes anything with potatoes in it, so...

Here's the official recipe:

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Classic-Chicken-Vindaloo

Japan House
Since Spring has sprung and trees are budding, we decided to take a drive over to the Arboretum and see if they had started replanting the Hartley Gardens. Not so much. Hartley still looked rough, but the trees over at Japan House had started to bloom.

Look:

Also, here are two fish:

Rennet
My cheese odyssey came to a grinding halt at Neufchatel. You need rennet (stomach enzymes from a cow or goat) to make serious cheeses. I went to the grocery store because Dr. Fankhouser said I could get rennet at the grocery store. Not so much with Schnucks. I even went to the cheese counter where they make some of their own cheese. The old ladies behind cheese counter looked completely baffled. They had a lively conversation among themselves about me and my request before turning and shouting "No!" in unison.

So I resorted to Amazoning it. I ordered it two weeks ago, but it shipped out of Massachusetts and those people have had their hands full. It should arrive sometime this week.

Parting Shot
Cooking Indian food can make you dog tired. Even if you're just watching.

The Irish Invasion of Bloomington

My mother-in-law Anne came for a visit at the end of March. Being Irish, she had no interest in Lincolnalia. She said she saw the preview for the Lincoln movie and that was quite enough for her, thank you very much (she wholly approves of the half-Irish Daniel Day Lewis, though). Don't get me wrong, Anne passed the oral exam required for citizenship a few years ago, which means she knows more about US History and Government than your average graduating senior. I helped her study for the exam and learned a few things myself.

Since Lincoln was right out, we visited some sites formerly unexamined by the Jabbo Exploration Team. I'll tell you all about them, but first, let's talk about National Historic Landmarks.

National Historic Landmarks
So far, we've been ticking off sites from the National Historic Register as we find them. However, within the ranks of the National Historic Sites, there exists an elite subclass, known as National Historic Landmarks. To rise to the status of Landmark, the site has to have National Level Historic Significance. The National Historic Register lists almost 90 thousand sites, and only 3% are National Historic Landmarks. You can find 25% of those in three states: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachussetts (basically, where all the best stuff between 1600 and 1800 happened). Illinois has 85 (I've seen 6), Alabama has 37 (I've seen 1), Oklahoma has 22 (I think I've been to 1), and Texas has 46 (I've seen 14, 3 of those on my honeymoon).

To see the Landmarks in your state, check out this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Historic_Landmarks_by_state

Clover Lawn
We took Anne on her first Illinois Day Trip to the bustling Twin Cities of Bloomington-Normal. There, we found a National Historic Landmark that was only sort of Lincoln-related. Clover Lawn.

As you can probably tell, Clover Lawn looks like a hodgepodge of Victorian elements, a style known as Victorian Eclectic. It has a crested roof and asymmetrical facade, both common to all Victorian houses, but it has the Mansard of a Second Empire, the tower and bays often seen in Queen Anne, and the bold eaves of Italianate.

By the time David Davis commissioned Clover Lawn, he had made himself one of the richest men in Illinois. So rich, they had a masonry outhouse.

So rich, he had the money to get incredibly fat.

Public Domain

Davis grew up poor, but studied law, passed the bar, and rode the 8th Circuit in Illinois. On the 8th, he became a devout Whig and close friend of (don't tell Anne) Abraham Lincoln. During his first term, Lincoln appointed Davis to the Supreme Court where he was influential in Ex Parte Milligan, a landmark court case that held civilians can't be tried by military tribunals.

They wouldn't let us take pictures of the interior, but the house was beautiful. And big. It even had a servants wing (I felt like I was touring Downton). The lady told us when the family tried to donate the house to the state, the state didn't want it. The state did want, however, the huge collection of correspondences between Davis and Lincoln sitting in the attic. The family said, you can have the letters, but you have to take the house with them. Which is the only reason the house is still standing.

Also standing are the original out buildings, including the coach house, which is also a Quilt Barn.

And before you ask...

Quilt Barns
I researched this and found the precise definitions required for Quilt Barnhood. A Quilt Barn is any barn or farm building that displays a Barn Quilt. A Barn Quilt is a wooden 8x8 ft. square painted with geometric or floral designs. Apparently this is a thing. There currently exist over 3 thousand Quilt Barns in 43 states and 2 Canadian provinces. Some say the tradition dates back to German immigrants in the 1830s, but the current popularity started when the first modern Barn Quilt went up in Adams County, Ohio in 2001. Several states have Quilt Barn Trails published online and you can follow them from barn to barn. Apparently, there are quite a few Quilt Barns in Oklahoma, but no one has created a list or a marked trail. That would be interesting for someone from Oklahoma to do. Compile an online list of Quilt Barns. Just saying.

Here's a good Quilt Barn site:
http://www.barnquiltinfo.com/

John W. Cook Hall
We couldn't go all the way to Bloomington without paying homage to another building funded by our favorite Progessive Patron, Governor Altgeld. That's right. Our second Altgeld Castle.

Built in 1898 as a Gymnasium (not the Greek kind), Cook Hall now houses the the School of Music for Illinois State University. Altgeld rejected the original plans for the building. He wanted it to look like one of the Rhineland Castles in Germany.

Here's Lahneck Castle on the Rhine for comparison:

Holger Weinandt

The Rhine River is also home to Lorelai, a Llorona-style legend who drowned in the river and whose spirit lures sailors to the rocks where they crash and sink. That's interesting if you know anyone named Lorelai.

Altgeld's architects acquiesced to his demands, but took some poetic license. They used Bedford Limestone on the exterior, limestone from a small area of Indiana. Limestone from the same vein was used on the Biltmore, the Empire State Building, and the Pentagon.

Art Deco Churches
Completely randomly, we happened to pass this church. I screamed until Aine pulled over to let me take a picture. This is the first and only Art Deco Church I've ever seen: Holy Trinity Catholic Church (it's also on the National Historic Register).

Though the US has several churches with Art Deco inspired elements, I could only find three Official Art Deco Churches. These include Madonna della Strada Chapel in Chicago and Christ the King Roman Catholic Church in Tulsa. Tulsa also has the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, both Art Deco and one of Oklahoma's National Historic Landmarks. (Apparently, Tulsa hit its second oil boom just in time to catch the Art Deco fad spreading across the US. As a result, Tulsa has enough Art Deco buildings to rival Chicago or New York, and an Art Deco museum to boot.)

A tornado wiped the original Holy Trinity off the map. The second one burned down in a fire. So you're looking at the third try. The Convent and Rectory building from the original structure (built in Richardsonian Romanesque) still stands behind the church. They are actually just left of this picture, but I didn't get them because I had no idea what I was doing.

Normal Theater
I saw this from the car and thought it might be important. I was totally right. National Historic Register site. The Normal Theater, dating back to 1937, was built in the Moderne style (a late version of Art Deco). Moderne features strong horizontal lines and rounded elements. MGM designed The Emerald City in the 1939 Wizard of Oz to look Moderne because that was the hottest new thing at the time. Go back and watch the movie: everything looks so Art Deco, it's disgusting.

Kroger
No joke. I took a picture of a grocery store. I didn't know you could find one north of Conroe. Apparently, Bloomington-Normal has one. Little known fact: Krogers have a unique Kroger smell that you can't smell in any other grocery store. A smell that makes me feel like I'm 16 again.

Uptown Girls
For lunch, we stopped in Uptown Normal, a trendy little main street area with shops and restaurants.

Anne said No Mexican Food. So we stopped at the locally renowned Reggie's Sandwich Shop.

Anne and Aine both got something boring with chicken, but I got the Chicago Style Beef. Mostly it tasted like a supreme pizza.

Anne hates having her picture taken, so I try to take as many pictures of her as possible. Here's one of my favorites from lunch.

Aine and I got in on the action too.

Downtown Man
After filling our bellies, we drove over to Downtown Bloomington, a city center somewhat more austere and old-timey than Uptown Normal. So, the McLean County Courthouse and surrounding square counts as one National Historic Site and then the entire business district around that counts as another.

The Courthouse itself lives on the site of three previous courthouses. It seems in Illinois, the life of a courthouse is cheap. The current one dates back to 1903, where it served in an official county capacity until 1976, the same year Bob Dylan released his album Desire, though I'm not sure the two events are connected. In 1976, the Courthouse became the headquarters for the McLean County Historical Society and the site of their museum.

I know what you're thinking. You're looking at those fluted columns with acanthus leaf capitals, that pedimented gable, the balustrade across the roof, that symetrical floor plan, and you're thinking, I'm looking at Neoclassical. Well, congratulations. You got this one, at least.

The business district includes the Ensenberger Building, built in 1926 to house Ensenberger's Furniture Store. Originally built as Gothic Revival with massive Gothic spires on the roof, the owner renovated the outside to look Art Deco in the 1940s. This place must have been special. It received 40 thousand visitors the week it opened, many coming from New York and California. Today it houses condos for the Bloomington Yuppie Class. The architect, Philip Hooton also designed the green terra cotta panels on the building's facade.

The venerable Mr. Hooton also designed the State Farm Building in 1929. That's three years later, so you don't have to do the math. As the name implies, this building served as the State Farm headquarters for Illinois for almost 50 years. Totally Art Deco.

On this next building, I found no information. As far as I can tell, it has no historical importance. I thought the copper Mansard looked sort of awesome, though.

Lincoln #15
In the shadow of the courthouse, we found another Lincoln, a 2000 work by Rick Harney.

 Parting Shot
Here's your opportunity to play our favorite Champaign game: Find the Cat.

Ebert

It's been all over the news. Roger Ebert passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. A respected film critic for over four decades, with the help of Gene Siskel, he invented the thumbs up. Basically, you make a fist and extend your thumb. Try it. If you like a movie, point your thumb skyward, if you don't, point it toward h-e-double-hockeysticks.

Born in Urbana, Ebert briefly attending the University of Illinois before transferring to the University of Chicago. In 2003, he founded Ebertfest, an annual film festival held at the Virginia Theater in Champaign. The Virginia Theater happens to be included on the National Historic Register, we just haven't been there yet.

The 2013 Eberfest is scheduled for the 17th through the 21st. Personally, I get bored sitting through a single movie, the watching of several movies in a row for a festival is pretty much the worst thing I can imagine. Unless there were also bees, then that would be the worst.

Here's the website:
http://www.ebertfest.com/

Ebert didn't pull any punches when confronting a movie he didn't like. As a tribute to his memory, here's a list of a few he hated and why I disagree:

North - Not only did this have two actors from Seinfeld, it had a young Elijah Wood when he was short and weird looking. Well, that much hasn't changed, but he was young. North was practically Wood's debut movie, if you hadn't seen Back to the Future 2, Radio Flyer, The Adventures of Huck Finn, or The Good Son, in which he played the good son. North gave us this memorable quote: "We don't want Hugh. He's not our son." And if you don't know why that's awesome, you need to watch the movie.

Waterboy - I didn't know anyone who didn't like this movie. Then again, I was still in high school when it came out and only discussed it with other high school kids. You have Adam Sandler playing football instead of golf, and Cathy Bates not killing or maiming anyone. Also, this movie taught me that alligators are cranky because of the medulla oblongata. I think that's a part of the brain. Or it might be a Mediterranean dish.

Armageddon - This hate pick shocked me the most. I rated it with my Two Part Action Movie Test: Does it have Bruce Willis? Does he blow shit up? Armageddon gets 120%. It gets extra credit because not only does Bruce blow up a giant asteroid in a last, sacrificial act, but he also shoots Ben Affleck with a shotgun. This is probably the most American of all American movies. More American than Patton. More American than Red Dawn (the real Red Dawn with far-famed Houstonian Patrick Swayze and the beautiful Lorraine Baines McFly). If you didn't like it, you're either French or a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The only issue I take with Armageddon is Liv Tyler plays the movie's hot chick. She looks a little too much like her father for my comfort.

Resident Evil - Zombies. Genetically engineered by a corporation for profit. This includes, let me remind you, rabid zombie dobermans that the lady protagonist kung-fus in slow motion. What's not to like here? Granted, this was no 28 Days Later or I Am Legend, but I'm quite comfortable with its inclusion in the canon. Also, I'm just going to say it. George Romero sucks. He should have stopped after the first one. And, yes, I know Land of the Dead has social commentary. I read the Wikipedia article, too. Even if I hadn't, the commentary is so heavy-handed and unsubtle, the only way you wouldn't catch it is if you didn't watch the movie. Or read the Wikipedia article. Also, it had John Leguizamo. It could only have been worse if Romero had cast Lou Diamond Phillips instead. What were we talking about? Resident Evil. Two Jabbo thumbs up.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Two words: Rainn Wilson.

Every M. Night Shyamalan movie made after Sixth Sense - Ok, fine. M. Night broke the first rule of Don't Be Like Joseph Heller which is: Don't debut with a masterpiece. Unbreakable even had Bruce Willis, but he didn't blow shit up. And I liked the premise of The Happening, but seriously, if I have to hear Marky Mark's whiny voice in one more movie, I'm going to go Full Elvis on my television set. Signs was awesome. I'll give you that.

Concession: Ok, maybe I was unfair to John Leguizamo. He did a bang up job of portraying the Renowned Dwarf Post-Impressionist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge. Also, the weasel thing in the Ice Age movies. But that's all I concede.

March-ing to Zion

Easter Time. That's right. The end of March. Easter is a movable feast determined by a lunar calendar. So we celebrate Easter on the Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. The Spring Equinox, which determines the First Day of Spring occurred on March 20th this year, the full moon on March 27th, and here we are.

None of the Apostles celebrated Easter, but Jewish Christians began celebrating it as a part of the Passover celebration (as you remember, that's why Jesus was in town) and it later spread to Gentile Christians. For the first 300 years of Christianity, Christians determined the date of Easter based on the date of Passover which starts on the 15th of Nisan. In 325, during our favorite Ecumenical Council, the Council of Nicaea, the attendant bishops uncoupled Easter from the Hebrew Calendar.

For those of you straining to find a mention of the Easter Bunny in the epistles, the tradition of an Easter Hare comes from the territory of Alsace, which also gave us World War One. Rabbits were long thought to be hermaphrodites which could self impregnate. Therefore, capable of immaculate conception, they were associated with the Virgin Mary. Which is gross.

Doing it Levant Style
To celebrate, we made the Levant's most popular cheese, Labneh, or as they call it in Isreal, breakfast. Also known as Yogurt Cheese, you make it by draining the whey from Yogurt.

Following the emminent Dr. Fankhauser's instructions, I boiled my cheesecloth for ten minutes to sterilize it. Boiling for a minute kills bacteria, sure, but ten minutes kills the endospores. And it's the endospores that scare me.

I then whisked the yogurt into a creamy consistency and added a teaspoon of salt. After thoroughly mixing the salt into the yogurt, I poured it into the sterilized cheesecloth. One hundred percent of the yogurt ran through the cheesecloth. So I went back and actually read what the good doctor had to say about cheesecloth. He said what they call cheesecloth at your local Schnucks is useless. It makes for a good bouquet garni, but fails to catch your curds. So, I can make Coq au Vin until I'm bleu in the face, mais le fromage, non.

I had to cut a huge square out of a white shirt and boil that. I have since purchased white cloth napkins for the next batch.

I suspended the little baggie of yogurt to let the whey drain.

I left it in the fridge for 24 hours.

I got a little over two cups of whey from my yogurt. In cheesemaking, two cups of whey is considered one wheam. You can retain the whey to distill your own whey protein powder, but that's time consuming and doesn't yield very large quantities. It takes three wheams to make a quarter cup of whey protein concentrate. That is, a quarter cup whey concentrate = a wheam of whey, a wheam of whey, a wheam of whey.

Aine told me not to do it. I couldn't help myself.

After 24 hours, we removed the labneh from the fridge and scraped it out of the cloth, it made about a cup.

We added some olive oil and rosemary and enjoyed it on some homemade whole wheat bread.

It actually tasted really good. Will eat again. If you want to make your own, but don't want to go through the hassle of making your own yogurt, you can just buy a quart of yogurt and strain out the whey. L'Chaim!

Next Time on Cheesing with Jabbo:
Neufchatel, an unripened rennet cheese from Normandy.