Archive for August, 2012
14 items.
It’s time again for guest comics!! I got some wonderful drawings from some wonderful people, and now I have about two weeks to get working on my new project, which we will be calling “the tornado book” until I come up with a clever title for it.
Guest comics are starting off with a delicious sandwich recipe from Tony Breed and his husband Eric! And now I want a sandwich.
Tony has a really wonderful webcomic called Finn and Charlie Are Hitched; his latest book, How Would I Know If You’re Dreaming?, came out in June, and is available at Tony’s site, and also at a handful of stores in Chicago.
Tony’s going to be at SPX in a few weeks (I will too! You should join us!) and guess what IT IS HIS BIRTHDAY TODAY. You can wish him happy birthday on Twitter if you want, I bet he’d get a kick out of that.
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You hear that, awesome friends? You are super awesome.
SO. This is my last Sauceome comic for a little while! I got so many guest comics that I’m going to start running them this Friday. I can’t wait to share them with you guys, they’re all so great!
So the awesome Eliza Frye surprised me with a box of giant Reed avocados this week. As a side note, if you want to make me deliriously happy, a box of avocados will pretty much do the trick.
Anyway, Reeds have a thicker skin, so it’s apparently pretty easy to let them go overripe, according to the “Avocado Care” pamphlet that came in the box. Sunday morning, they were all pretty much as ripe as they could be, all five of them. I thought about making them into the world’s largest bowl of guacamole and inviting people over for an impromptu guacamole party, but in the end I decided to try freezing some of them. So three of them are pureed and in the freezer now. I haven’t ever tried this technique before, so we’ll find out together if it works.
I did manage to consume the bulk of one of the two remaining Reeds today – I put about half of it on a salad and made a small bowl of guacamole with the rest. I didn’t have a Hass avocado next to it to compare, but just instinctively, the Reed avocado seems to have a slightly smoother and creamier texture, and the taste was milder, more balanced, maybe a little less buttery than the Hass. It was immensely easy to peel. It’s a much bigger avocado than a Hass, but it’s also got a larger ratio of flesh to pit; the three I pureed easily filled two decently sized tupperware containers.
There’s one more left now, and only about a day or so before it turns bad. Looks like tomorrow’s lunch will be avocado-heavy!
PS: Guess what, everybody! Next week I’m going to start running a batch of guest comics! I’ve already got most of them, and they’re pretty darn amazing. I haven’t scheduled them all yet, but it looks like they’ll fill a good two weeks worth of comics, and I’ll probably be posting them every weekday instead of just Monday/Wednesday/Friday. So get ready!
Okay. Now I’ll stop talking about the pigs. Promise.
Since I live in Logan Square, and I work in Rogers Park, I’m almost never downtown; which means I almost never see Chicago’s food trucks. So this was a treat for me! There were a good half dozen or so at the warehouse sale: The Southern Mac & Cheese truck, Big Star’s truck, Beyond Borders, Meatloaf Bakery’s truck, and a few more that I’ve unfortunately forgotten. They were so pretty and colorful parked all together! At the office I’ve been working on the design for a new food truck that’s going to hit Chicago in a few weeks, so it was really interesting to see how differently they were all designed.
So we ate our delicious tacos, ran into some people we knew, and would have stayed to hang out longer if we didn’t have perishables that needed refrigeration! The whole day was really awesome, amazing foodie fun. I hope JDY Gourmet has a sale like this again!
JEEZ SARAH SHUT UP ABOUT THE PIG ALREADY. I mean, seriously. How would you even prepare it? You have no experience cooking entire pigs. LEAVE IT.
This isn’t even all of the things that we got – our bags were pretty full when we left, and not all of it fit on the page. I’m really excited about the tangerine vinegar, because I bet I can make some amazing salad dressing out of at least some of it. Besides the black summer truffle sauce, we also got a truffle honey, and a truffle mustard, so there’s been a significant increase in the amount of truffley things in the kitchen. I am a teency bit disappointed in the garlic paste, because I was expecting it to be a lot more intensely garlicky, but it’s still great. Oh, and the chocolate covered cacao nibs are almost gone, of course. And yes I realize they are just chocolate covered chocolate, and yes that is what makes them awesome.
I actually spent most of this weekend in bed with a summer cold, but I knew I needed to drag my butt outside for this warehouse sale. JDY is one of Niles’s vendors at work, so we knew this place would be stocked with all manner of amazing foodstuffs. Plus, they promised an array of food trucks would be there too! I’d been pretty excited about this thing for almost two weeks; I wasn’t going to let a stupid cold keep me away.
The items are just a few of the amazing array of interesting things they were selling (for ridiculously cheap). I’ll have more comics this week about the sale and the food trucks and what we ended up buying – but here’s a spoiler, we did not purchase a whole suckling pig. I was unable to convince Niles (or myself, really) that we would have the knowledge or the means to prepare it.
I’m not sure how long ago it was that I started making my own salad dressings. It might have been after a friend’s wedding, where they served a salad at the reception with an amazing champagne vinaigrette on it, and I wanted to replicate it. It might have been after reading the ingredients on a dozen bottles of dressing from the store and seeing some form of corn syrup in all of them. Either way, it’s easy, fast and delicious to make a single serving of fresh salad dressing to put on your salad, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment.
All of these are some form of vinaigrette – meaning the base is some kind of oil and some kind of vinegar. I like making wasabi and sriracha vinaigrettes when my salad has shrimp and citrus on it; I like making mustard and blue cheese vinaigrettes when I’m topping a salad with grilled chicken and walnuts. Not long ago Niles made me a whole tupperware full of roasted garlic clove vinaigrette that was just amazing. You can experiment with different vinegars, different oils, different flavor balances, and different ingredients. I tend to favor honey over the vinegar in most of mine, because I like a touch of sweet, but you can just as easily add a little more vinegar to make it a little more tart. You can do anything you want, and you’re no longer limited to the three bottles of salad dressing that have been sitting in your fridge door for who knows how long.
Okay, it’s a minor complaint. I can’t really blame someone for thinking I’m weird for wearing a sweater in August, and I’m sure she’d think I’m even weirder for wearing it for as dumb a reason as this. But we all have our security blankets, right? Wizard World was a stressful four day convention, and it wasn’t easy to eat healthy during it, so i’m feeling a little cruddy lately. I’d love to wrap myself in sweaters and scarves, but the weather isn’t being very accommodating.
It’s always amazing to me how just a few days of eating and sleeping poorly can make me feel so down. But our fridge is stocked with vegetables now, so it’s time to get back on track!
Sorry guys! I’m completely exhausted after the Chicago Comicon. No comic today, I’m sleeping it off. Here instead is a picture of me with Sherilynn Fenn, the actress who played Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks.
So here’s the recipe for Niles’s mayo-less potato salad! It’s not very healthy, obviously, but it is awfully delicious. Bacon and blue cheese play so well together, and the crisp on the grilled potatoes is well worth the extra effort. True story: Niles grilled them on our little Foreman grill, in multiple batches, because we don’t have an outdoor grill. I asked Niles once if he wanted to get one, and he said he didn’t see the point since we had a perfectly serviceable source of heat in the stove. Which isn’t really the best answer – especially to someone like me, who grew up in Texas with a dad who grilled outside almost weekly – but honestly it doesn’t make sense for us to get a grill when we have a tiny back porch, and we don’t really grill that often.
Anyway! I do highly recommend this recipe. It’s an interesting and refreshing new take on your typical picnicky potato salad.
Reminder: I’m exhibiting at Chicago Wizard World this weekend, Booth 3416, in Artists Alley.. Come by!
