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Fall and winter are a great time to make warm side dishes with big roasty flavors.  Sweet potatoes (previously seen in pie form) are a delicious reason to fire up the oven.  I contributed a recipe for garlic sage roasted sweet potatoes to local mom parent-focused site, chambanamoms.com, for Thanksgiving.  This is a simple-to-prepare side dish that is sure to satisfy.  Make it for a holiday meal when you’re tired of mashed potatoes (as if that ever happens), or any weeknight meal that needs a little seasonal pick-me-up.

Find the recipe over on ChambanaMoms.com.  I made this with butternut squash just a couple days ago and it was delicious.  Just cut them up into cubes, since the squash takes a little longer to cook than most sweet potatoes.

As you may have seen, I’m trying out a gallery plugin to put together a bunch of photos on this post.  If you like it (or don’t), please let me know.

Reminder: if you haven’t already entered the giveaway for some tasty Taza chocolate, go read up on the details and enter!

Photo credit: Megan

A couple weeks ago we traveled up to the Chicago area to visit with family.  Part of our plan was to visit the downtown ice rink, near Millenium Park.  You can skate as much as you want for free, and skate rentals are available for $10.  I hadn’t skated since high school, but I was encouraged to get out on the ice.  We waited nearly an hour in the skate rental line, but ended up spending much more than that on the ice.  It turned out to be a lot of fun for all of us.  Our hearty lunch helped us stay warm despite the very cold temperature and the lack of sun, blocked out by all the tall buildings.

My brother came with us, and was the one who urged us to grab lunch before going skating.  Lucky we did, because we ended up spending way more time skating than we originally expected.

His recommendation was an iconic Chicago deli–Manny’s.  I don’t know all the Chicago area  names, but I’ve read it’s in the South Loop area.  We had a GPS to help us get there.  It opened in 1942 and has been going strong ever since.  According to the Manny’s site, the Zagat review says it’s “[t]he closest thing Chicago has to a New York deli.”  They host various events, and even have a counter inside where you can buy tickets for all sorts of Chicago events.  It’s been reviewed hundreds of times, bolstered in part by President Obama visiting for lunch back when he was just President-elect Obama.

Going in and seeing the long cafeteria-style counter with various menu boards strewn across the wall behind it, I was a little bewildered.  I didn’t really know what to expect, and there wasn’t much sympathy or patience for first-timers like myself.  My brother led the way, since he had been there before, ordering matzo ball soup.  He couldn’t decide between corned beef and pastrami, but was elated when the man behind the counter suggested he get both… mixed.  Off he went with his sandwich, picking up a Green River along the way.

My daughter got a jumbo kosher hot dog (just made that morning, they said), and my wife got a corned beef sandwich.  I got the pastrami sandwich and a side of pasta salad.  All the sandwiches came with a potato pancake.

So, here’s the rundown.  First, Green River soda is just plain wrong.  I tried a sip of my brother’s electric-green beverage and it tasted (as he told me it would) of green “lime” freezer pops.  This is not a bad flavor, per se, but it’s not something I want to consume as an adult.

I tried the matzo ball soup my brother had.  I apologize for not having a photo, but imagine a single large matzo ball (about the size of a racquetball) in a transparent yellowish broth.  I’m not a matzo ball expert.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever had matzo ball soup before, but this couldn’t be a good example.  The matzo ball had very little flavor, though the texture was great, not too dense.  The broth it sat in was even more disappointing, with little flavor to justify the cost.  I think any 89 cent can of broth could compete with this dish.

My pasta salad was boring, tri-color rotini with what tasted like salad dressing.  I should probably take the blame for this one.  Who thinks of a Jewish deli serving good pasta salad?

My pastrami sandwich, on rye, was a disappointment.  The meat was not treated well.  It was fatty and a little stringy, a little dry, but at the same time dripping with greasy juices which ran out and soaked the bread.  This sandwich was all about fulfilling the stereotype of a nearly-impossible-to-fit-in-your-mouth “sandwich” with no attention paid to the inadequate amount of (really delicious, house-baked) rye bread.  It was hard to eat and not that great.  You’d find better at your supermarket.

You can see the potato pancake peeking out on the left behind my sandwich in the above photo.  These could be great, but ours were not.  They weren’t hot enough, were fried at the wrong temperature (too greasy), and held too long (strangely chewy).  The flavor was great, and I could imagine if they were crisp and hot they would be a highlight of the meal.  Instead, they are a pushed $1 add-on to your sandwich.

My wife’s corned beef was the shining star at the table.  It was moist and sliced thin.  It was delicious, and while it was the same height as my overly huge sandwich, it stayed together much better because it wasn’t destroyed by the juices running out and making everything soggy.  If/when I go back, I am getting the corned beef.

It was a satisfying meal, despite the imperfections.  It’s an expensive sandwich ($11.95 each with potato pancake) for us small-town dwellers, but it’s an experience you can’t find down here.  Now, if there were only a way to get great deli meats and artisan breads in C-U.  If you live or eat in the Chicagoland or central Illinois area and can recommend other Jewish delis to experience, please leave a note in the comments.  If you want to try Manny’s, but can’t make it to Chicago, you can order their goods through Tastes of Chicago.

Oh, and if you haven’t already entered the giveaway for some tasty Taza chocolate, go read up on the details and enter!

The contest is closed. However, I’d love for you to fill out the survey so I can keep making the site better.

The humble site you are reading, Clever Food Blog, has only been around about a year.  I appreciate all the emails and comments I’ve received from my readers.  If you’ve shared a link to the site with others, thank you for spreading the word.

Furthermore, I want to make sure that the next year goes even better.  Help me improve the site, help shape it into something you love.  Share a story and your opinions on a bunch of things.  Please fill out my survey, created through Google Forms.

In about a month, after the New Year, I’ll choose a respondent at random to receive 2 (new, unopened) packages of Taza Mexican Chocolate (see the picture… you get 2 disks in each package).  You can read all about these delicious disks in my last post.  I’ll try to figure out something else special to give the lucky winner, and maybe a runner-up as well.  If you’re local, I’d be happy to hand-deliver the prize.  Otherwise, I’m happy to box it up and send it to you wherever you are.

To have a chance at the give-away, you need to fill out my survey.  I love filling out surveys, but what I hate is having to answer questions.  In that light, I made most of the survey questions optional, however the more questions you answer, the better your chances of winning will be (respondents will be weighted based on how many questions they answer).

So go take the survey!

First, to update from previous posts. The chef’s knife that I won has been working out fantastically.  The edge is sharp, and the weight of the knife has been a welcome addition to all my cutting.  It certainly came in handy over the gustatory celebration known as Thanksgiving.

I had a great seasonal recipe published on a local site, featuring more delicious sweet potatoes.  I’ll leave it as a tease now, but I’ll be posting a copy (with links to the original post) very soon.  This is one to bookmark and share with your friends for the holidays and any time you find great sweet potatoes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, chocolate has been taking over my life.  First it was getting involved with Dan Schreiber.  At some point I started noticing a small, artisan, bean-to-bar chocolate maker out of Somerville, MA–Taza Chocolate.  They’re on Twitter (@tazachocolate), and apparently if you’re in the area, they offer tours of their facility and have a Chococycle that they pedal to local markets and events.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of great chocolate makers out there.  One way that Taza distinguishes themselves is by putting their values in the forefront of what they do.  Their chocolate is not merely fair trade, but Direct Trade.  They work directly with the people who grow their vital raw material–theobroma cacao.  Not only do they pay them more generously than fair trade standards require, but they work with them to ensure they are using organic, sustainable growing practices.  So far, all their chocolate (other than a recent limited release) has used chocolate from a single coop in the Dominican Republic.  In addition to holding their suppliers to high standards, they work for sustainability and eco-friendliness in their own operations, reusing, recycling, and composting wherever possible.  They even work with a local organization to help keep their community green.

Their process is very manual, using vintage machinery that they put a lot of love into.  At the end of the line, the chocolate is wrapped by hand.  Their bars are sealed with a label that has a number corresponding to the batch of chocolate your bar is from.  On Taza’s website, you can put in this number and see all the details of where everything in the bar came from, when it was made, even the signature of the cacao grower the beans came from.  Click the image on the right of one of the bars I had to see all the details for batch #218.

When you unwrap one of these bars, you’re greeted by a shiny bar of dark chocolate.  Each section snaps loudly as you make your way through the bar.  The chocolate has texture, character, owing to the hand-hewn stone grinders they use at Taza.  Pressing it to the roof of your mouth, it slowly melts and the flavors of this 80% dark chocolate unfold with delicious notes of fermented flavors, a surprising brightness (acidity?) and unexpected tropical fruit flavors, like banana.  Before having real artisan-made chocolate, I never experienced chocolate like this.

Their other primary product is Mexican Chocolate, sold in adorable disks pressed with the company name and hand-wrapped in pairs.  They are all 55% cacao, since they are intended for making drinking chocolate, though they are tasty on their own.  For these decadent disks, they offer several flavors on top of their cacao puro, including classic flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, and guajillo chile.  They also offer, for the slightly more adventurous, a yerba maté infused chocolate.  If you’ve enjoyed the bitter South American beverage before, it’s a really neat combination.

Now, I mentioned drinking chocolate, not hot chocolate.  The recommended recipe is one disk to 6-8 ounces of milk, or water if you want to be traditional.  This elixir is intense.  If you love chocolate, this will change your life.  If you snack on the dark stuff every once in a while, and you think it might be too much, share it with a friend.

One of the typical ways that people all over the world enjoy this decadent beverage–from cafes and street carts in Spain and Mexico, to chocolate mexicano advocates like Rick Bayless in his Chicago restaurant, Xoco–is with churros.  I remember having churros in my high school cafeteria, but if you’ve never had them they are essentially fluted tubes of fried dough.  They are often dusted with sugar, maybe cinnamon, and if you’re going over the top, like Bayless does, rolled with finely ground cacao nibs.  Warm churros, with their crunchy exterior and (usually) softer, interior, are delicious on their own, but this classic combination is a winner.  The way the fluted edges hold just enough chocolate to soften them ever-so-slightly is a testament to why this is a lasting match.

As long as you’re not afraid of piping dough into hot frying oil, churros are easy to make.  Most recipes I’ve found make a dough that is too hard to pipe out of anything I have–most churros are extruded from large metal churreros, not plastic piping bags that most of us have access to.  The traditional dough is similar to pâte à choux (you know, the stuff eclairs & cream puffs are made from) without eggs  or butter.  Boil oil, sugar, and water, then turn off the heat, dump in flour and stir, stir, stir.  Bayless’ recipe is available from StarChefs.com (and probably elsewhere).  Since it was way too thick to pipe with my jury-rigged zip-top-bag-with-the-corner-cut (I do screw on a star tip), I added a couple eggs, which softened up the dough enough to allow for precise piping.  Pipe it into hot oil (watch out for splashing), and cook until lightly browned.  Watch the oil temperature though.  If it’s too high, the insides won’t cook enough, and I’ve heard that if it’s too low, they will explode as the outsides will set before the moisture inside has a chance to escape.

If you’re having visions of drinking delicious hot stone-ground chocolate, explore Taza’s online store or ask around at local stores.  In the C-U area, I found some of the Mexican chocolate disks at Art Mart in Urbana.  I’ll be hosting a give-away of some Mexican chocolate disks (and maybe an additional surprise), but it won’t end until after the New Year (expect details in the next week), so if you want some before the holidays, go ahead and order some.

Disclosure: Taza sent me some free samples of their products (see below), with no request or expectation of a review, positive or negative.  I have since bought my own chocolate from them, beyond what they sent, which is why I have some to give away. I like the chocolate and believe in their mission and their quality, which is why I’m spreading the love.