I'm climbing onto my soapbox.

Where do you get your eggs? Wal*Mart? Some other faceless corporate food empire? I know where I get my eggs. Every week Breezy Knoll Farms in Gap Mills, West Virginia provides me with one dozen of the most perfect, enormous, ultra-fresh, vegetarian fed, truly free range chicken eggs I have ever had the delight of  shoveling down my gullet. If I ever get sick from eggs they sell me, I can drive down there and beat the ever loving shit out of someone. More likely they would apologize all over themselves and happily refund my paltry $3 for the bad carton (they even recycle their own cartons). Can you do that? It takes something fairly special to fuck up one of natures perfect foods. Eggs are packed with protein and some yummy bad fats all encapsulated in protective nearly impenetrable hard white shell. It took the laziness and greed of corporate foods to find a way to give us disease from this delicious bounty. There are 2,000 of us seriously ill with salmonella RIGHT NOW because they don't have the luxury of keeping their egg farmer honest with threats of physical violence.

It's past time that I pimp a film that changed my life. Food Inc is the movie that pushed this lifestyle shift into overdrive. It is not a grotesque look at the meat industry trying to sway you to veganism. It is not a commie film telling you to live on a commune and save the environment. It is a very clever film that did it's homework on corporate foods. And if you care about your body, your children's bodies, it will scare the fuck out of you.

So work sends me off to Chicago for a few days on a quest for big sales and lots of hand shaking. They do this once in a while. I have to dress up and speak well, in exchange, myself and my family get to see cities we normally wouldn't. Chicago has so much to offer a foodie. I focused on three things. A steak, a deep dish, and a hot dog. All three are foods that Chi-Town is renowned for.

The Steak
It didn't happen. Money, time, exhaustion from a long day, and other factors all kept me out of the steakhouse. Chicago is known for the stockyards there and the superior steaks that come from them. Beef is manna from the heavens, but it wasn't in the cards. We did, however, eat at an Indian diner called Chutney Joe's. They assured me it was the only location, but it had that franchise feel. Whatever. The lamb was good, the naan was exceptional, the rice pudding was too small, but tasty. The prices were on par with McDonalds garbage. It was a win!

The Dog
From Wikipedia: A Chicago-style hot dog is a steamed or water-simmered, kosher-style, all-beef frankfurter^[1][3] on a poppy seed bun,^[4] originating from the city of Chicago, Illinois. The hot dog is topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, sweet pickle relish (often a dyed neon-green variety, sometimes called piccalilli^[5]), a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.
Yup. It's all of that and a bag of chips. My wife was kind enough to trek 5 blocks while I was working to bring me back this Frankenstein of a frankfurter. They really don't travel well. With all that shit atop them, they fall apart and crumble rather easily and then everything falls off. Or maybe they just look like that all the time. I ate mine with a fork and knife. It was really, really good. Not the hot dog experience I'm used to. Definitely more of a deli sandwich experience. It was awesome.


The Pie
I have had deep dish pizza before. We had a Pizzeria Uno's franchise locally and it was pretty good stuff. We ate at Lou Manalti's, a place that finds it's way to the Travel Channel and Food Network regularly. It was close to the hotel and had a great reputation. I understand why. It was terrific. The crust was crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and buttery. The sausage could've used some more pizazz, but the mozzarella was fresh and the tomatoes were phenomenal. I'm also fairly certain that Buddy Guy was sitting at the next table just 5 feet from me. Maybe his aura seasoned my meal. No matter, I want to go back.


Chicago is foodie town. I want to spend a week eating on it. So much to experience and so little time.