Schwa: A One of a Kind Dining Experience

I read about the reopening of a restaurant called Schwa right after I moved to Chicago. It’s considered to be one of the best restaurants in the city, it’s BYOB, and nearly impossible to get a reservation. I knew I had to try it. After several phone calls – most of which took me straight to the full voicemail box - I finally got a call back. A few weeks later, my friend Katie and I were off to Schwa.

I came across this article about chef-owner Michael Carlson the day of my reservation. It talks about the circumstances around how the restaurant closed. Long story short: Charlie Trotter called him in the fall of 2007 and asked to reserve the entire dining room for him and a slew of famous chefs, like Thomas Keller and Wylie Dufresne.

“Characteristically, Carlson refused to allow Trotter to pay for the meal—dinner for twenty-two on the house. Then, with the pressure of the evening […], he went on a three-day binge. Alcohol, cocaine, Ecstasy. […] He canceled all pending reservations for the restaurant, announced he was closing, and disappeared from public sight. “I did not know true mental stress until that day,” he says. He lacked the strength—and the money—to go on.”

Four months later, Schwa was back. His restaurant is full of eccentricities that make the restaurant wonderful but apparently difficult to sustain, both physically and financially. He only seats one party every half hour, which means that he never allows the restaurant to be at capacity. The restaurant only seats twenty-six. The chefs are the wait staff. They have no liquor license. We ordered the 9-course meal, and we got 12 courses (plus some free wine and beer). He says that the restaurant survives paycheck to paycheck, and I see why. Nevertheless, it was an incredible experience and I hope it stays open so I can go back!

I was nervous when I walked into the restaurant, for some reason. I thought it might be pretentious and people might wonder what we 20-somethings were doing there. Luckily, this was not the case at all; I felt like I was in Michael Carlson’s home kitchen. When we walked in, he graciously thanked us for coming and promptly poured us a glass of the Prosecco we brought. The restaurant was very small and basic looking, but I knew we were in for a treat.

Speaking of Prosecco, I should probably mention the wine we brought. Even though there were only two of us, we had read that Michael Carlson suggests bringing “something sparkling, a pinot blanc or a gruner veitliner, and a pinot noir or light-medium bodied red.” We brought three bottles, somewhat following these guidelines, and left it up to the chefs to pour whichever wine they thought was best for each course. I’m not a wine expert, but I tried to pick some that would be versatile with food. They turned out to all be fantastic.

Prosecco Veneto IGT Organic (Italy)
Vina Robles Red 4 2007 – Blend of Petite Sirah, Syrah, Tannat, Touriga Nacional (California)
Mulderbosch Cabernet Sauvignon Rose 2008 (South Africa)

Now, onto the food.

“Salad Course”: Hendricks Gin bubble tea
He took the flavors in Hendricks Gin (cucumber, rose, juniper) and deconstructed them. This honestly was way more delicious than it looks in this picture. It was a light, refreshing start to the meal. It was also fun to drink!


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Red beet risotto with cave aged cow milk bleu cheese puree and horseradish foam
This was probably one of my favorite courses. There wasn’t much of the blue cheese puree on the plate but it was so intense tasting and went perfectly with the sweetness of the risotto and the light horseradish foam.


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Pea soup with fresh peas, hummus, pea powder, and mentholated air
Who knew pea soup could be so delicious? I could have eaten a bowl of this for my dinner and been happy. Katie was writing notes down about what we were eating, and I now see that her description for this course was “pea soup (omg).”


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Cauliflower tortelloni with birch-smoked cheese in cocoa consume
The cocoa consume sounded a little shocking, but the combination of that with the cauliflower and cheese was amazing. There were also some crunchy cocoa nibs on top. This went so well with our red wine. I was a happy camper.


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Quail egg ravioli with brown butter and parmesan
This course also got an “omg” in Katie’s notes. We were instructed let the ravioli sit for 20 seconds before eating (so that the egg yolk sets a little bit), and then to eat it all in one bite. All I have to say is – wow. There was truffle, runny egg yolk, butter, and parmesan. That was quite a bite.


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Whitefish roe with lemon, buckwheat-polenta cake, coffee gelee, and fried capers
As you can see, I forgot to take a picture before we dug in, so this is an action-shot. Again, this was a random combination of ingredients that worked perfectly.


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Butter poached Maine lobster, toasted quinoa, pancetta, and fava beans
I’m from New England, and this was the best lobster I have ever tasted. The presentation was beautiful, too.


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Chicken liver with rutabaga balls, turmeric broth, greens, and beer foam
This was good, but not our favorite course. The flavors were great but the liver was a little rich by itself. They told us later in the night that they usually serve some sort of brittle to add some crunch to this, but the heat and humidity that week made impossible to make. They did give us some great beer to go with this course which went perfectly.


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Pennsylvania duck breast, duck confit, brussel sprouts, pumpkin smear, cocoa dust
Each bite of this was laid out perfectly with the duck confit on the bottom, the brussels sprout leaves in the middle and the seared duck breast on top. Again, it was absolutely delicious.


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“Cheese Course”: Taleggio cheese, coddled egg, white truffle, and powdered honey
The little dish contained taleggio cheese at the bottom and coddled egg on top. I’m not sure where the white truffle was, but it was in there somewhere. We were instructed to take the spoonful of powered honey and stir it into the cheese and egg mixture. We did what we were told and the mixture turned into something with a fondue-like texture. It was such an odd combination, but it was certainly the best cheese course I have ever had!


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“Dessert – Meat and Veg”: Candied veal sweetbreads, parsnip-ice wine-vinegar puree, passionfruit sauce, honeydew foam, and parsnip puree
I really felt like I was on Iron Chef with this course. Veal sweetbreads for dessert? It actually worked! They also gave us a glass of Muscat wine to go with our dessert.


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We thought we were done at this point, but one of the chefs put down a tiny bottle that said “bacon.” Hmmm…


They brought over another “bonus” course, which was a red beet ice cream on top of a white chocolate cream in a lavender cone. They added some of the bacon extract on top of the ice cream. Amazing!


Who wants to go back with me??

Garlic Roasted Asparagus

Roasting is my favorite way to cook asparagus. I make a lot of variations of this by adding things like balsamic or parmesan cheese, but here is my simple recipe for garlic roasted asparagus.

Asparagus
Garlic, roughly chopped (I used 4 cloves for about 1 and a half bunches of asparagus, but I change the amount depending on how much garlic I feel like)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

1. Trim the rough ends of the asparagus and spread out flat on a baking sheet. Top with the garlic.
2. Drizzle the asparagus and garlic with olive oil (to coat) and sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper.


3. Cook in a 450 degree oven for 10-15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the asparagus.

Turkey and Spinach Lasagna

I actually don’t always love lasagna because I find that the noodles can get soggy, but I came across a Cooking Light recipe for Turkey Lasagna that doesn’t call for pre-cooking the noodles. I’ve made it a few times, tweaking the recipe a little bit each time. I kept the base recipe (uncooked noodles, cottage cheese and mozzarella mixture), but upped the amount of sauce, added some extra seasoning, added some spinach to boost the veggie content, and broiled it at the end to crisp up the top.

This lasagna freezes really well, so I’m going to bring it to work for lunch this week and then freeze the rest for later. I love having this kind of thing in the freezer for lazy nights!

1 lb. ground turkey breast
Olive oil
1 ½ c. water
3 ½ c. marinara sauce (homemade or store bought…I used store bought)
16 oz. chopped frozen spinach, thawed
3 ½ cups shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese, divided
2 c. 1% low-fat cottage cheese
½ c. grated fresh Parmesan cheese
2 eggs + 1 egg white
¼ c. chopped fresh parsley
¼ tsp. black pepper
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. nutmeg
9 uncooked lasagna noodles

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Heat up a little bit of olive oil in a large saucepan and add the ground turkey breast. When the meat is browned, add the marinara sauce and the water. Simmer for 10 minutes.
3. Drain the spinach to get as much water out of it as possible. Combine it with 2 cups of the mozzarella, the cottage cheese, parmesan, egg, parsley, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.
4. To assemble, spread ½ cup of the turkey mixture on the bottom of a 13 x 9 inch baking dish. Arrange 3 noodles over turkey mixture; top with 1 ½ cups turkey mixture. Spread half of cheese mixture over turkey mixture. Repeat layers, ending with the remaining turkey mixture.
5. Top the lasagna with the remaining 1 ½ cups of mozzarella cheese and some cracked black pepper.


6. Bake covered for one hour. Then, uncover the lasagna and broil on high for a few minutes until the cheese is slightly browned.

Salmon with Horseradish and Lemon Cream

I made a quick and easy dinner for myself tonight with some salmon and the fresh peas I got yesterday at Green City Market. I kept the peas simple by just steaming them and tossing them in a little bit of butter, but I made a nice horseradish and lemon cream to spruce up the salmon.

¾ c. light sour cream
Juice of half a lemon
2 tbsp. prepared horseradish
1 tsp. Worcestershire
1 ½ tbsp. chopped chives
Salmon filet(s)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. To make the sauce, combine the sour cream, lemon juice, horseradish, Worcestershire, chives, salt, and pepper. Keep cold.
2. Coat the salmon filet(s) with some salt, pepper, and olive oil. Broil on high on the top rack of the oven for about 8 minutes, or until desired doneness (I like my salmon cooked to medium).
3. Top the salmon with a little bit of the sauce and garnish with more chives.

Green City Market

The weather is beautiful today, so I wandered around Green City Market this morning. I really need to start coming here every week because the produce is like nothing I can get at my local grocery store. I snapped a few pictures I thought I’d share…


I picked up a little lunch for the road: a feta and mixed green tart.


I ended up buying some fresh peas, a basket of strawberries, and far too much asparagus (including a bunch of purple asparagus, which is new to me). It looks like I’ll be cooking asparagus tonight!

Black Bean Dip with Homemade Tortilla Chips

A few months ago, I made this recipe for simmered black beans from the New York Times. They were fantastic (and I realized that it really is worth the effort to use dried beans as opposed to canned), but the recipe made such a big batch that I had to freeze most of them. I came up with this black bean dip to take to work for a snack this week to use the leftovers. I also made some homemade baked tortilla chips. They were super easy to make, and SO much better than store bought.

The dip would almost as well if you used canned black beans, but I think you would need to add some sort of liquid to thin it out a little bit because the black beans that I defrosted had some sauce that they simmered in.

Black Bean Dip

½ red onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 ½ c. black beans
2 tbsp. hot sauce (I think the Cholula brand gives it the best flavor)
½ tsp. cumin
½ c. light sour cream
Fresh cilantro (small handful)
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Sauté the onion and garlic in a little bit of oil until tender.
2. Place the onion, garlic, beans, hot sauce, cumin, sour cream, and cilantro into a food processer. Blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Baked Tortilla Chips

Small corn tortillas (however many you want)
Olive oil
Course salt

1. Cut each tortilla into six wedges.
2. Spread the wedges out in a single layer on a baking sheet. Brush on both sides with olive oil and season with salt.
3. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes.

Rigatoni with Lamb Ragu with Mint

I had been wanting to try Giada’s Lamb Ragu with Mint recipe and I found myself with some leftover lamb shank that I had frozen from a dinner at Terragusto recently, and – in an effort to clean out my freezer – I changed around the recipe a little bit to use my leftovers.

½ lb. rigatoni pasta
1 tbsp. olive oil
2 shallots, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
Lamb (like I said, I used leftover lamb shank meat that I defrosted)
½ c. red wine
2 c. marinara sauce (I used store bought)
¼ c. fresh mint leaves, chopped
¼ c. whole milk ricotta cheese

1. Cook the pasta according to package directions.
2. Sauté the shallot and garlic in the olive oil for a few minutes. Add the red wine and cook until reduced by half.
3. Add the marinara sauce and lamb meat. Simmer for 10 minutes and add the ricotta cheese.
4. Add the pasta and the fresh mint to the sauce.

I added some peas to this when I ate it the next night and thought it cut the richness of the sauce nicely. Either way, the lamb and the mint are a fantastic combination in this pasta dish.

Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwiches

I’ve been seriously craving a pulled barbeque pork sandwich after seeing them all over the Food Network last week. I was bored on Saturday so I thought: why not try to make one? Since I don’t really have the time or equipment to barbeque a pork butt, I decided to make something similar with chicken thighs. I figured that simmering them on low heat for an hour or so would make them fall apart and therefore give a similar effect as the pulled pork. To go with, I decided to make some coleslaw (because you can’t have a barbeque sandwich without coleslaw) and corn. It was all a success!

Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwich
I decided on this plan while I was already out running errands, so I didn’t have time to write a grocery list. I knew I wanted to experiment with a homemade barbeque sauce and had most of the ingredients already to do so, so I just picked up some canned tomato sauce as a base. I was a little overwhelmed with the variety of barbeque sauce recipe I found on the internet; people put in everything from coffee to chocolate to pineapple juice. Apparently, Alabama barbeque sauce is made with mayonnaise. Eek…

I wanted to go with something fairly traditional, so I turned to the good old Joy of Cooking and started from there. The recipe I started with had a ketchup base, but I just used the tomato sauce and figured I’d need to add some extra vinegar and sugar to the recipe. I also changed it up by adding smoked paprika instead of regular and tripling the amount of it (I really, really like smoked paprika). I tweaked the other ingredients here and there and wound up with a keeper!

My basic method was to brown the chicken, remove it from the pot, make the barbeque sauce in the same pot, add back in the chicken, and simmer until the chicken falls apart.

1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken thighs (trimmed of any visible fat)
½ c. chopped onion
½ clove garlic
2 c. tomato sauce
¼ c. plus 1 tbsp brown sugar
1 ½ tsp. smoked paprika
2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
6 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
2 tsp. mustard
2 tbsp. hot sauce
2 tbsp. molasses
Juice of ½ a lime
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Season the chicken on both sides with salt and pepper. Sear it in a dutch oven in a little bit of oil (something neutral flavored) on both sides until a golden brown. Remove and set aside.
2. Sauté the onion in the same pot. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes and sauté for about another minute.
3. Add the tomato sauce and the rest of the ingredients through the lime juice. Add salt and pepper, to taste. Bring to a simmer and remove about half of the sauce and set aside for later.
4. Return the chicken to the pan. Turn the heat down to low, cover, and simmer for an hour.
5. At this point, the chicken should be falling apart. Remove it and shred with a fork. Depending on how saucy you want it to be, you can add back in some of the sauce set aside earlier. Or, you can just serve it on the side with the sandwiches. The chicken should look something like this:

Coleslaw
I was originally going to be lazy and pick up a bag of coleslaw mix, but my grocery store was all out so I was forced to really make it from scratch. I used half green cabbage and half red cabbage, which I think gave it nice color. I made my coleslaw pretty vinegary because I wanted it to go in my sandwich as almost a condiment. Once again, my recipe was kind of an experiment, but it was yummy :).

¾ c. light mayonnaise
3 tbsp. white wine vinegar
3 tbsp. white vinegar
Juice of half a lime
¼ of an onion, grated
2 tsp. sugar
8 cups shredded cabbage
½ c. chopped scallions
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Whisk together the mayonnaise through the sugar. Add salt and pepper, to taste (I like lots of pepper in my coleslaw).
2. Place the shredded cabbage in a separate bowl. Slowly pour the dressing over the cabbage until it gets to the right creaminess (you might not need to use all of the dressing).

3. Toss in the scallions and serve.

Corn with Cilantro and Lime
I had wanted to make corn on the cob, but my grocery store failed me once again (ah, city grocery stores…). Instead, I doctored up frozen corn a bit with cilantro and lime juice. I didn’t write down a recipe, but I just sautéed the frozen corn in some butter. When it was heated through and slightly browned, I added chopped cilantro and a little bit of fresh lime juice.

Five Spice Pork and Sweet Potato Mash

Once again, I may have gotten overly ambitious when planning my dinners for this week. I was up late last night cooking, but it was totally worth it (and really, it was my fault for starting too late).

I had a couple of frozen pork tenderloins in the freezer and I remembered a delicious recipe for Five Spice Pork Tenderloin that I tried a few months ago. I already had most of the ingredients, so then I started to think of sides. I thought that some kind of mashed sweet potato would go nicely…maybe with some ginger? To round it off with something green, I went with one of my go-to vegetable sides lately: green beans with oyster sauce.

Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Ginger
I didn’t do a great job of measuring the quantities of liquid that I added to the potatoes, but the amount really just depends on how big the potatoes are and how thick you want the mash to be. I tried to approximate.

3 sweet potatoes
1 tbsp. grated ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tbsp. peanut oil
¼ c. orange juice
3-4 tbsp. whole milk
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Bake the potatoes whole in a 400 degree oven for about an hour, or until soft in the middle.
2. Heat the peanut oil over medium-low in a pot big enough to hold the potatoes and sauté the ginger and garlic until soft, but not browned.
3. Add the orange juice to the pot and stir until heated.
4. Peel the potatoes and add to the pot. Add some salt and pepper.
5. Now, there are a couple of options for what to do next. If you like your potatoes with some texture, then mash them directly in the pot. I like mine really creamy, so I first mashed them lightly in the pot and then pureed in my food processor. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with white potatoes, though; they’ll get over-worked and gummy.
6. Slowly add the milk as you’re mashing or pureeing the potatoes until they get to the consistency you want. Adjust the seasoning, and they’re done.

Green Beans and Oyster Sauce
I don’t even know if I can call this a recipe or not because I just stir-fry some green beans in store bought oyster sauce, but I think it’s worth including. I add it at the very last minute of stir-frying and just enough to lightly coat the vegetables. It has an intense, salty flavor, so a little goes a long way.

Five Spice Pork Tenderloin
I followed this recipe exactly except for modifying the cooking instructions. The recipe calls for first searing the whole tenderloins and then roasting in the oven. I, quite frankly, didn’t feel like dealing with the mess of searing so I did some research and found a way to get a similar effect by roasting at a very high temperature in the oven. Then, I realized that I (a) wouldn’t get through two whole pork tenderloins in one week and (b) wouldn’t enjoy reheated pork tenderloin throughout the week. I decided to roast one whole and then freeze it for later (maybe for a stir fry) and thickly slice the second to pan sear throughout the week. That’s a win-win, I think.

For the whole tenderloin, I roasted it on one of the lower racks of my oven at 500 degrees for 10 minutes. Then I flipped it and roasted it for another 7 minutes. The exact times will vary by oven, but I like to take mine out when the internal temperature is at 150 degrees. Be sure to let it rest when you take it out of the oven because the internal temperature will rise slightly and the juices will set in the meat.

To pan sear, I just cooked the pork on each side for a few minutes until the pork was medium/medium-well inside and had a nice crust on the outside. I topped it with sliced scallions. Not a bad weeknight dinner, if I do say so myself :)