The Sun-Times is already over Halloween. They did it last week, anyway. Instead, Chuck Sudo takes a look at the Day of the Dead / Dia de los Muertos, especially as it plays itself out along the main corridors of Mexican Chicago. It’s a baking holiday - your pan de muerto might be dipped into hot chocolate or offered up to ancestral spirits (flying around for eternity makes you very hungry). There’s also plenty of mole and whatnot, too, whether you go to your favorite local or one of the city’s top Mexicans. Actually, your local will probably just be serving whatever it does normally. But maybe not! Call ahead and ask.
Meanwhile, Seth Schwartz has a heartwarming story about a local school that went from frozen and canned food to fresh and insourced, and the kids…loved it! Usually, the stories are about how kids hate the delicious new food and are doomed to be fat and stupid for generations. Every time you break the cycle, you break it permanently.
Denise O’Neal thinks that Betty Crocker’s Sweet Potato Mashed Potatoes are crap. We just wanted to through that in there.
Sandy Thorn Clark has a profile on food personality Christopher Kimball. He’s been assembling a cookbook of old American recipes, like Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake. Maybe we could have let that one disappear into the ether of the past? (JK, everything should be preserved forever.) But also, we found out that there’s a secret to perfect pie dough: “Vodka! We add vodka and water for a moist, easy-to-roll dough that stays tender, and the vodka vaporizes in the oven.” MP:Boston laughed at us when we got excited, informing us that “there have been things about that on the internet for like two weeks.” We felt commensurately stupid.
Finally, “neener neener, your pumpkin looks like a squash!” “Wow, you are stupider than you look. First of all, pumpkins are squashes. Second of all, this is a red kuri squash. Don’t you read Lisa Donovan? It’s the new hot sh*t.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
[Photo: red kuri squash, vvvanessa/flickr]
