Yesterday we were bitching about how the Sun-Times food section wasn’t showing up. Well, someone finally got off their keister and made it happen.
Uh, just barely. We’re not really in any position to judge, but they kind of mailed this one in. Many of the articles are wire stories, and the layout of the main story on Polish Christmas traditions is totally FUBAR’d - it’s split in half in the middle of a paragraph, and the first half is listed after the second half on the Food homepage. That’s really sloppy, even for the week before Xmas! Especially because it’s a reasonably informative article, if a little scattered compared to Leah Zeldes’ normally high standards. It definitely wins the Captain Obvious award for the week, with the (quoted) sentence “’A lot of Polish Americans eat meat,’” in reference to the fact that Christmas dinner used to be a meatless affair, and now it’s not. Here’s something interesting! Poland is all of a sudden in the Schengen area, meaning there is no immigration control between it and Germany any longer. Now they can celebrate Christmas together like in olden days!
The other story this week is about El Jardin, the Mexican juggernaut in Wrigleyville. Dave Hoekstra chronicles the restaurant on the eve of its 40th aniversary. As with anything more than a year or two old, there’s a charming and heartwarming and historically telling story attached to it, which you can read at your leisure.
There are three wire articles that round out the section, and man are they ridiculous. One’s about how browning or roasting meat is preferable, flavor-wise, to boiling it. Another one starts out by telling us it’s a good idea to know how to bake. And the third one tells us we’re allowed to freeze cookie dough. O RLY?! The last third of December is just a bad idea.
El Jardin [MenuPages]
[Photo: Traditional Polish Xmas table. Looks a little bland, no? (stella_gonzales2003/flickr)]
p.s. If you’re wondering why there’s no TOC food section today, it’s because last week’s was a double issue. Case closed!
