You should eat here.

When Joe was awarded a dinner for two for an excellent sales week, we knew where we wanted to go: Russian Tea Time in downtown Chicago. It’s one of our favorite, romantic restaurants in the city, especially in winter-time when we’re craving rich, hearty dinners. Russian Tea Time is on 77 E. Adams, just around the block from the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.

It serves a mouth-watering variety of classic Russian and Central Asian foods, and the tea menu is larger than a wine list in an upscale restaurant (our favorite is the coriander tea, a fruity, fresh blend). The decor is just the way I’d picture an old-world Russian restuarant, if the restaurant was located in a storefront in a big city. The glistening antique samovars, cushy red booths, and balalaika music set a romantic, comfortable mood, and all the staff we’ve met, except the busboys, are from Russia or the Ukraine. If you choose a vodka tasting flight, it comes with a piece of dark brown break, a gherkin, and instructions on how to take a shot the Russian way. Na zdorovje!

Joe and I had visited the Art Institute on our engagement anniversary, December 20, and decided to make reservations at this restaurant afterwards. Everything is good, even their beet caviar, though ordinarily I treat beets like you’d treat toxic waste. Since then, we have been trying to re-create the items on their tasting platter, and I’ll be posting our recipes here. Hope you enjoy them!

Russian Tea Time platter for two: appetizers.
Clockwise from top: Tashkent carrot salad, stuffed mushroom, beet caviar, cracked wheat (tabbouleh) salad, apple-beet vinaigrette salad, chick pea spread, beef dumplings (pelmeni).

Russian Tea Time platter for two: entrees.
Clockwise from top: chicken pozharski, beef stroganoff, stuffed cabbage, Moldavian meatballs, rice pilaf.

Related Recipes:

Beet Vinaigrette Salad
Beef Stroganoff
Tashkent Carrot Salad
Parjoale – Moldavian Meatballs
Roasted Beet Caviar

Cahokia Mounds

I first learned about this place by following a lifelong interest in anthropology to a book about Midwestern Native American settlements. About eight hundred years ago, Cahokia was one of the largest cities in the world! National Geographic magazine did an article on this historic site recently. Although it’s not far from Chicagoland, I haven’t gotten to visit yet. It’s on my life list.

I want to eat here

I don’t know what they serve, but I know I’d like it. The Happy Food Spot is actually an unusual convenience store on Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Square.

I hope that isn’t Lake Michigan perch. Well, what the heck, everyone knows that deep frying kills PCBs and high mercury levels. The Fish Keg is on Howard Street in Evanston.

It just sounds good, doesn’t it? Get yer Ham on the Bone at Jeri’s Grill, on Western in Ravenswood.

Menacing Fruit

Watch out for the bananas!

I got this awesome idea from The Bloggess – you can trace invisible messages on a banana with a toothpick, and the next day it turns into a permanent message on the peel.

She notes that the person who gave her the idea was suggesting it as a way to write loving notes to her children and pack them in their lunch boxes. I’m fairly certain the suggester was a stay-at-home mom doing things like writing on bananas to reinforce her childrens’ status as the center of the universe while simultaneously justifying why she should be staying at home. After all, who would write on the bananas if the mother worked? The nanny? It’s like those Bento Lunch Boxes in which mothers pack sandwiches shaped like bunnies, and–

What? Oh, I’m rambling again.

Sorry.

In my household, the youngest member is about to turn 21 and so it is much more fun to try to frighten my husband and the Little Dark One by writing creepy messages on the fruit. Except that everyone in my family knows this is just the type of thing I am likely to do, so they just laughed and asked me why I was drawing on fruit. For this gag to actually work, I’d have to go to the grocery store and write on someone else’s bananas.

Imagine how perplexed they would be the next day, when their bananas start developing odd messages.