I thought Sweet Cakes was suddenly popular seeing the line at Damen and Walton. But apparently there’s a newish restaurant there that’s popular, Jam.

Haven’t been there yet, but the menu‘s online and sounds good: Savory buckwheat crepes with braised lamb, Asian pear, hazelnut-sage glaze, and spicy mesclun for $11. Egg sandwich with pig’s cheek? Ok, yeah, I’ll try it. Cured trout quiche? Yeah, all right, I guess. Panini Cristo, a sort of French toast with prosciutto and sweet mustard jam? Nah, not for me.

For breakfast in Ukrainian Village, I’m still a proponent of Uncle Mike’s. Though the good stuff’s not on the menu. You have to get whatever Filipino breakfast they’ve got written up on the chalkboard.

In mid June, the Sun-Times followed up on a story about how “living in a food desert — primarily the city’s African-American neighborhoods with no full-service grocery stores — can shorten your life.” The Chi-Town Daily News followed up with its own story that focuses more on Chicago community supported agriculture.

Farms like City Farms seem to be everyone’s answer to the shortage of fresh food on the South Side. I’ve even heard of people talking about stringing a series of farms all throughout Chicago’s vacant land that could grow enough food to support the whole city. Something I think was probably a pipe dream from the Chicago Center for Urban Agriculture.

I want to know the limits what you can cook in a food desert. Sure it’s hard to find good food in a lot of neighborhoods, but what’s the reality? How close can you get to cooking a good meal without having to walk more than 3 miles to get supplies?

There was this New York Times article over the weekend, too. It aggrandizes that whole notion of “people are ready to do hard manual labor again” that keeps coming up in all these New Society pieces that run in the magazine.

Here are some of the studies cited in the stories if you’re looking for some long reading:

Most recent report from Mari Gallagher, “Chicago Food Desert Progress Report 2009” [pdf]

Daniel Block‘s 2008 report that restarted the whole conversation, “Finding Food in Chicago and the Suburbs” [pdf]

Via Click Opera

Making Tangerine Sherbert in a tiny kitchen

Tricia and I started watching food videos on the New York Times video page a few months ago and got hooked on Jill Santopietro’s Tiny Kitchen show. Hosting the show from her super small apartment, she brings a really endearing clumsiness to each recipe that makes everything seem a lot more tangible than the theoretical perfection that recipes have in books.

Mark Bittman, self proclaimed minimalist (and favorite of mine) is kind of stating the obvious in this article when he says the size or completeness of a kitchen really don’t matter. What I like about the Tiny Kitchen videos is seeing the little moments of problem solving and last minute hacks that turn the space into a sort of organic evolving room completely designed to server a purpose. Sort of like The 5 Obstructions but then its like four small walls or something?