best pizzaria and fried chicken joint and pepsi vs coke 7866

Actually it's yogurt and cucumber, but I can't get it exactly right. The online recipes usually include oregano or mint, which isn't what I remember. Sometimes lemon or oilive oil, usually some salt. I usually add some sour cream to it, because it seems closer to what I remember, but I'm still missing something. And I'm sure it's not mint. Maybe it's just the yogurt I use...

That's what I thought, until I saw an episode of Good Eats where he made the meat on a grill rotisserie. Okay, it's horizontal instead of vertical, but the result it pretty darned close.

Just had beefs a couple nights ago. I bake my own bread, so that's not as much an issue. Sure, it's not exactly the same, but it's closer than anything I can find here.

Make my own pita bread, too, for the gyros.

And Cuban bread, for Cuban sandwiches.

Last year for Christmas, I ordered from Taste of Chicago, and got beef, Vienna dogs, pizza, and Eli's cheesecake. It was pricey, but good. Carson's ribs will ship, too, if you like them. Ordered those for Thanksgiving one year.

Sadly, I can get frozen White Castle burgers at the grocery store. I can live without those, no problem. I'd rather see a package of Vienna dogs or Vienna beef....

I just scored about a pint of them from a New York style deli here. The brand is Marconi, which is the right one. He buys the stuff in gallon jugs for the "Chicago-style" beef sandwiches he makes, but he sold me a container of the peppers, so I'm good for a while now. Those things go a long way. Maybe one of these days, I'll try one of beef his sandwiches - he cooks his own beef but says he buys the gravy from Vienna.. Other places have had them, but they always mess something up - one place was close, but the beef was sliced way too thick.

The New York deli also has the whole sport peppers used for hot dogs, although I saw similar ones at the grocery that I might try.

Peppers are pretty easy to grow, but I have no idea what those peppers are in the Marconi Giardeneira. They aren't the same ones other brands use, that's for sure. If you've got room for them inside, and enough light, you can grow peppers all year long, too. I've got a couple of odd plants that I've had in containers for going on three years now, and they bloom and produce all year. Better in the summer, of course, but if you're intent on one type of pepper, at least you wouldn't be starting over each year.

I used to work at Cermak and Ashland, more or less, which is predominately hispanic, but with a pocket of old-time Italian places just to the west. Lunches there were always interesting.

A couple of those hole-in-the-wall type hispanic places have opened here, which makes for some interesting eating. One is a combo grocery, meat market and restaurant. I've never seem so many selections of meats for tacos.

I'm not all that crazy about clams and oysters. When we lived in Chicago, we used to order lobsters and steamers from a place in Maine, though. We'd take orders from everyone we knew, and we'd end up with hundreds of lobsters to divvy up.

There are a couple of places here that sell Al Pastor tacos that are really good, and there's a meat market that sells the marinated meat. Not the same as the stuff as what you'd get carved off a spit, but it's pretty darned tasty. Those places are pretty new here, though. When we first moved here, there was one good place with a limited menu, and then Taco Bell and Taco John's. At least now we're getting decent Mexican places.

There's a cheese warehouse here, which is odd. Huge refrigerated warehouse with all sorts of imported cheeses. But I still can't get some of the stuff that I used to pick up in Wisconsin. Or in the grocery stores in Chicago, for that matter. I've given up on finding bread. I bake all of my own. I'm still trying to perfect pizza crust though. I think the albreastude is a big part of the problem.

I also miss some of the other ethnic foods that were so common in Chicago. I used to go to a couple of Polish deli's where I could buy fresh pierogi and sausages and all sorts of things. I found a two polish stores about 45 miles from here, and some of the stuff is imported from Poland and some is imported from Chicago. Like frozen pierogi. It's better than nothing, but it's a long drive, and still not as good at the plentiful places in Chicago.

Never been to a Trader Joe's.

We've got an Albertson's and it doesn't seem all that expensive to me; no more than the Safeway or King Soopers, which are the other chains here. Albertson's has a bigger Hispanic section and they've got some different cuts of meat that you can't get at the other places.

Ever been to Russell's on Thatcher in River Grove? (I think it's River Grove....)

Donna