My Other Blog

So, as if I don't have enough on my plate already, (pun half-intended), I now blog for the Chicago Sun-Times' food section/Web site/food site on the Web.

The blog, "Digging In," (you like it? I came up with that), is filled with food features, food and restaurant news, observations on food (that's by me - I wonder about things a lot) and occasional restaurant reviews. I know, I know, as if there aren't enough people writing about food and newspapers and magazines and Web sites blogging about food. But we hope this is a little different, because it is, for the main part, written by people whose background is in news reporting. Two of the people, Janet and Lisa, actually know and write about food often -- Janet is the paper's food editor, Lisa does the 'food detective' column. So, we'll have stuff on what chef is in the running for what food award, but we will also report on restaurants that are closed by the city because of health code violations and mouse droppings in the food prep areas. We'll also cover some things that the serious "foodies" wouldn't stoop so low as to write about -- that's where I come in. I am the guy who asks the stupid questions, but who hopefully finds some interesting food news and bits and bites (another intended pun) sometimes.

I am not what you would call a "foodie." I live right around the corner from one of the most renown "foodie" haunts in Chicago, a Japanese restaurant that is open like three hours a week and supposedly is one of the few "authentic" Japanese restaurants in the metropolitan area, and I've never been there. I also live a few blocks away from one of the hottest pizza places in the city, but I have never been there and do not intend to go there, because the place is so cool, so hip, that they cannot even bring themselves to say, in the window, that they are a pizza place/bakery. Seriously. My other half and I have walked past many a time and have wondered if the joint is a neo-retro hardware/furniture store, an organic bakery or rustic art gallery. No menu in the window, no hours posted, and they've got some ambiguous 'what could it be?' name, as well. I don't get it.

But I do like food. I like eatin' it, like cooking (sometimes) like watching other people cook, like trying to figure out what's in certain dishes. I like reading magazines about food and I get all breathless when I walk by the kitchen showrooms in the Merchandise Mart.

So we'll see how this goes. Every New Year's I resolve to be published in one place I haven't been before, and I guess this kind of sort of fulfills that resolution for this year. Who knows, maybe Lisa, janet and I will become sort of a Siskel, Ebert and friend of food writers. And soon, radio and TV shows will be clamoring for our witty and wicked insights. I can dream, can't I?