The plan was simple: eat the Italian frying peppers and arugula that came in last week’s CSA before they go bad.  That meant roasted red pepper soup with polenta dumplings and an arugula salad. I congratulated myself on the ease and elegance of this. Of how I’m above the quick bagged-lettuce salad and tortellini dinners of last week.

I was doubly impressed with myself because the meal required few ingredients: just broth, olive oil, onions, a few herbs. I’d had success with roasted tomato soup and once substituted Trader Joe’s jarred roasted peppers for the tomatoes with success. This time, I found an actual roasted red pepper soup recipe. I only had three peppers so I’d just halve it and skip the potatoes since I was making polenta anyway. This soup would be so delicious.

I beat my boyfriend home for work, so I blared Journey in the kitchen and enjoyed the alone time unwinding. I sang along with “Don’t Stop Believin’” as I coated the peppers in olive oil before broiling them, washed the arugula, whisked the olive oil and lemon juice for the salad dressing, chopped the onion for soup.

I opened a bottle of wine as the peppers made the kitchen smell like pepperoni. I discovered that the charred peppers’ skin slid right off, how the pepper, so soft and moist, felt human, like skin or eyeballs. They’d make a better haunted house prop than peeled grapes.

Something was about to go horribly wrong. Warning sign one: the tiny pile of chopped peppers. This meal was supposed to feed two! I should have divided it into thirds. And two: their color all wrong. How did I not see this before–there’s too much green!

As the soup simmered, I took a cooking break to sip some wine and eat the salad. Arugula, which I generally don’t care for because of its overly bitter sting, mellowed when drowned in a thick olive oily dressing, Parmesan, black pepper, and tossed with a few dried cranberries.

The soup, however, turned out to be a bland dog-food color once blended together. And too watery, not thick, not the warming, orangey red roasted red pepper soup should be. The polenta too lacked the richness I remembered from the last time I made it. The bit of Parmesan I sprinkled on top to spunk up the soup turned rubbery. And even the soup bowl! The dull blue-gray color made the crusty-colored soup look even crustier.

The remains. Bleh.

The boyfriend graciously ate the crappy soup. It was edible, and the polenta wasn’t awful. But when it somehow takes two hours from the start of cooking to the sit-down point, when a stack of dirty pans has mysteriously appeared on the stove, and the counter is mess of oils and chopped bits, and your eyes sting a little from the potent onion (or tiredness at slaving away, you’re not sure), you want something yummy to come from the chaos.

I was one of the first to stroll in to the class in 404 Wine Bar‘s back room, and when I saw the long banquet-like tables and the huge round tables that sat six, eight, ten people, I felt a familiar tremor ripple through my stomach, the kind I hadn’t experienced since I was 12 when I transferred schools and I had no idea who I was going to sit with at lunch.

I watched the entrance like I was waiting for someone as the couples kept trickling in, feeling relief wash through me whenever there was a single—but they went to join their growing group of friends at another table. I pulled out a book at one point and willed the class to start so we could do something, so I didn’t have to listen to giggles and snippets of everyone else’s conversation. I needed to be distracted from my alone-ness.

When the class finally began, I was the only single-single at a table with three other couples. I paid real close attention to everything, taking my time with each of the four pours to examine the color, smell the bouquet. I was there to learn, not gossip, or complain about my day like the couple sitting next to me (who didn’t appear to drink anything). I would learn by myself.

If I could have somehow known I would have been the only loner there, I still would have gone (I don’t think you should miss out on opportunities because you’re afraid of going by yourself). But this experience did show my super-loner-self, really for the first time, how wine (and food) can be enjoyed with someone in way that’s difficult to do alone.

It could be the alcohol and the loosening of the tongue that compels you to talk, to make jokes, to be silly. It could be that wine is one of the best drinkables on the planet and you want to share your joy with someone else. You just want to ask your friend if they also prefer the sauvingon blanc to the chardonnay, but were you surprised by the smoothness of the merlot compared to the bordeaux?

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy wine or food or whatever alone, but there’s a joy in having someone you care about there, sharing it with you.

- I definitely “oohed” my first time here when I saw the clay pots of melting cheese and chocolate. I managed to stop myself this time, just.

- The roof of my mouth burns a little with the piping hot fondu, but this is really the only way to eat it. Especially since the cheese fondu is made with dry white wine.

- Dipping sauces that came with our seafood plate were fun to play with (8, including hot-and-spicy, soy, garlic butter) but the oil we cooked the shrimp, scallops and lobster in added plenty of flavor. I’m also not a condiments person.

- There’s a couple sitting near us drinking sodas. I catch the woman with the heavily made-up eyes eyeing me and the chocolate fondu. I wonder if it’s her first time here.

-Very difficult to resist sticking finger directly in the fondu. Am glad Mindy asked for more fruit and angle food cake for our chocolate dessert.

- Guitar player doesn’t move from his perch in the corner in the 2 1/2 hours of our dinner. He holds the guitar incredibly close, almost vertically and a flap of blond hair falls over his eye. I wonder what style of guitar playing, what kind of songs.

- Apples work well in cheese and chocolate, though I prefer the cheese.

- Mindy: “This is a great date spot, but I don’t think anything romantic would happen after because of all this food and wine.”

- Full and pleasantly sleepy on the ride home. Everyday should end like this.

“Um. Um. Uh. . .” he paused, glanced at the floor. “Yes.” He knew I wanted him to say no, though I knew he’d think “yes” since he holds to the why-can’t-my-meals-be pills school of thought. And it is, for us, debt-saddled twenty-somethings way too much. $40 on a meal for the two of us is plenty; $100 is groceries for us for a week–that’s a lot of meals.

And yet, I’ve been infatuated with Alinea (with Next, with Aviary), with the idea of these places. From the look of the pictures of the meticulously composed plates, no doubt the color, texture, and presentation is as important to the food as smell and taste. The food also seems more suited toward a glass case than a dinner plate.

I read an article (somewhere, sorry! don’t remember where) about how Grant Achatz ‘s father wept after being served a dish at Alinea that involved burning oak leaves. Achatz’s aim in creating the dish had involved a childhood memory of burning leaves during fall, though he hadn’t intended at all for his father to cry.

But this, the emotional evocativeness of food, makes sense to me. Given the link of smell to memory, it follows that food would have superpowers. Onions sauteing in butter transports me to my grandmother’s kitchen, garlic and soy sauce back to China.

I don’t expect Achatz’s magic to time travel me back to St. Louis, age 8, but food, especially a great meal, makes you feel. Memories are created around meals, a damn good snack, the perfect cupcake. Though it’s surely a privilege to be able to drop a wad to indulge your senses, I’m also after new memories, new experiences.

I don’t fully understand Achatz’s approach to food, but that’s part of the draw. I’m too busy being dumbfounded and amazed at the look of it all, but that pushes me toward going, or wanting to go. Art, or whatever it is, I want to eat it.

The pears and lemon added just enough tartness to balance the otherwise extremely sugary meal so I didn’t waddle home in a sugar coma, which I’m sure would have happened if I picked any of the other hundred sweet breakfasts. Though waddle home I did because there are a lot of roasted pears and I couldn’t finish them all. Next time, I may go with the Smoked Salmon Napoleon, just for something completely different. Though it’s almost impossible to resist those sweet breakfasts.

* Marmalade is at 1969 W Montrose St., Chicago

1. Don’t go straight from work. (This, no doubt, aggravated the following problems).

2. Don’t go hungry.

3. Don’t forget to stop at your ATM by the office to get cash or you’ll find yourself walking a half block out of the way to CVS because you’re a bit of a cheapskate and don’t want to pay the $2.50 fee some other money machine will charge you.

4. Don’t forget your reusable bags because carrying more than two plastic bags, each containing a single item, is tricky when you’re also juggling your oversized work bag on the forever-long walk home.

5. Don’t bring all your work crap.

6. Don’t not take time to browse and buy the purple green beans you’ve never seen before and will regret not buying once you get two steps from the market. But by this point, your arms are so laden with plastic bags you don’t think it’s possible to make it home with anything else.

7. Don’t forget your camera. You’ll want to take pictures of the purple green beans and homemade pasta and plums and beets you didn’t buy.

8. Don’t forget to take pictures of your booty once you get home. Or you’ll eat almost everything before remembering to snap a picture, and this one doesn’t exactly say “farmers market:”

Eggplant from the farmers market, diced, with garlic for eggplant risotto, which was delicious

9. Don’t decide to do ALL your produce shopping at the farmer’s market next week unless you have someone (or a shopping cart) to help carry all the goodies home.

10. Don’t forget this advice next week. Or, more positively, remember this advice next week.

* the market is at Berwyn & Clark on Wednesdays from 3-8 until September 7; 3-7 until October 19

But the food, oh, the food. Eight of us sat around decor I would call comfortable minimalism and yet, I could tell by the looks on everyone else’s face when the food arrived (and yes, I was feeling it too) that we expected overfilled, Family Restaurant-portions, probably because it was 8:30 and we hadn’t eaten since lunch. But the minimalism carried over to the food.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the quality of the food just wasn’t there. The mac & cheese, served in a mini cast iron dish, had more like flecks of cheese instead of a sauce; the salmon, served with a pinch of fennel salad on top, was fine enough in it’s own right, but the pungent, overlytart saffron aioli, and hard, undercooked potatoes, forced me to put my fork down, though I really wanted the last bites of salmon.

Still hungry, and craving something sweet after all the salt, I ordered the raspberry gelato, which they were out of, but got a wonderful creamy vanilla instead, though they severely skimped on the promised raspberry sauce.

The highlight of the whole night, the scene-stealer, though, was the chocolate jar. A rich choclate pudding topped with fresh fruit and nuts did, really, come in glass jar.

All in all, I’d only go back for a glass of wine and a gorgeous night-time view.

*the first Wednesday of every month, a small group of the Hungry Hungry Hump Days Dinner Club eats out at a restaurant selected by another member.

“To get healthy,” my work-friend said. Juice for breakfast and lunch. This is completely depressing to me. I love food. I love to eat it, cook it, smell it. I’ve fantasized about rolling around in a tub of olive oil while someone feeds my Parmesan cheese and chocolates.

So, barring the threat of death for eating certain foods, I can’t see myself doing a fast or a special diet of any kind, ever. Why you ask?

I’m a proponent of eating what you like to eat in reasonable-sized portions. This means eating a balanced diet with fruit, vegetables, grains, protein, etc. And allowing yourself a scoop of ice cream or a cookie when you have a sweet craving. So I wondered, why not make the fruit-veggie juice as part of a meal or a snack instead of excluding everything else?

I admit, I fall victim to that deprivation line of thinking. The idea that withholding is somehow better, despite that your head aches and tummy grumbles to the contrary. This happens to me all the time at work, I wait and “work” that extra half hour while I feel my brain loosing power. Just go eat!

Sometimes, a little voice ( a mean and kind of sing-songy voice like it’s taunting na-na-nuh-boo-boo) echoes in the pit of my empty stomach that I should wait a little longer to eat because if I have a snack, that means I’m a pig and I’m going to get fat. It’s the same voice that says skipping meals is OK, or convinces you a piece of toast is a big enough breakfast.

This leads to headaches, more distractions, or a walk to the vending machine for a puffed-up bag of greasy chips or over-indulging in ice cream.

So my food goal, my diet that’s meant to be a lifestyle change, is to up my veggie intake and snack more in hopes of curbing the problem of deprivation diets: over-snacking and then guilt for over-snacking. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why eat overly large, often junky meals, and think that skipping meals, or dieting, or fasting somewhow makes it better, when it usually makes us feel worse?

Before this, I think I’d only tasted beets once, and they were citrus marinated beets at Prairie Fire. I remember they came as part of a salad and were tropical colors and had the texture of a cold potato. They were good enough, so I held the cluster of five beats in my hand and decided I would find a way to cook them. And then I threw them in the fridge for a couple days.

By happenstance, when on a leisurely Sunday googling adventure for “crostini,” I opened this provocative post on Gilt Taste, Perfect Summer Crostini and aaaaaaaall the way at the bottom there was this suggestion: Roasted beets, grated goat cheese, toasted pistachios. I had neither goat cheese, nor pistachios, but damn it, I did have 5 beets and a French loaf. I was gonna make roasted beet crostini.

I smartly peeled the beets over the sink and sliced quickly on the old, crappy cutting board so the stainable juice stayed mostly contained, and then tossed the beet wedges with olive oil, sea salt and rosemary before roasting for an hour. (Added a couple cloves of garlic in the pan with 20 minutes left).

They beets had shriveled and looked like dried slivers of bacon, but whoa were they sweet! The crostini definitely needed something to balance so I added slices of Parmesan cheese and scallions and voila, roasted beet crostini a la Christina.

Recipe for roasted beets via Guilty Kitchen

A boulangerie even, on a corner I would have strolled by every day to and from the subway. One of my dreams could have been fulfilled so many moons ago: fresh baguettes every day! (I’m holding out hope that Andersonville gets its own boulangerie, sometime). And that’s all aside from the performance spaces and art galleries that live in that area.

As to the fest itself, my pals and I listened to a few local bands. Here Soft Speaker rockin’ away wasn’t wholly eclipsed by the Blue Line.

Afterwards, we skipped over to Revolution Brewing where our group o’ four managed to snag one barstool next to a couple guys eating a pizza with truffle oil– that mushroomy smell drowning out the yeasty beer and booze.

photo courtesy of Shannon Boyle's iPhone

And finally, after bebopping around the locus of action at the actual square (food, jewelery, scarves, hats, paintings) and witnessing the drummer for White Mystery bash his drums on the stage floor at the end of the show, my group relaxed at Telegraph. It, like most wine bars, isn’t the type of place you want to go to if you’re carb-craving from standing and walking around a few hours in sticky heat, but they had plenty of  dishes on their short menu to linger over and play eenie-meenie-miny-moe.

photo courtesy of Shannon Boyle and my camera

We ended up sharing a  few small plates: cheese and cured salmon (pictured) and cannellini puree, and tried really hard not to be too conscious that Rahm Emmanuel was sitting next to us. Seriously.