They say the best way to learn Jewish is to do Jewish, and I’ve been learning just that in an expected place lately: the supermarket aisle. It’s a lesson that’s come much earlier than I ever expected. It takes a year or more to join the Jewish people, and I’m only standing at the very beginning of my conversion journey to Reform Judaism. Local Jewish friends have invited me to their synagogue, I’ve met the rabbi, and I’ve begun participating in community events.

It’s the tip of an iceberg I had heretofore only read about. And boy, have I been doing a lot of reading. I’ve been persistently haunting the Judaica section at downtown’s Harold Washington Library Center for several weeks now, prompting fellow blogger Leah Jones to point out to me, and rightly so, that I have a lifetime to learn about Judaism and I shouldn’t feel a need to learn everything all at once. Not ever having met me in person, funny how she pegged exactly what I wished I could do.

After all the holidays, and rituals, and philosophy of Judaism that I’ve been devouring, I know how well I seem to fit the faith and it seems to fit me. Uncannily so. But I didn’t quite know how to answer the question “Why?” until another new-media Jewish acquaintance made a sweet and surprising request:

“I want to hear more about how HaShem tapped you on the shoulder sometime if you’re willing.”

That’s the answer, I realized. In a nutshell, that’s what it felt like: like a tap on the shoulder. Not a tug on my arm. Not a billboard in front of me. Not a shout in my ear. Just a whisper, and I turned my head to make it out, and realized I had never looked in that direction before.

On Saturday evening, I got the chance to hang out with a group of young professionals exploring their own relationship to worship and to HaShem. (“The Name,” the polite term for God in everyday conversation…I haven’t quite worked my way up to inserting a “_” in the English word. If you read on, though, you’ll know I may get there.) We met with the rabbi in the synagogue’s temporary outdoor Sukkah to celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot, and to do the Havdalah ceremony which marks the end of Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath. I was lost through the Havdalah ceremony but did my best to try and follow along. But when I was invited to hold the holiday’s ritual lulav (bound branches) and etrog (citron fruit) and do the Netilat Lulav blessing, I surprised myself by not stumbling on the words.

I knew studying Hebrew for a failed Israeli teenage crush would come in handy someday.

But I also know I’m an abject noob. So finding myself standing frozen for five minutes in front of a shelf of deviled ham in an aisle at Jewel recently came as a shock. In my mountains of reading I’ve learned about kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws about keeping kosher, which very roughly gloss into: eating only animals with cloven hooves that chew their cud; eating only fish with fins and scales; and not mixing dairy and meat in the same meal, or even the same time frame. Traditional Jews are more apt to follow kashrut, or at least to follow it strictly, than are Reform Jews. Reform Judaism leaves questions of observance to the individual. I knew I had to understand kashrut. But I know I’ll never be the kind of Jew who keeps a separate set of kitchenware for milk versus meat products.

And yet…the act of putting a can of deviled ham or a package of bacon in my shopping cart, or a container of chicken stock for the quinoa that will accompany my cheese-covered soy burgers, has kept me at Jewel for far longer than ever before. Pondering. Rationalizing. Putting things into my shopping cart, rolling away, and then rolling back to return items to shelves. I really doubt strict kashrut observance is in my future. But considering how important this journey feels to me, the hypocrisy I feel every time I try to put trayf (a non-kosher item) in my cart, or think about planning a meal that would violate kashrut is astounding.

I never expected to feel this way, but I do. I can’t ethically reject kashrut without knowing what it is. And I can’t really know what it is without doing it. So now the supermarket is a minefield, if a temporary one, and I’ve unexpectedly come to understand the meaning of learning Jewish by doing Jewish.

It’s kind of like the email I sent to the rabbi asking for a formal meeting about conversion and to discuss a plan of study. I didn’t think it would be so hard to write. Friends suggested I say I was interested in converting, wanted to learn more, needed advice. All of that is true and he already knows all of that anyway. What I was afraid to say was how I really feel, which was driven home to me by how thoughtful a grocery shopper I seem to have become. That I feel like I’ve been tapped on the shoulder by HaShem and found a place and a people I never knew would feel like home. And that I don’t feel worthy enough to feel those things but I do. And I need to know where/how to begin.

But much like that can of deviled ham seemed to hop its way back onto the shelf at Jewel, those very words seemed to type themselves out in my email, shortly before the Send button pressed itself.

A couple of weeks ago, a reporter in the social-mediaverse asked me if I knew of any local eateries represented on Twitter who took customer comments seriously when they arrived via tweet. I had to think hard about that one. I see lots of local businesses tweet out specials, but the only one that I personally engage with–and on a consistent basis, too–is @BaoMouth. That’s the talking steamed pork bun character who tweets for Wow Bao, LEYE’s small but popular local chain of Asian bun storefront eateries. I shouted them out to the reporter on Twitter, sure the Mouth would prove me right and shout right back.

After a couple of hours of crickets, a contrite BaoMouth shouted back, which probably didn’t help my case with the reporter, but I’ve seen Wow Bao’s Twitter account at-reply thoughtfully more than enough times to know the delay was an aberration. The Mouth didn’t really need to be all that contrite anyway. I’m a big fan. I used to practically live on their Thai Curry Chicken bao and rice bowls when I lived at Marina City, across the river from the State/Lake location.

So they knew I’d be an easy mark when the Mouth and RedEye “Social Mediaologist” @ScottKleinberg asked me to ask you to consider making a fool of yourself for their co-sponsored WOW in Bao Contest. Details are after the contest link (or here), but the idea is Wow Bao and Red Eye want to know what you would do to “put the WOW in Wow Bao.” You know, like “What would you do for a Klondike bar?” only meatier. You can tell them by leaving a comment through Friday (9/24) under the contest announcement linked above. The Grand Prize is a party at Wow Bao for the winner and 50 grateful friends.

Food flew the same week the Mouth and Kleinberg asked me to show their contest some love. Someone who showed me some love recently, OutsideIn’s Esther Ildikó Brown (@estheribrown), told me about their foodie blog. Brown interviewed me for a September 1st blog post on OutsideIn that let me start to make amends with my blogging community (with my heartfelt self-pointed advice, “don’t be a dick” when you blog.)

Brown, herself, is blogging her way through her family heritage at Y’all Hungary?. The North Carolina-born daughter of a Southern father and Hungarian mother (she calls herself the “Budapest Belle”), Brown says on her new blog she intends to “cook my way through my family tree, from gulyás to grits.” Good luck, Esther. When you get to the gulyás, send samples.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

If you thought Chicago’s only new media-savvy sommelier was Alpana Singh, think again. Michael Bottigliero, scribe of Windy City Wine Guy, is out to show Chicagoans that the viney beverage is nothing to be feared by the average Midwesterner.

Bottigliero is one-half of a local power blogging couple spear-headed by Emmy-winning social media strategist Blagica, who suggested he create a wine site based on his experience as a sommelier. (The two welcomed their first child, daughter Liljana Apollonia, in mid-December.)

A native South Sider and Desert Storm U.S. Navy vet, after his military service Bottigliero studied at UIC and pondered his future. “Along the way I fell in love with wine, food, and beverage while working in some of Chicago’s best bars and restaurants,” he says. The work inspired him to obtain sommelier certifications and adopt a new career in the wine industry.

The wine blog went live in June 2008. With Windy City Wine Guy, Bottigliero wants to help Chicagoans get over the stress of choosing and pairing his favorite beverage. “I hope to make the site a hub for anything to do with wine, beer and spirits in Chicago,” he says. “I also want to bring down the stuffy attitude attached to sommeliers and wine. It’s a guy-and-gal beverage, and I’m just a guy who’s certified to give recommendations!”

The site includes information about Chicago-area wineries, bars, and breweries, wine reviews, primers, and best-buy and pairing recommendations, and tastings and events listings.  Interesting recent postings include:

• A multipart series on the opening of Metra’s downtown French Market;
• The opening of North Michigan Avenue’s Purple Pig;
• A report on 2009 Italian vintages;
• A ticket giveaway with Kersotes Theatres; and
• perhaps most useful of all, details on Bottigliero’s own wine cellar.

In addition, Bottigliero also has ongoing partnerships with major wineries including Terlato Wines International and Crushpad Wine, and recently helped Catbridge Cellars in northwest-suburban Antioch open and build an inventory of sustainable, organic and biodynamic wines.

“Chicagoans should know that our city is huge when it comes to wine,” says Bottigliero. “We have great wine bars and restaurants with award winning wine lists, and our chefs continue to be some of the biggest advocates of wine with dinner.”

So do I, for that matter.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

Husband-and-wife food bloggers Kelly Reis and Jason Waclawik video their meatless kitchen adventures every week at The Vegetarian Librarian. Just in time for Halloween 2009, on this week’s show some unexpectedly undead guests arrive to sample the duo’s vegetarian/vegan gumbo.

Watch as Kelly goes from roux to stew, blithely unaware of the creepy mood music and creepier characters climbing in her kitchen windows. I never knew meatless gumbo to be that popular with the living, so Reiss and Waclawik must have some real culinary, er, tricks up their collective sleeve. That is, until tonight’s dinner devolves into pleading screams of, “Get back, zombies! Get back!”

Browse through an archive two previous seasons of video-blogged recipes here, or visit their About page to learn the genesis of the food blog and their journey to vegetarianism in general. Or follow them on Twitter…if they live, that is.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

Shannon Fitzgerald is no stranger to her kitchen. An unyielding addiction to the foodie blogs of others led this on-again-off-again Chicagoan to launch her own–and a vegetarian blog at that. Amid a sea of omnivorous Chitown food & drink blogs, The City Vegetable celebrates its first birthday in the Second City.Shannon Fitzgerald is no stranger to her kitchen. An unyielding addiction to the foodie blogs of others led this on-again-off-again Chicagoan to launch her own–and a vegetarian blog at that. Amid a sea of omnivorous Chitown food & drink blogs, The City Vegetable celebrates its first birthday in the Second City.

Currently a Chicago resident, Fitzgerald’s palate traveled widely to get here. Born in France, her family emigrated to Iowa when she was two, dragged her to Dallas at age 7, then to Chicago at 17. At 21 she began a stint in my native New York where she learned to love the grub and grime of the inner-city. Oddly enough, the temporary Chicago-expat spent six years in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, ground zero for New York’s Polish population (“Give me sauerkraut and I’m a happy girl,” she says.)

“Now I am back in Chicago, living in Pilsen, which I love,” Fitzgerald told me yesterday via email. “The authenticity and grittiness of the neighborhood combined with the friendly neighbors, corner stores, and mom & pop taco shops reminds me of my time in much-beloved Brooklyn.”

A longtime fan of food (“eating, cooking, ogling it”), Fitzgerald became obsessed with foodie blogs while in NYC. “I would read The Wednesday Chef, The Amateur Gourmet, and Eater.com, and think ‘I want to do that!’”

Finding the free time to write about her kitchen adventures would wait until Fitzgerald decided to move back to Chicago in 2008. Suddenly saddled with frequent down times durng her local job hunt, she decided to take the plunge and launch her own foodie byline last September. “As you can tell by the title, The City Vegetable, it is a vegetarian-focused blog,” Fitzgerald says. “But I’m pretty lax about that and include information about all types of food.”

Fitzgerald’s blog tells the story of the foods she has cooked at home or eaten in restaurants, usually through the lens of escapades she shares across Chicago with her various friends Angeleno Smitty, chef Andrew, grill-master Joel, Mando, Tim, Lindsay, team-vegetarian Lailah, meat-eater Chris, voice-of-meat Kate, and Smash the cat. (Did you get all that?)

But even though you’ll find several pescatarian and some land-animal-based blog posts on City Vegetable, produce remains the star. Consider:

• The year of the super salad;
• The story of an attempted vegetarian done in by a tuna sandwich;
• Fitzgerald’s own, illicit love of a tuna melt (not to mention Montréal poutine);
• A South-American quest for quinoa;
• Interviews with a “rockstar cheese monger” and local caterers, Fig;
• An accidental dinner-party disaster (Fig not implicated);
• A look at the new Pilsen eatery, Abuelo’s;
• Fitzgerald’s personal favorite beer-braised cabbage recipe; and
• Of course, the veg-blog requisite bean-stew recipe.

Now employed in the Loop at the historic Chicago Theatre, Fitzgerald says the blog is a labor of love. “I really just want to share my love of food with others,” she says. “My family and friends are spread all over the country and hopefully the blog shares a little piece of my life with (them).” Future plans for the blog include hosting foodie dinners and events in various Chicago neighborhoods and posting guest “dispatches” about regional foods from friends in various cites across the country.

As far as Fitzgerald’s concerned, though, her culinary heart and blog both belong to Chicago. “I thought (the blog) would be a good way to dive back into Chicago and rediscover this city–which I must say, is a food-lover’s paradise.”

Speaking as a fellow ex-Brooklynite, she gets no argument from me about that. I’m always amazed how easily our town’s world-class, lively food scene leads to local blogs about personal culinary journeys that are readable, interesting, and recipe-laden. Fitzgerald’s year-old City Vegetable satisfies on all three counts. Happy Birthday.

[And with that, Yours Truly emerges from the worst flu of recent memory to return to this byline in earnest. I missed those of you missed me. Those of you who didn't, I'm even happier to return to stir the (ahem) vegetable pot...]

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

Chicago’s best multimedia food blog is Michael Gebert’s Sky Full of Bacon and I’m late to the party in saying so. His long-form video podcasts and essays tell the interesting stories behind the food that hits Chicago tables–and the people committed to getting it there. Foodies with attention spans will go away hungry for more.

Locally famous for co-founding the Windy City’s leading foodie discussion board, LTH Forum, Gebert is also a noted freelance food writer who’s contributed to publications including the Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, and Maxim’s. Since June 2008, he’s been sharing his love of the behind-the-scenes stories involved in bringing popular foods to you, the consumer, on his blog, Sky Full of Bacon.

The main attraction are the videos. Gebert assumes his audience to have an attention span–and rightly so. Most lovers of food know enough to slow down to savor a good meal or the contact high from a good description of one. About every month, he produces a professionally edited, 20-minute mini-documentary on the origins of familiar food stuffs, the drama of the food-production and restaurant sectors, and the commitment of the people who spend their lives stewarding food from farm to table.

My favorite example, Gebert’s in-the-kitchen feature on (my beloved) Sun Wah in Uptown, perhaps the best Chinese barbecue restaurant in Chicago:

Gebert’s greatest hit so far has been his two-part series, There Will Be Pork (Part One, Part Two) that accompanied Mike Sula’s year-and-a-half Whole Hog Project in the Chicago Reader. Gebert’s videos, which examined why raising endangered pigs for food could be the key to saving the breed, were nominated for a 2009 James Beard Foundation Award in the category of multimedia.

That’s impressive, but don’t miss other interesting videos on wild food foraging in Chicago,  how fish gets to your dinner table, or Iowa (yes Iowa) prosciutto.

Gebert’s blog also offers an equally thoughtful take on food and his interaction with it. See this love letter to the Chicago Green City Market, an introduction to the best pizza you’ve never heard of, a moment of rock-star food blogger self-doubt, or this rather visceral first-person account of honey harvesting (think: The Swarm.)

To watch Gebert’s video podcasts, you have several options:

• View Gebert’s foodie videos Sky Full of Bacon;
• View the videos on the Sky Full of Bacon Vimeo page; or
• Subscribe to the video podcasts on iTunes.

You can (and should) also:

• Read Gebert’s written Sky Full of Bacon blog posts; and consider
• Following Gebert on Twitter @skyfullofbacon.

Finally, if you were looking for an explanation of the Sky Full of Bacon blog name, not even Gebert offers one. He doesn’t need to. Bacon goodness. Falling from sky. If you’re a foodie, you’re already drooling. That’s branding, friends…

(Photo: A tee-shirt fit for a friend who took an unexpected Pepsi Challenge…and failed.)

I’m about as non-scene as a gay man can get, but I’m not a zealot. I’d never turn down an offer of free slushy drinks at Sidetrack. Nor did I yesterday, when I found myself sandwiched between Overly Frank and J. P. Organ in the MainBar of Chicago’s mainstream ‘mo hangout on Show Tunes Sunday.

Usually when I go to Sidetrack, which is rarely, I’m stuck in the stand-and-model GlassBar (yes, each bar has an official name), dragged there by whomever dragged me up to Boystown in the first place. Sunday was the first time them that brung me wanted to hang out in the MainBar, where Show Tunes nights are taken far more seriously.

I sneered at videos from the Madonna version of Evita and yawned through the clips from …Whorehouse (I’ve never gotten that show). But I raised my voice with the rest of the bar through the numbers from Oklahoma and tossed my napkins in the air during Titanic: The Musical.

What can I say? I’m a musical-theater purist.

After one too many prurient parts of others rubbed in passing across private parts of mine, though, I felt it was time to stop getting felt up. Frank and I quit Sidetrack and headed for somewhere altogether trashier: Gay-hop, otherwise known as the International House of Pancakes at the top of the Boystown Halsted strip.

Frank wanted something fried. I wanted to see if after two years since the last time I’d eaten there they’d finally cleaned the bathrooms. As I tucked into my biscuits with sausage gravy, I remembered why I used to like the joint.

“I forgot the interesting, trailer-trash vibe this place always has,” I told Frank. “It really is a guilty pleasure of mine.”

“You mean you like it here?” Frank asked, incredulous. “After all the eight minutes of shit you gave me when I suggested it?”

No one ever said I was agreeable. Case in point, I told the ex-Oklahoman to save his much-heralded Pepsi story for the walk back to the Clark bus. As we dodged the eternal puddle in the parking lot outside on our exit, I reminded Frank he owed me a tale.

“Much like I’ll eat in an Ihop instead of a real restaurant,” Frank began, “when I was in London a few years ago, I spent a lot of time eating in fast food places instead of savoring the fine English cuisine, since as you know the U.K. is not known for its food.”

“That changed a long time ago,” I interjected.

“Well maybe when you were there,” he shot back, “but that wasn’t my experience when I was there, now shut up and let me continue my story.”

I’d have smacked him, but as he is a libertarian who voted for McCain in 2008, I contended myself in the knowledge that as long as I know him my votes will cancel out his.

“Fast food places don’t have a lot of room in London,” Frank went on. “I was in a bilevel Burger King, with the dining room squeezed in downstairs from the order counter. I ordered something I don’t remember and a large Pepsi. I really don’t know what happened. A tremor? A foot slip? But there I was walking downstairs watching my soda tumble end over end in slow motion in front of me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“When things start to go slow motion,” Frank said, “sometimes you think you have more time to react than you do. I tried to catch the Pepsi gingerly with my tray and instead managed to turn my tray into a tennis racquet that slammed the container all the way to the bottom of the stairs, where it exploded. Everywhere.”

I’d have bet money on that.

“Mortified and being extra careful, I made my way down the rest of the stairs, retrieved the now-empty cup, and went back up to the counter to tell them what had happened. The staff was very nice about it. As female employee went to mop the stairs, the man behind the counter took the cup and said, ‘Here, let me refill that for you.’”

Personally, at this point I’d have opted for something in a sealed container.

“More careful than I have ever been in my life, I went back down the stairs and set down my tray at a table. I felt safe finally sitting, so I grabbed a straw, opened it, and poked it into the lid on top of my new Pepsi. And that’s when the sides gave way.”

I laughed out loud, picturing my straight-laced conservative friend sitting in a puddle of pop in a fast-food basement, probably doing his best not to show any outward reaction.

“The woman mopping the stairs from my first spillage just looked at me and said, ‘Having a bad day, huh?’ Turned out when the guy refilled my Pepsi, he didn’t give me a new cup. And the battered old sides of the one that went down the stairs had just about had enough poking and prodding when it saw my straw coming.”

I flashed on the likely health violation of refilling a customer’s beverage container that had recently hit the floor, but that’s not germane to the incident.

Frank’s story drew to a close. “In response to my latest embarrassment, the counter guy, himself, came downstairs with a bunch of napkins and a new, third Pepsi. I told him I’d just as soon eat my meal dry, but he insisted. He also insisted on inserting the straw for me.”

“Did you learn anything from the experience?” I asked.

“Yep,” Frank said in a drawl reminiscent of a tumbleweed suddenly graced with the miraculous power of speech. “You can’t catch a midair Pepsi with a slow-motion tray.”

There’s gotta be a country song in there somwehere.