Oh Yes! (Sweet Potato Creme-Filled Chocolate Cakes)

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There’s a new H Mart not far from where we live – a smaller version of the Korean supermarket in Niles, Ill. It took over space formerly occupied by an independent Asian grocery store (whether that was Korean, I don’t know). I visited the new H Mart over the weekend, and for a discount got some Haitai brand Oh Yes! “Premium Chocolate Coated Sweet Potatoes Filling Cake.”

Oh Yes! A good name. Catchy. Wasn’t that something Molly Bloom said?

I wondered about that sweet potato filling. But for a couple of dollars for 12 cakes, I was willing to give it go. The ingredients are simple: cocoa powder, cocoa mass, white sugar, and sweet potato cream. You get about a third of your DV in saturated fat in each cake, with none of that trans fat. There’s also some carbohydrates in them, but very little else.

Haitai is a South Korean food company, lately owned by Crown Confectionery, another Korean entity. Naturally, I had to look up Haitai’s web site, and found some other product names that I like, all of which look like confections: Baked Potato Stick, Choco Homerun Ball, Bravo Cone, and Babamba.

About Oh Yes!, the web site says (all sic): “Oh Yes! (1984) is our one and only soft chocolate cream cake, which has been on demand for many years due to its soft and delicious taste that melts in your mouth. It is proudly making monthly sales of 4 billions won.”

I liked the Homerun Ball description, too: “The idea of our snack product, Homerun ball, was originated from the Korea Baseball Organization in 1981. It’s unique name was derived from its particular baseball shaped appearance. Homerun ball contains chocolate inside every round ball, and is a easy to-go snack that is great to take out to any event. The Homerun ball is successsfully reaching monthly sales of 4.2 billions won.”

So, a few more Homerun Balls than Oh Yes! cakes sold each month. Anyway, the sweet potato favor does take a little getting used to, if you’re used to regular cream fillings. But the cakes aren’t bad.

The Rookery

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Also during my most recent visit downtown, I swung by the Rookery. Because it had been a long time since I’ve been in the Rookery. The last time might have been the Halloween parties that the concierge service down the hall at the Civic Opera building used to have, when I had an office at the Civic Opera building. The early ’00s, that is.

As always, the Rookery is cool on the outside.

And stunning on the inside.

As you can see, I wasn’t the only person paying photographic attention to the Burnham & Root creation, with its Frank Lloyd Wright filling.

Electric Jellyfish

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Not long ago I visited the J.W. Marriott hotel at 151 W. Adams. It hasn’t had that flag very long — only about three years — and the building itself is the former Continental & Commercial National Bank, designed by no other than Daniel Burnham in 1914. I read that to turn the structure into a 610-room hotel — an upmarket one, since J.W. Marriott is described as the “black label” of Marriotts — and restore the ornate lobby, the hotelier spent $396 milllion.

I didn’t have a lot of time in the lobby, but ornate is a good adjective for it. Mostly I was in one of the larger meeting rooms, which was more interesting than most hotel meeting rooms.

There must be a reason, maybe in the original design of the property, that the ceiling sports arched beams, but I’m not in a position to say why.

Nice lights, too. A bloom of electric jellyfish

What Kind of Passport Does Tinker Bell Carry?

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Lilly took this picture on Sunday, September 1. “Dog on Deck,” or “My Nose in Your Business.” (To give it a dual title like Bullwinkle episodes.)

Lately we’ve been throwing away, or donating, a fair number of unwanted items.  It’s astonishing how many there are around the house. Things have been turning up that we’d forgotten we had — or at least I’d forgotten. Yesterday the flow of debris included a girl’s purse with a Disney label on it. We might have bought it for Lilly at Disneyland in ’01 or Disneyworld in ’05, but it’s always possible we picked it up elsewhere. More recently it’s been with Ann’s things.

Anyway, I noticed something odd about it. It’s a Tinker Bell purse, and it says Tink America. Tink is holding a small U.S. flag, her dress imitates the Stars and Stripes, and the background pixie dust is red, white and blue. “Isn’t that strange?” I asked Lilly, pretty much rhetorically. “I mean, Tinker Bell usually isn’t associated with America, right? I think she’s a citizen of Never Land.” Or, come to think of it, the realm of fairies, but not the United States.

Then again, what about Never Land? I told Lilly I didn’t think it was claimed by any nation, but considering that Capt. Hook, the Lost Boys, et al. seem to be British, maybe Britain did claim sovereignty at one point. Could be that it was even harder to claim than Pitcairn Is., what with Never Land not quite being in the material world all the time. Still, I bet Capt. Cook visited at least once; he went everywhere.

On the other hand, perhaps American whalers visited too, so lost in the annals of U.S. exploration and commerce is a claim to Never Land. Could be that it was the subject of negotiation in the same treaty that fixed the border between Canada and the United States, as part of one of the lesser-known codicils added later. By this time, Lilly had expressed her usual mild bewilderment at my oddball train of thought.

Protest at Adams & Clark

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Back again on September 3 or so. Hard to believe the summer’s dwindling down, but at least it’s still as warm and dry as a real summer.

I was downtown late yesterday morning, and spotted a protest at the northeast corner of Adams and Clark. I heard it first, and then went closer to take a look. People filled the sidewalk in front of the building at that corner, and with them were a speaker on a small platform, some cameramen, and a few bored-looking cops, watching.

At first I thought it might be fast-food workers out on strike, but no. That was scheduled for today, and besides, no fast food is available at that corner. Instead, the building is home to the Chicago Board of Education, and it wasn’t long before I figured out that the protestors were being vocal about the recent closings of a large number of public schools in the city.

The speaker, despite his microphone, was a little hard to hear. Across the street, a fellow let us know his displeasure with Mayor Emanuel.

I haven’t followed the mayor’s time in office closely enough to form much of an opinion, but I know the protestor is hardly alone.

The Fern Room

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Another picture of the Garfield Park Conservatory: The Fern Room.

According to a sign at the entrance, the room was Jen Jensen’s “imaginative tribute to prehistoric Illinois. So natural looking was the result that when the Conservatory first opened, visitors thought it has been erected over an existing lagoon… Many of the plants in this room date to the time of the dinosaurs. They have changed little from their ancestors over the last 200 million years. Our plants, of course, are not that old. The oldest are about 300 years of age.”

At the entrance to the Fern Room, another Chicago talent of yore left his mark: sculptor Lorado Taft. Seen a few of his things before.

He called this piece “Idyl,” and it dates from 1913.

This one is “Pastoral,” of the same vintage.

The (Glass) House That Jens Jensen Built

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“In 1905, Chicago’s West Park Commission’s general superintendent and chief landscape architect, Jens Jensen, demolished the three smaller greenhouses in Humboldt, Douglas and Garfield Parks to create what was intended as ‘the largest publicly owned conservatory under one roof in the world’ in Garfield Park,” according to the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance. “Many of the original plantings came from the three smaller West Side conservatories.

“Constructed between 1906 and 1907, the Garfield Park Conservatory was designed by Jensen in collaboration with Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden and Martin and the New York engineering firm of Hitchings and Co. It represents a unique collaboration of architects, engineers, landscape architects, sculptors and artisans. Jensen conceived the Conservatory as a series of naturalistic landscapes under glass, a revolutionary idea at the time.”

It’s a fine place to stroll, even if you don’t spent a lot of time absorbing botanical facts. Plenty of leafy vistas.

Jens Jenson ought to be better remembered, and not just for the conservatory. The Jens Jenson Legacy Project tells us that he “created Columbus Park on the western edge of Chicago, and extensively redesigned three other large west-side parks (Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas) as well as 15 small ones. He designed parks in smaller cities – among them Racine and Madison, Wisconsin; Dubuque, Iowa; and Springfield, Illinois. He landscaped dozens of estates belonging to wealthy Midwesterners along the North Shore (Rosenwalds, Florsheims, Ryersons, Beckers) and elsewhere (Henry and Edsel Ford).

“Jensen organized and inspired the early conservation movements that led to the creation of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, the Illinois state park system, the Indiana Dunes State Park and National Lakeshore.”

The Garfield Park Conservatory

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Last week I was visited the Garfield Park Conservatory on the West Side of Chicago, one of the great conservatories (just ask anyone). Been some years since I’ve been there, but I remember taking younger versions of Lilly and Ann at least once, and pointing out the cocoa trees. “See? That’s the plant chocolate comes from.”

The cocoa trees are still there, of course. So are the banana trees.

Plus a welter of plants I’ve never heard of. Or forgotten. No matter how many conservatories or gardens I visit – and I try to take in a few every year – I always run across something new.  I don’t have it in me to be a botanist, just someone who says, wow, that’s interesting.

Take a look at the Hanging Lobster Claw, Heloconia rostrata cultivar, Heliconiaceae, native to South America (someone added the little glass eyeballs on the top petal). It’s like something Dale Chihuly might hang at the conservatory. He had a show at the Garfield Park Conservatory a few years ago for which he did hang his glass art in the conservatory, but I missed it.

Or the Shrimp Plant, Pachystachys lutae, Acanthaceae, which grows in Peru.

I liked this plant, but it also shows that my note-taking isn’t always very thorough.

Nephews & Uncle, 1988

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The picture doesn’t need much explanation, except to say that that’s me – I’m the large monkey in the see-no-evil pose – with my nephews Sam (speak no evil) and Dees (hear no evil). Since the picture was taken by my brother Jay, their father, in late August 1988, the boys have gone on to be grown men.

I’m wearing my Hog Heaven, Hog Hell t-shirt, which depicts a one-panel cartoon by Sam Hurt: pigs lolling around on clouds, pigs finding themselves on plates next to fried eggs. I think I got it in Austin that year. I’m not sure what happened to it – maybe I lost it in one of my moves since 1988.

The Opera House and the Box It Came In

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: acknowledge the famous, or at least the noteworthy, but don’t ignore the obscure. Never know what you’ll find in obscurity. Besides, odds are you yourself are obscure. It’s the human condition, or rather the condition of most humans.

That’s an over-long intro for the Sandwich Opera House, which we chanced on after seeing the Farnsworth. Sandwich, Illinois, is a town on U.S. 34 in southeastern DeKalb County. The Opera House dates from the golden age of opera house construction in small-town America, the late 19th century. It’s apparently also the City Hall. It was closed, but you could admire it from across the street.

It’s still in use for entertainment. For a little contrast, I took a picture of this brutalist box of a building across the street.

Maybe it isn’t beyond saving. What it needs is a lick of paint – some DayGlo green, say. It could be the Green Cube of Sandwich.