Walking, eating, walking, working, walking, eating, walking, sleeping...leaving

    ...Continued from yesterday:

    We started off Saturday morning by walking to a recently-opened Wicker Park restaurant called Kanela Breakfast Club. 
    Claire and Miguel had never been there before but were hoping that nobody else had yet discovered it so that it wouldn’t be too crowded.
    Too late, apparently the place was good and the word was already out. 

    But luckily we were able to get seats, a good enough cause for celebrating.

   Miguel got the Pork Belly Benedict which he said was awesome,

     Claire got the spinach and vegan bacon benedict, which she also declared delicious,

       I got the bagel and lox with capers, vegetables and cream cheese, which was likewise wonderful, but piled so copiously high that I could only finish half of it.

     Tom's breakfast was good, too, but was  delivered about five minutes after the rest of us got our meals.  The server said that the chef broke the yolks on Tom’s  eggs 4 times before finally getting it right. (Well,  okay, half-right.  One of the egg yolks  came out kind of broken anyway).   Hopefully with all those tries the chef will soon have mastered sunny-side up eggs as well as eggs benedict.

    Anyway, all the food was really good, especially the fried potatoes, which were seasoned with rosemary and other savory herbs.

      After breakfast we discussed swinging by Stan’s for a post-breakfast round of donuts,

...but decided we’d better get back to finishing up the cleaning of Claire and Miguel’s new house (side-door view).

​    It was, however, decided by popular consensus that my labor skills could be put to better use by staying back at  Miguel and Claire's apartment and making a cherry almond  streusel pie (see post from 10/9/2014 for the recipe).

    But. alas, the local supermarket that was close enough to walk to had neither the sour cherries I needed nor the sliced almonds, so I ended up having to improvise. 
    By good luck Claire and Miguel had a mega-bag of blueberries from Costco in their freezer so I decided to try a blueberry no-almond streusel pie, mixing a  half a cup of oatmeal into the topping instead of almonds.
​    The blueberry version was actually a great success, though I think now I'd like to try it again sometime with almonds in the streusel, as in the cherry version.

    After the pie was baked I walked from their Bucktown apartment to the new house in Logan Square- a half-mile - to check on the cleaning crew, who were just finishing up.

    Then we all returned to the apartment, cleaned up, and pow-wowed over where to have dinner.  The  vote went to  by Native Foods Cafe, a Chicago vegan chain restaurant with a location in Wicker Park.  

​    It was a lovely evening so we sat outside,

...and ate our vegan food:

    Claire had the Avocado Crunch Wrap, which received its crunch from the fallafal in the vegetable filling, with a side of  sweet potato fries.

​    I also had the Avocado Crunch Wrap but with standard fries.

     Miguel got the Twister Wrap, which was a spicy wrap made with vegetables and  tempeh.  Don't ask me what tempeh is, but Miguel said it was very good.

    Claire and I also really liked our wraps and all the fries were outstanding.

    Unfortunately Tom wasn't crazy about his  sliced-seitan Reuben.  I don't know what seitan is, either, but I guess it doesn't work as well as corned beef.  He did agree the fries were great, though.

    After dinner we took a pleasant Saturday-evening walk around Bucktown.

    The we returned to Claire and Miguel's apartment for our blueberry pie with ice cream.  Afterwards we sat out on their second-story sun porch,  which opens out from their kitchen.

    We expect that will have been Tom's and my last night in Miguel and Claire's charming Bucktown apartment.
    The next morning we all woke up early and Miguel  drove Tom and I downtown through the empty Sunday-morning Chicago streets to the Megabus stop,

​...across from the Dunkin Donuts that plays gospel music on Sunday mornings (See post from 10/1/2014).

    Then our Megabus to Columbus arrived and we were back on the road again.