Middle Eastern Bakery

When I first moved to Chicago many, many years ago, I was living on the South Side and A was living in Uptown, meaning long, gorgeous drives up and down Lake Shore Drive to visit each other. One of the places that A introduced me to while he was living up there was the Middle Eastern Bakery and Grocery. We enjoyed their food so much that even after he moved out of the neighborhood and we were both living further downtown, we still drove up every so often to stock up on some treats. It's a great neighborhood spot that I wish we had a version of in our current neighborhood.

The shop has lots of grocery items, especially spices, but we didn't do a lot of from-scratch cooking back then, so we mostly went for one thing - the pre-made pies in the bakery cases. There are a bunch of different varieties, and I think we tried most of them during our time living in Chicago. Since we were in Uptown for lunch at Tank, we decided to stop by the bakery, see what was new in the shop, pick up some spices, and definitely buy some pies.

The only challenging thing about buying the pies (which didn't occur to us until after we bought them) was that we weren't planning to eat them until the next day. Back when we lived in the city, we would buy large bags of pies, stick them in the fridge, and then heat them up for breakfast (at least for me it was usually breakfast). Our hotel out in Rosemont had no fridge for us to use (and you had to pay if you wanted them to empty the minibar and let you use it as a fridge, no thank you), so we were faced with a dilemma. Leave the pies at room temperature overnight (probably okay, but still a risk) or try to cool them off somehow. I decided to try to rig some sort of rudimentary cooler using the ice bucket to try to at least keep the pies a few degrees cooler until we could eat them for breakfast. Nothing happened, so either the pies are fine to keep out overnight or the cooler worked. Who knows.

We only got two pies from the bakery, even though we wanted to buy more. The one above was chicken with mushrooms, onions, and peppers, and the one below is the artichoke and feta pie. Both were good. They probably would have been better if we could heat them properly instead of just taking them out of the cooler, but these were not ideal circumstances. I think I liked the chicken pie more, and A did as well. The chicken was cut very small, and the mushrooms, onions, and peppers were nice and soft so the textures paired up very well. The artichokes were marinated and had a nice sourness to them that went well with the salty feta. The pies were just as good as we remembered.

It was great to be able to stop by the bakery to get some pies and also buy spices to bring home. (Our "souvenirs" from trips always seem to be largely food-related.) It brought back a lot of great memories of our time living in Chicago and how life was, in so many ways, much simpler back then. What a nice treat for our weekend.

Middle Eastern Bakery and Grocery, 1512 West Foster Ave, in Andersonville/Uptown.