therese

Here you go, Pan. Have fun blogging!

Not only could I do it, I have done it, though not in my present locale (Atlanta) but in southwest Virginia, on my grandparents' farm. They produced virtually everything they ate: vegetables, fruit, dairy, meat. They canned or pickled or preserved or froze all summer long so as to have a varied diet during the winter. Never mind 100 miles---it was unusual for them to eat something from farther than 10 miles away. They did buy things like salt and sugar, of course, but even coffee and tea weren't an issue, as they didn't use them. No alcohol, either, though berry wines and moonshine were readily available in the area (and there's now real wine produced in nearby Yadkin Valley). It would be harder in present day Atlanta, as one uses up a good twenty miles of the radius in city, but I think it could be done.

And that would be different from what we've done so far exactly how? Traffic apparently sucks all over town---between fallen trees, flooded streets, and dead traffic lights we're just amazed to be home and safe.

It's VI-enna sausages (that "VI" indicating a long, long "i"). But be careful, too many Vienna sausages will give you the gouch for sure.

Kyma's the farthest upmarket Greek we've got in Atlanta. Since she's doing business entertaining and is not as interested in the clubby atmosphere (though Kyma and Bluepointe both have an element of that---Bluepointe's bar is one of the best places in town to check out the work of plastic surgeons) she might consider City Grill. Right downtown in a lovely older building (one of the few we've got left), City Grill's got a pretty dining room that's well-lit and not loud, so much more suitable for business entertaining than many other restaurants in town. Nikolai's Roof (right downtown, in either the Hilton or the Hyatt) recently got a new chef. We've not yet been but mean to do so soon---I tasted some of his stuff at a recent charity thing and it was very nice. Definitely an expense account sort of place. Bacchanalia's not far from downtown. Excellent food, and not too boisterous or dark. If it's a weekend she'll definitely want to book ahead. Park 75 at The Four Seasons in Midtown another good option for business entertaining.

Update directly from our blogger via cellphone: yes, her web access went out during the night as a result of the storms last night, and there was a big tree down near her abode---experience tells us that it may be some time before thing are up and running. Anyway, that means that we can talk about her all we want.

We did a raspberry filling with an almond cake and it was great. Raspberry and apricot or peach also wonderful, both going nicely with the almond (or vanilla if you want to incorporate that).

Bad storms with lots of power outages here in Atlanta last night, part of Hurricane Dennis, and I'm thinking that TheFoodTutor may be off line as a result. So I'm going to go ahead and say some more stuff about how cool our dinner with her and lambfries really was: great food, of course, but also lots of fun and conversation. A great way to have a dinner party, so much fun that I think I may organize my next one along these lines. No foie gras the next time, though. More of a spa dinner's really in order...

Presumably you mean that she couldn't get a hotel reservation in Butthead (oh, sorry, Buckhead), not that she couldn't get restaurant reservations, right?. Kyma and Bluepointe are both part of the Buckhead Life group of restaurants. Busy places, sort of glam in a "look at me" kind of way, food expensive and not terrible. Downtown doesn't really have the same sort of restaurants as Buckhead because it doesn't have the same demographic (or any demographic at all other than conventioneers in the evenings). But downtown is close to surrounding neighborhoods with lots of restaurants. She'll have the most luck in Midtown, where she should consider (based her liking Kyma and Bluepointe): Spice Two Urban Licks Eno The Globe Hmm, that's all that comes to mind at the moment. She'll need a cab to get to any of these, or she could take MARTA and walk a bit. There are some places downtown that I've either not visited lately or not been to at all so can't vouch: Luxe Endenu

Platter Bean Corn Hmm. Seems like this restaurant sells a fair amount of ribeye and ribs. So the platter might be one of those with sides of bean and corn. There's no preference (medium, rare, etc.) on the ribeye, so I'm guessing ribs is the main.

Everything = Butter, Sour Cream, Chives, Bacon, Cheese This doesn't make immediate sense unless I consider the fact that "C" likely stands for cheese (because it's such a common thing in restaurants, though I'm pretty amazed that anybody would get all this stuff on a baked potato, but never mind that), and "B" could be either butter or bacon, but butter's the most common thing on a baked potato and there's no "A" in butter, so "A" must be bacon. Chives is the only word (other than cheese, already taken) that contains an "H". Close? [Edit to add that I see that "A" has already been defined as bacon. This restaurant sells a lot of bacon, doesn't it?]

Lots of miscellaneous prep pictures from dinner Friday night: TheFoodTutor can tell you what all the different bits are (though I'll lay claim to the exquisite girl in the orange dress helping lambfries make blinis). I need to go do some very serious hangover prevention just now.

I've absolutely no advantage when it comes to playing TFT's game with her chit. Plus her handwriting's for shit, isn't it? And here I thought I had crappy penmanship. But I'm going to guess that "K" stands for Coca Cola. Because it shows up twice, and we live in Hotlanta, and this restaurant might use "C" for something else.

This week similar to last week's, but with a couple of new items: basil (a couple of different sorts) pattypan squash

What we drank... We started with champagne (with the caviar/blini/creme fraiche/quail egg course): And then had more champagne (technically not champagne, of course, but very nice: The next course was the duck confit gyoza, with which we drank this very nice merlot that we purchased on a visit to Harrison Vineyards last spring. I didn't think to photograph the bottle until after we opened it, and there's a drip down the front of the label that gives it that "lived in" look: The next course was, hmmm, I forget which course came next. The lobster, I think. We had a really nice chardonnay with this course, one we'd had for some time. We don't really cellar wines, but we end up with a lot of them and store them in an old fridge that's the right temp but rather more humid than optimal for label preservation. The wines do well, though, so I'm not going to complain. I've no idea where we got this wine---husband's the wine guy in the family---but it was very buttery, very nice with the lobster and mango and avocado and curry: Foie gras is one of our favorites. Even the kids love it. Very cool to have somebody else take care of the prep, so here's what we served with it: Next up was another fish course (the one garnished with clams and corn foam), so more chardonnay, one we got while visiting Napa several years ago. Label degradation apparent: Dessert was strawberry soup with thyme ice cream. I had a muscat that I'd bought in Le Grau du Roi last spring, so served that:

So I'd been talking to TheFoodTutor about doing a dinner at our house for a while, and since she was blogging this week and didn't have a gig already planned we decided that this would be a good time to do it. We invited another couple who are also really into great food and would enjoy participating in the preparation. One of the guests is allergic to crustaceans, so TFT and lambfries came an hour early (at 6:00) to cook the lobster ahead of time so as to minimize lobster bits floating around the kitchen. They arrived to find a clean kitchen and a table set for 8 people: TFT, lambfries, me, husband, my two kids, and our two guests (who arrived at 7:00 after a very long drive from Alpharetta or Roswell or someplace like that): Nice, isn't it? And the really cool thing is that it looked pretty much exactly like that at the end of the evening as well, because we never sat down. Instead we mostly stood and watched and worked while TFT and lambfries put together a really amazing meal. Things started out pretty calmly. Here's TFT unloading gear and supplies: Early on there were three (or was it four?) additional guests. They weren't very good conversationalists, so we decided to eat them: I don't usually think of TFT as being soft-hearted, but apparently she is: Or maybe not:

One's a crumber, for sweeping crumbs off a tablecloth (so you use it at the fancy restaurant). The other one's a towel that you'll use to wipe crumbs off a table that's not dressed with a tablecloth (so you use it at the not so fancy restaurant.

You mean like this? Talk about your food porn... Some more conventional food porn: I'm sort of slammed with out of town guests this weekend, but I'll post some detailed pics (that TheFoodTutor didn't get a chance to take because she and lambfries were, well, working) later today. And in case any of you were wondering, yes, the food as really really great.

I'm going to answer my own query by pointing out that you can see this tattoo by looking at lambfries' profile.

Do we get to see the rest of the tattoo on lambfries' right forearm?

What software do you use to create the Hugh Hefner airbrushed food porn? Do you have a set sequence of changes that you typically make? I use Photoshop for my work-related pictures, and generally have two steps: make the whites true white (thereby correcting both brightness and color balance) and then "unsharpen mask" (which I basically don't understand at all, I just know that it makes thing look much nicer, though of course not airbrushed).

Oh dear. I'm feeling a little faint.

Oh, the shame... I do have packets of instant cheese-flavored grits in my pantry that date from my daughter's brief infatuation with same last year. Hmm, maybe I should clean out my pantry.

The menu at One's been just about entirely converted to Blais-type dishes, well-received by the largely trendo Atlanta crowd there this weekend along with my (decidely non-trendo) husband and self. But the really big news (as per the Atlanta Journal & Constitutions's Peach Buzz) is that he proposed to his girlfriend Jazmin Zepeda (co-workers for the last several years---she's presently working at TWO, One's sister restaurant) on July 4, right after the Peachtree Road Race. Congrats to them both.

Remember the tomacco episode on the Simpsons?