therese

Pani puri.

Really looking forward to visiting Dubai this week---it looks like an exciting time to be living there. The locked fridge is an interesting feature of the kitchen. I could see it being handy with a teenage boy in the house as well.

Yes, but they should. And we're headed out to Pura Vida tonight with a couple of friends from waaay OTP. This week qualified as a busy week for us restaurant-wise, but not an exceptional one. The lunch at Mary Mac's was the only one that I probably wouldn't otherwise have planned given the remainder of the week's schedule. In my final official post to this blog I'm going to show the rest of the kitchen, the part that's on the other side of the island. Speaking of the other side of the island, here it is. Note that the bar stools had to be custom made (though that didn't actually make them much more expensive than stock bar stools, it just meant we had to wait for them) because the bar is 6" higher than normal (raising my dishwasher a full 12" higher than usual and giving more storage in the island). You can also see the groovy pendant lights that hang over the island. The pendant lights are actually on pulleys with counter balances so that they can be raised and lowered very easily (not that I do this too frequently, but it's convenient). Plus they look really cool, and guests always remark on them: The other side of the island contains both a bar area and a desk. The bar area backs up to the screened porch. The cabinet at the far end contains pull waste baskets for storing recyclables like glass and plastic: Here's the bar sink: The French doors lead out onto the open deck (furniture, including a larger dining table for entertaining outside, on order). The granite-topped green piece of cabinetry actually rolls (so I store light paper goods in it), and is used at cocktails parties as the bartender's work surface (in front of the bar sink) and at other sorts of parties as a serving area. I can push it up to the opened French doors, for instance, and either serve from there or set up a bar. The white door in the far corner is the pantry. It's a walk-in size with wire shelving. The desk includes the computer, a place to store real (as opposed to junk) mail until it gets to the office upstairs, corkboard across the back for posting schedules and invitations, etc., the phone, phone book storage (Atlanta's phone books are not trivial in size), cell phone chargers, and photographs. My final photo of the blog: So I have included a picture of me, and in just few moments I'll be propping these bad boys up for a nice rest. I've enjoyed doing this blog tremendously, and would like to thank everybody for their participation and kind words. I'd also like to thank eGullet for providing such a cool forum for us all. Oh, and of course, there's a final trivia question.... In what way to my first and last posts reference the blogs (Chufi's and arbuclo's) that precede and follow this one? PM me if you think you know the answer, or if you want any specifics re suppliers or logistics of the remodel that wouldn't necessarily be of general interest.

The furniture's all new, but obviously designed to look older. My mom has very nice antique dining room furniture, but she is (a) in pretty good health, and (b) unwilling to move into a small seaside condo that would not accomodate very nice antique dining room furniture. So I bit the bullet and bought this stuff. Which I love, so that's okay. I'm going to make every effort to get up tomorrow AM and photograph the bits of the kitchen that I've not yet shown. Post queries and comments in the interim: How's that tapeworm working out? Does going shoeless all winter really build character? Are all chefs in Atlanta amazingly good-looking?

Ethnic dining's all well and good, of course, but Atlanta's also got lots of very cool restaurants that manage to be reasonably cutting edge and mainstream at the same time. One of these is Iris, located in the up and coming East Atlanta neighborhood (up and coming meaning there's a very interesting mix of people that OTP folks tend to characterize as very scary indeed). Like many groovy Atlanta restaurants it's a renovation of a old gas station. The front wall is still comprised of glass garage doors which can be opened to the patio in nice weather. Chilly tonight, though, so I'll just show you the convivial crowd: This is a cool poster that includes the restaurant's name across the bottom: A great Friday night in Atlanta with family and friends. One of the cool things about Iris is that they welcome children, even kids much younger than mine: While perusing the menu we were asked for drink orders, and I asked for a sidecar. But we'd already been spotted (aside here to point out that we've been going to Iris for years, and know the chef/owner, Nicolas Bour), so oysters and champagne arrived pretty much instantly: Our server had already put in an order for my sidecar, so I really couldn't refuse it: It's dark as pitch in many groovy Atlanta restaurants, and Iris is no exception. So the remainder of the food shots are with a flash. First courses (some of these are repeats, and we didn't photograph mushroom bisque, as some things taste better than they look): Butternut squash soup. The dark bits are pumpkin seed. Soup is poured into bowls tableside, very pretty. Kobe beef carpaccio with white truffle emulsion, every bit as great as it sounds: Mains included... Crispy flounder (for Boy): Flatiron steak, presumably ordered rare (The Man): Cedar planked salmon (for me, I never order salmon, but though it would be pretty): Girl had carpaccio for her main. Desserts were... A hazelnut chocolate mousse tart: Berry sorbet: Pumpkin and maple syrup custard with a ginger bread cookie that was, quite literally, the bomb: Desserts are the work of Tammy Harrison (also know as that really cute girl who works with Nic): The kitchen's a cool place to visit... The line: Soup, please... Could they be any cuter? Nicolas Bour. Earlier in the evening Boy had remarked that he thought that Nic bears a striking resemblance to Tom Cruise. The young Tom Cruise he hastened to specify:

Hey, not so fast there, blog boy---I've got an entire meal still to post... And if I manage to get up at a decent hour tomorrow AM I'll try and post some parts of the kitchen that I've not yet shown (bar, office, pantry). Gotta date with some ibuprofen at the moment...

So we swapped the dining room and library for reasons of space, but we also did it so that the front of the house could remain tidy (you know, maybe I do have just a touch of OCD). This is the view into the dining room from the foyer, the view that guests to the house see. The surface in the foreground (that the camera's sitting on) is the stone top of the table in the foyer. Just inside the wide arch into the dining room you can see the edge of the door that looks into the kitchen. Farther along that wall you can see the second opening into the family room. The ceiling medallion's the original---my contractor managed to move it intact from its original site. Another view of the ceiling medallion: View from the dining room into the foyer and beyond to the living room. All of those empty vases are supposed to have flower arrangements in them, but I've not managed to get the vases to the dried flower place to have it done (over Christmas it was all Christmas stuff, of course). Wall with sideboard: Closer view of sideboard:

At first it looked like a Road Runner cartoon. But I think it might be SpongeBob. ← SpongeBob it is. Kudos all 'round to Toliver!

Remember my dining room? A while back somebody started a thread that asked how often we used our dining rooms, and I answered not too often, only formal dinner parties and buffet service for cocktail parties (which I do frequently enough that I own plates and forks and glasses sufficient for a whole lot of people). It's basically just too formal for anything else. This is a view from the kitchen (I'm standing beside the microwave/toaster, to my right), showing the arched doorway into the family room, the family room itself (extra point trivia question: can you figure out what cartoon is on the TV?), and arched opening into the dining room. A matching arched opening between the dining room and family room is on the other side of the TV, again matching up with windows front and back. Each opening contains a can light which is cool for parties, and illuminates a step down into the dining room. The present family room used to be the dining room, and the present dining room used to be a library. We didn't need an enormous dining room, so we basically switched them such that the entire front half of downstairs is formal, the back half informal.

Thanks for compliments on the photos. Doing this blog is giving me an appreciation for food stylists everywhere. Shadows, reflections, color balance, unexpected extraneous objects in the shot. And all the time I'm taking the photo there's likely some hungry person (possibly myself) waiting to eat the food. I don't know the background of the owners. The family name is, I believe, Desai, a pretty common name it seems. As for me having an Indian background, no, not even remotely. I have possibly the least interesting ethnic background in the world, frankly. But I like to think that it means I'm a bit of a blank slate, willing to try all sorts of different things. Most non-Indians' exposure to Indian sweets occurs in restaurants. The choice is typically limited to gulab jamun (often not the freshest gulab jamun) and some sort of mysterious grain-based pudding, often flavored with rosewater (not popular with Americans, and even I find it off-putting if too intense---Pakola ice cream soda makes me feel like I've been drinking soap). So they think they don't like Indian sweets, when in fact they've just not had really good Indian sweets. The really really sweet things like jalebi don't appeal to me as much. But my kids love them, so occasionally I'll let them have one if we're in the shop. We go frequently enough that if it's more than a month since our last visit the owners express concern that we've perhaps met with some misfortune in the interim. We've never seen another non-Indian person in the shop, and the Indian customers almost always end up chatting with us about the odd fact that we like Indian sweets.

I didn't see her. Her husband waited on me, and he seemed happy, as usual.

Enough about food for the moment, and back to the endlessly interesting topic of my kitchen. Somewhere up thread somebody asked me how we picked appliances, and I have to admit that I didn't go absolutely wild looking at every possible option. I knew that I wanted a range with two ovens and more than four burners, but I also knew (because my husband is good at reminding me ever so gently of the fact) that we are not made of money, and so I wasn't willing to sink huge amounts of money into a Viking Range or Sub Zero fridge. So the appliances I got were a step down from that sort of thing, status-wise, but still at the upper end in terms of functionality. You've seen the range already, so I won't go into that. The dishwasher was the lowest end Bosch that would accept a door panel and hide the controls entirely. So that brings us to the fridge. It's Kitchenaid, counter depth, with the freezer on the bottom and a stainless steel exterior. Some people are chagrined to find that magnets won't stick to stainless steel, wheres I was delighted: we've got other places outside my immediate food prep area to post notices and photos. I despise side by side fridges, and the freezer on the bottom means that the fridge (which I use much more frequently) is up at my level. The freezer's also more usable, as the drawers (there are two levels inside) pull out so that I can see everything. Much preferable IMO to the freezer on top arrangement. Not a built-in, but we had the cabinet that houses it built so that the small cabinet over the fridge would be flush with the front of it (easier because it was counter depth). That cabinet's theoretically difficult to use unless you're a giant. Or unless you design it such that one need only access the front bottom edge of it: Cutting boards, cookie trays, muffin tins, serving trays---all the stuff that's flat but bulky and difficult to store goes up here. The fact that I can only reach the bottom bit of the cabinet isn't an issue. Every time I use this cabinet I'm delighted. I'm particularly delighted to know that nothing will ever be stored on top of the fridge itself.

Another picture of the item that I like so much for breakfast: Royal Sweets calls it julli, but I've never seen it elsewhere, and web searches don't show much (possibly because julli and alternate spellings turn up so many other results). Anybody else familiar with it? Each piece is a serving, about 5 inches in length.

So our after dinner stop to pick up burfi for the kids and my breakfast (which is a sort of sweetened cheese item that's like ras malai without the sweet milky sauce on top) and some rasgulla (which I wasn't planning on getting but the owner had just made fresh and so suggested) was here: It's a small family-run shop that has both sweets and chaat. Here are some of the other available items in no particular order. They were closing up, so lots of things had already been wrapped or put away:

Falooda! ← Woo hoo! Another winner! Falooda it is. For those of you who'd like to do some more reading on the subject of falooda, check out this site, as well as this one, and this one. [edited for careless typing]

My lunch. The chocolate bar is left from yesterday (turns out I didn't need chocolate after all, but it came in handy today) and the gai lan and quinoa are left from dinner the other night (you can seen the "curliness" of the quinoa here). Strawberries have apparently come in in Florida, as they're practically giving them away at the supermarket, and these were very nice: I ended up taking Boy to the supermarket (mostly for stuff like dishwasher detergent, which DFM doesn't have) with me yesterday. Cool, because we were practicing his French and he knew a lot more names for fruits and vegetables than I'd have though he would. Ananas, noix de coco, oignon, pomme de terre, pomme, champignon---maybe he is learning something in school after all!

Must be the basil seeds. I have no idea what the longer thingies are though. ← Correct, the dark thingies in there are basil seeds. The longer things are actually a sort of pasta, and the name of the beverage is also the name of the pasta (a skinny little sort made with cornstarch). Apparently the pasta's hard to come by, so you can either sub conventional pasta (like vermicelli) or some other sort of "bit" (like agar jelly). Or you can make the pasta yourself. So does anybody know the name of the beverage?

Yes, it looks a great deal like bubble tea, and drinks like bubble tea as well, but the "bits" are not tapioca pearls. There are actually two different types of "bits" in this item, one of which has been discussed in some detail up thread.

So, back to dinner last night. I'd ordered the thali (which I can describe in detail if anybody wants to know---the restaurant's all vegetarian), but my husband was less adventurous, instead choosing vegetable korma: The restaurant's known for it dosa, so we had to get one (plain, no filling, for maximum crispiness): As good as these are hot, they are addictively good the next AM, right out of the fridge. The restaurant's located in an area of town that's increasingly dominated by Indian merchants and restaurants. This is a huge improvement, as this is another restaurant (like the ill-fated Delhi Dharbar, previously a Shoney's) that had been "re-purposed". A hint as to the original restaurant in this location may be found here: The wooden thing on the door is a rolling pin, and until recently bore the sign "Belles". The mens' room was for "Gents". The first time we took the family to this restaurant my daughter (who uses the WCs in all restaurants we visit, and rates them) returned to the table, saying that the restrooms were labeled in some foreign language, and that I needed to come help her figure it out. A foreign language indeed. Anyway, in a previous life this restaurant was called Po' Folks, and it served downmarket southern food, sort of like Cracker Barrel. Here's the present interior:

Heh heh. Yes, the title of the blog is directed at others who might be considering doing a kitchen remodel. There are a number of ongoing kitchen remodels being documented on eGullet right now, but the process is too long to work for a week-long foodblog. Since we'd recently completed a kitchen (and house) remodel I decided to incorporate the new kitchen into my blog (which also looks at southern food and ethnic food in a large metropolitan area of the U.S.). I give some information about just how very not perfect the original kitchen was early in the thread.

That is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen! ← Thank you. I'm blushing now. I am very happy with how it's turned out, and it really is very cool getting to share it with others who appreciate this sort of thing.

i am also certain that it;s paan, and lassi, and some kind of burfi type dessert? love the pictures of your kitchen, but am little puzzled by the title of the thread: have you already remodelled your kitchen (it looks wondrous) or are you planning to? if the latter, why? it looks perfect as is.... ← Full marks for both spaghetttti and milagai as well on identification of pan/paan. The sweets in the box for the children's dessert are, indeed burfi (also spelled, somewhat unfortunately, barfi). Chocolate this time, Girl's favorite flavor. The beverage, however, is not lassi, but something else entirely. It can be made a number of different ways---this restaurant uses ice cream (as do most in Atlanta) and no yogurt (so not lassi) and some other things that you can see if you look closely at the glass. I'll give you another look: A hint: this item is actually described somewhere up thread in a discussion of one of the ingredients.

Another winner! Soba, do you remember the Time Life India book? It had this picture that showed the makings of paan. Very cool. There used to be a restaurant right down the road from the one where we ate dinner last night (which was Madras Saravan Bhavan, more on it later) that actually had a paan vendor who'd custom make it for you right then and there. The restaurant was called Dehli Dharbar and it was just the slightest bit disorienting going there because it used to be a Shoney's and inside, well, it looked like a Shoney's. But instead of a breakfast bar with hellishly bad food it had a buffet with food that was just not great. It burned to the ground a few months after it opened, so thoroughly obliterated that I've always wondered about the possibility of arson. I can assure you that I did not set the fire, even if they did put green food coloring in their raita. Anyway, this paan comes as part of the dinner thali (which I ordered). If this looks like enough food for a family of four, that's because it is: But in case you were still hungry it comes with naan:

Okay, everybody, last chance to tell me what this might be: Some hints: This item came as part of a combo platter in an ethnic (if you live in Atlanta, anyway) restaurant. It's just big enough to eat in one bite and you chew it for a long time so as to release all the flavors of the varied ingredients. You eat it after you're done with the meal (or in between meals), and one of the ingredients can be tobacco (though this sort did not include that item).

I've never seen it in the U.S., and so far as I know have never eaten (or seen advertised) horse meat in a restaurant anywhere in Europe. We had it pretty frequently at home in France when I was in high school. I don't recall eating it at home in northern Italy.