therese

Lunch today: Some "re-purposing" of previously prepared items. I hadn't eaten the cucumbers and carrots that I'd packed for lunch on Monday, so put them back in the fridge to wait for another use. Or until they went bad, which they fortunately hadn't. So there's a row of carrots and a row of cucumbers, both now chopped, separated by some of the same sauteed eggplant and onion mix that I'd prepared Monday AM. The container to the right contains Japanese sesame salad dressing to put on the vegetables right before dining (which I just did while in a meeting). The container bottom left contains almond yogurt (Total fat free flavored with almond extract) and frozen cherries. They'd thawed by lunch time, and the resulting product is way better than fruit-flavored yogurt that comes pre-made from the store. The little shiny blue packets contain the peanut ginger candy that I described upthread. Careful examination of the packet reveals that they are a "Natural Product of Indonesia". They are still pretty odd, but I'm developing a very high tolerance for ginger.

But many do. I bring my lunch most days, but when I don't I can get greens from the cafeteria virtually every day. Greens and cornbread, and maybe some black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes... There are weeks when I eat greens every day, and I'm not the only one (though it's nice to think that the cafeteria prepares greens every day just for me ).

Yes. Though I never make it myself, relying instead on the kindness of local restaurants to provide it.

Kosher kosher? Or kosher kosher at home and vegetarian in restaurants? Living in Israel it would presumably be pretty easy to do it all the time, but in Atlanta (and most places in the U.S.) it cuts way down on restaurant options if you keep strictly kosher outside the home (as you well know). So most of my friends who keep kosher at home just go veg when we eat out. The sides with stars beside them on the list are suitable for vegetarians. Some of the "souffle" sorts of items might contain cheese, in which case the rennet source might be an issue.

Tonight's another one of those very tightly scheduled evenings, where we somehow have to fit in homework, band practice, dinner, swimming lessons (Girl goes to gym), and chess lessons (instructor comes to house, along with another kid that's a bit older than Boy). This is often "girls night out" for me, in which case I usually cook something ahead of time. But tonight I'm staying in to cook. You can probably guess what I'm making by checking out the groceries photo. And speaking of the groceries photo, we still need to identify a few items and clarify some others: What kind of beer is that sitting under the gai lan? Where's the fourth alcoholic beverage in the picture (so far we've got hard cider, beer, and Japanese plum wine)? If you drink this item frequently you'll probabaly recognize the bottle (it's back by the milk), even with just a small portion of it showing. What specific sort of Hornsby's hard cider did I buy? Because there are different kinds, and I prefer this one. They're color-coded, so it's easy to pick the right one.

Sweetbreads are very mild, almost creamy in texture. A great option for trying in a restaurant. There are two sorts of sweetbreads, pancreas and thymus. Despite their being radically different sorts of organs in terms of their purposes and cellular composition they are so similar in taste and texture that I'd can't distinguish them (though I've never done a side by side comparison, so maybe I can and just don't know it). Eel is great. It's just fish, not strange at all. On the oily side, like mackerel. Get it in a Japanese restaurant. The biggest issue with tripe and similar items is that it's chewy. Kidneys tend to smell a bit like, um, pee. Brains are also interesting texture-wise, very soft. I'm not a big fan of brains, personally. Just not interesting enough to bother with aside from the weirdness of them.

Chicken livers would be my recommendation for the first stage of this trip. They're easy to make and really delicious. They come in a little tub from the grocers and there's basically no advance preparation required (though you should turn them all over and look at them to make sure that you don't have a gall bladder in there, because if you eat one you will be forever icked out by chicken livers). Dredge them in seasoned flour (the way you'd make regular fried chicken) and pan fry them in the fat of your choice until they're nice and crispy. Mashed potatoes make a great side.

The empty plastic soda bottles sound interesting. I'd need to get some, as we don't drink much soda. And then there's the issue of empty plastic soda bottles strung all over my yard. It actually took the squirrels a long time (months) to figure out how to get to this particular bird feeder, but once they did it didn't last long. So we're going to go back to our previous method of squirrel-proofing, a remarkably effective one that I'll share with you if everybody promises to not be completely and totally horrified.

Breakfast was Fiber One again. Trust me, you don't want to see the picture. Instead, I'll show you a close up of something I bought at DFM yesterday. In the large picture they're the bag of small blue shiny objects in between the Choya, the pomegranates, the roma tomatoes, the cucumbers, and the Total yogurt: So, wrapped and unwrapped. They are nice and chewy, and start out tasting mostly of peanut. After a few seconds of chewing you start to notice a nice ginger note. After a few more seconds you experience a rather more pronounced ginger note. After a few more seconds you consider spitting it out in the sink, but instead you just swallow it. A couple of minutes later you eat another one. Not so foggy today, but still a bit gray. This view out the back of the breakfast room shows my grandmother's butter churn in the foreground, lower left, as well as our bird feeder (which the squirrels destroyed a couple of weeks ago, so now we need to find a new one). The big blob of green down in the yard on the left is yet another huge azalea bush, and the vertical swath of green on the far right is the trunk of an enormous oak tree covered in ivy (the roots of which have been cut, but it still looks pretty healthy). The golf course is in the background.

Roma tomatoes, check. These are billed as organic, out of Florida, and they are much better than you'd think winter tomatoes should be. Presumably because it's not really winter in Florida. That's another nice thing about living in Atlanta: because it's a transportation hub we often get food (and other products) on their first stop in the chain, with less time spent on redistribution. The very high turnover at DFM also helps.

Green beans, check. Yogurt (Total fat-free to be precise), check. Year 'round green plants (not just pine trees) and even some that blossom (pansies winter over here) are some of the nice things about living in Atlanta. Four real seasons (and the foods associated with them), none of them too arduous. And a good thing, what with me having to go around without shoes the whole year. Boy and Girl can each make Dutch babies unassisted. Boy makes crepes, scrambled eggs (correctly), hot cocoa (with milk and cocoa and sugar), and all sorts of miscelleneous pasta kind of stuff and basic pan-sauteed meats. The sorts of food he likes, basically. Girl's repertoire is similar, if a bit more limited. We don't make cookies at home, but we do make pralines every year at Christmas and that's a family project. Either one of them can assemble dinner if necessary, generally either as a surprise for me if I have to stay late for work when my husband is out of town, or if I call home and specifically ask one of them to get the ball rolling. They generally eat school lunch, though when he was younger I packed lunch every day for my son because he really just couldn't choke it down. The other night at dinner (at Woodfire) my daughter observed that the school lunches are foul, and said that she might want to start packing her lunch. There's actually a thread on school lunches over on the Japan forum where I talk about this topic at some length, as it is near and dear to my heart.

I think one would be hard pressed to assign shrimp and grits to a single person. It would be like trying to assign fried chicken to a single person. Another really excellent combination with grits is grillades and grits (aka grits and grillades).

Finally, dinner tonight completed the southern food extravaganza. Country ham: Mashed potatoes (pronounced excellent by everybody---Boy said he thought they were better than ice cream, unless one counted home-made ice cream, and then asked why we hadn't made home-made ice cream in a while): Greens: Careful observers will note that these greens are not the usual collards or turnip greens, but instead gai lan (Chinese broccoli). Turns out my husband doesn't like the usual greens, so I usually make something like bok choy or spinach instead. But in the interest of authenticity I went halfway with gai lan. My husband ate them, but remarked that they reminded him of collards. Next time I'll blanche them first.

You can read about it at the Vermont Butter and Cheese Co. web site. Basically you use sour cream instead of sweet (unsoured) cream to make the butter (the web site describes it as crème fraîche because the sour cream that you get at the grocery store to put on baked potatoes is not even remotely like cream that's soured naturally). My grandmother used the term "clabber" instead of "sour" to describe the process. In the U.S. we now use the term "sweet cream butter" to indicate that it's unsalted, but that wasn't the original meaning. Butter made from cultured cream has a more buttery flavor (Bourdain describes it in the beginning of "Kitchen Confidential" as tasting cheesy), and it's much more common in Europe. You can even get A.O.C. butter in France.

Back to lunch at Mary Mac's today. Like I said, it's an institution, and the pictures all over the wall are of all sorts of famous and not-so-famous people. We didn't start eating until 1:00, after the big rush, and this shot is taken towards the end of our leisurely meal: Back on post number 140 of this thread I posted the list of available side dishes, with the warning that you might want to study up, because there'd be a test later on. Here are our test papers: Meals include bread, both yeast rolls (which would have been called "light bread" when I was growing up) and cornbread (in the form of small muffins). Both of these are made at Mary Mac's, and both taste that way. Nice yeasty flavor to the rolls, and of course no sugar in the cornbread: The bread is served with your choice of butter or some sort of plastic butter-like material. Neither's really required, frankly. Careful inspection of our test papers reveals that I had the good sense to order "pot likker" as a starter (so Abra, I'd be in no position to be calling out anybody else as piggy). Pot likker is pot liquor, and neither one sounds very bright, frankly. It's the liquid in which greens (typically turnip or collard) have been cooked along with some sort of salted pork fat, and it is very good when well made. Broth, basically. Our server was a very nice woman who not only brought TheFoodTutor her own bowl of pot likker, but didn't charge me for mine (because I was clearly somebody with really excellent taste when it came to this sort of thing). This is pot likker with square of cornbread in it. Note the little fat blobs floating on the surface: For my main course I chose sauteed chicken livers (fried is also an option, and note the surprise chicken heart peeping out from under some onion at the 6 o'clock position) with sides of creamed corn (made with fresh corn that's been cut off the cob and the starch expressed from the cob, not canned corn that's been thickened in some weird way) and stewed tomatoes and okra: TheFoodTutor got chicken and dumplings with creamed corn and pickled beets. I thought she should get fried chicken in the interest of the eGullet community, but, well, she didn't. She also broke one of the guidelines for assembling this sort of a meal: no two items should be the same color (people do this all the time, of course). But she made up for it by getting the very brightly colored beets. Note the jar of small pale green thingies in the background to the right---they are hot peppers that flavor the surrounding vinegar, destined for sprinkling on greens (which are otherwise a bit bitter). Desserts were bread pudding (with something described as wine sauce---I've not seen it before, and it's likely an old recipe) and banana pudding: So, a very southern meal at one of the few places in Atlanta that really does it correctly (or as correctly as you can without a garden out back). On the way out to the parking lot I took this picture just because it was pretty:

English cucumber standing on end, check. Two small pickling cucumbers on top of tub, check. Something or other in the tub underneath the two small pickling cucumbers is cornichons (bought in bulk by the market and packaged in these ubiquitous tubs. Having this many types of cucumbers in the house may seem odd. It may, in fact, be odd, but not as odd as buying four different sorts of cucumbers in a single trip to the market, which I'd have done if Armenian cucumbers had been on offer.

For any of you who might be joining this thread at this point I'll post another picture of my groceries. The idea is to try and identify the individual items. You can scroll through the previous page to see what's already been named.

Check. Isn't it great? Not as fantastic as my grandmother's was, but a lot better than sweet cream butter (IMO, of course).

Not mustard greens next to the gai lan, just leaves that are part of the gai lan bunch. Can you find the vegetable hiding behind the gai lan, towards the side where the milk is? I've actually three different versions of this same vegetable on the table, though you can't see one of them at all, just the container. The vegetable plate is comprised of four sides, so getting the pot likker is isn't piggy in the least (which is good, because the pot likker has a significant piggy element to it, and then it would be just weird). One of the coolest things about the toaster was that I didn't even have to leave the house to get it. I bought in on-line from Target, and it was delivered to my front door.

Calamari or fritto misto probably the most common, maybe once a month, and then it's actually ordered by the rest of the family. Not something I crave, and if you told me tomorrow that there'd never ever be any more deep fried foods I'd be okay with it. Beignet/fritter sorts of things for dim sum occasionally.

Please don't tell me it's Budweiser (unless it's Budvar). ← No, it's not Budweiser. It's from the same country as another item in this picture that's pretty hard to see unless you know it's there (tucked behind the necks of the hard cider bottles), and even then you'd have to recognize the packaging to know what's contained therein. Jensen?

Panela cheese, check. It's the white round behind the yellow-wrapped butter log (and what is it that makes this butter so special?), and it's a very pleasant young part skim cow's milk cheese. My kids love it.

Time to talk about the kitchen some more. The next item I'm going to discuss involves two small appliances found in most U.S. homes these days. Both of them bug me because they typically eat up counter space and need an outlet. One of them invariably gets all goopy and tends to accumulate crumbs in the immediate vicinity. So here's my solution: It sits in a niche that's built into a floor to ceiling counter-depth cabinet. The niche includes an electrical outlet in the back. Above the niche is a cabinet that I use for storing infrequently used items like vases and buffet plates for big parties. Below the niche are drawers for plastic wrap/foil sorts of things, more small appliances (hand mixer, waffle iron, etc.), and lunch boxes. To the immediate right of the niche is a countertop. It looks like a microwave, right? Well, check this out: Pretty cool, huh? Both the microwave and the toaster work well. The toaster obviously isn't as versatile as a toaster oven, but I have a real oven (two of them, but I'll talk about that later) for real cooking, and it probably wouldn't handle really chubby bagels, but it's fine for us. You can't use both of them at the same time, something my husband discovered sometime within the last month (which means it took him a year to notice it, so it wasn't a huge deal). It stays much tidier than my old toaster and it doesn't take up any counter space and there's no stupid cord in my way all the time. Maybe I am some sort of neat freak after all...

The log is butter, a certain sort of butter for which I profess a particular preference earlier in this thread (and by type of butter I don't mean vendor). The tub does contain a fat free item, and it's even Greek, but it's not feta. But I'm going to give you credit for feta (most definitely not fat free) because that's what's in the clear plastic box beneath the tub. Bionaturae whole wheat pasta, check. Penne rigate in this instance.

You're describing as a log the item wrapped in yellow paper? This company does make goat (and other types of milk) items, but this isn't one of them. Mascarpone does often come in a tub like that one, but this item is not mascarpone. In both instances somebody who already uses the product will likely recognize the packaging. There's another dairy product immediately below the tub. It's a clear container with a block of something white in it. Oh, and I just realized that there's another dairy product on the table (in addition to the milk, which I'll just go ahead and tell you is behind the pomegranates).