therese

Lunch today was out with TheFoodTutor. We don't usually dine together this frequently, but there aren't too many people out there who wouldn't think I was odd for photographing my food. Where we went is one of those places that people describe as "an institution". It's been around since 1945 and is one of the few places in town that actually does serve southern food. Some of it's even fried. Where we didn't go, but also a place I can recommend if you're visiting downtown/midtown Atlanta is Papi's East Cuban. Mostly takeaway with a couple of tables inside (and outside in nice weather), and lots of fried items (one of which is advertised on the poster in the window): But Papi's was not what everybody here at eGullet was clamoring for, right? Southern food, that's the ticket, and I'm here to deliver. So on the corner oppposite Papi's you'll find: The part of the sign that's obscured by the roof says "Tea Room", but Mary Mac's is nothing to do with Earl Grey and scones. While waiting for my lunch companion I photographed some of the menu: Look over the side dishes and consider what items might be good together. Note that of the possible meal formulas the one that's mentioned first is the "Fresh Vegetable Plate" (the description points out that you are not limited to vegetables---any combination of four side dishes qualifies), as this is indeed a very tradional and popular option. Oh, and take notes, because there's going to be a test.

You can make the image larger by right clicking on it and setting it as your desktop. A little bit easier to distinguish item that way.

Pomegranates, check. Croissants, check. Eggs, check. There's another alcoholic beverage that's sort of hiding out behind behind the gai lan (and another vegetable that's actually standing on end between the gai lan and the bottle in question). And apart from the eggs there are four other dairy sorts of items in the picture. One's particularly difficult, but you can probably guess from the packaging.

Yes, that is beer under the gai lan (aka Chinese broccoli). But what kind of beer? It's a king among beers, you know...

Not ramps (yes, too early in the season, and I'd probably have to get them at the Morningside Farmers Market, which is a real small farmers with trucks sort of market), but chive blossoms. If you've not had chive blossoms, Safran, and you're a fan of ramps you might want to check them out. Do not heat them in the microwave at work. Unless maybe you've already given notice.

Sadly, I'm enough of a nerd to google 'Choya' from the bottle label and found it to be one of the alcoholic items she referenced upthread. Some sort of Japenese fruit liquor. ← Yep, it's Choya, Japanese plum wine. There's even a couple of plums on the label. The neck of the bottle is as wide as the body because there are actually small green plums (ume) that have basically been pickled resting in the bottom of the bottle. When you serve the Choya you serve a plum in the bottom of the glass as well (or at least that's how it's been served to me---there may be some question of etiquette here of which I'm not aware; I eat the plum, too, and it's sort of odd---mental note to ask Torakris and/or Hiroyuki what the story is here)

Chinese broccoli, but I'm not going to argue the point. And there's both beer and hard cider (yes, it's Hornsby's, but what kind of Hornsby's? the labels are color-coded). Can you find the beer? It's there. Two other alcoholic beverages as well.

Well, obviously. You guessed that without even looking at the picture, didn't you?

I did indeed have lunch with TheFoodTutor again today, but it's going to take me a while to upload all the images. Plus I have to cook dinner. So while I'm doing that you can all play "I Spy" with my grocery shopping. After lunch I went to Dekalb Farmers Market, where I do most of my food shopping. I've been going there since I first moved to Atlanta in 1985, at which time it was in much smaller digs. It's pretty amazing (there are couple of threads over on the Southeast forum that talk about it), and I feel particularly lucky to live so close to it. Anyway, here's the game. Look at the picture and list one item that you see there. If you want to list more than one item do it with a separate post. Most of the items are identifiable, though some you'll have to guess at.

No, but that's the look I was going for. They're black granite (there's some name for it, I suppose---it's the one that's plain black) with a honed finish instead of polished. I didn't want a polished surface, as it's needs to be kept shiny. Yeah, that's what I need, more work. Soapstone's not used too frequently in this area, and my contractor's usual stone fabricator was not used to working with it, so in the end it was going to be a thrash. The drawbacks to the granite are that it gets cold in winter, and it's hard as hell. The very first meal that I cooked in this house was Christmas dinner (the story of our moving back into the house and the housewarming's funny---somebody needs to remind me to tell it somewhere along the way), and halfway through the meal my husband got up to open another bottle of wine. He hit the bottom of the bottle against the counter and it basically exploded. The advantages are that I can set hot pans directly on it, and it cleans up nicely.

Figs: One of my neighbors has a fig in her (I think it's a her) front yard. I walk by it on my way to work, and as the figs get closer and closer to ready I find myself walking by the tree just a bit more slowly...and then they're gone. I have no idea what happens to the figs. Anyway, her front yard's pretty sunny. I don't know if I'd be able to grow figs on our lot---I've only got one sort of sunny bank, and I grow hydrangeas on that. I have what amounts to a fresh fig fetish, by the way. Figs and scuppernongs, late summer heaven. We did just landscape our front yard, and I'm pleased to announce that we'll be growing star anise (entirely by accident---the landscape guy only mentioned that it was the plant that produces star anise after it was in the ground). Tidiness vs mental health: No, I've not developed a nervous tic that's related to backpacks and keys and so forth on the kitchen counters---they're sturdy functional sorts of counters, meant for use. I barely even flinch when such items are tossed on the fancy table in the foyer, as I wisely chose a stone table top for it as well. It's when one of them approaches the formal mahogony dining room table and sideboard that I find myself breathing a bit too quickly and my voice climbing an octave or two. I'll show the formal dining room later in the blog, by the way. Finally, the Tapmaster: Well, we'll check it out. If it's as cool as it looks I may just. In which case I'll let everybody know how it works out. Though that will be after the blog's finished, as we're pretty booked for the rest of the week.

I've churned lots and lots of butter in that churn, but none since I was a child. My grandfather had a stroke when I was 13 that left him pretty disabled, and my grandmother carried on alone for several years, but they finally sold the farm and moved to town (several counties away, to the town where my aunt lived). My grandmother still kept a huge garden, but no more milk cows or chicken coop or smokehouse. The amount of butter the churn makes depends on how much cream you put in in the first place. The milk was strained into sterilized glass jars immediately upon returning from the barn. Some was sold to neighbors with the cream intact (they'd arrive in the afternoon carrying the empty jars to be recycled, usually in an old paper bag that was soft and almost velvety from use), but all of the household's milk was skimmed (so I grew up drinking skim milk, which I prefer---homogenized whole milk seems very odd to me) and the cream collected. Different types of cows produce different % butterfat milk. Holsteins (the black and white ones) produce lower fat milk, whereas Guernseys and Jerseys produce higher fat milk. The amount of cream will also vary with the cows' diet and time of year (and presumably where they are in their reproductive cycles). Basically it took longer to collect sufficient cream in the winter than in the summer. It also took longer for the cream to clabber before churning in the winter. A day or two in the summer, five or more days in the winter. In the summer the churn was filled about two thirds of the way up with cream. I'd estimate that about one third of that volume ended up as butter. The butter was drained, chilled and washed with spring water (ice cold, even in summer), salted, and put up in wooden molds (my favorite left a shamrock imprint in the butter). The liquid left behind in the churn is the buttermilk. A very refreshing beverage on a hot day, and also used in cooking (particularly cornbread, which was made, along with biscuits, every single day). Seems like my grandmother would put up somewhere between 5 and 10 molds at a time (very rough memory there). She sold butter and eggs in addition to milk and cream. The money was kept in little dish on top of a tall cabinet---it was hers to use as she saw fit.

By way of explanation, "crap in a glass" refers to all beverage type sorts of sweets that involve the addition of particulate solids, like basil seeds or jelly strips or pasta bits or nuts or young coconut bits or tapioca pearls. The reference extends to include ice-based sweets that similarly involve assembled "bits". There's a very wide range of "crap in a glass" available locally.

I'm thinking that it may actually have been the Southern and Creole/Acadian versions that my mother returned. Or maybe I just didn't find them as compelling. Did any of you read any of the Foxfire series? Life in Appalachia, with lots of food-related stuff. As for the specifics that Soba recalls, so do I. Seems like the recipe that used shrimp paste to make "chestnuts" had something in the middle (maybe it was a chestnut, actually), and then the outside was coated with something sort of spiny to look like the spiny sort of outside shell. Like little tiny shiny dark sticks of pasta. Oh dear, now I need to go visit my mother.

This is the product you need to look for. Not sure if it can be installed with a wall mount faucet, but it never hurts to ask. http://www.integradynamics.com/ ← Wow. This looks like just the sort of thing I'd like. I don't see any reason that it wouldn't work for the wall mount faucet, as the pipes below it are the same as a deck mount. Now I'm going to love my kitchen even more than I already do.

Great pics, Varmint, and very cool looking kids: the younger girl is a dead ringer for my daugther (when she was that age).

None of these pronunciations is sufficiently different from the others to get anybody all upset. The key is actually to emphasize the first syllable, JOO-lup (there's a vowel sound in the second syllable, but not much of one, really just the upside down e/schwa thing). But the real question here is why on earth do you need to pronounce this word in the first place? Even those of us who do drink them do so rarely (on Derby Day).

Breakfast today was Fiber One cereal. The picture's a bit blurry, but that's not necessarily a bad thing: fiber is really not very photogenic. I've spared you the "with milk" picture. Actually, I've just edited it to remove that terrible blurry picture entirely. It was disturbing my karma. I'll try again tomorrow. Foggy this morning, so the view from the breakfast room is a bit spooky. That's my grandmother's butter churn on the floor. The windows wrap around two sides of the room, floor to ceiling. The lower ones are awning style: you twist that little handle and they open out. The upper ones are fixed. The yard is full of very tall trees, such that we get very little sun. This means that I cannot grow tomatoes, though I'm going to try in a new bed that was created when we added the garage. We'll see.

Okay, answers please to all of the above. ← Heh heh. No. I do manage to achieve that level of tidiness, depending on the work surface in question (the closer to actual food prep the cleaner it gets) at regular and frequent intervals (twice on weekdays, varies from once to three times on weekends depending how much advance prep I'm doing, or entertaining or whatever), but then it all mysteriously goes to hell about 22 seconds after I've finished the last wipe. I'm pretty sure it's something to do with the children (and I'm going to include The Man in that number), something to do with their mere presence in the room. I know this because on the rare occasions that I'm alone in the house for more than a day nothing gets dirty. Dusty perhaps, but no actual messiness of any sort. And the old soap had gotten so small that it didn't photograph well, and I wanted to make sure you could tell that there was that groovy soapdish up there.

See, now therese and I are a lot alike, but I've got to admit, if that were my lunch, I'd say, "OK, but where's the goddamned food?" There's no way I could get through my day on that. Maybe I should start sneaking food over to her office. ← As it turned out I didn't eat the apple, the cheese, or the carrots and cucumbers. I did get a piece of roast chicken offered as part of free lunch today.

Almost forgot that I'd promised (or I think I promised) to show you what happens to basil seeds. Before: After steeping in hot water for several minutes. I also brewed chamomile tea at the same time, and have added tea masala. Plus I'm taking the picture through plastic, so it's all bit blurry. But you get the idea:

Thanks. I think there may be something about being in that peripubertal stage---I remember developing an aversion to meat somewhere along this age. It passed.

Okay, let's have some more questions. Like "Wow, that's one scarily clean counter and sink you've got there. Is your kitchen always that tidy? Do you have OCD? Seriously---you put out fresh soap? Was the old soap dirty?"

Well, probably not my grandmother's fried chicken, as that involves going out to the hen house and grabbing a chicken and cutting off its head with an axe. And our yard's not fenced in, so chances are good that the chicken (which will indeed continue running around like a, well, you know) would either end up in traffic or on the golf course. Where we'd probably lose it to one of the foxes (yeah, we live right smack dab in the middle of town, but it sure doesn't feel that way). I could make my mother's fried chicken, but that's sort of stepping on hallowed ground: when she comes to visit she makes fried chicken as a special treat for the kids. If I make fried chicken it's not going to go over too well, frankly. I will, however, share some secrets: Brine the chicken for at least 24 hours ahead of time using buttermilk. Make sure your flour is really really well-seasoned. Too salty, too peppery, too whatever-y. My mom has started using a product called Kentucky Colonel Flour that's pre-seasoned and works well. She lives in Kentucky, where she buys it, but I also found it recently at our local Publix. Be patient. Fried chicken takes a long time to cook properly. The pieces cannot touch each other, so never mind crowding that skillet.

Please be honest: do you use or at least read them often? I am kicking myself for getting rid of my Dad's collection the last time I moved. If so, maybe I need to start picking them up at tag sales? ← My mom still has them, and I think she's got pretty much the entire set (seems like there were a couple she might have decided against keeping---they came month by month as a preview basis). I usually look at one or two when we visit. I still remember particular pictures that struck my fancy: the lumberjack's enormous breakfast in the Pacific Northwest, platters of cold meats dressed in aspic jewels in French Haute Cuisine, candies made of squash in Latin America, curries dressed with silver foil in Inda, the little blond boy eating bread and butter with radishes in France. I need to make sure I get these in the will.