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Some pretty funny descriptions of basil seed drink here and here. It's also often used in falooda/faluda.

So basil seed it is. The description of the final product on that site is quite accurate. The flavor is very mild, and (I think) vaguely reminiscent of kiwi. The seeds have a capsule (made of what's basically dietary fiber) that swells and becomes translucent when it gets wet.

Woo hoo! We have a winner! I'll find some links that show what it looks like. And tonight I'll show you some pics from home.

More great guesses. They do look so much like tiny black mustard seeds (particularly as they come in the same sort of bag, from the same store) that I occasionally pick up the wrong bag. In fact, that's one of the reasons I moved this item to the jar. Fennel and parsley seed both excellent guesses, particularly as both show up Italian cooking. The plant is, in fact, a green leafy sort of item. A while back docsconz noted that they reminded a little bit of larvae, and while they aren't, when prepared the seeds are remarkably similar to frog or fish eggs.

Happy to be back. And nope, jackal10 didn't get it right, and neither did Dianne: not anaradna. These seeds are really tiny, about a millimeter in length. For those of us who don't use metric in our daily lives, you could put 25 of these little guys end to end and they'd only measure one inch. They are seeds, and if I were to plant one of them I'd end up with a plant that's actually quite common in western cooking. Most people would associate the plant with Italian food.

Why must one admit something that is not a fact? That's like starting out with a statement like, "One must admit that all Frech food contains stunning amounts of butter", "all italian food has pounds of garlic in it and always involves pasta", or one like, "All food in Britain is bland and tasteless mush". Perhaps a more accurate statement might be, "One must admit that the general perception by those not acclimated to the diverse offerings of the Southern U.S. is that all food is fried-even the vegetables. These people have never spent any time with Southern cookbooks, or in Southern households, and have no clue what the daily fare of the average Southerner who cooks at home is. These people have no idea that the giant array of vegetables available, for large part, year round in many Southern Farmers Markets are not taken home and floured and thrown into a big boiling vat of lard (not that it is a bad idea, just that it is not an everyday thing), but many of them are lightly stewed, steamed, baked, etc. While frying is certainly an option, and when done well it is a tasty one, the Southern United States is also the center of the BBQ world, where meats are slow cooked over various kinds of heat sources to tasty, and many times, healthy results." I would say that this is a more accurate statement and I will be glad to admit to that. Sure we fry alot of stuff, and in fact, what most tourists seek out are fried offerings, as that is what they expect and they can't find these sorts of food done well back home. But to say that all Southern food, even most, is fried-is not true. At all. ← Amen, brother. Fried food is the exception in the South (even considering all the different parts of the south), not the rule. But you left out two of the most common preps for vegetables: raw, right from the garden to the table, and pickled (particularly important during the winter). It's the modern day departure from the traditional diet that's the problem.

Oh, yeah, TheFoodTutor isn't allowed to guess. Because she already knows what it is. Edited to add: And no hints, either.

No, but certainly one of the bajillion different sorts of black seeds sold at Cherian's. This item can also be found in Asian groceries, typically as a component of a prepared product (ready for immediate consumption) manufactured in southeast Asia. I've not seen it in the seed form in an Asian grocery in this area, but that's probably because I haven't looked hard enough (the Asian groceries are a bit more of a trek). These seeds are very tiny, about a millimeter in length.

Yep, definitely seeds. I don't think I have any larvae in the house right now. But I bet I could go buy some today if I wanted to. A hint's probably in order... I bought this item at an Indian grocery store near my house called Cherian's. Buying it required some help, as the Indian grocery store has about 200 different sorts of tiny black seeds for sale. The floor staff in the shop is not only almost entirely Hispanic, but also largely non-anglophone, and the item in question is not (so far as I know) consumed anywhere in Latin America. So I finally managed to track down a manager sort, an older woman in a sari, who was able to identify the item based on my description. So somebody from the India forum might recognize it immediately. Or not.

black sesame seeds? ← Nope. I've got way weirder stuff in my kitchen than black sesame seeds. The jar distorts them a bit. Here's a close-up:

Schilo's Delicatessen, 424 E Commerce St, is a pretty good German deli. As you noted, the "surrounding area" was settled by Germans. The best German food will be in and around Fredericksburg, about an hour away. ← Thanks for the recommendation. Husband's family was from Round Top, and it's pretty cool going back to visit. We had lunch a couple of years ago in a diner there where the old folks (and some of the young folks) still spoke German.

Lunch today: The sinister-looking stuff in the upper right hand corner is sauteed eggplant and onion. I'd gotten some Japanese eggplant to make a recipe that Vietamese friend/restaurant owner had shared with me (served at his restaurant, but the restaurant's a bit of a trek for us) but didn't manage to make it, so I'm using it for lunch. We get small Granny Smith apples because my daughter prefers them. The plastic-wrapped white things underneath the fruit are Sargento low fat string cheese. The best string cheese product I've found, and very convenient for lunches. This jar contains probably the single strangest food item in my kitchen: Who can tell me what it is?

Happy Valentine's Day, y'all. The flowers were from The Man and Boy and Girl. They arranged them in the vase last evening while I was getting dressed to go out for dinner. Apparently they'd been purchased at some point on Saturday afternoon, and so had been hidden away somewhere (probably my husband's office upstairs) in anticipation of the perfect moment. The chrome coffee service next to it on the sideboard (we're in the breakfast room of the kitchen, by the way) belonged to The Man's mother (now deceased). Probably dates from the mid '30s, and was used routintely back when The Man was just a wee thing. Pretty, of sentimental value, and not too far off period. Breakfast today, in two stages. Before: After: I think we can all agree that we don't need to see any more pictures of cooked oatmeal in this blog.

Now I’m really really testy (by now it's late Sunday afternoon): I’ve been without reliable internet access now for most of the day, so am blogging blind. Oh well, I’ll just keep going. The previous kitchen included a couple attached small rooms. The first was a butler’s pantry, really more of a hallway, and it’s through this hallway that visitors to the house first see the kitchen. The arched doorway is original, and is repeated in three other wide arched doorways that lead off the foyer (which is behind me as I take this photo): What we did with this space was turn it into a mud room, where everybody deposits their coats and scarves and briefcases and backpacks and sports equipment and shoes before entering the remainder of the house. A bit of a mess (I’ve used a flash here to illustrate the mess in all its glory), but at least it’s contained. A boot bench runs the length of the room, with space underneath for shoes (the idea being that the children will put their shoes under the bench, something that’s apparently a lot harder than it sounds), and drawers for storing gloves and caps and hair brushes and lint removers. Hooks line the wall for coats and hats. As this floor is inevitable likely to get the dirtiest quickest, we decided to just go ahead and make it out of mud. Or bricks, to be precise. The arched doorway here (through which you can see into the kitchen proper) is new. We added it to match the original, and barreled the ceiling over it. Here’s a better picture of the barreled ceiling (with a burned out lightbulb):

General stuff that I wanted in my kitchen: 1. Low maintenance, functional surfaces. 2. Relatively tight work area (range/sink/fridge) for a single, primary cook. Similarly tight loop for clean-up (table/sink/dishwasher/storage). 3. Cabinets and major appliances positioned so as to minimize stretch/reach and bend/reach motions, as well as repetitive bending. 4. Decor that respected the period of the house (though obviously this sort of kitchen wouldn't be even remotely consistent with the original period).

I’ve just realized that those sweets that were billed as being filled with bean paste are actually filled with chestnut (seems reasonable given that the pastry’s been made to look like a chestnut). Or if it’s not chestnut it sure tastes and feels a lot like chestnut.

Lunch today (or rather Sunday, when I wrote this entry) of cucumbers and tomatoes with feta, a clementine, and two Almondina sesame cookies:

So this blogging thing is both fun and educational. So far I’ve learned that if you commit yourself to a blog your internet service will go down. Boy howdy, am I ever testy. Another thing I’ve learned is that if you try and take photographs of highly reflective surfaces while wearing your pajamas you will end up with a lot of photographs of yourself in pajamas. So, on with the kitchen… Having finally scraped together sufficient scratch to foot the bill for the remodel we started working with an architect whose work I’d seen in a couple of other houses in the neighborhood. She had great ideas, and was as interested in maintaining the period feel and architectural integrity of the house as we were. She was also cool about incorporating my ideas. We took three bids from contractors, and ended up going with the lowest (by far) of the three. We’ve been happy with his work, happy with the fact that it was done on time, and happy with follow-up/touch up sorts of things that we’ve needed over the last year. Very detail-oriented, very concerned with getting trim “just so”, fine with working from non-detailed architectural plans (saving us the trouble and money of having the architect draw them up). I hadn’t planned on using a decorator at first, but realized early on that every minute I spent agonizing over twenty bajillion different light fixtures was another minute I wasn’t agonizing about something important, like food. He ended up contributing more to the design of the house than I’d anticipated. I didn’t end up working with a kitchen designer at all, in large part because I already had so much input from the rest of the team. I didn’t really need much in the way of ideas, as I’d been thinking about what I wanted in my kitchen for years, and the layout aspect of it was straightforward. Since I went with all custom cabinetry I could communicate directly with the cabinet maker and get exactly what I wanted---stock or semi-custom would have made this approach problematic, I think.

So what was it, precisely, that made the original kitchen so scary? I'd actually seen the kitchen at two different times, the first time in the early '90s, when the older couple who lived here for over 40 years (rearing six kids) put it on the market. This house is still known in the neighborhood as the "So and So House", and one of the original kids (who is now old enough to have grandkids of his own) lives a couple of blocks away and we see him and his family socially. Most of the other kids ended up in the area as well. The kitchen had originally been built for servants to work in, and it was a small and dark space when I first saw it in the early '90s. Seems like the walls were institutional green back then. It was located on the very back of the house, but there was no view at all towards the back yard and the golf course. A deck had been added at some point, probably during the seventies. The young couple that bought it that first time brightened things up by replacing the back wall with French doors (that opened out onto the deck) and painting everything cream. But the doors were single pane glass, and because the kitchen was located in a sort of shed annex it was very cold in the winter. Oh, and they didn't cook. At all. Lovely people, but they never cooked. Specific issues with the kitchen when we bought the house: 1. Thoroughly worn out pale yellow flooring (over several other layers of thoroughly worn out flooring, fortunately no asbestos). 2. Thoroughly worn out pale yellow countertops. 3. Cabinets poorly constructed and poorly positioned. I can't even begin to describe how badly laid out it was. Take my word for it. 4. Refrigerator smaller than standard, with no freezer. Awkwardly positioned, door opened the wrong way. I'm pretty sure that, over time, this arrangement would eventually have driven me insane. 5. Electric range on which only the two back burners worked. Oven worked on "broil" setting only. Have you ever broiled Christmas cookies? We had an outdoor gas grill that I used almost every night, as otherwise we might have starved that first year. 6. Shallow double sinks, finish nearly worn through. We hadn't yet figured out what to do with the rest of the house, but in the interest of my mental health we decided to do an emergency mini renovation after we'd been in the house about year. We ripped up the floor (to reveal boards, which we painted dark green), painted the walls and hideous cabinets (which we didn't replace, figuring it would give us incentive to proceed with the final remodel down the road, which it did) white, replaced the counter top (there was only one, hah hah hah) with dark green laminate, replaced the sink, replaced the dishwasher and dispos-all, switched positions of the range and fridge and replaced them with a gas version of the former and larger version (with freezer, opening to the correct side) of the latter. We added a small breakfast bar with stools and some shelves and a pot rack and in the end it was actually pretty cheerful and pretty efficient. But still too cold, and with such crappy storage that I refused to buy small kitchen appliances of any sort. No digital pictures of either the scary version or the interim version of the kitchen, I'm afraid. I'll look around for one that I might be able to scan.

Heh heh. I would if I could. The hae-mool pajun and the broiled macker are as FoodTutor described them. The assorted side dishes are all brought to the table without being ordered, and it just depends on what that restaurant has available that day. Some dishes more hot and spicy, some dishes more sour, some dishes more starchy. I usually recognize the base ingredient, but apart from that I don't have any particularly expectations for any particular item. Sometimes I don't even recognize the base ingredient---I've no idea what the strips of pale tan vegetable were, for instance. Some sort of root vegetable is as close as I'm willing to guess.

Finally back on line. Very limited web access most of yesterday. I could get to servers that I knew to be local (work and a few other sites), but otherwise pretty much nothing. Much thanks to FoodTutor for posting to the thread in my stead last PM, and on with the show... Both. As FoodTutor notes, there's an enormous ethnic mix here, much of it first generation. It can be a bit intimidating if you're not of that ethnicity (English marginal, unfamiliar food items, etc.) but of course also very rewarding. We were the only non-Asian (and I'd guess only non-Korean, but I didn't go around and take a poll) guests at lunch on Saturday, ditto the Vietnamese bakery. The Thai place, on the other hand, is in my neighborhood, and the clientele mix there is much more varied, with lots of university students, faculty, etc. We eat Asian pretty frequently because it's easy to get a great meal, it's inexpensive, and it's generally pretty healthy. I'm also specifically interested in exposing my kids to different sorts of foods, not just at restaurants but also at home. On a recent shopping trip to one of the really big pan-Asian/Hispanic markets here, Buford Highway Farmers Market, Boy wanted to know what sort of dish one would make with pork uteri (on display in shrink-wrapped foam trays in the meat section, right between pork testicles and pork tongues). I told him that I had no idea, but that it was probably pretty chewy.

Okay, time to start talking about the remodel. Some background: The Man and I both work at the same place, Emory University. He moved to Atlanta in 1982, I moved here in 1985 (for school), and we've both always lived within walking distance to work. When our present house came on the market we both fell in love with it, but knew that we'd eventually have to do some remodeling, as the bathrooms were original and the kitchen was truly scary (more about that later). So we bought the house is 1996, and actually had a total of three different sets of preliminary drawings done over the next six years, none of them giving us quite what we needed (and one of them unworkable because we wouldn't have been able to get approval from the Hysterical, oops, I meant to say the Historical Commission). In the end we realized that the only way to get what we needed was to extend the house towards the back. Our lot's deep and backs up to a golf course, so that plan takes maximum advantage of the view. The lot slopes off pretty drastically as well (Atlanta's actually in the piedmont of the Appalachians, so it's quite hilly), so it meant that we could extend the basement and create a two car garage (The Man's fondest desire, as it turned out). Many houses in in-town Atlanta have no garage at all, and attached garages are particularly unusual (and particularly prized). So the size of the extension was dictated by the fact that we wanted a garage at the ground (basement) level. Above that is the new kitchen (ground level with the front of the house), and above that is the new master bedroom and bath. Along with the extension we re-worked the layout of the upstairs bathrooms and closets, and gutted the remainder of the house: all new electrical, plumbing, new roof, additional insulation blown into (plaster) walls, floors re-done. If we could think of it we did it. The job took 7 1/2 months to complete, during which time we moved into an apartment. We'd been told 7 months, so all in all a very timely process, especially considering that the first couple of months were very rainy, slowing down some of the early work.

Breakfast today is the pastries I bought yesterday at Mozart. Here's the cake, now unwrapped. As the nut in the middle indicates, it's walnut. And here's the cake cut, along with a couple of cakes filled with bean paste: The cake is nice, mildly sweet. The top and sides look like they should have marzipan in them, but don't taste of almond, so perhaps contain ground walnuts or some sort of bean. The bean paste filling in the small cakes is very sweet, powdery/chalky rather than sticky. I do like stickier versions as well, but this sort is very nice with tea.

Cool. How long ago did you live in VaHi? We spend a lot of time there, though I don't think it too likely that we'll make it this week. For the others out there, VaHi is another ITP neighborhood, mixed residential (mostly bungalows from the '20s) and retail shops and restaurants. A bit of a bar scene on the weekends, but it hasn't kept families with young children away. Alpharetta, on the other hand, is about as far OTP as you can be and still be considered metro Atlanta. Lots of recent affluent development. As for the pomegranates, I actually sort of like the tediousness of the task: sort of soothing, like needlework or cutting out paper dolls. Pomegranate juice is the antioxidant of the moment (well, the wave has probably crested) and widely available now. It makes a nice mixer with vodka---hmm, does that drink have a name?

More festivities to come. And the iced Thai beverage is actually tea. It was prettier when it arrived, with the layers nicely separated, but I took a sip and stirred it a bit before remembering to photograph it. The restaurant's somewhat dimly lit, with red walls, so even after a bit of color adjustment that shot looks too red.