eG Foodblog: therese - So, you want to remodel your kitchen?

[slbunge]

It's cultured butter from Vermont Butter and Cheese Co. We buy the same stuff. Love the flavor.

[therese]

It's cultured butter from Vermont Butter and Cheese Co.  We buy the same stuff.  Love the flavor.

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Check.

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

[therese]

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.

[Jensen]

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.

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Well, I thought it might be an English cucumber standing on end. That would make it the same type of vegetable as the two "regular" cucumbers you have sitting on top of that tub of something-or-other.

[therese]

Well, I thought it might be an English cucumber standing on end. That would make it the same type of vegetable as the two "regular" cucumbers you have sitting on top of that tub of something-or-other.

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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.

[Pan]

I'm unfamiliar with cultured butter. Does that mean it has some bacteria like acidophilus in it? How is it different from cream butter?

[therese]

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:

[therese]

I'm unfamiliar with cultured butter. Does that mean it has some bacteria like acidophilus in it? How is it different from cream butter?

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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.

[therese]

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.

[Pan]

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Yum! If I'm ever in Atlanta, I want that for lunch!

[snowangel]

Thanks, from the heart of Minnesota, for a picture of something green and blooming. Warms my heart.

Me does think that there are green beans in the bunch of stuff you have. Is that one tub yogurt?

A question: so, the Boy and the Girl made Dutch boys. Do they do any other cooking? Do they take lunches to school or eat school lunch? If they take lunch, what do they take?

[TheFoodTutor]

Roma tomatoes. They look pretty nice, too.

[therese]

Thanks, from the heart of Minnesota, for a picture of something green and blooming.  Warms my heart.

Me does think that there are green beans in the bunch of stuff you have.  Is that one tub yogurt?

A question:  so, the Boy and the Girl made Dutch boys.  Do they do any other cooking?  Do they take lunches to school or eat school lunch?  If they take lunch, what do they take?

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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.

[therese]

Roma tomatoes. They look pretty nice, too.

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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.

[therese]

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.

[jackal10]

We have yet to find a bird feeder that is squirrel proof. Plastic they just chew through. Metal mesh resists for a while, but then is bent open. The ones with bars around a central feeder don't fare much better.

You can get designs that on on a pole with a big saucer underneath, that is meant to deter. Nope.

The only way we have found is to suspend the feeder between two trees on fairly thin wire, with empty plastic large soda bottles threaded on the wire, though the top and a hole in the bottom of the bottle. These are too wide a slippery for the squirrel to grip, and rotate around throwing the squirrel off. You may need two to stop them jumping over the bottle, and, of course ensure the feeder is high enough from the ground so that they can't leap up, and not overhung by trees so that they can't leap down. We see them measruing up, but it usually frustrates them, at least until the trees grow enough so that they can leap, or a crow brings the feeder down for them.

[therese]

We have yet to find a bird feeder that is squirrel proof.  Plastic they just chew through. Metal mesh resists for a while, but then is bent open. The ones with bars around a central feeder don't fare much better. 

You can get designs that on on a pole with a big saucer underneath, that is meant to deter. Nope.

The only way we have found is to suspend the feeder between two trees on fairly thin wire, with empty plastic large soda bottles threaded on the wire, though the top and a hole in the bottom of the bottle. These are too wide a slippery for the squirrel to grip, and rotate around throwing the squirrel off. You may need two to stop them jumping over the bottle, and, of course ensure the feeder is high enough from the ground so that they can't leap up, and not overhung by trees so that they can't leap down. We see them measruing up, but it usually frustrates them, at least until the trees grow enough so that they can leap, or a crow brings the feeder down for them.

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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.

[Swisskaese]

I am so jealous you went to Mary Mac's!

I haven't been there in years and I can't eat there anymore because I keep Kosher.

I love everything FoodTutor ordered, except for the beets.

I see the decor hasn't changed.

I love your kitchen.

[therese]

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.

[therese]

I am so jealous you went to Mary Mac's!

I haven't been there in years and I can't eat there anymore because I keep Kosher.

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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.

[Swisskaese]

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.

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Kosher at home and vegetarian in restaurants. I have to travel to some places where there are not enough Kosher options, like Taiwan. However, I did find a couple of very good Buddhist restaurants. Another time, another thread....

[jgarner53]

It's the lighter Hornsby's.

[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.

[therese]

It's the lighter Hornsby's.

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If by lighter you mean it's the one that's less sweet, then yes, that's the one. It's desribed as "draft" on the box. Other Hornsby's hard ciders that I've tried include Green Apple and something else that escapes me at the moment.

I really like hard cider, but the sort of hard cider that I really like is the sort that I first drank as a teenager when I lived in France. Cider is available pretty much everywhere in France, but in Normandy it's very widely available and it's just about free. Or at least it was then.

Anyway, it's pretty hard to find French cider in the U.S., at least in Georgia. And I probably wouldn't be too excited about paying a premium price to drink it if it were available. If I'm going to pay a premium price I might as well just go to France, right?

There's now an increasing number of U.S. manufacturers, large and small, who make apple and/or pear ciders. They're pretty much all (to my paste) overpoweringly sweet and fruity. Hornsby's Draft (not the other formulations) is less sweet and fruity, so more to my taste.

It's also slightly higher in alcohol (6%), and I think I remember it being somewhat lower in calories (though I'd have to check on that, not entirely sure).

[kitchenmage]

Boy makes crepes, scrambled eggs (correctly)

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Ah, now there's a question that has started the eternal arguments. Just what is the "correct" way to make scrambled eggs?

Therese, since you like games, add this to your repetoire. If you ask a bunch of people how they make their scrambled eggs you can get the most amusing discussion going. Before you know it the purists (who only use eggs and salt) are calling the liguidists (add water/milk/etc) heretics, and then you get to the people who add seasonings. Makes those holy wars seems downright tame at times.

So what is <i>your</i> correct way? It's your blog, you get to be right.