The waffle-like Dutch cookie pictured here is sold at my neighborhood market. These 99 cent snacks are strategically placed by checkout and always prompts my inner Dutch to question “vvat is dat?”

They are called stroopwafels (pronounced strope-waffles or this way if you are a stickler) and are thin wafer cookies with caramel centers customarily eaten with hot tea or coffee.

On its own the cookie is sweet, dense and chewy. Eat it like it is recommended — placed on top of a hot beverage for a few minutes — then the caramel filling turns gooey due to beverage steam. I don’t generally go ga-ga over sweets and these cookies certainly aren’t changing that. However, I do appreciate the small culture of stroopwafel fanatics who I found on the web-o-sphere. They also get bonus points for not taking themselves too seriously.

There is a stroopwafel Wikimedia page dubbed the Association of Stroopwafel Addicts (ASA) for individuals that have eaten the cookie “at least once and like it …

Continue reading Stroopwafel »

Asha Gomez, courtesy Melissa Libby & Associates

You may have read Gene Lee’s interview with Chef Asha Gomez, founder of Spice Route Supper Club, back in February when the event “An Evening in Kerala” was announced. Now Gomez has announced plans to open her first restaurant this September. The restaurant, Cardamom Hill, will be located on Northside Drive and will serve the Indian home cooking for which Gomez is known.

Excerpts from the press release:

Spice Route Supper Club Creator and Chef Asha Gomez is excited to announce she has signed the lease for her first restaurant location in the former My Girlfriend’s Kitchen space on Northside Drive.

Gomez chose to name her restaurant after the well-known mountainous terrain located in the southeast region of her native land of Kerala, India. The Cardamom Hills are named after the cardamom spice grown in much of the hill’s cool elevation.

The lunch menu will be a limited offering of vegetarian or meat Thali plates, as well as a …

Continue reading Spice Route Supper Club founder to open restaurant »

Elizabeth Schneider, Wine for Normal People

Are you intimidated by the prospect of selecting a bottle of vino amidst the rows upon rows of fancy-labeled bottles surrounding you in a wine shop? Do you purchase the same exact wine each and every time? Unsure where to shop? Stop sweating — there’s help.

I recently attended a wine-tasting event that led to a wine shopping expedition — one designed to provide help for those who feel crushingly overwhelmed in a wine shop. Elizabeth Schneider, Certified Sommelier and owner of Wine for Normal People, led the tasting and guided participants in sampling wines that typified common wine descriptors. During the presentation, Elizabeth casually mentioned that she purchased the evening’s wine at “Atlanta’s best kept secret.”

My ears perked up. Secret? Clue me in!

Where should you shop?

At the conclusion of the tasting, I snagged Elizabeth to prod her for information. Not only did she reveal the location, she offered to take me shopping there …

Continue reading Wine shopping 101 at ‘Atlanta’s best kept secret’ »

Chicken heart tacos at Holy Taco with spicy arbol chile (Photo by Becky Stein)

“This is spicy!” my youngest daughter cried, as she took a bite of the evening meal — a kind of burrito that I fashioned from naan bread and boneless chunks of spiced chicken I bought from a nearby Indian restaurant, and then rolled up with plain yogurt and salad veggies. “I can’t eat it.”

I extracted a chunk of the chicken from my own burrito and chewed it, feeling maybe a pinprick or two of heat on my tongue. “I don’t think it’s that spicy, ” I suggested.

“It’s not spicy at all, ” said her sister, mouth full.

“It’s a little spicy, ” countered my wife, doing that thing that moms do. That “you’re both right” thing.

My daughter did manage to eat most of her sandwich that evening, with extra yogurt and iced tea to wash it down. But this kid perplexes me. How did she emerge from our household so spice intolerant?

For years she’s grown up in a household where Mexican, Indian and Korean dishes abound. …

Continue reading Do your kids like spicy foods? »

While shopping at a small Asian market I came across this:

Minute Ginger Cake! There was also Minute Vanilla cake, but I went with the ginger. It promised to cook in two minutes in the microwave. When I turned the package over, I saw that it was manufactured in Thailand. I also saw this:

Hmm. It expired in March 2009. Risk food poisoning or make a two minute ginger cake? Best check the ingredients:

I’d bet a couple of years in a Thai warehouse wouldn’t matter to any of this stuff, right? Why, after two years on the shelf those “edible fatty acids” might become “not just edible but actually delicious fatty acids,” like a steak after a good dry age.

So I brought the minute cake mix home and unwrapped it. Inside was a bag of hopefully edible powder and a sturdy plastic cup with fill lines written in every language of the developed world. Seriously, this plastic cup could give the Hartsfield-Jackson airport train a run for its dinero. See that language with all the umlauts? I’m …

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In these everything-but-the-oink culinary times, fresh chicharrones — i.e., fried pork skins — have become a popular snack at all kinds of restaurants.

I just noticed them on the menu at Abattoir the other night when I was dining with my youngest daughter. She’s the serious meat lover in the family, so I figured she’d go bananas for this crunchy, fatty snack.

And…?

She took a couple of bites, chewed thoughtfully, and commented, “I feel like I’m eating dog treats.”

We brought the rest of the chicharrones home and everyone, including the dog, enjoyed them as a late-night snack.

Continue reading A chip off the snarky block »

courtesy of Casseroles

In Morningside, there’s a new solution for meals-to-go. A new shop called Casseroles fills that niche. The recently opened store offers what they call “Southern hospitality to go.”

Casseroles, located behind and below Rosebud, sells an assortment of main dishes, sides and desserts in three sizes ($12.50-$46.50). Don’t feel like cooking? Take home the classic tuna noodle casserole or the vegan Indian-inspired vegetable biryani. Or, maybe the Brussels sprout and fennel bread pudding is more to your liking. Whatever your tastes, they have something for you.

Products come frozen with reheating instructions, but if you want to arrive home the hero with a warm dinner, give Casseroles a shout a few hours before you stop in and they will heat your dinner so it’s ready for your table. Now, that’s Southern hospitality!

Casseroles also specializes in creating a “gifting experience” for housewarming, sympathy, new baby or illness recovery gifts. Have your casserole …

Continue reading Casseroles now open in Morningside and other restaurant news »

I’m probably going to wake up one morning to find a briquette thrown through my bedroom window for this, but I’m going to let you all in on a little secret that most backyard chefs don’t want you to know: Making your own barbecue is easy.

While my friends chow down on a rack of my freshly smoked ribs, they assume that it is mere modesty that leads me to dismiss their compliments and tell them it wasn’t difficult. Of course, I don’t really try that hard to convince them of this, because I’m a fan of any degree of affirmation directed my way. But the fact of the matter is, as long as you follow a few simple steps, avoid shortcuts, and give your meat the love that it deserves, you will likely turn out better ‘que than most restaurants in town. And if you happen to have a bevy of famished beer drinking dinner guests hovering around your table, you will look like a hero.

I recently posted on my new favorite toy, the BGE. And while having a ceramic smoker at my disposal will surely …

Continue reading Home barbecue 101: Pulled pork »

Duct Tape may be the universal DIY fix-all, but a Korean restaurant in Duluth was told to use something else for its repairs.

Jang Su Jang Restaurant at 3645 Satellite Boulevard had points deducted from a recent routine inspection because Duct Tape was being used to hold a table together and to join a longer handle on the end of a spoon.

Tape is not easily cleanable, an East Metro Health inspector said, and advised them not to use it.

The restaurant was also told not to store raw vegetables outside. Some carrots, cabbage, potatoes and squash had been left outside overnight and were contaminated by rain. The food was discarded.

These code violations, among others, gave Jang Su Jang a failing score of 43 out of 100. Their two previous scores were A’s.

Among other violations, the restaurant had a dirty meat slicer, blender and vegetable peeler. There were several cleaned dishes with food debris on them. Floors in the storage area were rotted and needed replacing, and there were …

Continue reading Restaurant Inspections, Jang Su Jang »

$$-$$$

There is a scene in the movie “Midnight in Paris” where the protagonist leaves a Parisian bistro in the 1920s to which he has been magically transported. He rounds the corner but then doubles back, only to discover he has returned to the modern day. That bistro that had been so full of life and laughter in a previous era was now a neon-lit laundromat.

Review by John Kessler

I can look around Atlanta and see some of the ghosts of restaurants past. When I drive past the Buckhead Bottle Bar, looking stark against the moonscape of stalled construction all around it, I remember it as the restaurant Blais, where my friends and I ate a 31-course menu prepared by the pre-“Top Chef” Richard Blais. After that epic meal we walked through the raunchy streetscape that used to be, as drunks spilled from bars and a girl on a swing swayed in a window front, her miniskirt fluttering.

But I haven’t been here long enough to remember when three popular restaurants lined up all in a row on …

Continue reading Sufi’s Atlanta restaurant review, Atlanta »