Bon Appétit: Spaghetti with braised kale

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the culinary delights detailed in this blog is eating something on the menu different from what my husband ordered, so we can share. Today I am contributing a recent success in the “what can I make with whatever’s on hand” cooking technique. I happened to have some kale on hand and my original plan to use it was increasingly impractical with the change in the weather, so I searched for inspiration and decided that this recipe, available here, looked like a good candidate for experimentation.

I called over my ~~guinea pig~~ husband and he made positive noises so I put it on the “do soon” list. I am definitely interested in more interesting ways to use pasta since Monday is pasta day and as much as I love my basic spaghetti recipe, every so often one has to do something different. This is simple, quick, and very tasty. If the subject of kale hasn’t scared you off already but you still have some reservations, my vegetable-phobic stepdaughter took seconds, and wants to bring leftovers to school tomorrow for lunch (she didn’t, but the enthusiasm was still appreciated).

Kale was in the freezer; it had been waiting to be mashed into potatoes, but what with spring progressing as quickly as it has been, it seemed likely there would be no mashed potato weather again until this upcoming fall. Some may have noted that the recipe was from last October, but the recipe is definitely suitable for warmer days. Garlic we had in plenty due to a previous recipe, and needed to be used up as it had also noticed that spring had sprung. Onions are always on hand, as are various options in cheese. I kept the changes to a minimum. I decided it needed some chicken seared in my nice Italian spice mix. The kale cooked down very well, and though the recipe called for being exceedingly careful not to let it get too dry, that wasn’t too much of a challenge. Mind you, I used slightly more olive oil than called for. It’s a healthy fat, after all!

On a whim, and because the plates needed some color, I decided that the strawberries that were supposed to be for dessert would be on the dinner plates instead. That worked surprisingly well. This is a recipe that goes very, very well with sweet/sour flavors. A citrus salad or cranberry relish would also probably do well as a side.

Normally I do more to alter a new recipe, but in this case the original is so simple that it seemed better to fiddle with the sides. However, in the future I plan to try mushrooms and/or pine nuts, possibly with a dash of balsamic vinegar. My sister also mentioned an interesting variation on this theme, using spinach instead of kale.

Just Around the Corner, Atlanta GA

I’m going to be so depressed when Marie’s job moves out to the Perimeter Mall area in the next month or so. Once a week, we meet for lunch downtown. The original idea had been to meet in Centennial Olympic Park and enjoy a nice picnic outside, but she has a longer lunch than me, and, honestly, I got a little tired of rushing back to work with a belly full of lunch and spending the next two hours feeling like I was going to lose it. So now she picks up our grub and we eat here at my job and it’s much more pleasant. Maybe this week, we can enjoy a nice meal on the tables outside.

More often than not, Marie picks up a burger and fries from Just Around the Corner, a teeny little place at the intersection of Spring and Marietta. I’ve actually only set foot in the place once, so I really can’t tell you much about it. It’s got just the sort of look to it that let you know, correctly, that they’re doing something right. It’s like one step up from a hot dog cart, with only room inside for perhaps five people. And in much the same way that some of the best meals come from street vendors – I don’t know that there have ever been falafels anywhere as good as the ones that this one Turkish fellow used to serve from a little cart just below Leconte and Park Halls on the UGA campus in the mid-90s – the burgers at Just Around the Corner are just dripping with character and style.

Over the last decade or so, Atlanta has really nicened up the area around the park, trying to make the place much more attractive to tourists. The whole area’s so much cleaner and family-friendly than its reputation holds. Nearby parking is usually under $10, and with so many museums and activities to check out, I imagine that you can easily find plenty of things to do, and have a really nice, juicy burger to top it off. And if you’re coming into town for an afternoon Hawks or Thrashers game, it’s certainly better than your options inside Philips Arena, and a lot cheaper, too.

Looks like the dogwoods are blooming in the park today. Yeah, maybe we can sit outside and enjoy our burgers with nature before it starts erupting with pollen too terribly. I’ve probably only got about 72 or fewer hours left before I will want to dig my eyeballs out with spoons, so I might try and enjoy the weather while I can, you know?

I have to tell you about this soup.

The best soup that there’s ever been, in the history of food, was the gazpacho at the late, dearly lamented Mean Bean in Athens. If you never had this soup, then you’ll never know what the best soup in the universe tasted like. Now about ten months ago, down in south Georgia, I did have a bowl of gazpacho which seemed to me to be in the same general hemisphere of coma-inducing wonder, but I was also a little distracted, what with being about five hours away from getting married, so I might have been exaggerating things just a little. I’ll have to try it again and see whether it holds up.

Assuming that it does, then it stands to follow that the third best soup in the world is the creamy tomato soup at Sweet Tomatoes, a national chain known on the west coast as Souplantation. And I can see disappointment in the eyes of a few readers through the screens of their laptops, as it’s just a month into this experiment and I’m already talking about a national chain. Tsk!

Obsession with the creamy tomato soup is widely known as writer Mark Evanier’s recurring joke, and I’m not trying to hem in on his well-worn territory, but I do have to thank him for cluing me in on the place. Depending on his mood, he’ll either casually mention it or go into full-bore rave when the soup returns to the restaurant’s rotating menu. This usually happens every March and for one week in the fall. I’ve never understood this. There are a few soups available here year-round. One of these is their signature deep kettle house chili, which is the blandest and most disappointingly ordinary chili I’ve ever had, and they serve that slop all the time?

Oh, and I’ll tell you what’s worse: they’ve also got some soups which are on an even sillier 15-day rotation. So if you go in the first half of March, you can alternate bowls of creamy tomato and their shrimp bisque, which is also outstanding, but in the second half of the month, they replace the shrimp bisque with clam chowder, which I can’t eat. Now what’s fair about that?

So anyway, about four years back, Mark was raving about this soup and I decided the kiddos needed some more vegetables, so we made an evening out of it and I was sold. I mean, this soup is really, really good. It doesn’t seem possible that anything made in such quantity can be so tasty, but I had something like six bowls of the stuff that first night. Then I remained sitting there for a very, very long time.

To be honest, Sweet Tomatoes is one of those places that flatly is not worth a visit unless you check the website beforehand and confirm that there’s a good soup on the menu. Now Marie likes the place regardless, because she enjoys making a nice salad to her specifications, but I never feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth unless I can enjoy several bowls of soup. The creamy tomato and the shrimp bisque are certainly deal-clinchers, and I also really like their El Paso chicken and lime. I’ll go to Sweet Tomatoes without a grumble if any one of the three are present. I mean, the day hasn’t come where I’ve dropped my fork in shock and raved about the lettuce and spinach I’ve just had, plus their pastas are uniformly disappointing, so there needs to be good soup.

Luckily, Marie’s birthday happens to come in March, so we can usually justify two or three visits during the month. I need to do a better job remembering to go at the start of March, however. Sunday night, we got a group of friends together to celebrate. We all arrived in the middle of a huge downpour, exactly the sort of weather that requires two or three bowls of soup.

Well, we were nine in total and an astonishing amount of soup was consumed. Neal had several bowls of their black bean chili, which surely must be superior to their regular deep-kettle-thing because it cannot possibly be worse, and was comatose for the next sixteen hours. Between us, my wife and I built a small fort of little red soup bowls. She didn’t have space on the table to set her gift cards down. That’s one of the advantages to having children; you can send them back to the line for more soup. Just keep it coming, with some of that cheesy bread to dunk in it. More tomato soup, and nobody gets hurt. Maybe we’ll go back Saturday afternoon, before they replace the creamy tomato with something inevitably inferior.

Other blog posts about Sweet Tomatoes in Atlanta:

Atlanta Foodies (Dec. 12 2008)
Food Near Snellville (July 30 2009)

The Real Chow Baby, Atlanta GA

There probably won’t be quite so many features in this column about restaurants as unabashedly corporate as this one, but since The Real Chow Baby is, at this stage, just a local chain with only two locations, I think it will be acceptable to write about it. I’m willing to overlook the small army of attractive young servers in matching black t-shirts and headsets, although they do reinforce the feeling that somebody’s investment in these restaurants is far more financial than emotional.

Real Chow Baby opened its first restaurant on Howell Mill some years ago, and a second in 2008 in the Cobb Galleria Center, giving area residents, at long last, a reason to actually set foot inside this misbegotten mall other than the annual Anime Weekend Atlanta convention. The Galleria’s been an embarrassment for a really long time now. When I was in middle school, it was opened with so much hoopla – an upscale mall! an AMC theater with eight screens! a video arcade with an airlock! – but it languished, a sad suburban wannabe that looked longingly at Phipps Plaza and just wished it could be that cool.

I guess about ten years ago, Cobb County finally took pity on the diseased beast, which had been coughing blood since the cinema closed, and gutted the upper floor of the mall, transforming it, quite impressively, into an extension of a mid-sized convention center that connected, above and across the shopping area, to the Waverly Hotel on the mall’s far side. There is still, nevertheless, a lot of vacant real estate inside. The excellent Sky City blog provided a terrific photoessay about the Galleria last October, which you can go read. The mall hasn’t changed a jot since those photos were taken, indeed since the top floor was converted to conference rooms and the Eckanakar people put in a reading room years ago, except that a gallery of horrible art across from Jock’s and Jill’s closed . And Sky City’s writer is quite right: unless a trade show’s in town, you’d think this mall had long been abandoned.

I overlooked the Real Chow Baby when we first noticed it during AWA 2008, but last year, Marie and I found ourselves free from children for a few hours on Friday and elected to have supper there, since it was so close to the con and looked reasonably nice. I was so taken with it that I asked whether she’d mind excusing ourselves and going back for lunch the next day. I never, never do that.

I’ve been so taken with The Real Chow Baby that I’ve eaten there probably twenty times since the con last September. They serve a stir-fry buffet, where you build a bowl from a huge array of ingredients. You can start with white or brown rice or four different pastas, work your way through dozens of veggies, add ladles of seventeen different sauces, about seven meats and then about a dozen spices. The potential for experimentation, while not mathematically endless, is pretty darn huge.

Fortunately, Marie likes this place almost as much as I do, and it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to persuade her that bowls full of stir-fry were exactly what she wanted for her birthday dinner last week. (She had two birthday dinners, because she’s that awesome, and I’ll tell you about the second in a couple of days.) Our daughter and I met Marie after work on Friday, where there is usually a pretty good crowd of weekend revelers and families. We each sampled three bowls and enjoyed all but one of them.

Now, three bowls of stir fry sounds like a lot, and it would be, if you foolishly piled high with the food. You see, a one-trip dinner order at Real Chow Baby runs you $11.99 on the weekends – lunch is only eight – but for a buck more, you can have unlimited trips to the buffet. This is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. If you make yourself just a teeny bowl with no more than two ladles of sauce, then you can sample several different flavors, and mix and match sauce offerings without worrying about whether you’ve gorged yourself stupid. I like to start with a medium-sized bowl, very heavy on the hot spices, and then have two smaller bowls with milder taste.

Marie’s second concoction of the night mixed black bean sauce and hot mustard over white rice. None of us liked it very much, but it didn’t really matter, because you can abandon something you don’t enjoy and try something different. If you can exercise enough willpower to keep your portion sizes reasonable, then this is definitely a place to provide you with an excellent meal or twenty.

(Update: On July 19 2010, this location split off from the other and became known as “Big Chow Grill.”)

Cheerwine Milkshake

Ah, to be eighteen again. Once upon a time, when I went to school at the University of Georgia, I started paying attention to all the many soda possibilities that were out there. Used to be, there was a sandwich shop called Steverino’s that would deliver the most amazingly tasty giant subs I’ve ever had, and would bring along a choice of some unusual beverage that I’d never had before. I led a sheltered suburban childhood; IBC Root Beer was so outre that a friend’s crazy mother once chased another friend down the street for coming to her door with a brown bottle of it, screaming that she didn’t care what kind of beer it was, he should know better than to ring her bell holding a bottle. I mention this because it really was a powerful, eye-opening experience, knowing that you could take an 11 pm study break on a Tuesday and call for a twelve-inch special and a bottle of Vernor’s, or Buffalo Rock, or the mighty Budwine.

Buffalo Rock immediately became my favorite soda; I’m scheming for a trip to Montgomery as soon as it’s feasible to bring back a couple of twelve-packs. But Budwine… wow, I’d never had anything remotely like that before. It looks like the company, originally called Bludwine, was founded in nearby Watkinsville in the 1900s. They changed the name of their beverages in the 1920s, by which time an imitator, Cheerwine, had cropped up in the Carolinas. For decades, the two companies dueled in competing regions. Cheerwine had the Carolinas and Virginia, and Budwine was sold in Georgia, Florida and parts of Alabama and Tennessee. Eventually, Budwine petered out and the business closed in 1995. Cheerwine gradually moved into the region, and while it is still uncommon, you can find it in twelve-packs in Publix grocery stores.

While Budwine was around, though, there was a little secret that everybody in Athens got to know by word of mouth. The Dairy Queen on Oak Street, between campus and the bypass, would sell you a Budwine milkshake. It was just what it sounds like: they’d pump their vanillay soft serve goo into a steel mixing cup, open a bottle of Budwine and pour about a third in, then do whatever Dairy Queen magic was necessary and what you had was a very light, very sweet cherry milkshake that tasted better than anything else on that menu.

For fifteen years, I told people who never had the pleasure that those were the most wonderful things you’d ever tried. It never once occurred to me that, with Budwine’s better-known copy readily available and DQs dotting the landscape, there was nothing stopping me from recreating the taste here in Marietta. Well, nothing except the incredibly rude manager.

Earlier this week, I was poking around the Roadfood.com forums and realized that I had never noticed the Beverage Forum, and certainly not the “Favorite Discontinued Sodas” thread, which started in 2006 and has been periodically brought back to life by necroposters ever since.

The thread’s pretty amusing, particularly with all the well-meaning nostalgists who genuinely thought their favorite soda was dead only to learn some other region was still enjoying it. I was pleased to see that the legendary Ort.Carlton, who used to write such wonderful columns about beer and post offices and aimless roadtripping for Athens’ Flagpole magazine, contributed to the thread and mentioned Budwine. Finally, those two misfiring synapses finally clicked. There really wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t try to get myself a Cheerwine milkshake!

So Tuesday, I picked up a 12-pack of Cheerwine, got my daughter from school, took her to the allergy clinic, and stopped into the DQ on the way back. We periodically do this as a treat for her; they sell half-price shakes from 2-4. They’re not exceptionally good shakes – soft serve goo just isn’t as good as, say, ice cream – but they do for a treat.

There’s a teenage girl who has been there for months, and today she was training some nervous newbie. My daughter ordered her shake. They made it and I said “And I would also like a vanilla shake, but I’d like you to open this can and pour about half of it in.”

I think that a teenager, even a nervous newbie, could have accomplished this without incident. Unfortunately, she was being discreetly watched by some manager, who, in that stereotypically loud, excited and singsong manner, jumped from somewhere I didn’t see her and shouted, without additional hyperbole from me, “No, no, no, no, no! You cannot do that!”

I really wouldn’t want to have been on the other side of me when I said “Yes, you can,” in my most emphatic and withering tone.

“If you want to put your Coke in, you can do it after we give it to you! We cannot do that for you!” she said, not politely. Well, a little something about her manner, probably that it was poor, didn’t mix well with my intense dislike of having anybody in food service tell me what I could or couldn’t do with the food I was paying for. Plus she called a Cheerwine a Coke; she was clearly a nitwit.

So I don’t mind telling you that I instantly discarded my otherwise unfailingly polite demeanor and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I used to have these all the time at Dairy Queen when I was in college, that the soda has to be mixed in for it to taste right, and that I was paying for the milkshake and I wanted it made my way. Okay, so there was probably some nine hundred page franchise contract that she and her husband – he’s usually sitting on the far end in a wooden chair – signed which clearly states that franchisees may not alter the formulae of Dairy Queen soft serve goo through the addition of whatever customers pass across the counter. But geez, just because you beat Tastee-Freez out of the local market in 1979 doesn’t give you the right to act like a horse’s ass.

Well, she caved. Common sense prevailed and I got my Cheerwine milkshake. My daughter, who’s sworn for years that she can’t stand the stuff, gave it a sip and wowed, “Oh! That’s SO GOOD!”

And she was right. I think the girl poured too much of the can, but it was otherwise a reasonable facsimile of what I remember. You should take a can to the DQ near you and give it a go. Maybe you’ll even avoid the dingbattery of the lady who thought she was trying to run the one by me and enjoy your shake without having to engage in formal debate over it.

Bon Appétit: Bison and red wine shepherd’s pie

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the culinary delights detailed in this blog is eating something on the menu different from what my husband ordered, so we can share. However, on intermittent Sunday nights I am doing something a bit more special than just the daily “what can I make with whatever’s on hand” cooking technique.

For these meals, I am entertaining myself (and with any luck my guests and family) by making a meal out of recipes from Bon Appétit magazine and serving them to my friends. So far the results have been tasty, although not always terribly photogenic. This week’s endeavor was the Bison and Red Wine Shepherd’s Pie. The photo below was borrowed from Bon Appétit’s site, where you can read the recipe. I’ve made bison chili before and liked the results so this looked like a good opportunity.

I am constitutionally unable to attempt a recipe without changing something. In this particular recipe I changed a fair amount. That can be dangerous, especially when your victims/friends will be there pretty soon to proof the results, but on the other hand it makes the recipe a bit more “mine” (my own, my precious). The most significant change was that the recipe called for bacon, right at the beginning. Also, the cut of meat needed was not available; there were no bone-in options. Those two things could very easily change the entire meal. The bacon was presumably there to add extra flavor notes and possibly some fat, and the bone…well, there are few stew-like meals that can’t be improved with a bit of gelatin from a fresh bone. The meat was fairly well marbled so the fat wasn’t an issue. The compromise I came up with was to throw in a bit of chuck hamburger to compensate for the lack of bacon.

Our daughter came along to help with the shopping. She was in charge of checking all the displays for free samples while I picked up potatoes, onions, pearl onions, some really nice sweet organic carrots, and went on a wide-ranging but ultimately successful quest for parsnips. She was also in charge of hitting one bunch of celery with another to mime the fate that should befall all celery, followed by a deep philosophical argument regarding the exact status of celery as food and whether anything else (besides celery) that was not originally a food item could be improved with peanut butter. I did not feel this particular recipe could be improved with peanut butter; fear not. However, considering that another part of the recipe involved turnips, which I hesitate to use, celery and turnips were both passed over in favor of some frozen sweet corn. Oh, and my paprika was not sweet, it was smoked, but I figured that would also help compensate for the lack of bacon. In fact, there was a disturbing moment for me as the meat was originally browning, when a smell arose from the meat that nearly (but not quite) triggered that part of my palate that revolts violently to the presence of that particular cut of pig. Thankfully it passed quickly, but if you are a bacon fan, you would probably not want to follow me in leaving the pig out of this recipe!

At this point it seemed that any further changes would make the whole point of the exercise moot, so I tried to follow the rest fairly exactly. One of the first rules of recipes is to add an hour of prep time to anything that has more than about 5 ingredients or which requires stages of cooking. This was no exception, and another half hour or so could have come in handy as the pie went into the oven just about the time as the guests walked in the door. The neat chopping tool my in-laws gave me might have cut down on the time, but I was rather attached to the idea of having the carrots be neat discs of the same general size, rather than irregularly-sized bits. Anyway, once everything was bubbling away and looked to be cooking down well I realized that there was going to have to be some compensation for the lack of a bone. A small amount of corn starch seemed to do the trick. The girlchild also provided some good encouragement along the way, as “Ewww, bison?!?! Is that like a buffalo?” turned into wide-eyed “Man, that smells good! How soon ’till dinner?” Eleven isn’t necessarily a terribly experimental age, so I assume resistance; if it changes to enthusiasm I get extra points.

Everything went very well up to the point where the last touch was added. The potatoes had an egg wash that was supposed to brown and make the peaks all pretty, but the gravy was bubbling so vigorously that I didn’t dare leave the pie in the oven long enough for the really pretty browning to set in. Even the garlic toast didn’t brown well. Therefore, there is no picture of the untouched serving dish. However, everyone took at least seconds and some took thirds. The corn went very well with the other vegetables, retaining a bit of a crunch. The pearl onions were almost as sweet as Vidalias. Dessert was pumpkin bread that baked while we ate dinner. Overall a successful evening, even if the aesthetics weren’t quite up to standard. The important thing is that we had a good time and the food was appreciated.

Blue Willow Inn, Social Circle GA

To help navigate around this blog, but also keep it simple, I decided that each restaurant entry should have just two tags, related to the type of food and the town that we’ve visited to eat it. Assuming this blog maintains my interest for a good while, eventually readers can get ideas and suggestions about where to eat by clicking a tag. I think that of all of them, the tag for Social Circle might end up being the least frequently troubled. Marie and I drove out here with our daughter Saturday and, other than nine hundred police cruisers maintaining order, we did not see anything whatsoever of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn.

Social Circle is about 45 minutes east of Atlanta out I-20. Louis and Billie van Dyke opened their restaurant in a gorgeous old home a couple of blocks north of Social Circle’s tiny downtown in November 1991. Among the framed articles on the walls of the main hallway, there’s a feature article from the inspirational magazine Guideposts that tells how their first few months were really tough, but a raving review by the late, great Lewis Grizzard turned things around almost overnight, and the restaurant has routinely served 200,000 visitors a year. They recommend that you make reservations, otherwise you might end up sitting in a rocking chair on their front porch for a while.

Blue Willow Inn serves up a really nice Southern-style buffet. The price is quite reasonable – just under $20 a head – and includes everything from ham and chicken livers to what might very well be the best fried green tomatoes that I’ve ever had. And I’m awfully particular to fried green tomatoes. The salad was pretty disappointing – uninspired iceberg lettuce in a concoction not unlike what you’d find at a Huddle House – but the rest of the vegetables more than made up for it.

Even though the restaurant is bustling with people, its layout is so nice that each room is comparatively quiet, allowing you to relax and take your time. Everybody there seemed to really be enjoying themselves, knowing that they were doing something particularly nice for lunch. We arrived a little bit before a birthday party started in one of the upstairs rooms. My daughter, who was making her way back from the buffet with seconds, put on a show of faux indignation and asked, of two people going upstairs with gift bags, why she had not been invited. The older ladies replied “Well, of course you’re invited, dear, come on up.” So my daughter put her plate on our table and ran skedaddling up to join them. Apparently she gave the birthday gal a big hug and wished her well before rejoining us, beaming. This is why, when my daughter feigns shyness to get out of something, we know she’s lying.

Desserts consist of a million billion calories in a series of decadent cakes, pies, brownies and forty pounds more banana pudding than I should have eaten. When we left, we made it as far as the porch before I had to commandeer a rocking chair for several minutes. Then we got as far as the koi pond and gift shop before having to stop again.

The parking lot is behind the restaurant, and behind it, there is a small, classy-designed strip mall. Actually, I was exaggerating earlier when I said there was nothing of interest other than the Blue Willow Inn around the area; there is also a small nostalgia-minded soda fountain in that strip mall which might have been worth a look had I not already consumed forty pounds of banana pudding and a slice of chocolate cake buried under whipped cream. How the dickens that place is meant to stay in business with the giant dessert buffet of the inn on the other side of a parking lot is anybody’s guess. Next door to the soda fountain, there’s one of those museums about Adam and Eve and the Jesus horses, for those of you who enjoy throwing up in public.