The good people at Blue Bell invited some local media to come out to Hal’s Kitchen in Brookhaven to enjoy a nice lunch and to talk about the rollout of their summer lineup of new flavors. Blue Bell, based in Brenham, Texas, recently expanded into Richmond, Virginia, and into Wilmington, North Carolina. Amazingly, this company only has a presence in fewer than half the states, but it is ranked third in sales volume nationwide. That seems to be because it inspires great brand loyalty in its customers. It is what we bring home from the grocery store, after all. Continue reading “Summer Flavors for Blue Bell Ice Cream”
Category: dessert
Hickory Pig BBQ, Gainesville GA
In a chapter last week, I mentioned that I have a project in mind to cover a certain west Georgia barbecue corridor better than anybody else has done before. Another notion is to visit considerably more places in the Gainesville area than we have. Each of these are fairly doable, but there are just so many miles in the Urbanspoon Gainesville metro – the city of Gainesville itself is reasonably compact, but, as defined in Urbanspoon, it stretches across a lot more territory than you’d think, incorporating everyplace from Dahlonega to Helen to Hoschton – that it’s really difficult to trace a reasonable route to stop by the five places that I wanted to sample. Continue reading “Hickory Pig BBQ, Gainesville GA”
Sweet Hut Bakery & Cafe, Doraville GA
Readers may recall that last week we included a chapter about our fun trip to BoBo Garden. Before we arrived, I had half a mind to pop across the street for dessert after we finished, because I’d been wanting to go to Sweet Hut with Marie since I first read about it. Her sweet tooth is, after all, sweeter than mine. This is a really neat little place that opened at the beginning of 2012 in the same strip mall as Quõc Húóng and the just-closed Fil-Am Star, a place that I really wanted to try. We didn’t go then, because we left BoBo Garden completely stuffed, and I resolved to go the next time we were in the area. Continue reading “Sweet Hut Bakery & Cafe, Doraville GA”
License to Spill at the Dogwood Festival
We’re breaking away from our usual chronological format to talk about what we did this past Saturday, so that – hopefully – we can let some friends and readers up the road know about an event traveling in their direction. The syndicated Better Show – shown locally on CBS affiliate WGCL – has teamed up with sponsor Mohawk Flooring for a tour called License to Spill, and they’ve been showing up at festivals and fairs eating messy food and, at some stops, smearing this messy food all over carpet samples to demonstrate that no matter what homeowners can do to their floor, Mohawk carpets can be cleaned. We rarely go in for product testimonials here, but I can truly say that when I lived in Oconee County some years ago, and the then-baby girlchild and her older brother routinely tossed their chocolate milk everywhere, I wished that we had carpet that cleaned like I saw this stuff. Continue reading “License to Spill at the Dogwood Festival”
Drinking in Nashville
Nashville looks very much like a town in which a man can go a-drinkin’. The bars open early and don’t seem to close until late, and there appear to be more hospitals per resident than any other place this side of Miami to take care of what you do to your liver. But if you’re a family like ours, where three of us don’t drink alcohol and the one that does maybe has a single beer a month, it’s also a terrific place to drink all sorts of other wonderful things. When my daughter and I first got to the Music City on this trip, we skirted around the south side of the metro area via I-440 and started things off with a great milkshake at Bobbie’s Dairy Dip. Continue reading “Drinking in Nashville”
Community Pie, Chattanooga TN
This is Marie, suitably contributing an article about dessert. Our daughter and I enjoyed a very good one on our trip to Chattanooga, and we were in serious need of a recharge when we came to it. We had visited the Creative Discovery Museum with our friends from The Boys Made Me Do It, and completely wore out the baby. This was our third or fourth visit to this children’s museum, and it is great fun seeing the baby grow up and explore new areas of it. Continue reading “Community Pie, Chattanooga TN”
Del Torro’s Artisan Chocolate Sauce
(In today’s chapter, Marie writes about a new product that we were invited to sample.)
We received an invitation to try out some chocolate sauce by Wheeler del Torro, a chef based in Boston who has also worked in Philadelphia, Paris, and a host of other places. He’s been getting some recognition for his desserts and treats after a few years of making a name in pop-up restaurants and other food events, and has a vegan ice cream shop as well, which looks pretty interesting. Should I ever happen to be up in his area I’d stop by, as enjoying ice cream without a stomach ache afterward would be a delightful thing. He offered us the opportunity to try one of his jars of chocolate sauce, and it shows the craft he put into it. Continue reading “Del Torro’s Artisan Chocolate Sauce”
Marie, Let's Eat! 