Category: dessert

Cherokee Cattle Company, Marietta GA

This is Marie, weighing in on the visit we made recently to The Cherokee Cattle Company. Admittedly, my contribution on this one is in large part because there are desserts involved, though the food itself was quite tasty.

My father-in-law picked this location for his birthday dinner. It is one of a small group of four local restaurants, each of them with a different name and arranged around a different theme, owned by “friend-of-Food-Network” Gus Tselios. Marietta Fish Market, Pasta Bella, and the original Marietta Diner are the other three locations. The Cherokee Cattle Company is a steak house and actually predates the other stores. For years, it was independently owned and proudly fought off regional competition from the likes of Longhorn and Outback, but joined the “Diner Family” in 2008. The menu was changed somewhat to fall in line with the others, and to bring the somewhat outsize dinner portions and ridiculously outsize desserts to Canton Road.

One of the best things about this particular location is that of the four, it’s the only one where you don’t usually have to wait for a year and a half to get a table. Mainly it’s just that it’s the biggest of the places, and the parking isn’t quite up to the capacity of the interior (an interior, I should mention, filled with things like antler chandeliers, but if you can ignore that sort of thing you’ll be fine). One of the worst things (for me–it won’t be a problem for anyone but the other four people in the universe who dislike the stuff) is that this place has an unnatural fondness for bacon. Having it appear on my salad was a little discouraging, if for no other reason than that I honestly ought to have remembered from last time that a vegetarian salad needs a special request. However, there were folks at the table willing to take the contaminated salad off my hands, and give every appearance of enjoying the favor they did to me.

Steaks don’t make it onto my plate very often. Most of the time they’re too big for my appetite. Also, since a bad steak is worse than no steak at all, they only get ordered when there’s plenty of money in the budget, or when there is a special occasion. I chose a rib eye because Grant doesn’t like that cut much and I’m disinclined to get a bunch of different slabs of meat for home cooking when it’s so hard to keep track of what is finished when. Which is, of course, one of the benefits of going to a steak house–timing the cooking is someone else’s problem. Actually, the best steak on our table was my father-in-law’s, which came with a bucket containing enough horseradish to clean out the sinuses of Napoleon’s army on the way back from Moscow.

The sweet potato fries are almost thick enough to reach towards home fry status, which as I understand it is a little hard for sweet potatoes as the sugars caramelize rather quickly. Generally fry portions defeat me well before half-way, but these were worth munching a bit longer, in no small part because the thicker fries held their heat better.

Grant got the salmon. Just because we were down the street from the place that specializes in fish doesn’t mean he got second-best; it was very well made, quite simply (as is best for fish) and with a little bit of crispiness around the edges. However, as has been said before, he likes fish rather more than I do, so we were not in danger of menu envy this time.

We closed the meal with some of the death-defying desserts. The selections of the table included cheesecake with and without strawberries, tiramisu cake, and some kind of death by chocolate concoction. Please note that there were seven of us, my piece of cheesecake was bought separately as a take-home item, and we still managed to bring home samples of every one of the cakes along with our other leftovers. Do not come to any of the four locations without a really good appetite, or an awful lot of time, unless you plan to leave with enough for tomorrow’s lunch box and maybe a snack after work, too. But do take home some dessert even if you can’t choke it down immediately after eating yourself silly. Just because the pieces are bigger than your head doesn’t mean they skimp on the quality.

Krispy Kreme’s Cheerwine doughnuts

Word had filtered down the pipeline that Krispy Kreme, purveyor of thousand-calorie snacks, had teamed up with that other North Carolina institution, Cheerwine, for a special month-long treat at their Carolina stores. Faster than anybody was able to connect to the internet five years ago, I already had the location of a Krispy Kreme store in Asheville pulled up on Google Maps and was phoning them to confirm that store was participating in this promotion. Several people in our circle of friends found the news and forwarded it my way. “I heard about that,” I wrote a half-dozen times, anticipation rising. “I can’t wait ’til we go to Asheville.” It got to the point that I was looking forward to a damn doughnut almost as much as the rest of our vacation. Continue reading “Krispy Kreme’s Cheerwine doughnuts” →

The Soda Fountain at Woolworth Walk, Asheville NC

Years ago, there was a chain of five-and-dime stores called Woolworth’s. Younger readers may not remember them, but they sold disposable, usless tat for low prices, and, in the days before fast food chains, were also a destination for shoppers who’d take a lunch break at what we now call an “old-fashioned” soda counter. They’d serve up quickie sandwiches and ice cream treats and maybe some of them would offer chili or roast beef or Salisbury steak. Hot meals were generally left to the larger, full-service diners of the 1940s and 1950s, with lunch counters their smaller brothers, but apparently some of them branched out a little. Continue reading “The Soda Fountain at Woolworth Walk, Asheville NC” →

The Chocolate Fetish, Asheville NC

This is Marie, whose usual contribution to the blog is to order something my husband didn’t so he can get menu envy, or to describe some experiment that made it to the dinner table and turned out well. This time the reason I am departing from tradition (and so soon after last time!) is to discuss a subject very dear to my heart: chocolate. Specifically, a wonderful little Asheville, NC business called The Chocolate Fetish. Continue reading “The Chocolate Fetish, Asheville NC” →

Hostess Fruit and Pudding Pies

Several weeks ago, I read the most remarkably odd thread over at Roadfood.com. People – sane, rational, sensible people – were discussing Hostess Fruit Pies and the various regional varieties available in their market. This just did not strike me as a sensible use of anybody’s time. I’d long ago written off the entire Hostess corporate entity as a huge disappointment, and couldn’t see why anyone was raving about these pies.

I don’t think this was snobbishness on my part. When I was a kid, Hostess was always a treat. I grew up eating King Dons, if you remember those. Apparently, they had that name in the southeast, as opposed to Ding Dongs or Big Wheels in other places, to avoid confusion with Drake’s Ring Dings. I always got a kick out of Hostess’s funny little comic book ads, where Batman would foil the Penguin’s latest scheme by throwing a Twinkie, a Cup Cake or a Fruit Pie at him, and grumbled that since King Dons were better than any of the others, they should be advertised in those pages, too.

Also, you could usually count on getting three baseball cards on the bottom of a box of King Dons. It wasn’t just that they were chocolate, or that you could roll the aluminum foil wrapper into a little marble-sized wad and pelt somebody with it, you could get a Rollie Fingers or a George Brett card if you looked at the bottom of every box in the Big Star and shouted “Mom! Mom! This one!”

But at some point in the mid-80s, Hostess cakes just started tasting terrible. Whether the local bakery started changing the recipe or puberty made its first freewheeling jigger with my taste buds, I just didn’t want to eat King Dons or Twinkies about the time I started high school. They didn’t taste like cake anymore, and that creamy filling, once so very delicious, took on the flavor of the sort of stuff that came out of the ground at Love Canal. The company just became synonymous with “chemical sludge,” basically. Last year, I had a “Dinah Finger” at the great Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, New Hampshire and was overjoyed. That was what Twinkies tasted like before they got all chemically.

Fruit Pies, however, I never liked as much as the cakes in the first place. This is perhaps unsurprising. I was a stupid kid.

So anyway, I was reading all these yahoos raving about the taste of Hostess strawberry Fruit Pies and figured that either they’re all completely crazy or they’re onto something. And the Hostess / Interstate Baking people have an outlet store about two miles from my house.

They haven’t finished switching over all the names yet, but Interstate Baking officially changed its name to Hostess Brands in November of last year. This incorporates Hostess, Drake’s, Dolly Madison, Merita and who knows how many other little brands that have fallen before the behemoth that is Twinkie the Kid. So I popped in after work two weeks ago and navigated through shelves of Wonder Bread and Moon Pies – not, I don’t hesitate to tell you, including the rare and wonderful orange flavor – to find a lovely bunch of Fruit Pies, nicely priced at eight for $5. I figured that if I didn’t like them, then I’m sure my daughter and her friends would eat them.

Oh, no. Random neighbor children will not be getting their hands on these babies. They are wonderful. They are four hundred and freakin’ fifty calories of wonderful, but they are not for kids. They’re for Marie and me. Maybe my daughter can have one or two.

The pick of the patch is the strawberry pie. These are seasonal, while lemon, apple, cherry and chocolate are baked year-round. Missing from the local region is blackberry, which is only available, apparently, in the northwest. The shop near me did not have chocolate on the first visit. They get deliveries every Monday and chocolate was promised the second visit. Honestly, it really wasn’t worth the wait; I just didn’t care for the pudding.

But these fruit pies are just amazing. Heat one of these for about twenty seconds and eat it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and tell me that’s not a more delicious dessert than the last thing you shelled out for at a restaurant. I like the strawberry and the apple best, but the others are still really good. Just, you know, don’t plan to eat one every night.

So thanks and congratulations, Hostess, for proving that some memories from childhood are still absolutely worth revisiting. Now, if you could only see your way clear to having the bakeries here in Georgia ramp up some blackberry pies as well, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.

Several months later (November), I found one of the rarely-sighted peach-flavored Hostess pies at a truck stop in Franklin, Kentucky:

Now all I need is time in my calorie schedule to justify eating the darn thing before it goes stale!

The Smith House and Connie’s Ice Cream Parlor, Dahlonega GA

Last week, my son phoned down from Kentucky to tell me something that was probably critically important at the time. He asked what we were doing that weekend and I told him that his sister and I were going to lunch at the Smith House in Dahlonega while Marie drove up to Athens to run over bicyclists at the Twilight Criterium. My son whined – he does that – that he wanted to come, too. I told him he’d better get a move on, then. The call ended disappointingly for each of us; we both wanted him to come to the Smith House with us. I’d never been; he enjoyed a school trip up there in fifth grade. Oddly, my daughter had figured that would be her fifth grade trip as well, but instead she went to Chattanooga to visit Ruby Falls and the Tennessee Aquarium, and they fed her class Cici’s Pizza. That’s budget cuts for you. Continue reading “The Smith House and Connie’s Ice Cream Parlor, Dahlonega GA” →