Peachtree Road Market opens for new season

Saturday was a beautiful day. The weather was great and it was the opening day of the Peachtree Road Market. The Peachtree Road Market is a food lovers dream come true. I was reading a post on another blog this a.m. about how good the Peachtree Road Market is and at the end someone posted a comment saying they liked to get 20 bucks from the ATM machine and spend it all at the Peachtree Road Market. I’m thinking that would only tease me, $20 bucks? are you kidding me. Hell Stacey spends that with one vendor.

Let me lay it out for you.

Bess is there and she owns Antico Mrecante. They sell some of the best cheese in the world. Bess has Italian cheese and she has cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy. If you don’t know Sweet Grass click on them and learn. The number of cheeses Bess sells are too many for me to write about, but off the top of my head the dolce Gorgonzola we got was excellent. The Tomini with herbs and pepper on top is excellent. Of course her Parmigiano is great. She has lot’s more and she has a retail shop. She shares a space with Via Elisa Pasta. Once again, if you don’t know about Via Elisa click on them and learn. The best fresh pasta in Atlanta. The best restaurants and Whole Foods use her products. It is available at the Peachtree Road Market every Saturday morning.

You can also stock up on fresh, as in made early each Saturday morning according to their signage, salsas, tortillas, guacamole and other Mexican specialties. Zocalo, a popular midtown restaurant is selling there product at the Peachtree Road Market again this year.

Hopes Garden sells Pesto. It is delicious. One is a regular pesto and one with jalapeno. Hopes Garden is a Mom Pop Daughter operation. Hope being the daughter, I bet she is about 13 years old. Click on them to learn more about them.

There are also many farmers at each market and lots of other vendors. Next week I will write about some of the other great products you can get there each Saturday morning. But my point is how great it is to go to one spot and get some of the best food in town. We always go home with an ice chest full. We go often because I sell my art and some furniture along side all these wonderful vendors. Like I said stay tune for more info about the Peachtree Road Market, but in the mean time I will see you there this Saturday.

BEAUTIFUL POBOY

If you go to Washington Rd. Seafood in East Point, Ga. this is what you can get for $4.29, tax included. Call me and I’ll meet you there.

Sydnee and Jameys Excellent Crawfish Boil

We have been getting to know our neighbors Sydnee and Jamey the last year or so. Really nice people and serious about their food. Serious about their beer as well. Anyway I’m gonna let these photos of last weeks Crawfish Boil tell the story.

DAY THREE NOLA

We wake from our food coma thinking about where we will eat today. It is our last day in the city for this visit and we think we have picked out a really good restaurant. Rio Mar. We have read about and the bar tender at Cafe Adelaide said he liked it a lot. We start with coffee around the corner and then head into the Quarter. We are looking for a book store and the Nepoleon House.

We get to the Quarter and right away find a book store. It’s a classic. Tons of books written by southerners or about the south. New and old. We spend about an hour looking around and get a few books. We then head to the corner of Charters and St Louis streets.

The Napoleon House is a famous bar and cafe and Napoleon never stepped foot in the building. He was supposed to hold up there at one time , but never made it. It is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever been in. It is and has been in the perfect state of decay for as long as I can remember. I first went there about 30 years ago and nothings changed. Tourist flock there , but that doesn’t stop the locals form coming as well. You got to have a Pimm’s Cup when you go and the food is good. Click on Pimm’s Cup to read about it. It is the only cocktail I’ve ever had that uses a slice of cucumber for a garnish. The muffaletta is very good also. We had a Pimm’s cup and then head out to lunch. We plan to sit for a hour or so and eat Spanish and Latin American Tapas.

So that’s what we do. We order a nice crisp white wine from the Basque region of Spain to match with dishes like ceviche, grilled Octopus, Oysters baked with chorizo & spinach, you get the idea. Maybe it’s because we make good ceviche at home or maybe it’s because we have had most of these dishes in it’s native land, but we’re just not that impressed. It’s not bad, but it’s not blowing us away like most all our other meals in NOLA have. No big deal. Can’t complain, what?, six great meals and one ok meal. I can live with that.
And with that being said, we can’t wait to get back to New Orleans, hope it’s not a whole year before we do so.

THE PIG CHEF AND HIS NEW BOOK

Found this in the New Orleans news paper. I did a fund raiser for the Southern Foodways Alliance with Chef Link and got to talk with him some. Nice guy and very serious about his food. Stacey and I have also eaten at all three of his restaurants. Cochon and Butcher are the places to go. So go.

Chris Granger / The Times-Picayune

This month, look for Chef Donald Link’s new cookbook “Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link’s Louisiana” (Potter, $35).

Paging through his new cookbook with chef Donald Link is like looking at a family scrapbook, one with recipes and photographs that make you want to run into the kitchen and prepare the food.

“That’s Billy Link, ” Link says, pointing to a photo of one of his cousins, posing with the chef on a tarp-covered boat. Link’s favorite photo in the book is one of him dancing with his 9-year-old daughter, Cassidy.

Debuting this month, “Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link’s Louisiana” (Potter, $35) is about the chef’s big family and its profound influence, what he grew up eating, why he so loves the smell of rice cooking. Boudin, bacon and beer are constant themes.

It’s about much more than his New Orleans operations: Herbsaint, Cochon and Cochon Butcher. But after reading the book, it’s clear why Cochon and Cochon Butcher exist. Link’s love of pork and rice is in his DNA, he writes.

Link’s great-great-grandfather immigrated to Rayne with 40 other families from Geilenkirchen, Germany, in 1881, settling in Robert’s Cove. He is credited with being the first person to ship rice to New Orleans. The family brought recipes, still in use, for making sausage.

“Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link’s Louisiana” (Potter, $35) is about the chef’s big family and its profound influence, what he grew up eating, why he so loves the smell of rice cooking.

“Everybody, when they talk about Cajun food, they talk about the French and the zydeco music. But if you think about it, the Germans played a huge role in modern Cajun cuisine, with the rice farming, crawfish farming and sausage making, ” Link said last week.

“I’m on a mission to prove andouille is a German sausage, not French . . . The Germans brought over the sausage, and the French named it.”

Link’s grandparents lived in Sulphur. His mother’s parents were from Alabama originally, and his Granddad Adams, a Southern-style cook, was “a big influence here at Cochon, ” Link said.

His paternal grandmother “did pretty basic Cajun: smothered pork over rice, gumbo, rice dressing, anything with rice. Of course, they were rice farmers. And that Granddad was all over the place. He did everything. He was really my true inspiration for cooking, ” Link said.

“He’d go in the kitchen and make eight or nine things. He’d have a squirrel with the head on sitting on the table, everything he’d gathered over the week. Then the whole family would come over, 35 people, and he’d cook for everybody.

“I have just amazing memories of growing up in Louisiana with food.”

Link worked on the book with Paula Disbrowe, who also cowrote the very successful “Crescent City Cooking” with Link’s mentor, chef Susan Spicer. Clarkson Potter won the rights to publish the book after four or five publishers accepted their book proposal.

“We didn’t want to do a beautiful coffee-table food-shot cookbook, ” Link said. “For one, I don’t necessarily think that’s a good characterization of Louisiana food. It’s not necessarily a pretty, overstyled cuisine. It’s more that you’re outside sweating, cooking crawfish, drinking beer, dancing a little bit, going to festivals.

“That’s how I grew up, going to food festivals, hanging out under the carport, fishing on Big Lake and shrimping with my dad. That’s more what I wanted to convey. It’s not a restaurant cookbook.”

He fought to get to work with Chris Granger, the Times-Picayune photographer whose freelance work includes Spicer’s cookbook. Granger, who grew up in Lake Charles, traveled extensively with Link to the festivals, the sausage-making sessions, the crawfish boils and the family camp, where they made etouffee on the big covered patio while it was raining.

“This is J.W., ” Link said, pointing to a photo of cousin J.W. Zaunbrecher. He turned the page. “And this is one of J.W.’s pigs he trapped. Chris got in the cage with him” to take the photo.

The beady eyes of the feral pig stare out at the reader. Flip to the next page and there’s a close-up of homemade bacon.

“Writing this got me a lot more involved in that area and way of life, ” Link said. “I’ve always known about it, but I’ve never really hung out with them until I started writing the book: making sausage with them, going to crawfish boils, going dancing at Bubba Frey’s, ” his cousin who owns the Mowata General Store.

“It’s been an amazing experience to connect with somebody like that. He’s got this little store. He raises guinea hens, has turtles in a bucket outside. He has a little garden. He just kind of does what he wants. My dad will talk about that. These people just live in their own world out there. I find it incredibly fascinating.”

Come to the Atl and have some pie!

A New York Expatriate’s Magnificent Obsession: Pizza

Jessica McGowan for The New York Times

CAUTION! Jeff Varasano makes blistered pizzas in Atlanta by disconnecting the safety latch on his oven’s cleaning cycle.

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Times Topics: Pizza

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Jessica McGowan for The New York Times

JEFF VARASANO woke at 2:50 a.m. so he could get to his kitchen, measure precise quantities of water, flour, salt and yeast on a digital scale, and then mix them together. Sixteen hours later about 30 guests would be arriving, and they would want pizza.

Since moving from Manhattan to Atlanta in 1998, Mr. Varasano, a 42-year-old software engineer, has been looking for the kind of pizza he left behind in New York. Finding nothing close, he has spent much of the past decade trying to reverse-engineer what had been his favorite — from Patsy’s in East Harlem — in a home kitchen oven which, like nearly all consumer models, has a maximum cooking temperature roughly half of the 1,000 degrees pumped out by the coal-fired pizza oven at Patsy’s.

“I came to the conclusion pretty early on that their pies were cooking in 4 minutes and mine were cooking in 15 minutes,” making dense and chewy pizzas, he said. “And so I just went on this quest for more heat.”

He could, he thought, rewire the oven’s internal thermometer to switch hot signals for cold ones. “I started to think I was going to burn the house down with these tricks,” he said, “and then I came upon this idea of running it on the cleaning cycle.”

That epiphany, four years ago, allowed Mr. Varasano to finally produce a pizza as good as he would get in New York. He took a photo of that pie and posted an account, with mad-scientist specificity, of his six years of experiments with flours, mixing techniques, yeast cultures, canned tomatoes, cheeses and oven temperatures.

He has continued to make updates to the single-page Web site, slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza, as he has turned his attention to different aspects of pie theory. The post is now less pizza recipe than the ravings of a pizza madman, 20,000 words of obsessive text in something like the crude Web style of the late ’90s. It has made him, perhaps, the Internet’s foremost homemade pizza maven.

Many of Mr. Varasano’s guests would be meeting him for the first time, having stumbled upon his Web site in their own quests. After corresponding via e-mail about this type of flour or that brand of mixer, they found themselves invited to this latest in an endless series of “pizza tastings.”

Whether it would be a success depended on Mr. Varasano’s seriously abused oven.

Electric ovens, which are what Mr. Varasano uses, clean themselves by maxing out their heating elements and incinerating spilled food. To prevent injuries, nearly all have safety latches that engage during cleaning to prevent someone from opening the door to, say, insert or remove a pizza. Mr. Varasano overcame that obstacle by snipping the metal latch with garden shears.

Pointing the laser sight of his $250 Raytek infrared thermometer, he found the pizza stone on the center rack in his cul-de-sac home in Atlanta was as hot as a New York pizza oven.

“It’s not so much about heat as it is temperature differential,” he said as he peered into the top compartment of his double oven. The stone needs to be about 150 degrees cooler than the air in the top of the oven, he said, so the crust beneath the sauce can cook before the bottom burns.

Over the past few years, he has devised a jury-rigged system to regulate the temperature of an oven that must, by now, think itself spotless. To cool the stone, he places a baking sheet on top. In the cabinet above, a fan blows over a tray of ice and water to cool the oven’s electronic console.

In the steel floor of the lower oven, there is a jagged, dime-size hole, made when an errant piece of superheated topping melted through. One window pane in that oven’s door is shattered, destroyed after a drop of sauce fell onto it at high heat. There is a long list of wrecked equipment — two more oven windows, three mixers and food processors, one internal fan. The oven has been shorting fuses lately. It’s getting harder, Mr. Varasano said, to make up stories for the oven repair guys.

As guests arrive, he engaged his one functional oven, and prayed. There was, in the room, the feeling of a happening, a kind of speakeasy anticipation as the oven’s temperature climbed.

Mr. Varasano was visibly nervous. If the oven were to break (again), he would pan-fry the 28 balls of dough he had been nursing for the past 16 hours into sugar-coated doughnuts.

The first pizza, mozzarella with basil, slid in and then out again in under three minutes. Over the next three hours, a dozen different pies slid on and off of Mr. Varasano’s peel, including a surprising arugula with lemon juice, a terrific clam pizza and a pie with oregano, black pepper and an elusive tanginess (the source of which was kept secret).

The oven overheated and shut down three times, the last outage lasting long enough to prompt doughnuts. It’s possible that it may join the other casualties of pizza, but there is something noble about sacrificing an appliance for one’s art. On his Web site, Mr. Varasano tells would-be pizzaioli that he’s not recommending they use their ovens this way. “Use this section with caution,” it reads, “i.e. no lawyers please.”

That warning may not be necessary. Mr. Varasano said: “I would say that one of the two or three most common comments I get is ‘Dude, I’d love to do that with my oven, but my wife would kill me.’ All the time.”

Freed from such personal restraints, Mr. Varasano has followed pizza-making to an abnormal level of compulsion.

Today, Mr. Varasano is hoping to translate his latest obsession into something more, by opening a pizza restaurant in Atlanta, perhaps as early as this fall. Whether his passion will survive the nightly grind of the restaurant business remains to be seen.

Chris Bianco, another ex-New Yorker, whose Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix is among the most acclaimed pizzerias in the country, said after reading the Web site that he could tell that Mr. Varasano was on the right track.

“I do like that he figured it out on his terms, and I honestly learned things the same way,” Mr. Bianco said. “I could train a monkey to make one good pizza, but I think it becomes an artisanal product when we are truly engaged in the process.”

DAY TWO NOLA

We slept with the windows open and wake to the sounds of the St. Charles Trolley passing. Today we will find the Indians.

We walked a couple of blocks from the hotel and had coffee and a bagel. Looked at our maps and decided the game plan. Last year we saw the Downtown Indians, this year we will try to see the Uptown Indians. The newspaper says both will be parading, but time and location details are sketchy.

We headed to Bayou St. John around 10:45. It’s only about a 10 minute drive and we arrive at the corner of Toulouse and Hagen Avenue. Home of the Parkway Bakery and Tavern. They open at 11. Perfect timing. We order two double Bloody Marys to go, you can do that in NOLA. These drinks are really good. Just the right amount of heat, olives and pickled string beans. Perfect. So, with Bloody Mary’s in hand we walk across the street to Bayou St. John. We don’t see any Indians or crowds of people, but it is a little early and we are not worried. Walking down the Bayou, people are kayaking, walking their dogs and just enjoying a beautiful morning.
We sit for a minute and a car stops and asks us “if we are waiting on the Indians’. We said yes and they said they were too, but saw no signs of them around and that they were going to head downtown to catch the other group. We decided the same thing.

We get in the car and drive across town - takes only a few minutes. Park in the same place we did last year. People are gathering. You can just feel something is happening.

Bought a beer at the neighborhood convenient store and started walking up the street. At one of the main intersections, lots of folks are gathering, pickup trucks selling food and drinks from the back. There is a Full bar of liquor in a green pick up truck.
















Can’t pass that up. Two shots of tequila and a couple of beers. We are just walking around looking at the sites and Stacey has to go to the bathroom. This neighborhood doesn’t have gas stations with bathrooms or port o lets for that matter. I tell her to follow me and that she’s gonna have to go behind a building. It’s Sunday and we are walking around the block and there is a small Community Church. Some members are sweeping and getting ready for services. I ask them if my wife can use their bathroom. They are very nice and let her. God bless them.

Back to the main intersection, another round of tequila and the Indians have started to arrive. Some are already in costumes, others are getting dressed. It is a family affair. The Chief, the scouts and spy boys. The colors are incredible.
















So we walk a few blocks with the Indians as more and more show up. The crowd is much larger then last year and there are a lot more Indians. One group of Indians decide to go a different route so we follow. Straight down the street, block after block making lots of noise. House after house folks come to the front porch to check them out. We spend about an hour or two walking with the Indians and decide we have had enough. We need food.

It’s a long way back to the car. We go looking for something to eat. We come across a little corner store with a sign that only says “FOOD”. That’s what we want so we stop and get more fried chicken, red beans and rice and biscuits. It was good food, but not as good and Man Chu.
Back to the room to eat as none of these hole in the wall joints have a place to sit and eat. We have a suite so it’s no problem. We eat and lay down for a minute thinking about a nap, but soon we realize we are in NOLA and not to sleep. We can sleep when we’re dead.

So Stacey put’s on a pretty purple dress and we head to the French Quarter. Sure the Quarter is all about tourism, but if you know where to go you can drink cheap and with the locals. We go to The Chart Room. Last year, our friend Harold took us to the Chart Room and we decided to go back. It’s a small hole in the wall bar with good music on the juke box and cheap drinks. The bartender, Will, is funny as hell. It’s not what he says so much as in his action. He tries to wait on three people at one time, while making drinks for another person. He fills all the drinks to the very top of the glasses and liquor spills out all over. He likes to toss mixing tools in the air, but doesn’t catch half of them. If he doesn’t like some song that people have selected from the juke box he turns down the volume and takes a vote of people that want to continue listening to a song. Says it’s a democracy and then selects another song. Funny. Some tourist from England start to leave and don’t tip. Well, Will the bartender follows them out to the street yelling at them the whole time “limey bastards don’t come back”. As Will takes his place behind the bar again he explains how he did that for all the other bartenders in the Quarter. He says where he used to tend bar he couldn’t do that, I think he’s getting even.

I met this guy that came and sat next to us at the bar. His name was Chris. Sometimes you meet someone and talk to them and it makes you feel like you missed out on something. When some guy sitting next to you at the bar tells you he quit his job as an architect, left Nashville and came to NOLA and helps run a soup kitchen it makes you think. It reminds of you how tied down you are to job’s and bills and house payments and such. Chris said he thought he would do a couple weeks at a soup kitchen, five months later he is still there and I run into him Sunday night, his only night off.

Well we need food again. The drinks are good, cold and cheap, but we need food. We had read about a new place, Cafe Adelaide and the Swizzle Stick Bar. It is one of Ti Brennan’s restaurants. She of the famous Brennan restaurant family. It is named after her mother and is in some big, fancy hotel. It’s a real shinny place and when we saw it we thought we had made a bad call. But, we took a seat at the bar which was empty and looked around the restaurant, which was empty and spoke with the bartender who seemed empty and we were sure we had made a mistake. So we thought one drink, a quick look at the menu and we were out of there. Well the menu looked great and we found out the bartender, a native of NOLA, was moving to Wisconsin soon. No wonder he was in a bad mood. Anyway we ate, boy did we eat. Check this out.
We had a Corn Dog. Well that’s what they called it. It was a large Shrimp wrapped in Tasso, skewered and deep fried. Served with Asian sauce. It was awesome.

Then we had Oysters Benville. Well that’s what they called it. It was fried oysters on a couple slices of french bread smothered in a creamy spinach sauce. It was awesome. Then we had Gumbo, well that’s what they called it and that’s what it was and it was awesome. Then we had Biscuits and Gravy. Well that’s what called it. It was a cat head biscuit split open with andouille sausage smothered with Foie gras gravy and it was awesome. We then had Shrimp Curry and it was okay, not as good as the other dishes, but it didn’t suck. Then I went to the kitchen and applauded the kitchen crew. They liked that I think. There were only three of them and the chef had been carrying the food out to the bar himself. He told me they had sent all the help home cause it was so slow. I guess the word was not out yet cause this was very good food.

Then we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Amen.