What the heck is jicama?

A second ode to my favorite united state to visit…Tennessee.  With a third travel season under my belt, I have once again managed to drive through Tennessee just as the leaves are beginning to change, the cool breezes are rolling in, and the Vols fans are coming out of the woodwork.  Now, football fun aside, I come to see the students, and enjoy the food.  I’ll include as many pictures as I can!  Working my way west back east, this trip concludes with Chattanooga.

Chattanooga has a compact downtown area, with a mix of franchises and local enterprises.  One of the first gems I discovered in the fall of 2010 is nestled right down the street from the Tennessee Aquarium.  By the way, a trip to the Tennessee Aquarium is an afternoon well spent.  The displays and exhibits have a good balance of kid friendly entertainment, but I still felt like an adult that learned something from a trip, too.  Back to food - Thai Smile 3 was a gem of a find.  There are few dishes that basil can ruin, which is why I order the spicy basil noodles each time I go.  The server always asks about the desired heat level on a scale of 1-6.  I have yet to make it past 4!  With a hearty helping of spice, I can never finish the whole dish.  I’ve been known to take the leftovers back to the hotel, and eat the cold leftovers for breakfast.  It sure beats cold pizza!

Next up, I enjoy getting coffee or tea at Greyfriar’s Coffee and Tea Co. on Broad Street.   Nobody makes oolong tea taste better!  Usually, I make a pit stop here on the morning before I head up Signal Mountain for college fairs.  

On the way down the mountain, I have to stop at Petunia’s Silver Jalepeno for lunch.  The owners had a vision of a fish taco stand long before the nationwide food truck craze.  They went with a different version - a food Airstream trailer!  It’s a silver bullet on the side of the road that serves up a decent veggie burger, and fantastic fish tacos with just the right amount of pepper sauce and relish.  

 Any trip on the road is not complete without the local pizza place.  Everyone who is anyone knows that Ingleside Village Pizza in Macon is pretty hard to beat, but I may have found a close second.  Lupi’s has a lengthy selection of classic, fresh ingredients with which to build a pie you can write home about.  And, best of all, Lupi’s is a participating restaurant of the Harvested Here network.  Part of the Gaining Ground movement in Chattanooga, surrounding counties, and parts of north Georgia, it’s a foundation that promotes and supports local growers, and encourages local restaurants, chefs and schools to provide healthy eating options within 100 miles.

Memphis has too many fun places to eat!  One of my favorite stops was McEwens downtown.  Last year when I dined there, I was sadly not the proud owner of an iphone.  I have no delicious pictures!  However, the Sweet Potato Crusted Catfish is a southern girl’s dream dinner.  Topped with creole honey mustard and laid to rest with sides of wicked good mac and cheese and braised collard greens, this could easily be my last meal request.  I would only ask that my mother’s squash casserole and rice and tomatoes be considered dessert.  

A stone’s throw away stands the impressive, historic Peabody Hotel.  I was only able to afford a drink in the lobby bar, but I was in town in time to watch the Duck March!  A time honored tradition, the North American mallard ducks ride the elevator down from the rooftop Royal Duck Palace to the lobby each morning and afternoon, parade through the people, and take a splash in the lobby fountain.  Too cute for words!

Heading east to Nashville is not only a very pretty drive, but a journey of anticipation.  Nashville, specifically the East Nashville neighborhood, is home to my two favorite stops during travel season.  Lunch at The Silly Goose is never disappointing.  My Frisby Sandwich on flax seed bread had a tangy, grilled portobello mushroom, walnut pesto with kalamata olives, sun dried tomatoes and thomme cheese.  I had a sweet and refreshing glass of basil lemonade right from a jelly jar.  I love the Goose’s decor.  Most of the rustic tables are for communal seating, and my silverware (real silver) comes wrapped in a bright red bandanna atop the menu on a clipboard.  The back of the menu has a map of Tennessee and pin points all of the local farms that the Goose supports within 150 miles of Nashville.    

Although I know I’m sweet enough, I usually need a little sugar to finish the meal. Next door, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams serves up the most unique flavors imaginable.  Thanks, Kaylan, for recommending it.  Now, I can’t openly admit how many times I have frequented this establishment, especially when some trips have infringed on my Admission duties….  I think that would constitute the creation of Ice Screamers Anonymous.  Yes, I have tried all the flavors.  They make you, really.  You can’t in good conscience choose a duo or a trio of goodness without knowing what they all taste like.  You can’t know for certain that the Sweet Corn and Raspberry goes well with the Bangkok Peanut, or the Pistachio and Honey plays nicely with the Goat Cheese and Red Cherry until they skip double dutch on your tongue.  You may think that the Ugandan Vanilla Bean is just another vanilla.  Au contraire, mon fraire.  Tis false, this assumption.  It’s better than vanilla.  Here are my top three combinations. 

Cherry Lambic Sorbet / Queen City Cayenne / Ugandan Vanilla Bean

Riesling Poached Pear Sorbet / Wildberry Lavender / Lime Cardamom Sorbet

Holiday Collection 2011…

Sadly, I’m stuck in Macon for the Holiday 2012 unveiling.  But I’ll be back in the saddle this summer.  I need to visit Mas Tacos and a few other tasty places.  And if you, the reader, are there without me, please report back!  

One of favorite things about being female is my industrious nature.  Sure, I enjoy the occasional weekend spent catching up on my Netflix, but most of the time I would rather be doing something productive.  With the summer closing out, and fall settling in, visions of changing leaves, harvests and pumpkins come rushing in.  While some go crazy over football and tailgating, I go crazy for fall gardens.  I’ve had to settle for apartment patio plants for a few years, and must get my gardening fix in my mom’s backyard!  I like to think of it as perfecting my technique before my husband and I get a backyard of our own.  Team colors like green and yellow, red and black, and orange and blue make the adrenaline rush for some.  My greens and yellows are of the swiss chard and winter squash variety, with red beets, black seeded simpson lettuce, and cute little carrots to complete the team roster.  

Last weekend marked one of the final opportunities to plant seeds for a 30 to 75 day harvest window in middle Georgia.  For the past few years, the area just over the edge of the brick patio has been the compost ground.  The graveyard of egg shells, coffee grounds, vegetable peelings from every stir fry, and stale bread has been the birth place of countless earth worms in free food heaven. This summer the backyard goal was to fence in the free range chicken coop so the little ladies don’t lay eggs all over the place.  The hens still have plenty of roaming space, about 1/4 of the yard, leaving another small plot for a 10x10 garden.  This may seem small, but it is a significant amount of space for a vegetable cornucopia.  

It only took about an hour to prepare the ground.  With a shovel, Mom and I marked out the square boundary, making sure to leave a path on each side from which to harvest.  Each packet of seeds only needed a half to a full inch of soil for planting, so digging up the square garden did not take too long.  Tilling the soil to break up large clumps, and ridding it of rocks took up most of the time.  Once well tilled, we used a broom handle (resourceful, eh? who needs a trowel) to draw rows into the plot.  This was reminiscent of cutting into a huge brownie pan!  Then we began dropping seeds.  Drop, cover lightly, water, repeat.  Had it taken too much longer, it would have been terribly back breaking work, which really makes me appreciate the fact that I don’t have to manage huge acres of farmland by hand!  One week later, you can almost see the first two rows of lettuce breaking ground and sprouting!

Without getting too spiritual on you, gardening provides a remarkable sense of connection with the earth.  Joel Salatin, a very outspoken advocate of the “slow food” movement, says “How dare you treat your soil like dirt!”.  How dare you not put an incredible amount of effort into nurturing something that benefits you and whomever you share it with.  It’s creation and care, humility, patience and love.  Aren’t those written somewhere?  As mentioned in a previous entry, I do consider food an important part of communion and community.  Imagine if the world leaders got together over a good potluck.  Do you think the G8 and UN could run a little smoother on a full stomach of culturally rich casseroles?   

Now, we wait.  And wait.  And weed.  And weed and weed some more.  But then one weekend, we’ll get to harvest.  Whatever will we do with so many vegetables?   You tell me.  What’s your favorite salad recipe, or what do you like to do with carrots, beets, swiss chard, peas, etc.?  Kaylan, I know I’ll be making a batch of your beet burgers!  Give me some ideas here!  And go out and grow something.  Start small if you still think you have a pale green thumb.  A houseplant is a good start and lettuce is pretty hardy, so it shouldn’t let you down.  

A month between updates went by entirely too fast!  I said I would write a blog, not consistently write a blog…  I will do better.  Wesleyan College is working on an Admissions blog, and a key component will be polling prospective students regarding their favorite places to eat in their cities that the Admission Counselors will visit.  Sweet.  Keep your eyes peeled for that one!  That should pretty much force me to stay on top of my internet presence.

Back to business, and how to mix business with pleasure.  As a college fair traveler, it can be very lonely on the road.  One easy fix is to find fun places to eat.  Fast food gets old, well, fast.  Any decent sized city should offer local fare, whole in the wall gems, and unique joints that you can’t find at home.  Welcome to Athens, little grasshoppers.  Since most people don’t know where Watkinsville is, I usually call Athens home by default.  Although, I don’t claim UGA as the home team.  Woof.  Traveling to Athens for work can easily turn into a foodie’s fun house.  With Annabel in tow, let the misadventures begin!

Our first stop for lunch was Chango’s Noodle House, where we devoured enormous steaming bowls of miso soup, as well as veggie spring rolls and fuzzy edamame.  This is a favorite stop of mine in Athens.  It’s a communal style seating room where people gather for just about any occasion.  All of the noodle bowls are great, and can be made with tofu upon request.  My two other favorite dishes are Spicy Thai Basil and Garlic Eggplant.  

Checking in at the Hotel Indigo was a snap, and I returned a few weeks later to stay again for my high school reunion weekend.  The Madison Bar and Bistro offered a great dinner menu that was very reasonably priced for the basic traveler.  If you’re looking for a “green” place to stay with plenty of modern flare, it’s a very hip choice.  Annabel chose the Southern classic shrimp and grits, with a side of iphone.  I nearly drank every last drop of the curried zucchini soup special.  

Our next luncheon out was with a few near and dear Alumnae at the Last Resort Grill.  Another staple of the Downtown dining scene, LRG is always bustling, and always delicious.  Offering fried green tomatos, sweet potato pasta, the veggie grill, and homemade desserts…to quote Reverend Lovejoy regarding the Bible - “It’s all good”.

Dinnertime again?  For the most best meal, we suited up for Ted’s Most Best.  Growing up, I remember this joint as a downtown Michelin tire shop and repair garage.  Well, the Michelin sign is still there, but the garage area and front sidewalk have been converted into patio seating for the pizza goers.  Huge criss-crossing country Christmas bulbs, a rosemary and wild flower garden, and a bright green sign all indicate you’ve arrived at Ted’s.  For $15 Annabel and I split the White Rabbit pizza with artichoke, arugula, bell peppers, onions and bechamel sauce.  I also hummed aloud as I nibbled on a spinach and golden beet salad, my favorite food.

Finally, you can’t leave town without an obligatory breakfast, not necessarily during the breakfast hours, at The Grill.  24 hours of food, all day, every day.  The menu is too extensive to highlight here.  Just go.  Eat breakfast, or a burger, or apple pie since you can’t go wrong.  To start your day, or sober up, the booths are comfortable just the same.  You stay classy, The Grill.  See you next time. 

After too many afternoons trapped in the office, I finally took a late lunch and made it to the Mulberry Market downtown.  Sponsored by Community Health Works, the Market is a grass roots initiative to provide better food access and education about wellness to the community.  Seeing rows and rows of fresh produce and baked goods was a welcome sight for a hungry shopper.

I planned on preparing a meal made with ingredients that came from less than 100 miles away from home, except for the chili sauce and beer.  Sorry, but I couldn’t do a home brew, and next summer after canning tomatoes, I’ll try my hand at chili sauce.  For now, I’ll have to settle for Heinz.  This ridiculously easy recipe came from Andrew’s grandmother, Gama, who loved her beer roast and Braves baseball.  

After almost a year of veggie fare, grass fed beef from Rockingchair Ranch in Bolingbroke, Georgia, is back on the menu.  With a chuck roast in hand, along with a small bag of onions and red fin and yellow fingerling potatoes from Gray, and carrots from Dublin, I set off for home to cook dinner.  To me, roast and veggies is the quintessential Sunday dinner, a classic comfort food dish that needs no twists or changes.  Plus, I find chopping veggies very therapeutic, so any excuse to do that is a welcome change of pace.

If you have a Le Creuset slow cooker, you’re job is very easy.  Pour one bottle of Heinz chili sauce along with one beer of choice in the pot and gently whisk together.  I love the bubbles!  Add a cup of water or vegetable broth to make sure there is plenty of liquid to cover the veggies and meat.  When you add the salt and pepper (to taste) the bubbles go crazy!  I’m also partial to adding a few chopped cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of cumin, as well as a tablespoon or two of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomato in the sauce.  

Next, add your chopped veggies, and add celery or fennel or turnips for more crispy things if you like.  Finally, season the outside of the chuck roast with salt and pepper and pan sear for a few minutes on each side to seal in the juices.  Place gently in the pot.  In a 350 degree oven, cook the dish for 1 hour per pound of meat.  Then, remove from the oven and let it sit for about 30 minutes before serving.  Whoa.  I like to serve it over rice, but it also does well on its own.  Once you have devoured all of the meat and veggies, the remaining sauce freezes well as a starter for your next batch of soup.  

Enjoy your “locavore” fare - support your local farmers’ market and buy local produce when you can.  Trust me, anything that comes from a good backyard garden tastes better than the grocery store version shipped across the country or a continent.  Heirloom tomatoes, skinny carrots with those cute little fronds, squiggly eggplants and potatoes with some good ole Georgia clay stuck on ‘em, make for a most delicious meal that can’t be replicated!

One of our greatest blessings is the ability to enjoy acts of simplicity.  Sure, our overactive social media’d brains appear to prefer thousands of neurons firing every second.  In fact, our brains need a bit of recovery time, and sometimes it comes when we least expect it.

My recent vacation trip to western New York is my new standard of relaxing.  Knowing I would need a few days of leave after traveling with my boss, I planned a trip to see a dear friend, spend precious days away from the hustle and bustle of the office (still checking email, of course), and enjoy life at a slower pace.  And Kaylan’s house was the place to be.  Although she is in the midst of her own hurry to have a baby, her home has retained a calm, and even in her preparation, great care has been taken to preserve a spirit of quiet.

Sunday is a day that can easily turn into a scramble.  The hustle to get ready for Monday, and the hours spent completing everything you neglected on Saturday, usually make the weekend fly by in those precious hours before The Simpsons.  But our Sunday scramble was filled with laughter and family cooking - my two favorite things!  Our simple lunch of pretzels, almond butter, carrots, apples, bread with cheese and thinly sliced radishes was an invigorating start to an afternoon of preparing beet burgers, calzones and mac and cheese.  If you’ve never given a radish a chance, this is a good introduction.  These little red gems are deliciously crunchy when thinly sliced and eaten raw on top of salad greens or bread with cheese.  Trust me, try it.

I can’t complain about a single meal.  And yes, I will count our endless supply of Sour Patch Kids as a meal!  We enjoyed black bean cakes with chipotle corn sauce, beet burgers, Indian food with homemade paneer, mockaritas and ridiculously good peanut butter ice cream with chocolate sauce.  Each meal was eaten with the knowledge that we had spent a fulfilling day despite some rainy weather.  Seeing Houghton in the spring was a taste of lush farmland and late dogwood blooms.  There’s plenty more to do in New York than just see the city. 

On my last day, we shared a picnic in Highland Park in Rochester.  Among the raisins and almonds, the meat of the meal was bread and cheese.  I could not ignore the feeling that we were sharing communion, a thanksgiving in the park for friendship and memories, a vivid reliving of our time spent together.  Such simple food triggered a complex emotional experience.  At least, those were the neurons that my brain was firing, and it was an unexpected thrill that could only have been experienced in that moment.  

Not only did I instantly relive my time with Kaylan, but I remembered the weeks I spent hiking the Camino de Santiago with my mother.  Most days, our snack or lunch on the trail was made up of bread, cheese, maybe jamon serrano, a smoked sliced ham that we were very tired of after 6 weeks.  Dried fruit and a few pieces of chocolate with hazelnuts or almonds gave us the sugar boost we needed to soldier on.  Stopping on a hillside, or under the shade of a tree to break bread allowed us to intimately experience our environment, and make sacred memories of our trip.  Don’t worry, I’m working on a longer blog for these stories.  And Peru!  Oh, the food of Peru!

Let that smell of a familiar meal bring on a wave of memory, or enjoy your surroundings whether alone or with friends or family.  Food is a sacrament and eating creates community.  If you take that knowledge to every meal, however simple, be prepared to gain perspective. 

Spring has sprung, and it’s time for backyard chickens!  

One of the perks of having backyard chickens is, of course, having fresh eggs.  Sure, you can buy organic, free range, grain fed eggs at the grocery store.  And with all that baking I’m about to do, I have to on occasion.  They’re edible, but nothing tastes like a backyard egg.  Home raised, fresh eggs have less cholesterol, less saturated fat, and more vitamin A, beta carotene and omega 3.  And I really know that they are from free range, grain (and veggie scrap) fed, organic raised chickens.  How?  Because I see them and help feed them on occasion, and know they have a happy life. 

Mom has been the hen in charge of all the research, and this year she decided to go with Australorps.  This breed was developed post World War II in Australia (hence the Austral) and bred with Black Orpingtons from England.  This breed is best known for high egg production and meat.  An Australorp has set the record for laying 364 eggs in 365 days.  Math : 24 chicks x 1 egg a day = a lot of cakes to bake, custards to cool and deviled eggs to devour!  

The chicks were adorable little balls of fluff, and the teenagers are have developed black feathers with a dark green sheen in the sun.  Mom says that this sassy lady will sit in her lap or perch on her shoulder.  She is also partial to eating from your hand.  When most of the other chickens flutter away with the rest of the herd, she is strutting off on her own.  A liberated chic if you ask me!  Does this sound too much like a personal ad?  I’m taking name suggestions….

Not really, but I can pretend.  One of my favorite times of year is the 10 days of Macon’s International Cherry Blossom Festival.  Over 300,000 Yoshino cherry trees are beautiful in bloom, and they make a spectacle of the city of Macon.  

To celebrate the wonderful blooms, our office had a Hanami picnic under the trees on the lawn.  Hanami means “flower viewing”, and is a traditional spring custom in Japan. According to Danielle, our resident Japonesa ;), she says it’s perfectly normal to see everyone from mothers to business men enjoying a picnic lunch and beer under the trees around town during the blooming season.  How fun!

Our office Hanami included take out from Sushi Love and dessert in the form of mochi.  Mochi is a small square dessert made of glutinous rice with a sweet filling of mild flavor.  Last year I was brave enough to try the red bean paste, so this year I attempted a green tea.  It has a very interesting texture, very gummy and chewy!  Annabel is holding up the box of mochi in Danielle’s video.

Talkin’ ‘bout cupcakes!  Little cakes that keep you from eating a whole cake, but not necessarily from eating the whole dozen.

As yet another kick start to the Cherry Blossom Festival, Annabel, Amy and I scooted downtown for some free baked heaven.  Amanda’s Cakery gave away free cupcakes for an hour this morning to those willing to wait on the rapidly warming sidewalk.  And boy, was it worth it.  See almond pound cake with vanilla butter cream below…oh yeah.  Pound cake cupcakes are most delicious, and butter cream icing is pretty hard to mess up.  Bon Appetit has a rock solid recipe for sour cream pound cake cupcakes which has yet to fail me.  

One of my favorite things about butter cream icing (other than butter and sugar), is that you can flavor and color it to your heart’s desire.  Extract is a good introductory option, but you can also use a few tablespoons of squeezed juice, or a few tablespoons of zest and get a great fresh effect, too.  One of my best attempts was sour cream pound cake cupcakes with kumquat icing.  What the heck is a kumquat, you ask?

Kumquats are the little golden gems of the citrus family.  You can eat the fruit inside, but you have to take out the little green seeds.  To me, the guts are not so good as they are a good bit more sour than the skins.  The skins are great for a citrus zest or juice.  Or you can chop them and mix with whipped cream, dump it in a graham cracker crust and have a poor man’s pie!  The flavor is very distinctive - it definitely has the bite of citrus, and a hint of sweet, but it’s almost musky compared to an orange or a lemon.  Your icing and batter options are endless.  Much like what to pair with your budino, you can add fruit, herbs, or a combo of both to make a signature creation.  

  Amanda’s Cakery and Hello There Cupcake are offering Cherry Blossom specialty creations.  Hello There is another of my favorite sweet spots in town.  They make a mean Heavenly Chocolate, Funky Monkey, Chai Spice, and Carrot Cake - my absolute favorite.

Okay, kids, go out and satisfy that inner child of yours.  Eat some cupcakes!