heavy metal.

Nostalgia and drinking continues unabated. Saturday we spent the afternoon and, well, most of the evening at another old old fave in Little Five Points, the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club, which began with huge deadly shots of tequila, followed by a petite but nicely varied selection of beers, and finished with some surprisingly way above-average BBQ. The pulled pork sandwich and Brunswick stew (sort of pictured below) were really the most satisfying I've had so far this trip (notice I'm not saying "best"), and on that scale I have to give it a 8.5/10.0, which includes a massive margin of error given the probable tequila skew.

Then, our judgement began (or continued) to fail, and we went to Metalsome Karaoke for the second night in a row. This was not a problem in itself: Metalsome is a live band karaoke situation that is not really like anything you've ever seen before. The judgement failure involved more tequila. Totally too much fun, and ouch are we paying for it today.

hotness.

This is the thermometer outside, it's hung in the shade of an old stone fireplace in the backyard. I took three pictures of it just now, one after the other, and from the time I took the first one to the time I took the third one, the temperature went up one degree to 93°F. That's 34°C to you People Over There. And it's only noon. Yesterday it was a good bit hotter.

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Below: we're staying at a friend's house, which is a stone's throw from where Mara and I lived 14 years ago when we lived downtown, so we're surrounded by many of the places we used to go back in those historic times of our first "dating" experiments.

This morning I went across the street to pick up some breakfast and coffee from Alon's, which used to "only" make the best croissants and pastries in town. They've now blossomed into a full-service gourmet grocery with multiple branches, but luckily they still make my old favorite, the poppyseed-raisin danish.



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Yesterday was our first day down here, and we walked and walked and walked, and sweated and sweated and sweated.

As it got later in the day and passing motorists switched from air-conditioning to rolled-down windows, we were treated to a twilight Dopplerized medley of Michael Jackson's greatest hits: probably half the cars on the road were simultaneously listening to different extracts from the King of Pop's pre-HIStory catalog.

time machine.

I recently posted about a bar where I spent most of my twenties. I forgot about the bar where I spent the other half of my twenties. This would be the Highland Tap. Primary attractions? Subterranean windowlessness; sleazy crimson gentlemen's club decor; frosty-cold Sierra Nevada; even-colder martinis with big gorgeous olives; excellent burgers. You really can't tell how big this blue cheese burger is from this photo b/c the onion rings are also humongous, there's no way to get a sense of scale. Trust me, it was big: Mara and I split this.

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stuffed.

Tonight: chiles rellenos con camarones y queso affumicato. Or the same thing in accurate Spanish. Plus a salad with Homesick Texan's buttermilk dressing, otherwise known as "ranch dressing". Above, we see the peppers being blackened so their skins can be (hopefully) slid off.













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my brothers.

Today I once again found myself hungry and directly in front of a BBQ place.

Coincidence? Not wholly. Since I
knew
thought I was going to be tasting some purportedly-good BBQ in the next few days, I figured I would create a control by tasting the BBQ I've eaten the most of, Williamson Bros. The historical reason for this spectacular devotion is one-fold: Williamson Bros. is about 1 minute away from our old house.

In brief, let me say that, as with Sonny's, something has changed. Though in this case I fear it may be my palate (a lot can happen in 10 years). The best thing I can say about my BBQ pork platter is that it met the needs of my BBQ craving. Their sauce isn't bad, and though the pork itself was dry, it was real BBQ. My choice of sides (fried okra and cole slaw) warranted a couple of bites each and that was it. My official rating is a 6.5/10.0: worth the 1-minute drive, but any further and I could easily have been disappointed.

the secret life of plans.

Time is flying, we're trying to manage some sort of balance between doing things and not doing things, and there's a pronounced lack of focus at the moment. For reference's sake, here are some relevant food things it probably makes sense to do:

• Taco Truck in our hood (a tip from The Blissful Glutton)...
• We're going to be spending an evening next door to DBA Barbecue, so a visit seems inevitable, but based on popular opinion we should maybe hit Fox Bros. for comparison...I don't forsee time for a Daddy D'z trip, but I've eaten there enough as it is...
  
• Kind of interested in this...
  
• Chat Patti was just great when I went last year, and their bhel puri is calling to me...(Blissful Glutton review here)
• I'm really afraid/hoping that Saturday night has us ending up here.

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Pictured: the first tomatoes of the year from the Tomanek garden. As well as cucumbers #475-479.

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saturday night.

Understandably, Saturday began with some Hammock Time. Followed by some White Sangria Time, some Sierra Nevada Time, and eventually some Paella Time. And then of course some Playing Until 5am Time. The cumulative effects of which completely negated the positive effects of the original Hammock Time.

durian day one.

Friday began innocently enough, with an admirably responsible number of beers at Charlie Mopps, which will always be known to us as Taco Mac, because back when it was called that, we were some of their most regular customers of all time, personalized mugs, brass nameplates on the bar, etc.

It's easy to see how it happened: for eight years Taco Mac was right down the road from our office, they had 300+ beers to choose from, and so understandably this is the bar where I spent most of my twenties, and where much personal drama occurred, but almost exclusively the good kind. Here's kind of what it used to look like:

















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Returning to The Present: For some reason, after successfully reaching the idyllic back porch, manly amounts of Scotch were consumed by some members of our party. By 9pm Steve's Panamanian wife Mary had whipped up something I'm pretty sure she can make in her sleep, pollo asada with black beans and rice (eaten with generous pours from a bottle of habanero sauce), and then we spent the next couple of hours trying to revive a miscalibrated Steve (bottom left), miraculously succeeding around 1am and then playing for several hours, until we were all quite miscalibrated.

eight seconds later.

Add to this one cup of hot coffee, and you have a Breakfast of Champions. Though it was more like 10 or 11 seconds with our microwave.

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cosa nostra.

If this is supposed to be some kind of summer break, I'm failing miserably. Could we please bring on the quiet time?

I'm quite far behind on posting pictures, but please bear with me: I just got back from a Weekend With The Boys, and you probably know what those are like.

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So, skip ahead to tonight: pictured above is a relatively imposing-looking posse that I am somehow related to. We have a Big Adventure planned for this coming weekend in which we are all going to get dressed up and wreak havoc upon yet another cousin who is the bar manager of a "hot" "club" downtown. I imagine that once all of us sizable dudes are all dolled up we will look like not much more than Mara's security team.

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Tonight, however, we were all about cooking. Chris (above left) is an actual chef, and he made seared scallops with a beurre blanc and a pomegranate reduction, served with a pretty perfect salad: arugula, bacon, cherry tomatoes, and a truffle vinaigrette. Mara and I made Chinese pork ribs, red food coloring and all, from this Saveur recipe, our only modification being a halving of the hoisin sauce, but in retrospect I think the original recipe may have been a better idea.

the good side.

The semi-mangled piece of BBQed chicken in this picture is not really the point. The point is the corn salad directly north. I could eat this all day. It's from a now-gone restaurant (or perhaps there was more than one?) called Stringer's Fish Camp, that used to specialize in fried fish and this awesome side dish. This recipe comes from here, below is my slight modification/Europeanization.

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stringers corn salad.

1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup sour cream or crème fraîche
1 to 3 tbsp cider vinegar, depending on your vinegar and your corn
2 biggish (400gr?) cans of corn, drained
1/2 cup minced sweet onion
1 jalapeno or other hot green chile (Holland or Thai would be fine), seeded and minced
salt and pepper to taste

Combine and chill for an hour before serving. Serves 4 I would imagine.

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back on buford.

Finally had banh mi today, and, well...I've got some good news and some bad news. Actually they're both the same news: it's a nice sandwich, but I'll take a broodje pom hands down, any day of the week, etc. I really don't think it's that I had a bad one (or two)...I'm pretty sure I get how it works. It's just really no competition for Amsterdam's Indo-Surinamese sandwich trade. Sorry!

alligator, mole.

More detail to come, but for now: what we have here is a pretty OK Gator Taco, a not-so-great Cajun Egg Roll, and a perfectly delicious Abita Turbodog from AJ's (we just wanted a tiny bit of food, and these were the smallest things on the menu...turns out they were also the least impressive things we've eaten there).

Then a few hours later we made a series of small plates for the family dinner: some Monterey Jack and mole quesadillas (yes, mole from a jar); some shrimp satays with peanut sauce + some of those reliable quick Surinamese pickles (because there we are overwhelmed with cucumbers from the garden), plus a watermelon-feta-mint-balsamic salad that I've been wanting to make for a long time, very good.

Sorry for the oversaturated photos, I'm not using my computer, and the image-tweaking software I'm currently using has no patience for my normal shenanigans. It's also a Mac keyboard, and so my typing isn't what it should be. Typos abound.

q.

So, we're in Atlanta, staying with Mara's parents in the house that used to be "ours" (and in fact still feels pretty much like "ours" because almost nothing has changed about it: same old billiards table, same old couches and beds, same old custom-osity of furniture, same old creative room-to-room paint jobs, ect ect ect).

A side effect of this is that, for better or worse, we are in our old stomping grounds: by car, there are only a couple of ways in and out of this neck of the woods, and each of them involves passing one or more nostalgic landmarks. Today's case in point: Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q.

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If you're looking for guitar strings in East Cobb these days, your options are few and far between: I headed down to the Big Chicken, turned south on Highway 41 (yes, that Highway 41), and was looking for the now-defunct MARS Music (which I then remembered had already been gone the last time I looked for it) when I realized that A) I was hungry, and B) I was right in front of Sonny's.

Now, if you're a real BBQ person you'll cringe at this, but I used to eat at Sonny's all the damn time back in the 1990s. I knew that it wasn't the best BBQ in the world, but it was right on my way home from work, that's the only excuse I can offer.

After reading tons of negative reviews about Sonny's on the Google wire, I have some disturbing news: I think it used to be worse than it is now. In fact, I think I'm happy to report that either it has improved significantly or I have been so unbelievably BBQ-deprived for the last 7 or 8 years that I am under the illusion that it has improved significantly, either of which is fine by me. Today I had a pulled pork sandwich with their new hot sauce, which I thought was a solid improvement over what I remembered (if you click on the bottom picture you can check out the list of highly unnatural ingredients).

This sauce compels me to highlight the fact that Sonny's is a chain, and their BBQ sauces are very obviously not the result of some grizzled old pitmaster hunkering down over a hot stove, tweaking his decades-old recipe into perfection: these sauces are straight from the laboratory. Nonetheless, considering my recent lack of BBQ, this was a satisfying sandwich experience overall.

I'm planning a few more BBQ excursions while I 'm here: since Mara is ostensibly on a Pork Hiatus, I've got to get some pig somehows. So for the sake of comparison, I'll call this pulled pork sandwich a good, solid 6.0/10.0, with the strong caveat that this is my first BBQ sandwich in a long time: absence has almost definitely made my heart grow fonder.

noodlehat, cups.

Above: five years ago I would've stolen this hat from Big Dog. Below: why don't we have these in Amsterdam?

welcome to scimmieland.

Bet you're wondering what happened to me, or maybe you're not. I'm guessing you're about to find out regardless: I'm in America.

One of many reasons that I haven't been blogging is that my visit here was a surprise to a few of the primary recipients of my presence, and I was very afraid that I would blow the surprise.

But now I'm here and can blow any surprises I want to, which I will begin doing imminently. Until that shining moment, I shall pepper the hypothetical you with random fun facts from the last 2 months of my life. Here goes:

1) I believe I have exhausted Facebook's ability to hook me up with my friends. When I go to "Suggestions" now (the feature that suggests people that you should probably be friends with), the only people left are people that I actively avoid in social situations. Clicking on the "Suggestions" button is a little bit like a terrible nightmare, or like a gig I went to a couple weeks ago where all of these UnFriends were in attendance and I spent most of my time hiding behind a large ornate column. Not really, but I wanted to hide behind a large ornate column. BTW, posts like this are the reason that I won't be hooking this blog up to Facebook anytime soon.

2) Monday morning I awoke to find a large black dead dog in my hallway. No blood, no one else around, just me, my full bladder, and Death. This is no way to start one's day. As I explained to Klary in email shortly thereafter, my next moves were to A) go back into my room and then go back into the hall a couple of times to make sure that the dog was truly dead, which it was. And then B) begin to stress out because my brand-new catsitter (who I've just met for the first time a few days ago) was showing up for duty in less than 24 hours, and, really, how do you explain any kind of large dead animal sitting outside your apartment door? "Oh don't bother feeding that one, hahahahahahhaha"? Long story short, the answers to your unasked questions are: the neighbor; epilepsy; shortly thereafter; I don't know.

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out in the streets.

Start the presses: I'm planning to go out to dinner, finally hitting Fenan Klein Afrika on Thursday with a whole pile-up of homies.

Other than that, no plans for forseeable future, and that sounds great.

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REVIEWETTE: I thought the food at Fenan was sufficiently interesting, diverse, and inexpensive to easily warrant one or more return visits. Certainly one of the better Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant meals I've had, primarily due to the distinctive spicing across a range of 10 or 12 dishes: nothing really tasted like anything else on the (large) plate. And as always seems to be the case at Ethiopian places: lovely people.

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wankie? yanked.

I think that this last little while here can be called the longest unscheduled VDuck outage in history. Several intriguing forces combined in a sort of Perfect Storm of blogging demotivation, and I was cast as the Andrea Gail. But, you know, in a significantly less deadly or even dramatic way.

So, yes: the theatre/er experience speedboat left me spinning in its wake, and it took some time to get used to the placid pace of "normal life" again. Still not there yet: this little duckling's eye continues to scan the horizon for a glimpse of the receding speedboat speck as it continues to speed on its merry speeding way, speedily...

I obviously haven't written in some time, bear with me.

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The summery glimpse we opened with is the kind of weather that I was talking about in my last post: a perfectly sunny, breezy 70F that made you want to be outside all day. Sadly, those days are gone, which makes total sense because well, now I have a few weeks off.

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Above: Pacific Parc. I actually had a nice time there a week or so ago...the service problems that made it such a drag before seem to have been totally cleared up.

EDIT: totally not true. Went back with Klary and Dennis and experienced the good ol' comedy of errors that is their trademark. And Klary had the worst-looking tosti I've ever seen.

And below: This is the view from our window onto the street where a departing Sweet Mooperbird heads off to Omerica for a month. That's the bad news. The good news is: she is going to send us some pictures.

More in a bit.

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