Food notes and restaurants revisited – Fini’s Pizzeria, Lawrenceville GA and Haru Ichiban, Duluth GA.

My wife has taken a fancy to Fini’s Sicilian style pizzas and we’ve been there twice in recent days.This preference, of course, is expressing itself right in the height of the Antico pizza craze. Fini’s is just world’s closer, and it’s a place the family knows.  Drive to Highway 29, head up Lawrenceville Highway to Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road, turn left and eventually, Fini’s is on your right. Couldn’t be simpler.

Fini's Sicilian slice. Crisp bottom, chewy crust, and delicious.

On one Sunday we tried to go to Fini’s and it was closed, so turning around the choices in the car were Umaido or Haru Ichiban. Haru ended up winning, and we went there. The menu at Haru Ichiban has changed since my last review. Robata grill items have been added, the special tuna combination is gone. It was a quiet Sunday and we were the last serious table to arrive. My daughter and my wife ordered udon. I ordered miso cod and grilled pike mackerel and my mother-in-law ordered salmon of some kind. We had chirashi sushi as a side. My mother-in-law’s chopsticks (back sides of them, as in FB’s cartoon) were in the chirashi routinely. Her comment, over and over again, was “oishii.”

chirashi sushi from Haru Ichiban.

By the time our fish dishes were on the table, the salmon was gone, to be replaced with pike mackerel and my dish was given to my mother-in-law. We were half way through the fish before either of us noticed. We must have been hungry. I got a piece of the miso cod before it completely went away and it was the best thing I had that day, melt in your mouth tender, miso flavor permeating the fish. The pike was good, though the white flesh along the back and sides was the best part of the animal.

nabekayi udon, in an iron pot.

grilled pike mackerel, or pacific saury; sanma in Japanese, kongchi in Korean.

Grilled foods. Miso cod and pike mackerel

I dropped by Buford Highway Farmer’s Market recently to look for Sichuan peppercorns and found, to my surprise, green mangos. I tried to call my wife but that didn’t work. I went ahead and bought a few. I knew she’d find a use for them. As for the Sichuan peppercorns, it looks as if they call them “red pepper corn” in BHFM, and they are currently on the lowest shelf in the Chinese section of the market, reasonably near the black and white peppers. So a question: I bought a pepper mill, to grind the Sichuan peppercorns. Is that how this spice is used?

Green mangos and Sichuan peppercorns.

My copy of “Izakaya: the Japanese Pub Cookbook” has arrived. I’ve only had a chance to glance at it, not really read it thoroughly. The izakaya scene in Japan, and for that matter, in Los Angeles (also here) and New York, is remarkably diverse and trying to categorise the izakaya as a single thing or a single model, as some people have done, is a bit like saying there can only be one kind of pub. When the izakaya can go from vast commercial chains to three story Western influenced institutions to settings hardly more robust than a roadside stand, hardly anything epitomizes the izakaya “model”. I think the spirit of an izakaya can be captured, though, and thinking about it, I’m guessing that’s what Bill Addison meant in his recent Atlanta magazine review of Shoya. The spirit of the izakaya is what Mark Robinson is trying to illuminate in his tour guide of saki house foods.

 

Japan Reviewed, a view of the world from a former izakaya chef

I found this blog in a round about way. I was doing some historical research on the izakaya (Google, if you enter “izakaya history”, will return a time line, among other things) and in the process, saw Zack Davisson’s  review on Amazon of Mark Robinson’s cookbook. I found the review to be well written and impressive (I’ve ordered the book as well). Zack’s coverage of Japanese topics was too extensive for him not to have another outlet for his skills. With a little digging, I found the author’s blog and a blog based review of “Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook”.

This is the kind of article I hope for in a blog, something heart felt and based on personal experience. Looking at the rest of the blog betrays interests from high culture to low, from novels and literature to the simplest pop phenomena.

The author of the blog lived in Japan and claims a master’s in Japanese studies. As such, this kind of eclectic resource isn’t to be missed, for those of us curious about the history of food. Right now, Zack’s experience is totally on point as the “izakaya craze” expands to Atlanta and beyond.

FnS.

 

Three Cookbooks

There are certain books that are useful (e.g. Chilton’s Total Care Care Manuals), certain books that are entertaining (e.g. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), certain books that are, at times, profound (Studs Terkel, in The Good War, interviewing Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi), and then there is the rare masterpiece that manages to be entertaining, informative, and profound.

One such masterpiece is the cookbook Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art. This is a book I owned, loved, lost and recently purchased again. I love it for its matter of fact descriptions of how the Japanese eat, how they cook, how they prepare food, and in certain very fundamental ways, how they think. The first chapter sets the tone, 20 pages on the Japanese meal, and it just develops from there. No detail is too small to be covered. Shizuo Tsuji, the author, even shows you how to use chopsticks. Further, the book is chock full of small details, such as:

Nigiri-zushi is representative of Tokyo food. The reasons for this might relate to the fact that Tokyo – or Edo as the city was known before 1868 – is situated on a bay that was once rich in seafood of all kinds. No doubt influenced by the bountiful catch of their wide, placid bay, the people of Edo always knew the taste of truly fresh fish and craved it.

There are very few pictures but plenty of diagrams, and I love the functional simplicity of the line drawings in this book. Simply put, this would have to be on my short list of books to be left with on a desert island.

The Book “Quick & Easy Tsukemono: Japanese Pickling Recipes“, was a choice I made in part because I wasn’t 100% sure that the previous book was the one I lost. I wanted to fill out my bookshelf on this subject and this book isn’t a bad addition. Tsukemono is central to the Japanese meal. As Ikuko Hisamatsu says in the preface:

For most of the Japanese nothing can replace enjoying plain, hot rice with tsukemono and dinner is not complete without it as the final course.

There are lots of pictures, visual step by step instructions on how to make various Japanese pickles, and if you’re at all acquainted with the topic, then you know that pickles aren’t just made with vinegar in Japan. I liked the book, whose focus is getting the reader to be able to make pickles.. utilitarian, in other words.

The final choice isn’t so much a cookbook as a history of food in Korea, and was an attempt to find something covering Korean cuisine that was as good as Shizuo Tsuji’s text.  Nonetheless, “Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History” by Michael J. Pettid also does have 23 pages of Korean recipes at the end. I like this book, though at times reading it feels a little overwhelming. I tend to think though, with the explosion of Korean food throughout Gwinnett County and the Buford Highway region of town, it was time to learn something.

 

Benny’s (Snellville) in pictures, and thoughts on spicing a Cajun dish.

I’ve spoken about Benny’s Bar and Grill at least three times previously, and I wanted to do it once again for two reasons.  First, I wanted to capture the place in images. I hadn’t done that before. The second reason was that I had an ordinary crawfish etouffee elsewhere. It was, like too many frustrating plates of Cajun in Atlanta, missing the point. The dish had good ingredients. The dish had a roux.  But the etouffee had no real spices to speak of, and when online grocery stores can say of an etouffee:

A proper etouffee will be orange-colored, with a hint of brown. It should be spicy, as it’s main spice ingredient is cayenne pepper, and saucy enough to form a thick gravy for the rice. However, take note that it is not gumbo, and should not be served like soup. The gravy in etouffee is much thicker than the roux of a gumbo.

you have to ask just what people are thinking when they serve underspiced food.

Further, if you look in Donald Link’s excellent Cajun cookbook “Real Cajun“, you find that he uses eight sources of ‘heat’ in his etouffee. He uses a poblano pepper, a jalapeno pepper, and paprika. He also uses ground white pepper, ground black pepper, red pepper flakes, and cayenne pepper. This is before he adds hot sauce to taste. He doesn’t use a huge amount of anything. The peppers are there to let you know they are there, to tease and cleanse the palate, to make you ask, “Just what flavor is coming next?”

Anyway, I needed something to remind me of what serious spicing is all about, so a visit to Benny’s was truly in order.  Mike “Benny” Miller, for better or worse, has the spicing of his food down cold.

The outside of Benny’s is modest:

Outside of Benny's

The sign may be the first thing you see.

Once inside, I started with a beer. They were out of most of their draft beers, but they still had Guinness draft. Guinness draft is lighter than you might expect and very drinkable. If you can handle Harp, Pete’s Wicked Ale, or Sam Adams, you should be able to handle Guinness:

Guinness - lighter in taste than the color suggests.

That was followed with a salad

Vinagrette on the side.

Then a bowl of Benny’s excellent gumbo.

The gumbo has flavor that builds with every bite.

The entree was Benny’s excellent jerk spiced pork tenderloin.

Rich with flavor. Somewhere around here I'm finishing my 2nd Guinness.

The dessert was a pair of Key Lime sticks. I’m sure the dessert was overkill.

Worth every minute of exercise they'll cost.

The restaurant was pleasantly full, with a church group meeting inside.  I was able to speak to Mike a bit, all much appreciated. He’s a gracious host, knows food far better than I ever will. His theory on heat is to get the hottest pepper possible, and then add ingredients that add flavor (shallots, garlic, etc). Flavor, to Mike Miller, is more important than pure ‘burn’.

Benny’s Bar and Grill
3902 Highway 78
Snellville, GA
(678) 209-0209

 

Photographs, knees, food notes, and a preview of Sushi Avenue, Snellville GA

Thanks to the recommendation of Barney of Urban Spoon, I am now the proud owner of a Canon SD Powershot 1200 IS.  The camera was purchased because of its small size, its optical image stabilization, and its performance without a flash in low light. With it, you can get food photos such as this one, from the Snellville Ruby Tuesdays:

Turkey mini burgers and a potato, from Ruby Tuesday in Snellville.

Or this one, of the front of Albatross Bar and Grill, on Main Street in Snellville:

The front of Albatross Bar and Grill, Snellville GA

Yes, I’m pleased with it. It’s emotionally awkward to take photos of this kind, just I know that there is a huge difference when I can see what I might eat, as opposed to just reading about what I might eat.

As readers may know, I’ve been trying to go onto a diet, exercise and lose weight, and this Wednesday I woke up and my knee wasn’t working properly. It hurt to move. I didn’t have very good balance, it hurt to do much of anything other than lie on my bed with my knee pretty much straight. Bending my knee hurt. So next day, I went to the doctor and she told me I probably have torn cartilage in my left knee. So it’s ice and an anti-inflammatory drug for now. CVS has this cool device for icing legs, consisting of a wrapper and a package full of gel that you freeze:

This thing works really well for icing joints.

I go back on the 30th of July, to see if I’ve been healing. I can say getting to the doctor was smart, because ice and drugs have markedly improved my mobility. Just, I have to figure out how to keep an aerobic component to my workouts when I can’t push my knee anymore.

All my boonie peppers are outside now. 6 of the 7 look good, the 7th plant is a roll of the dice for now.

potted Guam boonie peppers.

Driving along Scenic Highway, north of the Scenic Highway-Highway 78 intersection, there is a strip mall with a vitamin shop, a Radio Shack, and now, a soon-to-be-opened sushi shop:

Sushi Avenue in Snellville, GA

They have posted hours, but I wasn’t able to go inside.

Sushi Avenue Hours

I’ll let everyone know more as I know more.

 

For those of you who remember C. K.’s Pizza

Some notes: Craig Priebe, the former owner of C. K.’s, now has a notable Internet presence. He has published a cook book named “Grilled Pizzas and Piadinas“, with 75 recipes, including the Gamberian, named Best International Pizza of the Year by the Pizza Expo. He has a page on “We Are Chefs” and has his own web site as well.

I remember for years the crawl west down Jimmy Carter to the place where Holcombe Bridge and Jimmy Carter met, to get to the small cramped pizza joint, to get in line and get one of these pizzas. The place was small and crowded, but worth it. In those early days, the root beer was home made as well, and oh so tasty.

 

More food and Boonie notes

This is going to be a jambalaya of a post, so bear with me. In cookbooks, “Real Cajun”, by Donald Link, is out. This was a book inspired by Donald’s upbringing in southern Louisiana, and his interest in Cajun (as opposed to Creole) dishes.  And on both the cover and inside, it is one pretty cookbook:

The recipes inside are just delicious looking. It makes me want to go out and buy a few pounds of crawfish right away. In the boonie pepper department, the seeds from Reimer have arrived, in nice neat packages.  So in the end, all three sources of boonie pepper seeds delivered a product. My boonies are growing slowly on the windowsill, perhaps because this has been a cool wet April. I suspect I need some kind of greenhouse factor to improve the odds (one technique, called pop cloches, has been posted on the site You Grow Girl. Another resource for pop bottle greenhouses is the blog  Mr Brown Thumb. Finally the Instructables site has some blow by blow instructions for pop bottle greenhouses). In the meantime, I’m planning to plant some of the seeds from floralys.

As part of Earth Day, Jo and Sara of Innocent Primate have posted a link where if you click and look at some ads, you help feed a dog.

A lot of good food is simply a riff off the salsa base of diced tomatoes, diced onions, and citrus juice, such as most common black bean and corn salsas. One critical advantage this blend has is that it’s low calorie. In one case I believe I estimated a pint of one black bean and corn salsa to have less than 400 calories. In this recipe from Men’s Health, it’s about 180 calories a serving and they’re using olive oil to boot. We reviewed a bunch of black bean and corn salsa recipes here.

It’s encouraging enough that I think salsas deserve a higher place on the menu than simply a condiment. They should be treated as a side or perhaps the main component of a meal, perhaps lunch. One place that is thinking along those terms, but hasn’t quite got there yet, is the restaurant Fresh Mexi-Cali. They offer good, inexpensive border cuisine, but they also have a salsa bar that is pretty much all-you-can-eat. They serve at least 5 salsas by my count, a mango salsa, pico de gallo, a salsa verde, a moderately hot chipotle salsa and a very hot salsa. The restaurant I’ve been to is a little out of my blog’s normal range, in Sandy Springs, but they offer other interesting dishes, such as their bowl (black beans, rice, pico) that could be turned, with a little work, into something more calorie free, lightweight, salsa-centric, vegan and fresh. They could have people gushing about Mexi-Cali Grill the way this place gets the love.

Fresh Mexi-Cali Grill
6631 Roswell Road, Suite J
Publix Shopping Center
Sandy Springs, GA
(404) 256-6394

For a good introduction to salsas, this article by Mexican Food World is useful. For those who have never made their own salsa, a good salsa recipe is on the blog Wicked Good Dinner. Another easy salsa is the one posted by My Vegan Planet, called an Argentinian BBQ salsa.

A nice use of salsa is by Just a Taste, who mixes a pureed salsa with fresh pita chips. On the blog Blue Kitchen, there is a nice tomato-basil salsa over pasta recipe that looks wonderfully delicious. The blogger The Friendly Kitchen has a salsa recipe that also looks top notch. Hers is blended, so it isn’t quite as easy as a salsa cruda.

Finally, the blogger Cat Scratch Fever was looking for good salsa suggestions in her article, “In search of the perfect salsa” Too bad the comments are closed, else I’d have answered.

 

Cookbooks, lizzies and boonie pepper notes.

I’ve bought at least 3 new cookbooks over the short term, and I thought I would mention them briefly. “Whole Grains for Busy People“, by Lorna Sass I found to be a fun read, though not as clued into “pure” whole grains as I had originally anticipated. That’s not necessary a bad thing. Foods like couscous and bulgur cook quickly, and everyone can use a recipe or two that is fast to the table. Second is Mark Miller’s “The Great Chile Book“, which is a paperback that is roughly 3″ by 9″ and his nice long color pictures of the peppers that he speaks about. It’s not much of a cookbook, though there are recipes in the back. Better is Mark Miller’s “The Great Salsa Book“, also in 3 by 9 format. The salsa recipes he publishes all look fantastic. Some look to be doable even with modest kitchen skills, such as mine.

In terms of my grandmother’s holiday lizzies, I wrote Barry Popik on the matter and he replied that he had posted an article on lizzies about a year ago. His understanding is the origin of the phrase is unknown, but in a Dallas Morning News article (dated 21 November 1952) that he quotes, you see the following:

…and if you’ve lost your grandmother’s recipe for Brown Lizzies, those rich Christmasy cookies, you’ll find it on Page 67….

My point simply is that if lizzies were a “grandmother’s recipe” in 1952, they must have been decades old at the time.

In terms of the Guam boonie pepper, seeds from both eBay sellers (rightbbq and floralys) have arrived. Seeds from Reimer Nurseries have yet to appear. I’ve planted some of pepper pilot’s (aka rightbbq; they’re the same) seeds and we’ll see how they do. I’ll also note the site Garden Web, which I have joined. There are a number of gardeners seriously growing (or attempting to grow) boonies there and you can get a host of good advice on Garden Web on getting your peppers off the ground. I started mine in Jiffy peat pellets because Garden Web regulars have had good luck with peat pellets and boonies. We’ll see how they go. I planted some jubilee tomato seeds at the same time as the peppers, using the same method, and they have already sprouted. Speaking of jubilee tomatoes, the blogger Out of the Garden has a good looking tomato chutney that uses jubilees.

boonie seeds in jiffy peat pots

Last but not least, let’s post this link to Haley Suzanne’s salsa criolla. It just looks fantastic.

Update: from this post on cheftalk, JonK notes that Cross Country Nurseries will sometimes sell boonie pepper plants. I have verified that they do. Be warned there is a minimum purchase of 12 plants from them and shipping is not cheap.