Snacking State-by-State: New York III - A Brooklyn Original

So many classic American recipes were created in New York City (except maybe the Reuben sandwich, but I won't rehash that here).  There's the Waldorf salad, the Baked Alaska (yes, a New York City invention), the Bloody Mary, the black and white cookie, Delmonico steak, even vichyssoise and even General Tso's chicken.  Another simple recipe is the chocolate egg cream, a beverage that hasn't spread too far outside the Big Apple.  It's pretty easy to make, as long as you have the right versions of the ingredients.

Official Name: State of New York
State Nicknames: The Empire State
Admission to the US: July 26, 1788 (#11)
Capital: Albany (6th largest)
Other Important Cities: New York City (largest in the state, largest in the nation!), Buffalo (2nd largest), Rochester (3rd largest), Syracuse (5th largest) 
Region: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic; Mid-Atlantic (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Maple Syrup; Wild Rice; Clambake
Bordered by: Québec (Canada) (north), Lake Ontario (northwest), Ontario (Canada) & Lake Erie (west), Pennsylvania (south and southwest), New Jersey (south), Connecticut & Long Island Sound (southeast), Massachusetts & Vermont (east)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: apple (fruit), milk (beverage), sugar maple (tree - for the maple syrup), rose (flower - they are edible, you know), trout (fish), apple muffin (muffin), bay scallop (shell), beaver (mammal, though outside of "Bizarre Foods" you won't see many people eating these)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: In New York City, anything and everything - it is one of the most multicultural and diverse cities in the United States, and is a culinary capital of the nation; typical NYC foods include: Waldorf salad, bagels & bialys, corned beef and pastrami, chocolate egg creams, hot dogs, New York pizza, General Tso's chicken, Baked Alaska (invented in New York City), and so on; New York cheesecake; "garbage plate" (Rochester only); Buffalo wings (Buffalo of course); apples and maple syrup, and of course, more apples

The chocolate egg cream, mind you, has neither eggs nor cream (discuss).  According to Linda Stradley of What's Cooking America.net, the chocolate egg cream has its origins in New York City, though historians debate if it got started in Brooklyn or in Manhattan's Lower East Side. While one origin myth suggests that it was a creation of Yiddish performer Boris Thomashevsky, who found a similar drink while on tour in Europe, most historians pin its creation to Brooklyn:

According to most historians, the Egg Cream was allegedly created in the early 1900s by a Jewish candy shop owner, Louis Auster, who came to America and opened a candy store in Brooklyn, New York. It is reported that 3,000 Egg Creams a day were sold until the day the store closed. [Stradley 2004]

Broooklynites will tell you that a proper egg cream must be made with Fox's U-bet Chocolate Syrup.  This stuff is probably easy to find in New York City.  It is not so easy to find down here.  Since it is a kosher product, I immediately headed to 7 Mile Market, assuming I would find it.  I found a wide variety of kosher chocolate syrups, but alas, no U-bet.  I went to Wegman's. No luck (though they do carry it during Passover).  Harris Teeter?  Nope.  Finally on a whim, I stopped in the Waverly Giant after going to the 33rd Street Farmers' Market.  They have it there, in the chocolate syrup section (didn't check the kosher section though). So U-bet is locally available here in Baltimore.  You just have to look for it.


U-bet has its own chocolate egg cream recipe on its bottle, but I was more captivated by the recipe I found in The Brooklyn Cookbook [1991], a compendium of recipes that gives a very thick slice of the culinary history and diversity of Brooklyn, NY.  One person interviewed for the book, high school teacher Ron Schweiger, describes his grandfather's chocolate egg cream, sold at his soda fountain in the 1940's: 

"First, you use Fox's U-Bet.  Take a tall Coke-type glass, from the 1950's.  Put in 3/4 inch of syrup, then milk up to one-third of the glass.  Then you add seltzer from a spritz bottle, the heavy kind with seltzer under pressure.  You tilt the glass; if it's tilted, the force of the seltzer squirted under the milk and syrup pushes foam up on the other side.  Fill the rest of the glass with more seltzer, stirring as you spritz.  The foam should be white, and at least 1/2 in thick. [Stallworth and Kennedy 1991:359]

Okay, I didn't do it exactly like Schweiger says, but I did get some foam.  Okay, maybe a quarter inch.


The Recipe: Chocolate Egg Cream

For your chocolate egg cream, assemble the following, along with a tall glass and very long teaspoon:

* chocolate syrup (yes, Fox's U-bet, which was about $3.  But I'll tell you what: I almost gave up and went back to 7 Mile for another Brooklyn-based chocolate syrup I found.  I cannot for the life of me remember the name, but I figured if I couldn't find U-bet at least I could get some brand from Brooklyn)
* seltzer water (alas, I have no seltzer water spray bottle.  I used a bottle from Giant instead)
* milk (had it)

Pour the chocolate syrup into your glass.  I eyeballed the 3/4 inch.

And top it off with the milk to about a third of the glass.

Fill the rest of the glass with seltzer.  I admit, I should have tilted the glass, but... well you try doing that and taking this photo all at once!

And there you have it!  Probably the head of foam isn't as big as it could have been had I tilted the glass.  That said, it was a sweet and silky drink that I almost couldn't finish.  I guess it's sweeter a syrup than I'm used to, or maybe it's the chocolate itself.  It is a tasty drink.  I just don't think I can indulge in a chocolate egg cream too often!

Sources:


Anchor Bar.  "The Original Buffalo Wings Story".  Published 2008.  Copyright 2008 The Anchor Bar.  All rights reserved.


Beekman 1802 (Josh Kilmer-Purcell & Brent Ridge).  "December 12" (Maureen Lodes' Apple Cake).  Posted on the "Sharon Springs Heirloom Recipe Advent Calendar" page, Beekman 1802 website.  Copyright 2011, 2012 Beekman1802.com. All rights reserved.


Beekman 1802 (Josh Kilmer-Purcell & Brent Ridge).  "Sharon Springs Heirloom Recipe Advent Calendar" page, Beekman 1802 website.  Copyright 2011, 2012 Beekman1802.com. All rights reserved.


Bon Appétit.  "Old-Fashioned Chicken Noodle Soup".  Posted on the Epicurious website, December 1998.  Copyright 1998, 2012 Epicurious.  All rights reserved.  


Center for Jewish History.  "Jews In America: Our Story".  Copyright 2005 Center for Jewish History.  All rights reserved.


Mannur, Anita.  "Indian Food in the US: 1909-1921".  Published on the South Asian American Digital Archive website October 18, 2011.  Copyright 2008-2012, South Asian American Digital Archive.  All rights reserved.


Mitzewich, John.  "Authentic Anchor Bar Buffalo Chicken Wings".  Published on About.com, date unknown. Copyright 2012 About.com.  All rights reserved.

Roberts, Adam (Amateur Gourmet).  "Fall Out Of Fall With A Matzah Ball".  Posted November 21, 2006.  Copyright 2004-2012 Adam Roberts.  All rights reserved.


Sahni, Julie.  Classic Indian Cooking.  William Morrow & Company: New York, 1980.


Sheraton, Mimi.  "Introduction: A Table Before Me".  In The New York Times Jewish Cookbook, edited by Linda Amster.  St. Martin's Press: New York, 2003.


Stradley, Linda.  "New York Egg Cream - How To Make An Egg Cream".  Published on What's Cooking America (WhatsCookingAmerica.net) 2004.  Copyright 2004, 2012 What's Cooking America.  All rights reserved.


Suddath, Claire.  "A Brief History of Buffalo Wings".  Published on the Time Magazine website (Time.com), September 3, 2009.


Sussman, Lance J.  "Jewish History Resources: New York Jewish History".  Posted on the New York State Archives website, date unknown.  Copyright 2012 New York State Archives.  All rights reserved.

Stallworth, Lyn, and Rod Kennedy Jr. The Brooklyn Cookbook.  From the Knopf Cooks American series.  Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1991. 


Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "New York" and "Demographics of New York City" pages and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "New York".

Snacking State-by-State: Arkansas II - Everything's Better as Gravy

Hoppin' John may be traditionally Southern, and it may be traditionally African-American. But I was still hung up on finding something you could only find in Arkansas.

Snacking State-by-State: Arkansas

Official Name: State of Arkansas
State Nicknames: The Natural State; The Land of Opportunity
Admission to the US: June 15, 1836 (#25)
Capital: Little Rock (largest city)
Other Important Cities: Fort Smith (2nd largest), Fayetteville (3rd largest), Springdale (4th largest)
Region: South; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ
Bordered by: Louisiana (south); Texas (southwest); Oklahoma (west); Missouri (north); Tennessee, Mississippi & the Mississippi River (east)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: rice (grain); South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato (fruit/vegetable); Dutch oven (cooking vessel)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: many of the typical Southern classics (corn bread, hush puppies, catfish, sweet tea, barbeque, fried pies, fried chicken, Hoppin' John), chocolate gravy (Ozarks), Cajun/Creole (crawfish)

John Egerton helps me out here, in his mammoth compendium Southern Food, a book not of recipes but about the cuisine and its history. One uniquely Arkansan recipe he finds: something called Chocolate Gravy, found specifically in the Ozarks:

[F]or sheer originality, nothing can match chocolate gravy, a breakfast meal of long standing in the Arkansas Ozarks. Made in a saucepan with butter, flour, sugar, cocoa, and milk, it is customarily poured over hot biscuits. A 1976 recipe collection of the United Methodist Church women of Conway, Arkansas, resurrects this remarkable dish, the origin of which is lost in history. [Egerton, p. 189]

I couldn't get a hold of this cookbook, and Egerton doesn't provide any recipes here, so I went online. I found a very useful recipe on Saveur.com's website. Indeed, many commenters on the webpage for Chocolate Gravy, almost all of whom were Southerners, had never even heard of Chocolate Gravy, though some had (most with ties to Arkansas). One recent commenter suggests the recipe is of Cherokee origin. It's a shame that so few people know about this because it's a quick and simple thing to whip up and serve on biscuits, cake or ice cream.

The recipe: Chocolate Gravy


As with most gravies that don't come in a packet, Chocolate gravy is made with a fat, a liquid and flour for thickening. Only instead of chicken or turkey drippings and broth, it's butter and milk, with a few things. Most of these ingredients will be around your kitchen:

* milk (I had some)
* flour (again, not difficult to find in my pantry)
* powdered cocoa (I was actually out. It only costs $2.50 to $3)
* butter (had it)
* sugar (had it)
* vanilla (had it - not all recipes call for this)

Just make a gravy from this stuff: melt the butter while you whisk the dry ingredients together. Add the dry stuff to the butter, stir, and add the milk. Stir until thick and smooth.


I was worried about it not thickening at all. Instead, I think it got a little thicker than it was supposed to. I have seen gravies that are almost pudding-like, but I know they aren't supposed to be that way. That's what mine turned out to be - like a pudding.

Like two hundred - and forty dollars - worth o' puddin'. Awww yeah.

It was a runny, gravy-like pudding, but like a pudding nonetheless. That doesn't matter because it was still absolutely delicious and easy to whip up. You can pour this on cake or cupcakes as a last-minute ganache (don't expect it to harden), or on ice cream as an alternative to chocolate syrup.


The first State of the New Year is done, fittingly with Hoppin' John. And again, let's hope it brings the good luck it promises. The folks in California certainly need it after the last few years of recession and the recent megafloods. California is also the next stop on my road trip, and having lived there for several years, I have a specific insight into California's food. If you think Arkansas was tough to pin down...

Sources:

Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. "Southern Cuisine: Arkansas Southern Cuisine & Free Southern Recipes". Arkansas.com (http://www.arkansas.com), 2010.

Egerton, John. Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History. First edition. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1987.

Lundy, Ronni. Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden. North Point Press, New York, 1999.

Raskin, Hanna. "Southern Museum Pays Homage to 'Arkansas Cuisine'". Slash/Food (http://www.slashfood.com), posted July 21, 2009.

Shelf Medearis, Angela. The New African-American Cookbook. Lake Isle Press, New York, 2008.

Saveur. "Chocolate Gravy". Saveur.com (http://www.saveur.com). Originally printed in Saveur Issue #126, January 2010.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Arkansas" page and the Food Timeline State Foods webpage link to "Arkansas".

AAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!

I haven't read the Cathy comic strip for years. It got tedious. And yet, I'm a little wistful that Cathy Guisewite is shutting it down in October. No more of this...

So, when are they shutting down Garfield (yes, please)?

Stainer Chocolate

Ma Petite Shoe had its monthly First Friday chocolate happy hour (is it a chocolate and shoes happy hour? I don't know) yesterday and I stopped by for something chocolate. Though I was tempted to buy something of the "genuine Chiapan cacao" or "Mo's Bacon Bar" variety, I quickly threw out those ideas when I saw a curious seciton of chocolate bars with spices and flower petals infused in them. Andrea Steiner Chocolate, out of Italy, has landed on to US shores and found their way to Hampden, hon. Though I almost grabbed a 50 g (1.75 oz) box of rose or violet chocolate for about $6, I went in for the white chocolate with saffron. Though the texture was not too out of the ordinary for me, the flavor was pleasantly unusual. I thought the saffron went well with the white chocolate. My sister, on the other hand, got a very sour look on her face. As she popped the chocolate into her mouth, I saw her grin turn into the funniest look of displeasure I have ever seen on the face of any woman who was eating chocolate at the time. Really, I thought Cathy would like it. Guess not. Now the rose-petaled bar she is more than up for, so I will get her one of those.

Log Cabin Chocolates

I started a new part-time job this week all the way up in Bel Air (I live in Towson - yay, commute from hell). I passed a few times by Log Cabin Chocolates, a Fallston business that held the intriguing promise of homemade chocolates. But only today did I have the opportunity to stop in. I'm happy I did, because homemade chocolate does something for me that regular chocolate just, well, doesn't.

The big, wooden outside of the building belies the bright and friendly interior of the candy showroom, which opens on to what appears to be a gigantic chocolate-making workshop. The friendly little old lady behind the counter greeted me and asked what I would like. Sionce I can't make a decision to save my life, I had to just look around for a minute, and take it all in. The offerings were fairly typical of most homey candy shops: gummy candies, butter creams, nuts and sponges and brittles and truffles and all manner of things covered in milk and dark and white chocolate. Rheb's did indeed come to mind. The prices were fairly typical as well: a pound of assorted chocolates (your pick) was $15. Half a pound will only cost you $7.50. A quarter pound is half of that. I went for the middle and got the half-pound box.

The woman helped me in a most friendly way, reminding me constantly that there were more chocolates along the entire span of the display case. But I'm more of a buttercream fanatic, so I found myself lingering there. A few I got: vanilla, chocolate, maple and lemon buttercreams, peanut brittle, white chocolate-covered nuts, an orange jelly, and something called a "nougatine" which I had never heard of before. She may also have slightly undercharged me, as I technically ended up with about .53 lbs but still paid the 1/2 lb rate. Hey, it's just a few hundredths of a pound. I didn't need it gift-wrapped, but she tied a neat green bow around the box anyway - to keep it from falling apart in case I dropped it.

Of course, I couldn't wait the extra 40 minutes to get home, so I made quick work of that green ribbon and before I knew it one of the vanilla buttercreams was in my hand. Just the smell made me crazy (in a good way, of course). The taste was such a rich, chocolatey taste that I just don't experience from a Godiva or another big-name chocolatier. Of course, I went for the maple, then the orange jelly (such a luscious candy, that orange jelly), and before I knew it, I had eaten a good quarter of the box before I even made it into Baltimore County.

I had to hide them so I wouldn't eat the entire box. And I have to drive by there and back three times a week for the next 15 weeks! Ah, poor me. Poor me and my chocolate-lovin' waistline.

Mo's Bacon Bar: Milk vs Dark

One of the happiest days in my culinary life was the day I first realized that bacon could be used in a dessert context. This was when I walked out of Ma Petite Shoe with the legendary Mo's Bacon Bar from Vosges Chocolate. The smooth chocolatiness surrounding sweet and salty bits of crunchy applewood bacon were more than enough to send me over the edge. Wow.

Recently I found out that Vosges has started putting out a dark chocolate version of their famous Mo's Bacon Bar. I was ecstatic, because I much prefer the slightly bitter, more intense chocolate flavor of dark chocolate to the smooth yet slightly tamed down flavor of milk chocolate. The bar is lovely, but here's thing: although I prefer dark to milk, I prefer the milk chocolate bacon bar to the dark chocolate one.

I had to think about why this is the case.

It eventually dawned on me that the things that make me like dark chocolate don't work when you throw the sweet and salty intensity of bacon into the mix. In this case, the dark chocolate and bacon are fighting for your attention. In contrast, the milk chocolate bacon bar really lets the bacon shine. The milk chocolate isn't so much in the back seat as it is in the passenger seat - but the bacon is clearly the one driving. With the dark chocolate bacon bar, the dark chocolate is constantly fighting with the bacon to control the wheel. It works, but not as well as when there's just one driver.

So do try Mo's Dark Bacon Bar from Vosges, but I'm still sticking with the milk chocolate original.

One Night in Raleigh Part 2: Chocolate and Cha Chiang

Before heading back to Bawlmer, I wanted to see what downtown Raleigh had to offer during the day. Since I am a museum person, museums were the logical option. And Raleigh has a few nice museums in their downtown area, plus a public parking lot that only costs $1 an hour, max of 8 hours. Two of your best options are the state history (which I had no time to check out) and natural history museums. I swear, out of all the state museums I have ever seen, the North Carolina Museum of Natural History is one of the best in terms of its layout, subject matter, location and exhibits. To wit: the massive skeleton of the whale hanging from the ceiling of their North Carolina coastal life exhibit, or the recreation of a woodland mountain habitat that you can see taxidermied animals staring out from! (The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman also has similar exhibits, but I liked NC's just a wee bit better. Does Maryland have one, or do we just use the Smithsonian as ours?).

Perhaps their keystone exhibit - similar in focus to the Smithsonian's elephant in the rotunda - is the skeleton of Acrocanthosaurus, the celebrated "Terror of the South," having freshly attacked a life-size model of a Brachiosaurus. One mother had to coax her kid into the exhibit (this one under a four-story tall glass rotunda room). Press one little button, and the injuries that felled this most complete specimen of Acrocanthosaurus magically light up!

Beware, kid!

Of course, I came because they had a special exhibit on Chocolate! They wouldn't let me take any photos, as is the case in so many special exhibitions of stuff.

This was the only thing they would let me take a picture of. Wow.

This was all for the best, as I would never have been able to figure out what to photograph first. So here are the highlights of this very cool exhibit (all text was in English and Spanish):

• life-size model of a cacao tree with dissected model cacao pods
• the ancient history of cacao, highlighting the importance and prestige of drinkable chocolate to the Maya (especially in the first millenium) - that includes replicas of Maya chocolate drinking vessels, and a verybrief introduction to Mayan hieroglyphs (basically, that they represent actual words, which I knew, but hey, not everybody does)
• the more recent history of cacao, including how the Aztecs used the beans as money, how the Spaniards exported it to Europe, how chocolate (as prestigious to Europeans as to Mesoamericans) profitted from the African slave trade, and how it finally became available to the masses.
  

I was allowed to take whatever I wanted from the exhibition store, so long as I paid for whatever I took. I bought some locally-made chocolate caramels (25¢ each), some chocolate-covered cacao beans from Nahualli Trading Co. ($9 - how's that for po-mo redundancy?), and locally manufactured "HOT South of the Border" bon bons from the Carrboro, NC-based Miel Bon Bons ($4 for a bag of two). The ckeckout person noted that I was adventurous. These were chocolate bon bons coated with pineapple and chili pepper, and they were chewy, soft and spicy all at once. These were very good bon bons, and I would get them again. Miel Bon Bons also makes a habanero bon bon, which I would've tried had they had any. I wonder if they do mail order? As for the rest: I could've stuffed those caramels in my mouth all day, and the cacao beans were what I expected, even though I had never eaten a cacao bean before: bitter coated with sweet.

Afterwards I had a few options for lunch. There was one BBQ place I wanted to check out - where else but in Raleigh can you find both types of North Carolina BBQ, the sparse vinegary whole-hog pork BBQ of the East and the sweet tomato/ketchup based shoulder-only BBQ of the West? But I wanted to walk, and this was not in walking distance. I had choices of sandwiches, burgers, Pan-Asian, Chinese, sushi, Southern, deli, Irish - the choices were dizzying. One place, the Duck & Dumpling, continued to pop up in small adverts everywhere I went (the hotel, the museum, etc). When I found that I was only a few blocks away I hoofed it on over.

Duck & Dumpling is a very sleek, very stylish Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant with snappy service (the regulars next to me got their cashew chicken almost immediately). It has a small yet eclectic menu styled by Chef David Mao. What specifically drew me in was the $12 prix fixe lunch menu. Let me say that again: $12 prix fixe lunch menu. What a great, frugal find for a guy who just wasted $40 on a motel room he didn't even use! I was all up for that.

As with most restaurants in our own Restaurant Week (coming up in early August, by the way), Duck & Dumpling offers three courses (appetizer, mains and dessert), with your choice of one of three to five dishes for each course. For the first course, I could have had a salad with ginger dressing, but the waitress described a most intriguing edamame hummus (probably the first time you have ever seen those two words in the same sentence) with taro chips.


The chef simply made a hummus out of edamame instead of chickpeas. I was too curious to pass this up, and I'm glad I got it. It tasted surprisingly more like hummus than the waitress described it, and it was substantially thick. I've never been that crazy about edamame, but this was good.

For the main course, I ordered the only noodle dish on the prix fixe menu, the cha chiang noodles: a savory dish (Savory noodles? Go fig.) of thick noodles covered in ground pork and finely julienned cucumber slices.


I asked for spicy sriracha sauce on the side. The pork was indeed savory and slightly salty, which I liked, and the cucumber pieces gave a nice, refreshing contrast to all the savoriness. I kept on dipping my chopsticks into the sriracha and mixing it around in the noodles, to slightly spice things up.

I originally wanted flan for dessert, which they had run out of. So instead I ordered a Kahlua chocolate souflée. I waited a while for my dessert when my waitress comes out and tells me the chef just made more flan! But I stuck with the souflée, and it was a good choice.


From every place that I stuck my spoon, piping hot choclate sauce oozed out into the soft, moist cake. It was a delicious way to end my meal, and strangely appropriate considering the Chocolate! exhibit I had just spent half an hour not taking photos of.

The meal came to only $12 plus tax, and the sweet tea (they also offer unsweetened - which I normally order and then dump a whole lot of artificial sweetener into it anyway) was apparently part of the cost. Either that, or they forgot to charge me. Anyway, it was a good way to prepare for the mammoth 5 hour drive back to Baltimore, towards which my GPS sent me via US 1 to I-85, not straight up I-95 as I expected. It was more scenic, I must admit. Plus I got to stop in a Food Lion and buy another six pack of Fat Tire!

Other photos:

Yep, they have these guys, too

And this is what they look like when they're babies. They're baby blues!

Don't look up!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Unsuspecting dinosaur, you have no idea what that Archocanthosaur is gonna do to you...

REALLY don't look up!

Er, don't look down?

for Duck & Dumpling

Georgia on My GPS Part 4: On to Raleigh

As you are reading this, I am heading back to Baltimore (I love auto-scheduled publishing). I wanted to go to Atlanta, but I've been hemming and hawing for a while because I wasn't sure I'd have the time or the money, or that my car would be able to take the extra driving (this trip pushed it over the 150K mark). That, and Atlanta is too fabulous a city to devote just one quickfire night to exploring - and I'd rather have seen it on a Friday or Saturday night when more bars are actually open!

So Atlanta is off my itinerary for this road trip. But it'll still be there when I get back (since Cathy's moving down here at some point, that isn't too far off), and I can spend a good few days in the ATL. But I've already planned for when I do get back. I asked Leslie at the Southern Social blog what is best to eat in Atlanta (thanks, Leslie). She quickly recommended a favorite Chinese restaurant off of Buford Hwy., Chef Liu. From the photos I've seen, this place looks like a dive from the outside (as many good places do), but serves delicious authentic Chinese - think more Mandarin Pork Cakes and Soup Filled Dumplings, and less General Tso's Chicken and Crispy Orange Peel Beef. Atlanta's Blissful Glutton blog corroborates Leslie's recommendation, in this post from four years ago. Since this place has been making damn good food for a while, and since it was recommended to me, it'll be the first place I stop when I finally do get to Atlanta.

But alas, I am instead heading back up the 95. I had already planned a stop in Raleigh - ATL trip or not. Raleigh is about a half hour off of I-95, but it's the perfect place to stop for the night since it's about halfway between Savannah and Baltimore. Besides, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has this amazing looking exhibition about chocolate that I would be a damn fool to miss.

All the girlies they just like me for my gelt, beeyotch!

Because it's Hanukkah, yeah boyyyyyyyyeeeeeeee!

MMMM. GOURMET CHOCOLATE..

I just heard the most wonderful thing on NPR's Diane Rehm Show this morning. Ms. Rehm, who recently featured an hour of Paula Deen (isn't she popping up all over the place these days? Seriously), had the perfect guest for this or any season: Clay Gordon. You may have no clue who this guy is, and before 11:00 today, neither did I. He's the author of the book Discover Chocolate, which I will be going out to buy at some point in the near future. He spent all hour talking about, as stated on Rehm's website, "the intricacies of buying, storing, tasting, judging and, most of all, savoring the world's most heavenly chocolates."

And he's not just talking about Belgium and Switzerland. A true chocolate gourmand, he waxed over the subtleties of flavor in chocolate from Mexico, Peru, Cote d'Ivoire and Papua New Guinea, not to mention Belgium and France. And here's something one caller got him excited about: chocolate and beer pairings! We hear so much about chocolate and wine pairings, and he's a big avocate of that, too. But he mentioned that some beers can complement chocolate even better, as they aren't overpowered by it the way most wines are.

Did I also mention that the New York-based author runs the Chocophile website and sells chocolate on it?

Listen to the entire hour's worth of choclate-ness here (scroll down to "Clay Gordon" and choose either one of the audio options - either RealAudio or Windows Media File).