Welcome to the start of my food blog! For the longest time I'd been thinking about starting my own channel on YouTube, but for more than just food posts. I wanted to do vlogs, makeup tutorials, and cooking videos, but I feel like this blog is all I can handle at the moment. Maybe I'll start a channel eventually, but this works for now.
This blog will feature posts about both food from non-chain restaurants that I eat as well as food that I cook. Most of the food that I'll cook will probably be recipes I've found but every now and then I will post something I've created on my own. Though this is just the first post, I'm pretty sure the majority of my cooking posts will feature SortedFood recipes. Click on that link to look at the SortedFood YouTube page and explore it a little. They're a group of four friends in London, England who film cooking videos (Ben is a trained chef and Jamie, Barry, and Mike are normal guys learning from him) that feature twists on various recipes. They're also really funny and entertaining in general so I love watching their videos and trying out their recipes.
I'm going to try my best to include pictures with every post. Hopefully with pictures from my DSLR, but I don't always have it on me so there's bound to be a lot of cell phone pictures as well. However, the quality of the camera on my cell phone is pretty decent, so it should still be able to capture the yummy food in a good way.
Enough of the introduction portion, lets get to the first post!
So this past Thursday and Friday (August 15th/16th) I was in Atlanta for a concert. One of my friends I was travelling with and I made a pact that we would avoid any chain restaurants while travelling as much as possible and we stuck to it. Well, with the exception of a late night post-concert run to Waffle House because we couldn't find any non-chains open that late.
Our first food stop was The Varsity. It's been an Atlanta staple for over 75 years and with good reason. It's the world's largest drive-in and it's Downtown Atlanta location occupies more than two acres that can hold over 600 cars and over 800 people in the restaurant building itself. My friends and I barely explored a small fraction of the location. It has a really cool retro theme to the decor with different themed rooms. My friends and I ended up sitting in the CNN room (the CNN headquarters are in Atlanta, if you didn't know). I ordered a Glorified Bacon Cheeseburger with Onion Rings. The burger came with bacon, cheese, lettuce, and tomato on it. It wasn't until I was halfway through my food that I realized I forgot to take a picture, so here's a photo of my half eaten food, haha.
It was delicious! I kind of feel like it's hard to mess up a cheeseburger (though it has happened before), but they definitely got it right. However, I feel like the onion rings were the star of my meal. The breading on the onion rings was nice and light and it stuck to the onions well so I didn't have that annoying problem of biting into the onion ring and pulling the whole ring out of the breading.
The next morning we decided to check out Highland Bakery for breakfast. It's such a cute little bakery/restaurant. We went to the old 4th ward location. When you first walk in through the front door they have a bunch of desserts and breads on display for you to buy and then there's the seating area for the restaurant as you walk towards the back. The walls are lined with some cool artwork and the whole atmosphere is very relaxed. I ordered the Peanut Butter French Toast. It's two huge slices of challah bread with peanut butter in the middle, battered, coated with bran flakes, and fried up like you would normally do with french toast then topped with caramelized bananas. I suppose the price ($8.99) should've been a clue as to just how big it would be, but it was so early and I got so little sleep the night before that I didn't think about it.
I think the proximity of my camera to the food makes it seem a little smaller, but trust me, it's huge. Our waiter was super awesome and he said if I finished the whole thing he had a special prize for me to take home. He also said they didn't have to-go boxes so I had to finish it all, haha. Of course, he was kidding about the to-go boxes. I tried really hard, but only got through just over half of my food.
It was so good, but definitely a good amount of sugar. I may or may not have been a little wired the rest of the day. It also had a nice crunch thanks to the coating of bran flakes. And thankfully, it wasn't soggy like a lot of french toast can be. It had just enough give/softness to make it the right texture. The peanut butter tasted like it may have been made in house or at the very least wasn't a commercially made peanut butter. It had a slight saltyness that helped cut through the sweetness of the rest of the dish. The caramelized bananas were a good addition. They were cut fairly thick so they weren't too mushy. I'm not gonna lie, I sang The Banana Song when my plate came out. So I never found out what the special prize was for finishing the whole plate since I failed. I'm wondering if he was just saying that as motivation and there was really no physical prize, just the satisfaction of knowing I ate the whole thing, haha. If anybody reading this has been to Highland Bakery and you've finished the peanut butter french toast, did you get a prize? If so, what was it?
The last noteworthy food I had recently that I want to mention in this post was the incredible Polish food at a Polka party fundraiser for the music ministry at a local church. I'm not exactly sure what I had beyond sauerkraut and pierogies, but it was delicious. Well, I'm actually not a fan of sauerkraut, but everything else was tasty. I didn't take any pictures of the food, but I snagged this photo off of the parish Facebook page--
Starting from the sauerkraut and working counterclockwise-- there was sauerkraut (obviously, haha), some sausage that I think may have been polska kielbasa, a pierogi, some sort of meat (I'm guessing beef?) wrapped in a cabbage leaf, a swirled roll with poppy seeds on it, and I'm not really sure how to describe that last dish. I also don't know what's in the little plastic solo container because I didn't pick it up. All the food was well seasoned. I didn't feel the need to add any salt/pepper or down a glass of water because any flavors were too powerful. I really enjoyed the pierogi the most. Like I said, it was my first experience with Polish food, but it's definitely not going to be my last. If you haven't explored Polish food, I highly recommend you do.
What are some of the yummy foods you've eaten lately? What are some dishes you think I should look for to try? Also, since I said I'd post some cooking blogs, what are some recipes you think I should try? Leave a comment below and let me know what you've been eating and what you think I should eat next.
Thanks for reading!
<3 Kathy.
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