Kentucky in pictures

Still alive. Here are some pictures from a wintry trip out to Kentucky. And yes, I realize it's June now...

Peter Chang the enigmatic chef

Some of you demanded to know what was going on with the elusive chef Peter Chang ever since we posted this weekend’s event notification of his new restaurant venture, Peter Chang’s. Currently parked at the new digs getting it all ready and firing, Chang and company are finally slated to open his namesake eatery off Powers Ferry Road. But some of you are skeptical about this restaurant actually being his place (at least for the long term), and naturally I don’t blame you.

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Attempting shrimp tempura

Last night, I pulled some uncooked shrimp out of the refrigerator for dinner and had no idea what to do with it. I ran through a medley of ideas that I thought would be relatively fun. Shrimp and grits came to my mind, but I lacked ingredients at home that would have comprised my ideal version. It was also chilly outside here in Atlanta, and I had no desire to run to the store.

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Tofu Village Dining Review

(Yukgaejang, spicy beef soup - image by Becky Stein, for the AJC)

Drive to Buford Highway or farther north to the Duluth-Suwanee corridor, and you’ll find a world of Korean restaurants. But along the eastern corridor of Cobb County, just off I-75, there sits Tofu Village, a lonely little outpost of Korean dining sharing space with a liquor and cigar store in a drab strip mall.

But inside, the setting resembles a restaurant one might find in rural South Korea. On the fringes are shiny metallic barbecue tables, and a flat-screen television is positioned front and center, broadcasting KBS, a Korean channel. With no alternative Korean restaurant nearby, it seems that Tofu Village could easily rest on its laurels. But it is pumping out some of the most consistent Korean food in metro Atlanta.

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Sampling sweet paan

After a recent lunch outing at Swapna Indian Cuisine off of Cobb Parkway, I decided to try one of their triangles of sweet paan ($2.50) sitting by the cashier. Paan was a tough subject to research. Mainly because I couldn’t figure out the majority of the ingredients in Swapna’s version other than coconut shavings, which were pretty obvious.

Secondly, a lot of the ingredient names that I found in leads were in romanized Hindi. When I would try to pull up the images in google to verify matches, I’d sometimes get images returned of Indian couples that were of the erotic variety. So there I was sitting in a crowded coffee house full of children running around, and I’ve got Indian porn unabashedly displaying on my laptop.

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