Sausage & Peppers

Lately (and finally) our CSA box has started to include peppers and tomatoes. Last night we made Sausage and Peppers using three colors of bell pepper, green basil, purple basil, garlic and tomato all provided by Full Moon Farms.

 

Went to Athens Twilight this evening. This is a first for us. People got really into it, cheering the riders. We hung out in front of The Nowhere Bar, which is in between turns one and two. I felt slightly at a loss for not knowing the nuances of bicycle races, but it didn’t hamper the fun. The group standing next to us had a buddy that led the race for a while, but crashed in a huge pile up with four laps to go. Trying out viddler for the first time. This video was shot with my point and shoot camera, so no snarking about the quality.
A good time was had by all! (Well maybe not the guys that crashed out)

Lambie’s Leg

Lambie in Brine

Lambie Rolled

Lambie Cooked

Personally, I feel that any day is a good day for lamb, but Easter is especially lambic. Lambie was very tasty

We want our Eastside La Fiesta Back!!!!!

No way we are eating Mexicali, so we head across town to try out the Timothy Road La Fiesta, I mean Dos Palmas. Its very strange, its like they took La Fiesta, renamed it, moved a few walls, painted, bought new waitstaff and opened for business. The menu seems to be identical. The food is tasty, somewhat authentic and not overtly cheesified. If you were a fan of La Fiesta, you will slip right in.

Did I say we want our Eastside La Fiesta back? Its been since December, repair the fire damage already, pretty please.

Dos Palmas
3525 Atlanta Highway

Hmmm, this is a tough one. In general we would rather eat at/support a local place with history and community involvement. We would also like a clean table and some sort of waitron.

We walked in and the place had a few tables with people, an empty table by the door, and several empty booths with the detritus from the last meal. Like most people, we don’t want to sit five feet from the front door, so we settle into a booth and scoot the tip out to the front and skim the napkins, paper plates, and styro cups to the back. We sit, we wait, we wonder. Finally I get up to eyeball the pizza buffet (all you can eat). After thoroughly memorizing the offerings, I decided to stand in line a the register to enquire if we need to place the order there or if there is a service staff. After a few minutes of queueing, I notice a person who might be a waitress walking by our table. She doesn’t stop, so I stop her and ask for instructions. She indicates that, 1) yes she is a waitress and 2) yes, she will take our order. She comes back, no menus (I saw them while queueing, so they do exist) and takes our drink order. She leaves, the tips go with her, the trash remains. When she returns with our Cokes, we start handing her the trash. Maybe she was having a bad day, maybe I was hungry, mabye-schmaybe.

We order the buffet. The pizza is not bad, its of the thickthin crust variety and the sauce is minimal and ok tasting. I guess it tasted better than Papa Johns or Pizza Hut, but marginally so.

It was pretty cheap, $14 for 2 including sodas. Still not sure what to recommend though. Support your locals I guess. Damming though faint praise?

Mama Sid’s Pizza
2240 Barnett Shoals Rd

Do they have Turkish Coffee? I have been jonesing for a cup ever since we moved away from the Fat Omars.

The Sultan is in kind of a weird location and we have often thought about stopping, but we are never on that side of town during lunch. Last week, I decided that it was to be our next port of call.

We arrived around 1pm and had the place to ourselves. The Host/Owner/Waiter/Cook/AOTA? Came to get our drink order, (no inkahol) and we looked over the menu. It was fairly Americanized with gyros and kabobs (chicken kabobs, not Shish Taouk mind you); but there were a few decent staples as well. I was very happy to see Turkish Coffee on the list!

We ordered:

Punkerdoo: Shawarma Wrap with Lay’s Potoato Chips (WHAT?)
Husband: Kibbeh Plate

We had a plate of Baba-Ganouj for an appetizer.

The Baba-Ganouj was really good, we had not had any fresh for a great while. The tzatkiki on Punkerdoo’s Shawarma was very tasty as was the wrap itself. My Kibbeh was perfectly fried and crisp. We really enjoyed the food. It has been quite a while since we have had some decent Middle Eastern Food.

When we were done we ordered two Turkish Coffees………….zing! Sadly, no cezve was harmed in the making of our coffee. The coffee returned immediately, I am not really sure how it was microwaved so quickly. Is instant Turkish Coffee allowed, I am not sure, but I don’t think so.

Coffee disappointments aside, the food and service were excellent. Please go visit them and have some food.

The Sultan
3812 Atlanta Highway

Amazingly, Taste of India has been open for 15 years. They must have painted the front or something because we had no idea it existed. We thought it was a fairly new open. Who knew?

We went for lunch fairly early, for us, around 1PM. They were quite busy. We were seated right away and decided to go for the lunch buffet. While not a fan of buffet, we reasoned that our unfamiliarity with Indian food made this shotgun approach feasible.

They have a decent by the glass wine list. By decent, I mean the wines are well chosen value wines.

The buffet had a good lentil dahl, tandoori chicken and several dishes with escaping names. While we were bit puzzled by the inclusion of beef meatballs, the food was quite good. While eating, I asked to look at their dinner menu and was amazed by the amount of dishes. There were copious lamb dishes…….mmmmmm……..lambie….. and 4 or 5 goat dishes. The hostess told me that they were getting new menus the next day, so I cannot vouch for the current level of goat.

They also have a “to go” buffet where you pay by the pound, it seemed a very popular choice.

We will certainly go back for dinner and I imagine lunch as well.

Taste Of India
131-B East Broad Street

For those of you who really want to know how we did it, here is the real answer….in order from the beginning of the circuit (the computer) to the end (the lights), not necessarily in the order we actually built the parts. Much of the information below came from numerous Christmas Lighting groups. Links to the original documents and pages will be included at the end of this post.

Question: How did you do that?

Answer (2): We found a song we wanted to use, in this case, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies by Arctic Express. We bought it from iTunes, converted it to mp3 and loaded it into Vixen. Vixen is a freeware lighting automation program.

A special cable is needed to connect the printer port to the main controller board (in this case an Olsen 595). We made it by putting a RJ45 connector on the end of an old parallel (printer) cable. There are 4 specific pins that need to be connected: 1, 2, 14 and any pin from 18-25 ( we used #19). Theses pins need to be connected to 4 specific pins in the RJ45 connector. Pin one needs to go to Pin 5, Pin 2 to pin 8, Pin 14 to Pin 7 and Pin 18-25 (19) to Pin 3.

Printer >>>>> RJ45
————–
Pin 1 = Pin 5
Pin 2 = Pin 8
Pin 14 = Pin 7
Pin 19 = Pin 3

We found the proper pinouts by using our multi-meter and simply checking for continuity. When we first built this cable, we made it pretty short, `8 feet, but ended up needing it to be much longer, so keep in mind how far your controller board will need to be from your computer.

We built the circuit boards by printing out the PCB traces onto photo paper. You need to use a laser printer to do this. We also learned that a specific brand of photo paper works best for this process, Office Depot item xxxxx. The trace for the controller can be downloaded HERE and click HERE for our version of the SSR.

You take the copper clad board scour the copper side with sandpaper. We used 1200 grit. This is just a light roughing. Wipe the board down with a cloth and then clean it well with acetone. After it dries, tape the photo paper face-down on the copper side. Heat your iron up to its highest setting and make sure to turn off the steam. Lay the PCB copper side up and put a papertowel over it. Once your iron is up to temp, put it in the center of the PCB and hold it there for a count of 30 or so. DO NOT MOVE the iron, if you do it will blur the trace and you will have to start over at the acetone phase. Once you have set the paper, you are melting it to the board, you need to move the iron around to the different areas of the plate. DO NOT slide the iron like you would if you were ironing a shirt, you need to pick it up and place it where it needs to go and hold it still. If you slide it, you will make the emulsion slide and make your traces blurry. I pressed the board for about 10 minutes (several 30 second counts). Once you are done pressing it, fill the sink with hot water and put the board in. Let it soak for a while and start peeling. It takes a bit of work and I used an old toothbrush to get the last bits. Just be sure not to scrape the black parts off. I will continue this in another post

Very often a burrito is a good thing, sometimes even great. We needed some frozen dough disks to make some empanadas (I KNOW that empanadas are the new global warming! Stop telling me that.) We were headed to Normaltown to stop by the Mexican Grocery, so we parked at Agua Linda to have lunch. We went inside and were seated. Our very pleasant waiton brought us chips and salsa to amuse ourselves while reading the menu. My eyes get weird when I am extra hungry and to be frank, I need an eye exam, but there is something really wrong with the type on their menus. Its like there is a registration issue or something, the words blur just enough to be annoying to read. That aside, we looked over the lunch specials and ordered. I had Enchiladas Verde and Punkerdoo had a pick 2 combo with a chalupa and hard shell taco along with two DosEquis Ambers. The food came to us quickly and was OK. Nothing exciting, nothing horrible, decent. The price was OK, $21 for 2 lunches and beers, but we won’t make any extra effort to return. IOW, we wouldn’t not recommend it ~

Agua Linda Taqueria
1376 Prince Avenue

We were going downtown to try Shokitini, but they only serve lunch on Fridays, so we pointed the Black Mistress (NewCarOfPunkerdooToReplaceOldCarOFPunkerdooSmashedByOakTree) towards Lumpkin to try Cali-n-Tito’s place. Its in the old K’Bob building across from the SDT house. The building has been given a curb appeal makeover so that it resembles a shack of sorts. There is even a clothesline decoration (I assume) by the back door. The menu is pretty simple, but filled with many things we want to go back and try. We seemed to be thinking alike when we both ordered the Cuban sandwich with chorizo and egg. Punkerdoo had Fried Plantains as her side and I went with Yuca Frita. The Cubans were HUGE, I’m still full six hours later. We were also provided two sauce choices of which I brilliantly forgot to inquire their use. Not sure if they went on the cassava chips or the Cuban? Anyway one tasted a bit like spiced 1000 Island dressing and the other was more herbal oil.

The meal kicked ass. We want to go back tomorrow for empanadas……edit, while viewing the hipster olympics, I just learned that empanadas are the new global warming.

The place is BYOB, but there is no corkage fee durning the lunch hours. Also, they only take $ and checks, so plan accordingly.

1427 South Lumpkin Street