The Upside of Recession

A bunch of the city's top restaurants are having recession specials! Here are a few newbs:

Monday: Boneyard Bistro in Sherman Oaks pairs half-priced beer with an excellent fried-chicken dinner ($12 for a quarter chicken, $17 for a half, including very fine potato salad and cole slaw).

Tuesday: The Park in Echo Park serves a terrific fixed-price dinner for just $15. And it’s BYOB with no corkage, making it an even better bargain. Tonight’s menu is Greek: avgolemeno soup or Greek salad, followed by lamb or vegetarian moussaka, concluding with baklava.

Wednesday: Campanile’s Soup Kitchen, first created for WGA members during the strike, is back on Wednesday nights. You get three courses, including a soup entree, for just $22, with special $7 cocktails to take the sting off the midweek blues.

Thursday: Wine tastings at Silverlake Wine are a deal at $12 per flight — and the Let’s Be Frank cart is outside that night, so you can dine cheaply on superb grass-fed, hormone-free hot dogs.

Friday & Saturday: It’s harder to find bargains on the weekends, but consider the every-night deal offered by Burbank’s best-kept secret, Bistro Provence. For $29.50 you get a hearty, three-course, totally delicious French bistro dinner in a room that’s much more appealing than its strip-mall setting would suggest.

Sunday: Back in Echo Park, the new Allston Yacht Club serves three of its very good small dishes for just $16, and it always has some good-value wines by the glass.

I still couldn't afford to eat at most of these places, but I think there's something about being Jewish and hearing words like "special" "sale" or "bargain" that triggers in me an urge to spend money I don't have. 

EVENTS!

Upcoming food events:

February 24: National Pancake Day 

       It's a real thing and it's TOMORROW! According to the IHOP website, "Pancake Day dates back several centuries to when the English prepped for fasting during Lent. Strict rules prohibited the eating of all dairy products during Lent, so pancakes were made to use up the supply of eggs, milk, butter, and dairy products...hence the name Pancake Tuesday". So from 7-10 a.m. IHOP will be serving free short-stacks to celebrate.

 

March 29: Drink: Eat: Play Los Angeles' Cupcake Challenge

       Southern California's top bakeries serve mini-sized samples of their cupcakes for you to taste and judge who deserves the title of Best Cupcake LA. Competitors include a few of my favorites: Vanilla Bakeshop, SusieCakes, and Buttercake Bakery, plus many many others. Sadly, it's the same day as my race, but I hope at least one of my buddies will go (so I can get a contact yumtown). More info at their website. 

April 4th and 5th: Los Angeles Beer Festival

       Unlimited four-ounce international and domestic beers, tribute bands and beer-friendly food vendors. Fun, if you're into that kind of thing.   

April 5: Spring Tamalada

        Master purveyors lead a day of making, cooking, and eating tamales at Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe. The cost is steep, but on the up side, it provides more of an incentive to get a job. Info about this and other groovy Slow Food events can be found on their website.

On Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe

This post was going to provide my tiny readership with a general introduction to This Is Why You're Fat, a website devoted to absurd culinary excesses, but I was beaten to the punch and have therefore decided to refocus on a single in-depth analysis of my favorite [absurdity]: Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe. 



Sure it's fattier than you're used to, but something about Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe's blond goyishe sweetness is terribly attractive. While it easily disarms you with its silly name and self-deprecating sense of humor, its focused creativity proves that it's more than the humble sum of fried dough and canned Manwich. Savory tangled innards complicate the sweetness of its superficial first impressions, prompting "just one more taste" after another in search of even more hidden dimension.

For such a manly sandwich, it's unexpectedly fragile; if you don't hold it just so, it could spill its guts all over the place. So although it's not entirely balanced (even its savory center tends to be on the sweet-side) and your Bubbie probably wouldn't approve, with each successive bite you realize that you could actually love this sandwich...and besides, a doughnut is more or less a bagel anyway.

But contrary to its sweetness, Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe can be so hurtful. It comforts and warms you and then turns, causing the kind of heartburn and indigestion that painfully keeps you awake at night. Your girlfriends are right when they advise you not to put Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe on a pedistal. It's just unhealthy. So why do you keep going back for another bite?

Maybe it's because the meat satisfies in a way that makes you wonder at the fact that you once thought you weren't really a meat person. Or that it won't let you get away with your bullshit tendency towards self-depravation. Or that when it's good, it's so good that you start to think of everything that could be. If only Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe would recognize the eclipsing effect of his genius and give credit when it's due, and finally get over his ex-girlfriend, I could let go of the heavy bottle of Pepcid AC I've been schleping around in my purse and just get comfortable already.

This wouldn't be the first time I misread Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe. So I apologize if I have.

HOW TO GIVE CREDIT: I was turned on to This Is Why You're Fat by my hilarious friend Barry's hilarious blog, The Barry Rides.

French Green Beans with Sausage in Garlic-Sherry Reduction

Tonight, I made a favorite dish of mine, and chicken-apple sausage is the no-so-secret ingredient that makes it super delicious and cheap. I pick the chicken-apple because I dig the sweet/savory combo, but one could easily go savory/savory (I saw a portobello mushroom sausage at the store that sounded purty dern good). Either way, using sausage like this in a pasta is a really easy way to get cheap protein and add a lot of flavor without much fuss. And if you buy it pre-cooked (which you should because there's no reason not to), you can't muck it up!

Ingredients:
Olive oil, butter, or ghee
3 cloves garlic
4-6 oz (half a pack) of French Green Beans from Trader Joes
1 chicken apple sausage, pre-cooked
Dry sherry or white wine
Pepper to taste, since there's plenty of salt in the sausage
and pasta of your choice...I like fusilli because it catches the good stuff in its nooks (or so I imagine).

Sautée and brown the garlic. Then, add the green beans, and cook on med-high heat until nearly done. Add the sausage and pepper, and let cook for another five-or-so minutes to warm them up. Finally, add the sherry/wine to taste. If you don't have wine, use a little water. You just want to get any lingering deliciousity at the bottom of the pan before you mix it in with your pasta. Toss in with the pasta, and sprinkle on a little parm. Voilà. This takes twenty minutes start-to-finish, and its light, flavorful, and satisfying.

And finally, I know this post was sort of about the sausage, but I made this dish without it the other night and it was just as good.

Valentine's Day for Low Maintenance Ladies

Fancy dinners be damned! If I were comfortable riding a bike and mah boo hadn't already made cute plans for tomorrow, I'd be all over this mother...



From Daily Dish:
"Last year for Valentine's Day we suggested you woo your sweetie with a cupcake crawl: hop onto your bike and pedal from bakery to bakery. To help you plan your route, we drew up the Great L.A. Cupcake Map, which you can always find at latimes.com/cupcakes. You could go cupcake crawling in your car, which is helpful when you're trying to cram as many bakeries as possible into one day. But if you ride a bicycle, you'll burn off every last calorie. It's a scientific fact."

It's romantic AND scrumbo. Or is it romantic by virtue of scrumbo? Just the thought sets my heart a-flutter.

Cake Wrecks

Recently, my down time has been occupied by food blog surfing. Sometimes I find good ones, but more often I find not so good ones. Yesterday though, I discovered a real goodie: Cake Wrecks.

Cake Wrecks posts photos of bunked-out cakes as they're sent in by readers. The site has guidelines for what cakes can be submitted and Rule #1 is that the cake MUST have been professionally made. That means that someone actually got paid to make this.



Administrator Jen lays down exactly what makes a cake a wreck: "A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate - you name it. A Wreck is not necessarily a poorly-made cake; it's simply one I find funny, for any of a number of reasons." What results is a sort of when good cakes go bad, but sometimes it's bad cakes gone worse. And what could be better than that?



The site thrives on finding the money cakes--the ones that shoot for the stars and fall painfully short. Cakes of this kind are placed side by side in a section called "Inspiration vs. Perspiration". Substitutions are made, corners are cut, and somehow bamboo trimming is transformed into tootsie rolls logs.

But the true genius of Cake Wrecks is its ability to ride the line between too much and too little badness. Sure the focus is wrecks, but when the cakes are too ugly too frequently it gets boring. Like those marathons of World's Greatest Police Chases that they used to show on FOX, overexposure to ugly can be desensitizing. So to avoid this, Jen includes dream cakes...

Like this shirtless Tom Selleck. And look, c'est por moi!

Yum.

The Wake N' Bacon

It would seem that our prayers have been answered as this is indeed a working bacon alarm clock. Instead of waking up to loud beeping or buzzing, imagine waking up to the comforting smell of sizzling bacon. And just look at that piggy punim as he wordlessly, generously offers himself without judgement--it's genius, right? And yet, I have my reservations.

How it works: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n' Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. The signal is then re-routed by a microchip that responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon.

They had me until the halogen lamps. THAT'S unkosher.

MUSHROOM FAIR

This Sunday, the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden will host the 25th Mycological Society Wild Mushroom Fair from 10am-4pm. The actual mushroom "hunting" is going to be on Saturday. But Sunday's events include mushroom cooking and mushroom cultivation demonstrations.

Admission to the Arboretum is $7 for adults, $5 for students with ID. Parking is free.

LA Wild Mushroom Fair
Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden
301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia

NEWS: 1/2 price from Dolce Group

According to Eating LA, Dolce Group's "celeb-centric restaurant owners are offering 50% off all food at Dolce on Monday nights, at Bella on Tuesday nights and at Ketchup on Sunday nights."

Am I a tool for finding this insanely enticing? Maybe. But I have never had a problem dismounting my high horse for cheap eats. Especially when they toss in some cheesey bready bits as hors d'oeuvres.

Yep, I think that 1/2 price food might just be sweet enough to counterbalance my distaste for Dolce's Ashton Kutcher. At least for the time it takes to finish my meal.