culinary tour little saigon

Last Saturday, I joined a group of food writers for a culinary tour of Little Saigon. It kicked ass. I could have spent an hour in Lee's Sandwiches alone, staring at that machine as it turned out molded creme puff-like treats. But the afternoon was so thoroughly enriching. And the book, Robert Danhi's Southeast Asian Flavors: Adventures in Cooking the Foods of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, & Singapore, which I've really only just cracked, has already brought me to tears with its earnest professions of love for Southeast Asian culture.

Here are a few photos from the trip that I didn't include in the post. Btw, the first photo is of "meat floss," which sounds homo-erotic, but tastes like regular jerky. I also have a short post up about a kimchi and sauerkraut making class, "This Cooking Class Should Stink: Kraut Fest 09 at Machine Project."

peach sake

Aaron took this at Beacon yesterday. I'm so proud of it.

Here's the post, "Fusion Infusion: Seasonal Peach Sake at Beacon."

media shit storm over ground beef and nancy silverton

Daily Dish and Eater LA both ran stories that Nancy Silverton was previewing burgers for a new restaurant that she and Amy Pressman were going to open in the farmers market. The stories are not true. I wrote "An Amendment: There Will Be No Nancy Silverton Burger Joint" yesterday as an official redaction of those stories. Some of the redaction reactions were, um, biting:

"I'm glad Nancy isn't responsible for the burgers last night. I feel ripped off because $36 for a 3-course burger menu is expensive but worth it if Nancy Silverton is making the burgers. If I had known beforehand she wasn't doing the burgers or this wasn't a preview for her place, no way I'd have made the drive from OC or paid the $36. More importantly, I respectfully have to disagree about the quality of the burgers last night."

"I'm just wondering how many major things Eater can get wrong before somebody pulls the plug. It's becoming almost comical to see Kat thrashing around like that."

Then from Eater:

"Why is Kat "fault-free?" because she copied the Times? Just because they got it wrong doesn't mean she's not at fault. Did anyone see the mistakes in SIV's review of Ado today? They're just as bad over there. All it takes is one or two phone calls, people. The paper and blogs, alike. So lazy. I don't care if the fact checkers got canned (LAT) or bloggers don't know any better (KAT), but if you don't know who to call to get the real story, you shouldn't f**cking print/post it.

And I agree with some of you: Reading Eater now is like walking through a mine field of misreported facts and general nothingness that the editor makes up. who knows what to believe anymore."

"I love it when all the food blogs get it wrong except the LA Weekly."

I hope there isn't going to be a food blog rumble, unless it's the dance-off kind.

Here're more scraps from this week:
"Weed in a Bottle: Mary Jane's Relaxing Soda"
"Digestive Table Invites Worms to Dinner"
"It's Sustainable L.A. Day at the Downtown Film Festival"

Inky leftovers, some fresher than others...

Last week's doggy bag includes a few vegan stereotypes "Hot Knives Host Vegan BBQ Sunday at Verdugo Bar," and "Rush Street Celebrates Christmas in August with Traditional Dinner + Naughty Elves and Deer Pong"is a giant "snow" cone of sarcasm for what are basically frat parties for adults.

And today's lunch was "Tickets On Sale for the Modesto Reel Food Film Festival."

Sorry if any of these posts stink, they're not exactly fresh.

Finally! Gourmet.com clears cobbler-family confusion.

A cobbler and a crisp are different things, no matter how many people use the terms interchangeably. Occasionally you'll hear "buckle" used in reference to either of these two, or less frequently, "brown Betty," which I'm sure is more common in the south (excuse the King of the Hill-informed stereotype). Luckily, the ever-informative Gourmet.com posted this (definitive?) list, distinguishing characteristics of each of these members of the cobbler-family, to steer our baking and eating endeavours toward greater PCdom. Here it is in full. Check back to the original piece for photos. They're incredibly helpful.

Think of a cobbler—fruit topped with a crust and baked—as a fruit pot pie. Most cobblers have a thick biscuit crust, which can either be cut into rounds (“cobbles”) or left as a single layer. Cobblers were originally made with a pie crust, and you can still find cooks in the American South who sandwich a fruit filling between a top and bottom crust made of pie dough. Eat a cobbler warm or cold, wrote Lettice Bryan in The Kentucky Housewife (1839). “Although it is not a fashionable pie for company, it is very excellent for family use.” A few of our favorite fillings for cobblers: stone fruit, sweet cherries, blackberries, apples, berries and brown sugar, or plums and almonds.

In a crisp, the fruit is sprinkled with a streusel-like mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and often oatmeal or nuts that has been rubbed together (or pulsed in a food processor). A crisp is called a crumble in Britain. Try our recipes for plum berry crisp, peach crisp, apple oatmeal crumble, and fall fruit crumble.

A brown Betty is similar to a crisp, but breadcrumbs are used, and they’re layered in with the fruit rather than scattered on top. Try a recipe for brown Betty with apples; add prunes; or make individual little brown Bettys.

In a buckle, the fruit is generally folded into (or sprinkled onto) cake batter and then covered with a topping similar to that found on a crisp; the cake batter will “buckle” as it bakes. Try our recipes for blueberry nectarine buckle, raspberry sour cream buckle, and lemon blueberry buckle (registration required).

A pandowdy is a deep-dish fruit dessert that originated in the hearth kitchen as a way to use up leftover dough (typically bread dough) on baking days. The thick crust, which would become as hard as a cracker, was then broken up and left to soak in the cooking juices. The end result was similar to a bread pudding. The pandowdy evolved with the times, and by the 1850s and ’60s, most women had switched to a biscuit crust, which had become the default crust for all baked and steamed fruit desserts. After the 1860s, both biscuit crusts and pie crusts were used. Up until the mid-20th century, apples were the only fruit and molasses the only sweetener used in pandowdies. Try our recipes for apricot pandowdy and old-fashioned apple pandowdy.

Apparently, all of my readers are comedians

These "diggs" apropos my pee on your tomatoes post:

"It works especially well if your tomatoes have been stung by a jellyfish."

"Vitamin P?"

"I'll reference this article to the police next time they arrest me for public urination."

"Done and done"

"I also heard that you get better results for lettuce if you take a dump on each head."

"I crap in my neighbor's garden."

"Another tip: bury banana peels near your tomatoes' roots. Tomatoes often find themselves short on potassium in the soil, which the peel will provide. Also, it's mellow yellow too."

Can a bagel made in Florida be a New York Bagel?

That was the question asked by Sun Sentinel writer John Tanasychuk. His article, on which I based "Florida Bakery Makes Brooklyn Water, Offers Hope for LA's Bagels," says Yes, emphatically.


To be honest though, the whole NY bagel as holy grail thing (pun intended) is total meshugas. The NY bagels I've eaten brought me no closer to enlightenment, nor did they give me deeper happiness, or tighter buns. I've gleaned far greater satisfaction from the Bagel Broker down the street. So the idea that someone would spend that kind of money on a purification + mineralization system to turn Florida tap water into Brooklyn tap water -- if it even works -- is beyond me. Oy!

The SI post is rant-free, I swear by my bubbie.

S'more cake from Nickel Diner

As if by mandate, Aaron and I rose at the crack of 7:15 to get to the Nickel Diner downtown, for early morning bites and photos of their famous s'more cake. "Nickel Diner's Blowtorched S'more Cake: How Best to Celebrate National S'more Day" is a short suggestion for tardy celebrators of the unofficial holiday.

S'more cake, Dutch-angled because it's so intense.

Mozza: a little better all the time.

From Eater LA.

Say "No" to stale popcorn and prescription comedy

The idea was to compile a list of places to do dinner and a movie in LA, but with all of the J & J madness, and the fact that neither Shin nor Cinespace were very forthcoming with information about their screenings, "What To Do This Weekend: There Are Alternatives to Stale Popcorn and Cinema" turned into a list of food-related screening alternatives to seeing "Julie & Julia."

Also, I wanted to find a complimentary photo that really said "dinner and a movie," but the idea is so abstract that most of my searches turned up with art from the TBS show by that name. Ultimately, I used a photo of popcorn from Creative Commons. I did, however, find the perfect "dinner and a movie" pictures, surprisingly from an ad campaign for a food court in the IBN Battuta Mall -- the "world's largest themed mall" -- in Dubai (naturally).

I couldn't use them for a commercial website, but I can here. Aren't they amazing! I love the use of space with King Kong.

While we're talking tomatoes...

My trip to the Santa Monica farmers market yesterday was excitingly fruitful: I bought some half-dozen early Galas, made dinner plans with Amanda, and learned how to prep tomato seeds for sowing.

Tomato Seed Preping:
1. Select the best tomato and let it over-ripen on the vine to ensure that its seeds are ripe as well.
2. Cut the tomato in half horizontally. Expose the open sides of the tomato to the sun for 3-5 days.
3. Squeeze the tomato seeds out over a metal strainer. Run them under very hot water and rub the seeds against the strainer, to remove any remaining tomato membrane.
4. Spread the seeds out on a paper towel to dry.
5. Store them in a tightly sealed container with a teaspoon of Powdered Milk stapled in a Paper Towel "envelope," to absorb moisture and let 'em get moldy!

Photos of lovely zebra tomatoes, yet another fruit of my trip.

Via the twitter of Stephen T. Colbert

"Hey yogurt, if you're so cultured, how come I never see you at the opera?"
7:50 AM Jul 5th

Fertilize your tomatoes with pee pee!

Apparently human urine, which is high in nitrates and vitamins, makes great fertilizer for tomatoes and cabbages. My brother Nick has been peeing on our plants since he was little, but I always discouraged it. Guess I'm the fool.

Read "This From Finnish Researchers: When in Drought, Pee on Your Tomatoes," my SI post on the subject, for more.

Take the kitchen

Cruising the NY Times today, I spotted this nifty picture. It reminds me of Eternal Sunshine and being at Jackie's beach house.


The corresponding article was written by Interpreter of Maladies author Jhumpa Lahiri. "Note To Myself: Take the Kitchen" is about cooking on vacation in a rental house kitchen, which is always a trial, but Lahiri's predicament feels a little elitist, and her diction a little too kitchen jargony. The working title could have been, "Oh the woes of life on the Cape!," though it probably would have been scrapped for being such a turn-off. Still, it would have been more fitting I think.

Lily's birthday cupcakes, part 1

Baking mini chocolate cupcakes for Lily's birthday parties has become something of a personal tradition. I do it partly because it's sweet, but mostly because I love when her friends say, "You made these?!" with surprise, before pounding down another three or four tiny creme cheese frosted cakes. Of course, I did make them. But I had help.


You see, the secret to Lily's birthday cupcakes is boxed cake mix with double pudding. I know there are those who find this to be a cop out, those who'd rather spend a lot of time and money to make a decent to good cake because it helps them see themselves as better people. But I say with total earnestness that I believe in boxed cake mix because, after all, it's about baking better cakes. Yes, Uncle Duncan (Hines) and Aunt Betty (Crocker) are the originators of my "secret" "family" recipes, and I take no shame in admitting it, because if they got cake so incredibly right, which again, is so much better than your Aunt Sally, why mess with it? Note: I feel this way about Heinz Ketchup as well.

When I was little, Nancy Silverton and her kids used to be at all of the family birthday parties. The gatherings were almost always pot-lucky, always a little pastiche-y, and everyone contributed their specialties. So when it came to dessert, my mom would bake a cake (from a box), cousin Licia would make the creme cheese frosting, and Nancy would frost the cake (because it requires artistry). As my mom likes to tell this story, at the first of these parties, Nancy's kids (who already had pretty refined palates, as you can imagine) took just one bite of the dessert collaboration before their minds were blown by its perfection. "Why don't your cakes taste like this?" they asked their mother, the world-renowned baker.

Boxed cake mix is simple and delicious. But perfect creme cheese frosting is a little more demanding of its maker. However, since I must get down to real work, I'll save that for Part 2 of Lily's birthday cupcakes.

"Ice Cream Man" and a few thoughts on "Julie & Julia"

"Eyeballs, Gore, and Clint Howard: Everything You Need to Jump Start Your Post-National Ice Cream Month Diet" is my formal farewell to July. It's kind of funny, if you want to take a look.

Also, because the "Julie & Julia" coverage is embarrassingly over-saturated, I'm not going to review it for SI. I admit I'm slightly relieved about not having to write it. I'm not a critic, so my review would deal primarily with the food aspects of the movie, which, as I noted in my Susan Spungan post, were flawless. The movie itself, however, was far from it.

I struggle to describe exactly what was wrong with it because I thought aspects of it were lovely, even moving. But there was something dishonest in the way the two stories were forced into parallel structures for the sake of the film's cinematic palatability. Something that I have too many specific words and instances for, but which ultimately amount to very little. Yesterday, Gourmet.com ran "The Trouble with Julie & Julia," an occasionally self-indulgent detailing of its writer Laura Shapiro's thoughts on Julia Child and Meryl Streep's portrayal of her, that concludes in a very apt detailing of at least part of what feels wrong in the film.

...Ephron is wholly faithful to the essence of Julia’s experience, and to the reasons why her years in Paris contributed so markedly to American culinary history. When Julia went to the Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook—by hand, without fancy equipment, from the ground up—she was also learning that passion and appetite weren’t enough. She needed technique, confidence, patience, and a host of finicky skills that only came with practicing. It was an approach to cooking that had all but disappeared from American kitchens, and without it Americans were never going to know what they were missing. That’s why she wanted to teach—because mastering French cooking had ushered her into a world so fascinating, so enlightening, and so endlessly delicious she thought everyone deserved access to it.

The idea of Powell as a contemporary heir to this personal and culinary epic is absurd. Nothing in her relation to the kitchen offers the slightest hint that she has learned anything at all from her heroine. In the film, Adams tackles each recipe as if it’s her opponent on a battlefield and the only point of cooking is victory. If the dish comes out well, she glows; if it fails, she throws a tantrum. Watching tapes of The French Chef (splendidly recreated with Streep as the 1960s Julia), her sole reaction to the sight of a genuine master at work is to coo, “She’s so adorable.” This is a journey of self-discovery? At the end, she visits the Julia Child kitchen exhibit at the Smithsonian, and her husband takes a picture of her mugging at a portrait of Julia (i.e. Streep). It’s completely unbearable.

Although I don't think the movie suggests that Julie Powell is "a contemporary heir to" Julia Child, I can see why it might seem that way. The end of the movie tries to tie things up in a convenient bow -- Julia gets Mastering the Art of French Cooking published and Julie's answering machine fills with offers for movie and book deals. Success/success suggests an aligning of fates to a point, not destinies. But more importantly, Shapiro says, "Powell progresses from cute to famous without anything happening on the inside." Or on the outside, I'd like to note, since she's supposedly gaining all this weight from cooking. Again, it's insincere but insignificant, shortsighted maybe.

I guess I just feel that for a movie that has a built in resonance with 20-30 year olds who have graduated college only to find that they've leaned everything except how to become the people they want to be, there are so few moments that honor that connection. "Julie & Julia" starts strong and then gets lost along the way. By the end, we know that we are not Julie. But maybe that's the thing that pushes us in the kitchen after seeing the movie -- the need to start as Julie starts, honestly and with integrity, and actually finish that way.