the one with Marisa Tomei and GMOs

Here's a link to "Marisa Tomei Was Pissed When the GMO Labeling Proposition Failed. So She Got Some Friends Together..." my first feature-length story for the LA Weekly's A Considerable Town.

The story wasn't supposed to take a stand on GMO labeling, and I don't know enough to do that anyway. At least not in any official capacity. But here in my own space I'm free to say that the not knowing, the major and probably intentional holes in public information I encountered during my research on GMOs, is what convinced me that labeling is necessary. GMOs haven't been proven harmful, but they haven't been proven safe either. And the fact that there's so much resistance to labeling feels like something is purposely being hidden.

This isn't a cause blog so for now I'll stop with that. The article has received 1.8K Facebook likes in less than four days, so I'm probably on a least a couple watch lists anyway, which is funny considering I've been living out of a suitcase for three weeks. Or maybe it's more threatening, because I have so little to lose...

don't call it a comeback

It's not a comeback. I'm still feeling my way around on the floor in the dark, only now my eyes are starting to adjust.

Here's that other post I mentioned last time, thrown together at the request of my editor, immediately after the Elemental post went up. There are parts of it I actually like and really I was proud just to finish. It's been so long since I published twice in one week.

I also wrote a third piece that week, a long form article for the Weekly's People issue. It won't be published until May, but I can't wait to share it. It feels distinctly mine. You'll see what I mean when it goes up.

first of the year

Here's my first paid post of the year, Elemental Superfood Seedbars: Gluten-free and Still Delicious, posted yesterday, the 5th of March. In defense of my (indefensible?) sloth, it was a hard one to start with. For some reason I felt I needed to legitimize gluten-free as alternative food blog fodder, so I started with sentences like "Grapes are gluten-free and they're delicious" and "Channing Tatum ate gluten-free to get into pants-dropping shape for Magic Mike, so it can't be all bad." Also it dealt with autism, so aside from being bad, lazy writing, it didn't feel appropriate to take that approach.

Anyway I'm happy with the final draft. Mostly happy. And the next post should be up at the end of the week.

Finally, somewhere in my notes I wrote "It's the difference between using MSG and sacrificing a whole steer into a beef stock; the MSG's good, but it's not a fucking cow." I can't remember what it had to do with the post, but it has sound logic, applicable to a number of things, and gusto, so I'm keeping it here for posterity. 

a criterion feast

These days it seems I can't get anything done unless it's preceded by an emotional breakdown. That's what happened with this post. I sat down, I cried, and then I birthed out a couple of decent paragraphs. But it feels good to care. To remember that I do. To put on some weight and anchor myself again.

Thank you Shawn for the tip and for always showing me that there are more good things.

Here's A Cinema Feast from the Criterion Collection.

10 paletas

10 Best Paletas in Los Angeles is the fruit of enormous collaborative effort by everyone we live with, have lived with, lived with on a temporary basis and friends who just stopped by. I had icy, chili powder diarrhea during the month we were working on this baby and, since you're likely someone I coerced into "helping with my research," it's likely you did too. First, I am so sorry. Second, I hope that reading the final post and seeing at Aaron's spectacular photos justifies your pain, even just a little.

dieting logic, a not-crazy conversation in text message

ive done some things

during my radio silence:
Michael Voltaggio + Homeboy Industries at L.A. Film Festival Wednesday
10 Best Milkshakes in Los Angeles

I've baked some things too and started a new project. But I don't really care. Not really.

People have been asking me what's new. I tell them I'm reading 50 Shades of Grey and I realized that I've pronounced "exasperate" wrong my whole life. They laugh but it's no joke. Clearly, I'm in crisis. Maybe I need to go to grad school.

news: get jiro! update + comic con

Finally an upadate on Anthony Bourdain's comic Get Jiro!

DC Comics is sending me a hard copy this week, but I won't be able to post about it until they give me the go.

In related news I've been credentialed for Comic-Con and the LA Film Festival.

In unrelated news I've jumped back on The Sopranos boat and I'm currently paddling through season 3.

In news relating to the related news, my HBO bender is making it hard for me to muster the motivation to metro downtown for LAFF screenings.

This story was originally going to be called "CORRECTION: Doritos Locos Tacos Taste Like a Foot in the Mouth, Not Broken Dreams + Doritos Existentialism." But Doritos Locos Tacos: A Visit to the Taco Bell HQ Test Kitchens + Doritos Existentialism is probably more fitting.

Since it went up I've been invited to tour the test kitchens at Yogurtland HQ. Probably not into that. What would be the angle? I suppose it could become a funny beat: touring corporate kitchens... Whatever.

research of late

Images from my new research project, the latest source of trunk junk.

breakfast for lena dunham

If Lena Dunham and I were friends I'd make these for post-sleepover breakfast.

Read about them here: Sapore dei Mobili: Tiny Furniture You Can Eat, a post for the ol' profesh food blog.

GUEST POST: Making Hanukkah a Major Production

Five days ago my mom and I got together to make meringues, a sweet tribute to the life my great aunt Miriam who passed away last week. They were her signature dessert. Mixing egg whites and sugar, we traded favorite stories about my wild and wonderful gypsy aunt. About her wild dances and hanukkah song, her ENORMOUS jewelry. It was a good day. I think Miriam would have loved it.

My cousin Margy wrote "Making Hanukkah a Major Production," the piece here below, about our aunt almost 22 years ago. Even though I was five when she wrote it, it's pretty much exactly how I remember her. We decided to post it here so that our family and friends would have a chance to read it.

December 06, 1990|MARGY ROCHLIN | Rochlin is a frequent contributor to the Food Section. 

One afternoon in 1941, my Aunt Miriam immigrated to the United States, escaping the Nazi invasion of her temporary home in Rotterdam, Holland, by a single day. She arrived at Ellis Island, at the age of 20, with her mother and brother--her father had already relocated from their home in Berlin to New York City. But it was only Aunt Miriam who was detained and then roughly interrogated for seven long days. (The problem had something to do with her not qualifying for political asylum because of her age.) When things were finally straightened out, though, and her mother came to fetch her, Aunt Miriam wasn't as happy to leave as she might have been.

During the week, she had taken up with a handsome Lithuanian man and the night of her release coincided with the Passover dance. "What can I say?" she explained when I recently asked her about the experience. "I was very busy while I was there. I was a good dancer and not the quietest violet."

I retell this anecdote so that you don't underestimate how much my Aunt Miriam loves the Jewish holidays. I can't remember the first time our family attended one of her Hanukkah parties. But one of my earliest recollections is of my brothers and sisters and I huddled on the dark doorstep of Aunt Miriam's and Uncle Sidney's Los Feliz home and the look of extreme excitement on Aunt Miriam's face when she'd fling open the door.

She'd be wearing a bright Bedouin wedding dress of embroidered silk and her wrists would be rattling with silver slave bracelets. Inside, there would be 40 or so guests, people speaking so many foreign languages that it sounded like a cocktail party at a Trilateral Commission. At this point, a stranger to her home might have wondered if something theatrical was about to happen. And, of course, it was.

Her dramatic flair might have been inherited from her father, an Orthodox rabbi who also wrote secular plays on subjects such as the unfortunate romantic denouement of Anne Boleyn. From the time Aunt Miriam was very young, her creative expression helped reshape the traditional format of her family's religious celebrations. Consider her younger brother Bernie's Bar Mitzvah: Aunt Miriam co-wrote and performed a bloody-but-tragic operetta based on a fictional character she invented named Mondi the Convict.

It only makes sense that Hanukkah would represent to her some kind of free-floating proscenium upon which to stage her alternative theater projects. I could tell you about the Super-8 movies she has scripted and produced, short films with serpentine plot lines and titles like "The Case of the Missing Hanukkah Gelt." There was also the year that she thumb-tacked a white bedsheet on the archway between the living room and the dining room and had her husband, children and grandchildren act out, in back-lit silhouette, the saga of the Maccabees re-interpreted as a Western adventure complete with prop 10-gallon hats and blazing six-guns. Aunt Miriam narrated the action in rhyming verse while the theme song from "Bonanza" blared in the background. At some point, usually toward the end of the evening, she performed an improvised modern dance to Israeli folk music. 

After the entertainment came the food. The interesting thing about what you'll find to eat at a Hanukkah party is that the menu is different from house to house. I've eaten Polish latkes, which are more like flapjacks and made without any potatoes at all. In "The Jewish Festival Cookbook," the authors talk about Portuguese cheese latkes , which are sprinkled with olive oil to symbolize the ancient miracle of lights. Once, while attending a Hanukkah function hosted by Israelis, out came a plate of freshly made jelly doughnuts, a sight which surprised me until someone explained that hot fruit fritters are what you serve at Hanukkah parties in the Land of Milk and Honey.

Unlike the dishes at other Jewish holidays whose ingredients are dictated by religious dietary laws, Hanukkah food is all about custom and taste-memory, about the way ethnicity takes over in the kitchen at holiday time. Because Aunt Miriam is from Germany she follows her grandmother's Rhineland latke recipe, which requires nothing more than eggs, grated potatoes, and a little salt and pepper. Alongside the platters and platters of potato pancakes--she makes about 200 of them--are bowls of sour cream and homemade applesauce. The cranberry sauce is her domesticated version of preiselbeeren sauce, a puree made from tiny berries that she's only seen in Germany.

Even as a child I understood that Hanukkah was one of those rare times when dessert can be consumed at any stage of the meal and where quantity goes unchecked. This knowledge held even more significance at Aunt Miriam's house: Sweets are where she truly excels. Her brownies are so dark with chocolate they make your heartbeat quicken, her lattice-topped mock Linzer torte are flaky isosceles triangles smeared with raspberry jam.
If Aunt Miriam's Hanukkah spreads are anything, they are reliable. It's reassuring to know that every year you'll find the exact same items on the dining room buffet table. This means that there will always be meringue kisses, sweet cookies made from egg whites and sugar that look like huge white cosmetic puffs, only marked with crackly brown striations where the vanilla extract bubbled out while cooking.

Through the years, I have often met non-Jewish guests there, people for whom my Aunt Miriam's party is their first encounter with Hanukkah. And I've often thought about how her individualized take on the festivities might leave the kind of indelible impression that other hosts might find hard to compete with.

Perhaps next year these new Hanukkah initiates will go to someone else's house and encounter a roomful of Jews quietly lighting the menorah and intoning the ancient blessing over the candles with a good deal more piety than my relatives could muster. Confusion will set in as they look around for the crunchy meringue kisses. They'll check and recheck their wristwatches, hoping that show time will begin soon. And they will leave wondering why the evening didn't close as it had the year before at Aunt Miriam's: with a loosely formed circle of people clapping their hands wildly, while the lady of the house danced alone in the middle, smiling her big, happy smile and shaking it like there was no tomorrow.

chocolate editions

Chocolate Pie Chart: A Thank-You Gift for the One Who Does Your Taxes is dedicated to my step dad, who does my taxes, and loves chocolate.

photographic lunch at fundamental la

chocolate toffee matzo crunch ice cream

I was sick for a whole week! A business week, but still -- long time to be bedridden. Eating was a chore, thinking and hygiene were exhausting, so I didn't do much of those things. Instead I got cozy with some HBO Go and fell asleep to many an episode of Extras.

I've only just started to get my appetite back and my mind is still feeling mushy. So please, excuse the lack of intro to this recipe for Chocolate Toffee Matzo Crunch Ice Cream, Aaron's new favorite ice cream.


Using David Lebovitz's recipe for Chocolate-Covered Caramelized Matzoh Crunch.

INGREDIENTS
4 sheets unsalted matzohs
1 cup unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 cup firmly-packed light brown sugar
big pinch of sea salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

RECIPE
Line a rimmed baking sheet (11 X 17) completely with foil, making sure the foil goes up and over the edges. Cover the foil with a sheet of parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 375F.

Line the bottom of the sheet with matzoh, breaking extra pieces as necessary to fill in any spaces.

In a heavy duty saucepan, melt the butter and brown sugar together, and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the butter is melted and the mixture is beginning to boil. Boil for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat, add the salt and vanilla, and pour over matzoh, spreading with a heatproof spatula.

Put the pan in the oven and reduce the heat to 350F degrees. Bake for 15 minutes. As it bakes, it will bubble up but make sure it’s not burning every once in a while. If it is in spots, remove from oven and reduce the heat to 325F, then replace the pan.

Remove from oven and immediately cover with chocolate chips. Let stand 5 minutes, then spread with an offset spatula. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Let cool completely, the break into pieces and store in an airtight container until ready to serve. It should keep well for about one week.


VANILLA ICE CREAM

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1 1/8 cups granulated sugar
3 cups heavy cream
1/4 cup powdered milk
1 1/2 tbs vanilla extract

RECIPE
In a medium bowl, mix the milk and granulated sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the powdered milk and mix. Stir in the heavy cream and vanilla. Pour the mixture into the ice cream maker and let mix until thickened.

Break up the candied matzoh into small pieces and stir them into the soft ice cream. Transfer into an air tight container and put it in the freezer to harden.

doritos locos tacos

I wrote Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos Taste Like Broken Dreams, then a representative from Big Dorito emailed me an invitation to tour their test kitchen and give it another try. I'm going to take them up on it and hopefully they'll offer me a lifetime supply of Doritos in exchange for a redaction. I've already told my editor I'm going to take the deal. The headline would be something like "CORRECTION: Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Tacos Taste Like Summer Romance."

Luckiest girl does Q & A with Jiro Dreams of Sushi Director, gets food posioning

My little cousin Josie does this incredible thing: she doesn't talk much yet so when she's feeling super lovey she shakes her head back and forth in fast, mini shakes, she clenches her teeth, and pushes her face into yours. Sometimes she stomps her feet, like she has a point to make in Morse code. She is so full of love that she doesn't know what to do, how to express it, so it just overflows all over the place -- like a tea pot with steam. I've been feeling like that every day for months now, overwhelmed with love and gratitude and blessing.

And then I got food poisoning. It too was an overflowing, of sorts. At one point, when my head was on the toilet seat, I thought about how many butts had been on it and that I didn't care because even if it had been 5000 butts I wasn't going to move. Then I laughed about it, briefly because it made my stomach seize up and that was shitty... The point is that food poisoning brought me back to Earth. I had been feeling so lucky, undeservedly lucky -- free drinks and hotel rooms lucky, the perfect pair of salmon colored loafers at a steal lucky -- like the universe was out of wack. And now, after 30 solid hours of bed, the score is settled.

Here's another thing for which I was lucky:
Q & A With Jiro Dreams of Sushi Director David Gelb: Elegant Eel Dissection + The Importance of Rice

preview + more posts for hipsters

The gentleman and I spent the weekend in Palm Springs living like wealthy 60 and overs -- tasting wine, munching quince and cheese toasties, napping. In an act of youthful defiance we ordered burgers from room service 10 mins before the kitchen closed. They called him Mr. Courtland when taking our order and told him it was a pleasure to serve us. Very successful trip. PHOTOS COMING SOON!

Until then, read Food Gadgets for Hipsters: Bicycle Can Cage, a new post on Squid Ink.

Did I mention that my Mac & Cheese post got its own page in this week's LA Weekly? I've riding the residual elation all week so it must have been an oversight. But here it is.

strawberry ice cream

I know what you're thinking. You must have a zillion cute ice cream bowls. Yes, I do. They're from Anthropologie. I got them for my birthday and I put all kinds of things in them -- cereal, soup, everything.

This recipe is adapted from the Cuisinart recipe booklet that came with my ice cream maker.

RECIPE

3 cups fresh strawberries, stemmed and quartered (you can use some frozen ones too)
4 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 1/2 cups sugar, divided
1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 3/4 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons vodka

DIRECTIONS

In a small bowl, combine the strawberries with the lemon juice and 1/2 cup of the sugar. Stir gently and allow the strawberries to macerate in the juices for 2 hours. Stir gently and allow the strawberries to macerate in the juices for 2 hours. Strain the berries, reserving the juice. Mash half the berries.

 In a medium bowl, whisk the milk and remaining sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the heavy cream, reserved strawberry juice, mashed strawberries, vanilla and vodka. Pour the mixture in to the ice cream maker and let mix until thickened.