corkbar: wine bar for neophytes

It's been hard to type with my fingers triple-crossed, but I think I've finally found a new home. I don't want to jinx it, so I won't say more than that. Only now I feel comfortable taking some time away from house hunting and money making to sit down and put in some table time. So here we go.

I got a hold of a beer once when I was very little. I don't remember drinking more than a couple sips of it--nor do I remember trying to eat part of a raw steak afterward, though I've been told that I did that--but I do remember slamming my hand in the door of our red Subaru station wagon, and I remember it was horrible.

I like to think of this story as a fun explanation for why I never felt possessed to drink. I didn't start drinking until after I turned 21. And I still don't really drink-drink. But the truth is that I was probably scared straight by a video I watched in the D.A.R.E. program in 5th grade. (You may have seen it too: it's the one with the anthropomorphic bee and rabbit. It's terrifying.) As a result, wine is one particularly cavernous gap in my food culture knowledge.

Now to last week: Aaron and I were invited to sample the summer menu at a wine bar downtown. These things are a bit funny for us because we're always slightly convinced that there's been some kind of mistake. Any minute someone will announce that we were accidentally invited to sit at the grown ups table, and that we should go back to our rooms where we'll be served shells with ragu.

Of course, that didn't happen. And as we sat at the table at Corkbar, looking over the menu with two of the sweetest PR girls, I realized that it is the perfect wine bar for a horticultural neophyte like me. Corkbar's wine menu is meticulous and comprehensible. The list includes notes about flavor and pairing for each wine on the menu, all of which are made in California.

The food menu offered wine notes as well. And everything we ate was delicious. There isn't much to say because the bar seems to specialize in comfortable simplicity. They have taken the impenetrably high culture concept of a wine bar, stripped it of pretense, and given it air and light.

I will say, however, that it does not get better than their bahn mi sliders. Ground pork, ginger, cilantro, garlic, and carrot, with cool daikon that tempers the hot bursts of sriracha for the most pleasant kind of heat I've had served between two mini challah buns.

Corkbar: 403 W. 12th Street, Los Angeles. (213)746-0050

I'm a grownup

I drink coffee now. Like, twice a month maybe. It's no big deal, I'm a grownup.

This is my drink: the Cubano at Coffee Commissary on Fairfax--cinnamon, raw sugar, espresso and milk. Sometimes I add a Splenda.

I get coffee at 7 pm before the longer double features and four hour foreigns. Then I haul ass down the street to our favorite revival cinematheque and I talk very fast about my ailments and which girls at work I don't like and literature and I feel that I am just like Woody Allen. The unmarked paper cup looks very sophisticated in my hand. (A haiku!) I wonder if people think I'm European.

breakfast still life arrangements

In elementary school I knew a kid whose mother would dye his sandwiches with food coloring. I envied him. His lunches were mesmerizing and distinct, and in a small unconscious way they expressed the love that his mother had for him--a love so great it couldn't help but pour over on to his meals, warming him from his tummy out through his limbs--a love surely greater than all the mothers who made normal sandwiches had for their children. Albeit to a lesser degree I also felt this way about my friends who had cans of soda and fruit roll ups in their lunches: their mothers must love them so much, I thought, to bestow on them such treats. I believed Lunchables were the ultimate delicacy.

Then came March, and the Saint Patrickfication of our school. We colored leprechauns with red beards to hang in the windows and cut four leaf clovers from construction paper. My friend's mother made green egg salad sandwiches. They were vivid green, like the moss on the teeth of children who ate sugar cereal (my mother's name for Fruit Loops), with darker patches suggesting something more rotten, more sinister. Putrid.

The sight of them was stirring, to my stomach and my soul. In my life I've gleaned more than a little insight from sandwiches, moments of perfect clarity about culture and Truth in bites of corned beef on rye, but never before has such a revelation come from sheer sight. In a glimpse I realized that my friend's mother did not love him more than my mother loved me, she just had less to do during her days. I imagined that dropping him off at school was the hardest part of her day, and picking him up was the happiest. Around this time I stopped asking to have the crusts cut from my peanut butter and jelly and realized the meat in Lunchables was slimy and disgusting.

I unconsciously developed disdain for people who play with their food. I don't think I've seen Close Encounters all the way through because of the mashed potato mountain, or maybe I thought it was boring. The feeling has subsided as I've gotten older, but it still peaks out every so often, catching me and the poor soul with whom I'm sharing a table off guard. I'm not sure what triggers it exactly, but often wonder if it has something to do with those green sandwiches and that sad lady who made them.

Naturally, my feelings about these photos by Museum Studio are a bit mixed. They are, in all honesty, extremely charming and sweet. Very happy pictures. I just hope that someone ate these breakfasts after the photo was snapped. Because I like them, I have to imagine they did.




photos via BOOOOOOOM!

doughnuts of late

Portland is quite probably the best vacation city in the United States. You can literally spend hours just browsing bookstores, drinking coffee, sampling food trucks--all of the things you enjoy doing in your own city, without the guilt of doing stuff you do in your own city. Portland culture is that of cultural aesthetes, a collective of our type of people doing stuff we like to do. Zinester/animal portrait artist Nicole Georges, whose Portland zine anthology Invincible Summer I am currently enjoying very much, describes it as "a city of seasonal affected disorders and kids who never grow up," and every time I visit it gets harder to leave.

On that note I've been eating a lot of doughnuts at work lately. And I don't like doughnuts. To me they're like arcades, alluring and charming, only insofar as I understand they're supposed to be. Things for which other people's abundant excitement has often swept me up, though I have no particular interest in them myself. Jonathan Taylor Thomas was another such popular fixation. [In third grade I bought a Tiger Beat magazine because I assumed it was another part of being a girl my age I didn't yet understand. Like bras.]

Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland meets every criteria for a necessary vacation visit--small, local, weird. These are qualities I seek out tirelessly in other cities. And yet, during our last trip, I started walking over to shop, after a perfect vanilla latte from Stumptown, located conveniently down the street, and at the last minute I decided to keep walking because I didn't want a doughnut. This probably seems insignificant, I know, only it wasn't. In my own city I do and eat things that I don't even like. And why? Maybe it's easier and less exhausting than a life of amazing things all the time, less emotional. Is that why Portland is such a special place to visit, because it encourages you to behave like a local and live exactly as you would if you didn't worry about money and failing and the future. That's what it does for me.

They Draw & Cook, and hand-written recipes

There are few things in the world that are more wonderful to me than the hand-written recipe.

While visiting my grandmother's house last week, I spent hours perusing the cookbooks in her kitchen. They're filled with her favorite recipes, transcribed from ancient issues of Gourmet and Bon Apetit, always credited, or from her friends who (I like to imagine) traded them like gossip or quasi-folk remedies at parties. The latter have titles like "Sybil Bracker's Famous Meatloaf" and "Marcy Shapiro's Delicious Fruit Cake." Adapted in her slanted finishing school handwriting on now browning paper, they seem to me like integral but forgotten history, as if they might contain an answer to life's most pressing questions, or, at the very least, a cure for cancer.

They don't, but there is still something wise about them. The romance of sharing knowledge among women coupled with the distinct beauty of my grandmother's script, maybe. I used to receive a letter from her every month when I was little and to me, her handwriting is her signature, her seal of approval. Her pithy commentary too; even the typed recipes have little hand-written notes and food stains, a reminder of their continued evolution. I'm sure it's all three--the sharing, the script, the evolution--they're all so personal, like a living history.

Which brings me to this, the hand-drawn recipe.

I don't often check in with They Draw & Cook, a blog of recipe renderings by different artists and illustrators, but every time I do, I'm amazed with the beauty and coolness of its offerings. The recipes, which are often basic, scrambled eggs, spaghetti and meatballs type-things, become incredibly personal and meaningful when drawn by hand. I am so thoroughly gladdened that this project exists.

Seeing my grandmother for the first time since her fall. Watching her, passed out on the couch in a posture not unlike that of my papa before we buried him, I can think only of what to eat, or not eat.

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.

Empty house, full stomach

Coming back from Boston has been, for the most part, lousy. The house is a strange, unfamiliar echo chamber. Most of the mattresses are empty, my stuff is still in white boxes because I've got no drawers, the shower head is placed so high that it sprays me in the face with piercing rods of high-pressure water, the neighbor next door has been watching the History Channel so loud I'm convinced that what appears to be a normal, healthy mid-thirties male is actually a deaf WWII Veteran, and Boston still feels more like home than L.A. ever has.

The kitchen is really the only place in our new digs that has anything that I recognize, and so far, it's the best part of the house. Cooking in it has been the only thing that makes me feel okay about life right now. Alana and I are calling it quits for the time being, my grandmother might be seriously sick again, and I'm back here to patch a life together that I'm not entirely sure that I want but that I have to carry out anyhow for my own well-being (personal and financial). I can't say cooking has exactly staved off the loneliness and existential confusion, but it's been an outlet for restless energy and a reminder of what I enjoy. And hey, at least I can feed myself.

I got home on Sunday, and as I may have mentioned, the house is fucking EMPTY. Unable to unpack, I paced up, down and through the vacant rooms. I looked around the kitchen, opening each cupboard one-by-one to see where everything was. The refrigerator had a few miscellaneous items, mostly dairy and dairy-like products: milk, soy milk, coffee mate, Joe's yogurt, and a plastic to-go box filled with about a dozen french fries, most likely a remnant of Jesse's presence (and a reminder of his absence). My can of ground ginger didn't make it over, my punishment for not being around for cleaning shit out of the fridge at Veteran. I found one cabinet filled with my spices, and was hit with the distinctive, strong, and now comforting smell of hing. I saw my lentils sitting rolled up with a clothes pin holding the bag shut, and I realized that was about the only thing in the damn house of any nutritional value, meaning that's what I'd cook.

After eating a bowl of cereal, I got to the lentils. Cooking them is a long process. You have to rinse them, soak them, and even still, they take hours. So, I built the rest of my day around the process. I sat, worked, walked over to Fairfax high, hopped the fence, shot a few hoops, and prepared the lentils in between. They simmered for over 3 hours, 1.5 cup black lentils and about 11 cups of water (ratio is 1 cup lentils to 7 cups water) with a bunch of toasted cumin, mustard seed, corriander and salt. This batch turned out to be one of my best (slow cooking and whole, dried red peppers did the trick, I think).

Now, this isn't a chicken soup-type story. The food didn't make everything all better. Daal didn't cure mid-twenties, suburban existential confusion. They did, however, at the most basic level, give me something to do, something in my history that has always made me feel better (both in the process and in the end result). The smells didn't carry me on a wave of nostalgia, but they did make the house smell homey, and they made me think about cooking them over the last few years: when I started making them at Brandeis, preparing them at Chestnut Ave. in Boston when I was super busy at my internship, and when I came back to Los Angeles at Veteran. They've become personal. They happen at home.

I made this today, and I'm calling it Huevos Hindùes, which is leftover lentils and rice mixed together on a bed of sauteéd frozen green beans from Trader Joes with a poached egg and red pepper. It was pretty satisfying, by no means perfect. A bit like the new house, I guess. And though nothing has changed in my mind (I still feel pretty heartbroken and confused), the food will take care of me the rest of the week. No matter what is going on in my external or internal world, a guy's gotta eat.

So for the moment, at least I have a full stomach.

Tourist Makes Local

I got up the other day with Alana, my girlfriend from Massachusetts, and made fresh orange juice. We took six oranges from a large plastic sac, knocked them around a little to soften them up, and squeezed their sweet, pulpy contents into a glass. I scooped out the seeds with a spoon, and we sipped it all morning.

Two weeks before, we were driving through a section of L.A. equally unfamiliar to both of us on the way to Hollywood. I've become accustomed to drives like this in this city.: start somewhere I know, have no idea where the hell I am for awhile, and get spit out in a familiar spot. Usual for a city, but in L.A. it just gets stretched out over miles of long freeways and boulevards full of traffic and stoplights, which augments the nervousness and bewilderment. This role as the semi-lost, local chauffeur-cum-tour guide can't be reassuring to my passenger when I'm the one who's supposed to know my way around, but honestly, I've learned more and seen more of L.A. this way than I have as a resident.

On the way, we stopped at an ATM tucked away form the street at the rear of a drab, beige adobe bank building, and pulled up next to a midsize white pickup full of oranges. The man standing next to the truck offered up a taste, and told us that an entire sack of what must have been thirty medium sized oranges was only six dollars. Granted, he probably picked the best looking one from his lot, but what we tasted was fresh, juicy, sweet, not to mention that it came from the back of the truck, and was handed to me by a man who either picked it or knew the people who did. It was a little bit of L.A. packed into one moment: fresh produce (citrus, no less) and food hidden in a mini mall.

We threw the oranges in the back of my car (for only $5...he gave us a deal), and the first thing we thought of, never before having so many oranges at our disposal, was to do something a little reckless: make fresh OJ out of them. Easier said than done, of course, because she had to return to MA the next day. Alana took a few oranges back with her, and I was left with a huge bag of oranges sitting in the kitchen to chip away at slowly and remind myself of unmade orange juice and her absence.

Alana returned, of course, and we got to squeeze some oranges. They literally hissed with juice when I cut them in half. From six oranges, we got one delicious eight ounce glass. The juice tasted a bit green because not all of the oranges were perfectly ripe, but it was nice to get a little more of the citrus bite and lose the sugary viscousness that's in even "fresh squeezed" store-bought OJ.

Running into the orange truck was a complete surprise, one that I should perhaps come to expect in L.A. I was happy to get credit for the chance find as tour guide. But it made me think, why wouldn't the city be literally brimming with oranges during citrus season, so much so that usual channels aren't even enough to unload them all? Why can't I always have oranges that aren't covered in wax and that I pick from a neat pile at the grocery store? Why shouldn't I make my own fresh juice? This the kind of stuff that I can only do here. What I loved about this was that it wasn't just new to Alana, but it was new to me too in a different way: it made the myth of L.A., of finding good food in a parking lot or in a truck, real. It's like when I ate at Zankou Chicken the first time: it made the the vast unknown knowable. Where do I go to eat when I've got hundreds of square miles to choose from? In a dumpy mini mall.

So when Alana asked me, "why wouldn't you have a juicer if you lived here?" I told her that I'd be getting one soon.

The City Bakery Closes, an Era Ends

Two days ago I found out that The City Bakery is closing today. I cried. Then I felt stupid for crying and I wondered why I was being so sentimental. Yes, there was a time when I ate there almost every day, but in over a year, I don't think I've gone more than once.

So I planned to go for lunch today, for one last taste, but I didn't go. Although I'll undoubtedly miss City's cornbread salad (for both the flavor and the comedy of calling what is essentially a bowl of dressed croutons a "salad"), this feeling I have isn't really about the food.

Only very recently, I realized that I have subconsciously organized my entire life according to specific foods/flavors/restaurants that I associate with each distinct period. I have begun to refer to this subconscious organization as my Autobiography in Food. And much in the same way that my childhood was Rosa Rita beans (see Deep Fried Twinkie), the summer of 2006, my first summer with David, was The City Bakery.

That was the summer before I started UCLA. Neither one of us had jobs, so every day, we'd grab lunch at City, and picnic on the beach and then swim in the ocean. Sooner or later, I'd get taken out by a wave and drag myself back to the berm and collapse on my towel. I would lie there catching my breath and then when I had he would ask me about my plans for the future and I would talk about them with exhausting excitement until we both fell asleep. During those days at the beach, he taught me what it meant to be present, and what it meant to love my body. I stopped associating eating with shame and my weight finally equalized. That summer, for the what might have been the first time in my whole life, I was confident that every decision I'd ever made was right because each one had led me to that spot on the sand, where I was always just beginning.

In my Autobiography in Food, all the parts of that summer, everything I learned, and that truly perfect happiness of having direction and purpose, occupy the same space as The City. In my Autobiography in Food, they are tied inextricably. And because the end of one era and the beginning of another is often only distinguishable in retrospect, when I heard that The City is closing, I was finally awakened to the fact that that time, when I knew where I was going and it was exactly where I wanted to be, is most definitively over.

Today, I don't know what I'm doing or what's going to happen. I talk about my future reluctantly, and with hesitation. I know there will be other good places, like there will be other happy summers and other nurturing lovers. But today, losing the bakery is like losing a part of myself; it's like losing one of the best parts when I need it the most.

deep fried Twinkie

When I tell people that I never really learned how to ride a bike, they laugh and joke about how deprived my childhood must have been. Sunday's conversation with my favorite professor adhered to the standard bike-conversation protocol. He got a good chuckle, and then we went to lunch.

We pull up to a cute hoagie joint in Moorpark and he says, "They have deep fried Twinkies."
"No," as if I've won a prize.
He smiles and nods, "Yes."

Besides fries and falafel, I have very little experience with deep fried food and I have never even been within 100 (if not more) feet of a deep fried Twinkie. I think it may be a greater novelty to me than other people, first, because of the whole deep fried thing, and second, because it's the kind of food that could only have been conceived by the mind of a goy.

After my parmesan chicken sub and good conversation, I've completely forgotten about the Twinkie. The chubby guy from the counter comes to our table with the crispy blond turd atop a styrofoam plate and sets it in front of me. Suddenly the table's quiet and everyone's watching. I semi-nervously take my fork, cut, and pause with the bite aloft, and then plunge it into my mouth.

I am stunned. It's so plasticy, so good. I say the first thing that comes to mind: "It tastes like the best day of childhood." And I mean it, but it's complicated. It doesn't taste like my childhood. There was not a day in my childhood that tasted anything like deep fried Twinkie. My childhood tastes like Rosarita beans. I mean the taste sums up everything I've ever imagined about the best childhood experiences I never had. In that first bite, it was learning to ride a bike, going to the fair, having a dog -- everything I wanted to do as a kid but didn't get to.

I'm slightly embarrassed about how moved I was by such a trifle. But it was like getting to glimpse those things and be happy for that glimpse, happy that those things exist, and ultimately more happy for the perspective of Mexican beans than individually packaged cakes.*


Chris and Jeanie Mott, the facilitators of deep-fried Twinkie revelations

*I still want to ride a bike.

sweet memories made sweeter by pickles

Even though it ended badly, I have to admit that the year I spent at Clementine changed my life for the better. It's still hard for me to go back because of all of the memories tangled up in their signature smells and tastes. Their homemade chai smells like Amanda smiling so wide and for so long I thought her face would break and Sloppy Joes taste like the first time Patrick kissed me because Christine had made me cry. That year, the restaurant was my life and now going back feels like finding out that your parents have turned your bedroom into a gym while you were away at school. SO, when Margy said she wanted the 3-salad-combo for her birthday lunch, I opted for curb-side pickup to avoid the nostalgia (and the lunch rush).

NOW TO THE PICKLES...
Clementine serves a side of homemade pickles with every sandwich. They are my among my all time favorite foods of all time. Their watery crunch is more cucumbery than pickley, but the flavor is all pickle. Hands down, the BEST pickles I've ever had. However, because of my Clementine-flavored emotional baggage, they've been forced to take on "very rare treat" status. Today, my consumption of these deliciousnesses sparked a funny memory:

When Clementine closes before Christmas, the staff gets to take home all the unsold food that won't keep. The most coveted foods are the whole apple pies and roast chickens. They're great because they're huge and expensive and you can share them with your family. So while everyone is fighting over the biggies, Livier calls me over and uncovers the barrel of pickles she has stashed in the walk-in and generously offers to share them with me. I hastily fill the quart jar she has just handed me, and run to my car to hide my treasure. When I get home I retreat to my room and greedily eat the whole quart. Soon I feel the sickness. Unable to puke, I sit alone for hours. My insides are pickled and I don't regret it.