Gastronomy 101

It's time for another LA.Foodblogging entry. Pitfire Pizza recently was named by the L.A. Times as one of the city's great bargains. So when I found myself downtown recently, I had to check it out . Tags: LA.FOODBLOGGING

Go figure. "Fig" is not just just a sweet jammy paste that sits in the middle of a Newton. It is, in fact, a real live round globule of fruit. And right now is a perfect time to enjoy fresh ones. A fig is not just a fig, it is an inverted strawberry. It's true! The strawberry underlies the true fruits, which speckle its outside, while a fig surrounds its true fruit, which are in the center. What you think are seeds are actually tiny dried fruits! How cute! But what is really fascinating is the sex life of a fig. Figs have a complex interspecies relationship going on with what is described as " a tiny wasp ." In order to pollinate the florets inside, the fig has a little pore on the bottom through which the tiny wasp will enter to pollinate. I'm going to pretend I never learned that. Some fig varieties can set fruit without pollination and produce seeds with no embryo. The way a fig reproduces affects its flavor, apparently. The figs fertilized by wasps are a

Our local foodblogging establishment, la.foodblogging , has seen fit to allow me to contribute. From now on most of my Los Angeles centered posts will be done there, and linked to from here, in order to avoid duplication. My first post is on my morningtime friend, Groundwork Coffee (as promised to Jeremy and my sweet Auntie). You can read it here: I'll Have the Works . Tags: LA.FOODBLOGGING

It's that time again. It's Sugar High Friday! This month's edition is hosted by Veggie Venture . The theme for this month is: The Surprise Inside. Participants are asked to create a sweet dish with some sort of surprise inside--either a surprise ingredient, or a hidden surprise treat, or any other reasonable interpretation of the theme. In honor of the host, I began with a vegan recipe for brownie bites by Erin McKenna of Babycakes NYC. So the first surprise inside of this recipe is what's not in it: eggs, milk, and gluten. Then I destroyed the vegan-ness of it by adding in Vosges red fire chocolate chips , which are made with butter. Which is the second surprise, as these brownie bites have a spicy cinnamon-chile heat lurking in their belly. As McKenna acknowledges in the article where I found this recipe, it's really hard to make good vegan brownies. The recipe is the product of six months on her part of trial and error, so as far as the main ingredients go, I di

Orange muscat is a unique variety of muscat grape. Orange muscat generally appears as a dessert wine and is grown in California and Australia. The most well-known orange muscat comes from Quady Vineyards in the Santa Barbara area of California. The orange muscat grape originated in Italy, according to Andrew Quady, but other sources have it coming from France. True to its name, wine made from this grape has an aroma of orange blossom and apricot. The orange muscat grape has never been a popular wine grape. Perhaps because of the sunny conditions it requires, and some say it was scorned by vintners and serious oenophiles. Quady has been responsible for bringing back the grape, and more California wineries have followed suit, including Bonny Doon 's Muscat Vin de Glaciere. Quady's wine was award-winning from the start. Not only does the wine have aromas of orange, but it is orange in color, and has a perfumy orange blossom tinge in the flavor. Having read about and been intrigu

On a recent trip to Surfas I purchased a bag of "Tongue of Fire" beans. These are a type of cranberry bean, or as they are known in Italian, borlotti beans. The beans are white, with swirls of red and they are very pretty. Despite the name, they are not spicy, which is kind of disappointing, but the beauty of beans is that you can MAKE them spicy if you want to. The beans themselves have a nutty flavor, which is really good. I'm not so much of a bean fan, but I preferred these to other types of beans I have had. Cranberry beans grow fresh in the summer, i.e., now and are available dried throughout the rest of the year. It just so happened that there was a recipe for a halibut dish utilizing cranberry beans in the September issue of Food and Wine. It's a pan-roasted halibut with the lemon butter sauce. Recipe and wine pairing suggestions can be found HERE . Things I would do differently next time are: 1. Soak the beans before cooking. They took forever to cook. 2. Turn

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a girl who did not cook. Not unless it was a very special occasion. Why? I don't know ... I never saw any use for it. I didn't know it was fun. I have lived in a succession of quite small apartments that came with equally small kitchens. In two of the cases the kitchen was merely one side of the living room. In another the kitchen was the size and shape of a small hallway. Not the greatest setting for culinary wizardry. So now that I have learned the calming effects of chopping, mincing, boiling and sauteing, the relaxation that comes from the mindless, repetitive tasks of prep work, I am like a cooking madwoman. But because I am also in learning mode, in addition to all of the fabulous molecularly gastronomic wonders that would blow your mind too much to put on this blog, I also have to take a certain amount of time to go back to my basic cooking textbook, "The American Woman Cookbook" and learn some basic dishes that most pe

I promise I am going to start posting real posts up again very soon ... tonight, even. It's been an overwhelming several days, workwise and it's hard to get into "foodwriting mode." So instead, I'm tiding you over with a link to Pat Saperstein's review of the Black Dahlia flavors at Scoops . Why? Because there's a secret hidden shout out to me in it. In the picture of the Scoops flavor suggestions at the top of the review, you can see, smack dab in the center in my fantastic handwriting, the flavor suggestions that my friend and I came up with: French Toast, and Apple Brown Betty. You know that those would be good. And isn't Apple Brown Betty an awesome name, for anything? It deserves to have a gelato made out of it. It's only a hop skip and a jump from the "brown bread" flavor that Mr. Kim currently makes. I feel like a little part of me will now live forever. My flavor suggestion is pictured on the internets.

Photo by: Stephen Osman / L.A. Times The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday on Measure J, a countywide voting initiative on the San Luis Obispo county ballot. Measure J is the result of an ongoing dispute regarding the Dalidio farm, which the owner, Ernie Dalidio has been trying to have developed into a shopping center, but has not yet been able to win approval for the plan. His latest effort is to propose a compromise meant to appease environmentalists and others ... the Target, Lowe's, TJ Maxx, SportsMart, Old Navy, Chili's, Johnny Rockets, etc. will share space with a butterfly preserve, an organic farm, and a farmer's market. Besides being a pretty typical state of affairs in my hometown, which has an eclectic population, this illustrates to me the complexity of the problems we face, especially when it comes to how we produce and acquire our food. Because it is my curse, as usual I can see arguments on both sides of this issue and I am torn. This is another facet of

A recent L.A. Weekly article pegged gelato as one of the five signs your neighborhood is gentrifying . The article points to Pazzo Gelato as evidence of the completion of the "Brentwoodization" of Silver Lake. Which leads me to wonder. Can gentrification ever be complete? How do you know? How do you know if it's really as ... um ... gentle (?) as it's going to get? Because it has a gelato shop? I don't know ... there's been a gelato shop in my neighborhood for a while and I think there's still quite a bit of gentrifying to do on my skeevy section of Melrose. And then, I get an e-mail about Scoops Gelato, and how owner Tai Kim is creating twelve different flavors based around the theme of "The Black Dahlia," to coordinate with the movie release and as a tie-in to Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak's "Real Black Dahlia" Crime Bus Tour. I've been hearing a lot about these gelato places, and I think we are asking the wrong questions here.

August has passed us by and we are now racing through September at breakneck speed. Kids are back in school, the days are getting shorter and there is a barely perceptible shift in the weather as the Southern California heat just slightly begins to toy with the notion of giving in to fall. We won't have to get our sweaters out for a while now, but we can start anticipating that day, at least. To commemorate the end of summer vacations and trips to the beach, and barbecues and growing things and suffocating heat that demands a refreshing beverage, Paul at The Cocktail Chronicles is hosting edition number seven of Mixology Monday , "Goodbye Summer." Instructions are simple: "just post whatever drink you’ve been enjoying this summer and bid it a fond farewell as we head into the apple cider and hot toddy season." Now part of the deal at my place is that I am the cook and J. is the bartender. I let him eat the food I make and he makes me wonderful cocktails to ease

Okay, I don't often go really far into my non-food related life on this blog, but some occasions deserve to be commemorated. It was about two years ago, during my second summer of law school. I lived in an apartment that didn't allow dogs, and so I got my vicarious doggie thrills by volunteering on weekends at a dog rescue adoption day held in a PetCo parking lot. I often had to go walk through PetCo to wash my hands of doggie slobber and related gunk and I often found myself passing the display of betta fish sitting along one aisle. One day I stopped to look at them and found myself remembering another betta fish. When I was in high school, roughly 1.5 zillion years ago, my friend Gerald and I made an impulse buy of a betta, whom we named "Techno KT," after me. Seriously don't ask about the "techno" part, it's just another dull piece of evidence of why we were gigantic dorks and the explanation would take up more room than it's worth. "She&

Hey you guys ... there is a new, cute little directory out there called Delightful Blogs . It's a blog directory where each site is carefully reviewed before being added to make sure it is a legit blog with something to say. They describe themselves as looking for blogs that are "personal, passionate, and of course stylish!" I hope that my blog is all of those things, and they seem to agree because they accepted it for inclusion. Anyway, if you have a blog and would like to include it, you can find instructions for how to submit here . They also have a rating system where you can rate a blog you like. If you happen to like my blog (or if you happen to particularly dislike it), you can give Gastronomy 101 a rating here . Anyway, just thought I'd give a shout out because (1) they accepted me and (2) I cannot resist the cuteness of their bird logo. Tags: delightfulblogs Tags: MISC.

It's taken me a zillion years to peruse the entries in the last edition of Sugar High Friday , but I finally made it. Along the way I discovered several new and interesting blogs, but one of them stood out, for a few reasons: 1. The blogger, SurfinDaave, is local. I always like to find more fun L.A. foodbloggers to read. 2. SurfinDaave likes: Breakfast at Tiffany's, Quadrophenia, and Thomas Pynchon. These are some of my favorite things. To the point where people hate to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's with me, because I will say all the lines, and to where a friend and I once planned a road trip to go try to find Thomas Pynchon. We didn't go, though. But we planned it. 3. SurfinDaave is an inventive chef who makes fabulous dishes and then blogs about it, at the same time incorporating stories and musings so you're not just looking at a food and a recipe, you are truly entertained. So if you are looking for more L.A. foodblogging fun (or general foodblogging fun, since

I go to the Farmer's Market almost every week for practical reasons, for the most part. I go to get exercise (it's a 1.5 mile walk) and I go to purchase fresh, seasonal produce direct from the producers for my weekly meals. I like knowing where my fruit comes from, and whether or not it's organic and I like being able to ask the producer directly questions about the fruit, like when it was picked or when it should be eaten by, etc. But I also have some less practical reasons for going. I love to go beyond the ordinary and I am always hoping that in among the ordinary apples and green beans I go to purchase, I will also find some new and exciting exotic fruit or vegetable, or even just some new and exciting type of an already familiar fruit or vegetable. And sometimes I do. This summer I have learned about several different types of heirloom tomatoes, discovered kyo-ho grapes and "tongue of fire" beans and discovered that there are so many types of potatoes that i

At first, I could not believe I was going to out this restaurant. But then I looked around and saw that someone had already let the cat out of the bag on this one. Terried is one of those restaurants that you don't discover unless someone tells you about it, because it somehow just flies right under the radar despite the fact that it is just so good. It's nondescript and low-key. Heck, I not only lived right near it for a while, I spent a summer with my butt parked at Cacao a few doors down and didn't even notice it. Until someone took me there, and I realized that I had found a hidden treasure--my new favorite Japanese restaurant in town. Once you make the leap and actually decide to go in, you know it's going to be good, because the place is always busy and there is often a wait. It has the standard sushi bar and a bunch of worn wooden tables where you just need to get lucky enough to have enough seats open up to fit your group. The specials are drawn up on a white b

Maki of I Was Really Just Very Hungry is hosting the second edition of Food Destinations , a food blog event in which bloggers document a food destination under a certain theme in photos and blog about it. This edition is called "My Local Greenmarket," and bloggers are directed to take a journey to their local farmer's market and document the trip in photos as well as provide details about the market. This is a perfect exercise for me. I love my local market and I go there almost every week to purchase a few things. To begin with, let me tell you about my market. There are a jillion farmer's markets in L.A.--one of the city's redeeming qualities. But for me, there is only one that I can walk to. It's a long walk, and sometimes I set out with visions of a young woman strolling down the sidewalk, skirt flowing in the breeze, looking cool in her sunglasses and looking even more cool with her little tote bag overflowing with greens and baguettes. The reality, unf

Last night was the big test of my sundried tomatoes. I tested them in a panini, which I got the idea to make from a recipe on the Medlock Ames Winery website. The number one thing I learned is that while drying, those tomatoes really suck up flavor. If I were to make these for the general public, this means I would go lighter on the salt, because they turned out incredibly salty. But since they are for me, well, I love salty and they were perfect little nuggests of savoriness in this sandwich. There were also some that got peppercorns in them from the salt-herb mix and those surprised me. They were infused with heat that opened my eyes a little, but it was a nice surprise. So I learned that making dried tomatoes is very easy, but go light on the flavoring because it won't get lost and could potentially overpower the tomato and it's better to check on them regularly and not just leave them, because (a) they will be done at different times, and (b) there IS a perfect moment to t