Gastronomy 101

Tomorrow night at Angeli's Thursday night family style dinner, it's Crabby Thursday. And it sounds oh so good ... simple dishes featuring fresh crab, like Mr. Pinchers up there. The menu reads like this: Kathy’s Famous Crab Cakes Pizza Puttanesca California Garbage Salad (with everything but the kitchen sink!) Pasta Aglio e Olio Lots of Dungeness Crab served with melted butter, lemon, aioli Garlic Bread Lemon Curd-Rum-Raspberry Tirami Su (Trifle by any other Name) !!! All of this is $30 per person, not including tax, gratuity and alcohol. The dinner is at 7:00 p.m. and is served family style at a big table. I already have a meal coming at Mozza this weekend, which we reserved one month ago at 10:00 a.m. like we were trying to get tickets to Radiohead or something. I don't know what this world is coming to. But it means that's my hearty Italian meal for the week. So please go and eat mounds of buttery Mr. Pinchers for me and say hello to the Tira Mi Su.

I feel like I (and in turn you) have now learned a bit about the basics of wine. So now I think it's time we go out and put our skills in practice, and the way to do that is do go buy some wine. Aahh! That is scary! Reading about how wine is made is easy. Drinking it and going "hmm, do I like this?" is easy. But going out on your own and picking out a wine all by yourself? Is scary. You have to spend your own money. And you might be wrong! And the store people might be mean! They might laugh at you for picking out an uncouth wine! Oh yeah, and where do you go? Well, we live in a big city with no strange stringent rules regarding the buying and selling of alcohol. We have lots of options, depending on what kind of wine we want and what kind of experience we have: BIG Costco: Yes, you can buy wine at Costco. Now, granted you are not going to make that crazy sweet secret find here, but if you're looking for something standard from a big producer for a dinner party for yo...

The New York Sun reports today that restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow spent $80,000 in order to take out a full page to wine about his restaurant Kobe Club's bad review in the New York Times. According to the Sun: Mr. Chodorow attacked the Times reviewer, Frank Bruni , in his open letter yesterday, writing that the newspaper has been lacking a "real food critic" since Ruth Reichl left for Gourmet magazine . He wrote that he was the victim of a personal attack. New York times food critic Frank Bruni gave the restaurant zero stars in his review, saying, among other things: Although Kobe Club does right by the fabled flesh for which it’s named, it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account. For the most part it feels like a cynical stab at exploiting the current mania for steakhouses in Manhattan by contriving one with an especially costly conceit and more gimmicks than all of the others combi...

This is the second of two posts dedicated to Jeremy , also known as the SFist Top Chef recapper. While many people, including Jeremy himself, may not share my opinion, I *heart* Stephen Asprinio , one-time Top Chef contestant! I mean, just look at him! He is a masterpiece. One part regular guy, one part troll doll, 71 parts arrogant snob, 16 parts talking way too much, and 11 parts plate artistry. He is beautiful and terrible. How can you not be fascinated by that? Anyway, Stephen is coming to Los Angeles! Eater L.A. and Slashfood report that he will be opening a wine shop in downtown L.A. this summer. Called Tastevin, it's a wine boutique aimed at young hipsters who are developing their wine tastebuds and want a place to go that is cool and affordable. It's going to have one of those "wine on tap" systems so you can sample any or all of the store's wares. So I'm older than the type of customer young Stephen really wants, but I look really young, so I think ...

This post (and one to follow - you'll see when it happens) are dedicated to my friend Jeremy , aka the Trimethyldioxypurist. His blog is very cryptic lately, but his SFist articles are not, and if you want to know about coffee and/or Top Chef, he is your man. So I think it will be gratifying to him to know, and it certainly is a relief for me to know, that of all my bad habits, coffee may not actually be that bad, as Food Technology magazine reports in its January issue. No, I do not read Food Technology magazine, jeez. But I do listen to the "Science Talk" podcast ( I told you I was a nerd ). And Roger A. Clemens, who co-wrote the magazine article was interviewed about coffee. It seems that after 30 years of studies, the preponderance of evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption, which is defined as 3-5 cups per day, can reduce your risk of certain diseases, in particular: Type 2 Diabetes: Now I know all of my readers are responsible eaters, but the fact rema...

I spent Valentine's Day with all of my true loves: my husband, Angeli Caffe, David the host with the most, and Chef Evan Kleiman. Read my Angeli Caffe Valentine's love letter on la.foodblogging.

Oops! I forgot to take pictures! The other night, we had my in-laws over for dinner. Yikes! I have never felt so much like a '50s housewife, all nervous and trying to impress someone with my domestic skillz. Generally, when I am cooking for others, I just make pasta. It's the safe, easy-to-impress, easy-to-cook-in-bulk option. But this time there were dietary restrictions to consider, and I had to go outside my normal comfort zone. After literally a week of considering different things, J. and I decided on Indian. I was looking at an article about Indian vegetable stir fries in Fine Cooking magazine and they looked so good that we decided to make one of them, and some Tandoori chicken to go with it. Then I looked at the recipe for Tandoori chicken, which advised that if I made it in the oven as opposed to a covered grill, I had best be prepared for lots of smoke. No. Not only do I not appreciate smoke with my asthmatic lungs, but we have a very ornery smoke detector that goes o...

I am not a scientist, and I never did so well in my science classes, but all the same I have great respect and admiration for the scientific method. I'm definitely a right-brained person, but I have a strange affinity for left-brained things. I take my artsy-fartsy crap with a strong dose of science. I like Kraftwerk and their robot songs; Thomas Pynchon and his Maxwell's Demons and his entropy; and most of all I like my husband's works of art, which are usually pixelated and square and incredibly genius. And I like when scientists tell me how to cook. I like Harold McGee, and Alton Brown and ... I like Cooking for Engineers , a website started by a Silicon Valley engineer to hold his kitchen notes and recipes. There are detailed recipes with pictures and explanations of each step; notes about interesting subjects like browning foods, brining, and Scoville units; cooking tests; and an ingredients dictionary. If you're looking for a recipe, this is a great place to start...

Hmm. I have been tagged by Chubbypanda to tell y'all five things about myself that you may not know. And with an intro like this: "Litigating defender of the elderly by day, passionate food enthusiast and student of Oenology by night. I'm dying to read more about this sexy LA lawyer and food blogger," how could I refuse him? Although I will say, without counting it as one of my five, that it is a rare day when you would find me litigating anything, as I'd rather eat glass than go to trial. I'm more of the less-sexy document-drafting, researching, and petition-filing defender of the elderly. Not as exciting but I will take it. So, here are my five things. I will do two food related and three non-food related, assuming I can think of things that I haven't blabbed about already that I don't mind sharing with the internets. Two Food Things: 1. Up until very recently, like maybe a year and a half ago, I rarely cooked for myself. Every once in a while, on a...

I decided this year that a lot of my gifts to people would be food gifts I make myself. This way, I could practice my skills, do something I love, and give people gifts that are labors of love and consumable, so they don't sit around taking up space. I have a few birthdays coming up rapidly this month, and I had decided to make some marmalade. Well ... that didn't go so well. First of all, I had problems finding everything I needed for canning that would also work with my budget and kitchen space and existing cookware. Then, I decided to use a recipe for lemon lime marmalade from The Joy of Cooking. But it was this strange recipe where it started out giving a few instructions, and then directed you to another recipe for the rest of the procedure. But I think somewhere in trying to pull off that switcheroo I missed something or got confused because the marmalade just didn't jel very well. Basically, I ended up with a thick lemon-lime syrup and which I also thought was too sw...

All right ladies and gents, it's time to get your Valentine on. I know that many people out there hate this holiday and I admit that I can see its downside. After all, forced presents aren't that much fun. But I cannot entirely hate a holiday where you get candy as a matter of course. And it always functioned as a great excuse to make some dude take me out to dinner. And I must admit that all my bad valentine's days are far off in the distance now, and they've fortunately been getting better as I go along. Of course, I'm not much for grand shows of affection. I'm thrilled to get a card or flowers or something small and have a romantic evening at home with my man, so it doesn't take much to make my valentine's day great. And at heart, I think most of us are just the same. We don't really need fireworks spelling out our name with a heart and mondo diamond rings and mounds of puppies and boomboxes outside our windows. We just want a something, anything ...

Knowing the basics of wine is fine. But we all know the real reason why we are trying to learn more about wine in the first place. So we can look cool. Anybody can enjoy wine as long as they have taste buds and they don't have to know anything about the wine to have fun drinking it. But if you can also talk about your wine, then you alse seem super-suave and smart. Therefore, I'm going to throw down a little bit of advanced wine terminology that you can sprinkle in your wine conversations and look really educated. Viticulture: The agricultural process of growing grapes for wine. Vinification: The conversion of juice into wine by fermentation. Only if a wine producer does both of the above processes themself can they call their wine estate bottled . Many wine producers do not grow their own grapes, and some neither grow the grapes nor convert them into wine. They buy wine in bulk and create a proprietary blend in stead. Microclimate: The local climate of a particular site. And...