Gastronomy 101

Many cities have their own "signature" version of pizza, and proponents of each type of pizza are willing to argue all night that theirs is the best - whether it be from the source in Naples; or a large, thin New York slice; or perhaps a hearty deep dish from Chicago. Here in Los Angeles, we don't really have a "signature" pizza, except perhaps the use of untraditional toppings, made famous by Wolfgang Puck. But even so, you can get a "California-style" pizza at five different places and have five completely different pizzas even in the most definitive aspects, like crust thickness and cheese-to-sauce ratio. It would be a fine thing if we decided to make Nancy Silverton's style of pizza the definitive Los Angeles pizza. In my book, it can compete with any pizza anywhere. It's not just the variety of really good, really fresh ingredients in both unusual and familiar combinations. It is mostly the crust. A crust that was carefully created through

The first thing I chose out of the 99 things I must eat before I die was a no-brainer. Bob's Doughnuts is pretty much a regular destination, since my husband has a love for doughnuts like no other except perhaps Homer Simpson. But even though I've had many of Bob's delicious doughnuts, I have never yet had a plain one. While this first choice of "thing" was in many ways the easiest, it still contained an element of challenge, which was to face up to all of those frosted, glazed and sprinkled donuts and absolutely turn my back on them in favor of a doughnut that is utterly and completely nude. I hope you won't be too harsh on me when I admit that I purchased two donuts - one plain and one one sprinkle. I hope Jonathan Gold can forgive for diluting the purity of his 87th thing. But this blog post is not about a sprinkle doughnut, so what transpired between the sprinkle doughnut and I will forever be a mystery as far as you are concerned. I am here to talk about

So last week, Jonathan Gold published his list of 99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die . When I saw this, a flash of inspiration struck me, because to be perfectly honest, I've had a hard time keeping this blog going. *checks date of last post--yep* I still enjoy it, and I love eating and cooking and drinking and taking pictures of food, but somehow something happened that I never actually thought would be--I now get paid, as my job, to write things and I spend a whole lot of my time writing things for money. That doesn't make me enjoy writing any less, especially since writing for fun is a lot more enjoyable than the stuff I normally have to write. However, when you've just spent 6-8 hours in a row writing stuff, what you want to do is plop in front of the TV or game or do some reading instead of writing. I just get kind of ... tired of it. So I've been thinking what I've been wanting is a project-something I would want to do anyway but that would give me enough