Gastronomy 101

You may have ideas about gnocchi - preconceived ideas of what it is and how you feel about it. You have to forget about these preconceived notions when you eat gnocchi at Angeli. Evan Kleiman is famous for her gnocchi and part of the reason is because her gnocchi is perhaps not what you were expecting. For starters, Angeli gnocchi is not the potato gnocchi of Northern Italy that most people envision when they think of gnocchi. Kleiman's gnocchi is the Florentine version made with ricotta (also known as gnudi). Compared to the other type of gnocchi you might as well be eating clouds of delicious. It is lighter and more delicate. They are perfectly round balls of light and fluffy goodness. The gnocchi is a special and as such, it doesn't have a uniform configuration. You have to wait for the server to tell you what type of gnocchi you can order that night. It very often has a sage and brown butter sauce with or without other accompaniments. It has been known to be made with beets...

Thing 25 was a fairly non-specific directive and I interpreted it rather loosely. "Lou" is Lou Amdur, the owner of restaurant/wine bar Lou, a wine connoisseur and repository of knowledge, and husband of New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis. At any given time you go to Lou, a number of people in there will be people who know he and his wife. I don't know them, so I haven't had the pleasure of a personal wine recommendation, but I figure that everything on the menu is included in things that Lou would tell you to drink, and our waitress also clued us in to a secret wine not on the menu. But I am not going to describe the food and drink in particulars, especially since I'll admit I made a few trips to Lou, because it's kind of addictive. The best way to describe a visit to Lou is to describe in general, since both the wines and food are variable and change often. First of all, Lou is extremely unobtrusive. Tucked into the corner spot of a mini-mall, scrunche...

Spring is my favorite. The weather is nice, but it's not hot yet and this year we had enough rain that everything was growing and blooming like crazy, including delicious produce. The farmers' markets are starting to get a bunch of good stuff. We can't stop planting new stuff around our house and we want to be outside all the time. Meaning, it's hard for me to sit down and write stuff on a blog. But here are many pictures from April. This is a cream of dandelion soup made with dandelion leaves. They are very bitter, but the cream mellows them a bit. They are also very good for you, being very high in potassium and Vitamin A. Dandelion leaves are also diuretic, so this soup is called creme de pissenlits in France, which basically means "have fun wetting the bed after you eat this." But honestly you don't need to worry about that unless you've also drank way too many glasses of wine. I adapted the recipe from A Kitchen of Her Own to make it. Strawberry...

It's true that there are taco stands galore in Los Angeles. It is almost mystifying to think how any one of them could distinguish themselves. Taco stands are basically made to be a place you go because it's close, it's cheap, and the food is of the type that, even if it's not the best example of its kind, it's also really hard to go badly wrong with a basic taco or burrito. Tito's basically resembles most taco stands. It has the same basic dishes (taco, burrito, enchilada, tostada) and it's cheap. But there's something about these tacos that makes you want them even if you're not nearby. I have driven from Koreatown to West Los Angeles at lunchtime for these tacos and it is a miracle if you can get me to go somewhere that's out of walking distance. A modern foodie would probably be mystified. There's nothing immediately special about the food at Tito's. It's far from authentic, it's not healthy, nor is it fused with any other int...

Without these "things" I may never have tried this coffee. Or not for a while anyway. I like my coffee in the morning, but not enough to drive all the way out to Silverlake to get it. Not to mention to get a morning coffee that costs about 4x as much as my regular coffee. But this is some pretty special coffee, and a special occasion (like going to see the Clientele at Spaceland) deserves a special cup (or two) of coffee. So we decided to head into LA Mill for dinner. This will be one of the fanciest coffee places you go - they appear as a nice restaurant and they do serve food, and their menu matches their decor. Slightly upscale dinner fare, but nothing too fancy. Jason had sliders and I had a Spanish-inspired panini or pork, manchego cheese and piquillo peppers. The food was good - nothing drop-dead amazing but just solidly delicious. What we were really waiting for, however, was this coffee that was so special. As soon as we began to peruse the coffee menu, we could tell ...

I really have a real post, that I will hopefully put up tomorrow, but I want to take a break to put up some cool pictures I have accumulating. First, we had some people over to our house to watch the Oscars last month and our lovely guests brought the most amazing cupcakes from Big Sugar Bakeshop . Each cupcake had an image representing a Best Picture nominee or an Oscar on it. They came in vanilla, chocolate, and red velvet flavors and all were delicious. I really cannot talk up this bakery enough. It is in Studio City, very near my former workplace and it is one of my favorite bakeries I've been to in L.A. They are extremely creative, but the stuff they make is not overly complicated or unbalanced. For example, their cupcakes are my top cupcakes in Los Angeles. Most of the trendy cupcakes seem to load on frosting completely out of proportion to the amount of cake and it's gross. I end up lopping off most of the frosting and leave it on the plate. These cupcakes have a correct...

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...