Gastronomy 101

Ooh breaking news ... on Saturday, September 18, MUNCH LA will hold its first event - a food and fashion extravaganza featuring over 30 of L.A.'s famous food trucks as well as indie fashion vendors. The event will be from 11am - 5pm at Fairfax High. Sought after food trucks such as LudoTruck (Ludo Lefevbre's fried chicken), Let's Be Frank (gourmet hot dogs), the Dim Sum Truck and Tropical Shaved Ice will be there. The full list of trucks follows: Ahn Joo, Baby Bad Ass Burgers, Big Swirl, Calbi BBQ, Crepe n Around, Del’s Lemonade, Dim Sum Truck, Don Chow Tacos, Dosa Truck, Dumpling Station, Eat Phamish, Fish Lips, Flying Pig, Frysmith, Greenz on Wheelz, Greasy Weiner, India Jones, Kabob N Roll, Komodo, Lake Street Creamery, Let’s Be Frank, LudoTruck, Nana Queens, Slice, South Philly, Sweet Truck, Tropical Shave Ice, Vizzi and more. In addition, attendees can do some designer shopping, as Young Fabulous & Broke, Hudson Jeans, Wendy Glez Lingerie, T Bags, Dylan George, Pai...

Strawberry farmers are always on a quest to build a bigger and better strawberry. In strawberry terms, what that means is they want the perfect everbearing strawberry - one that produces a large amount of fruit for a long amount of time. Seascape berries were birthed at the University of Davis and they are an extremely productive variety of strawberry, and even better than that, have a very good flavor. Seascape berries are particularly suited to California, but will grow especially well in any cool region with a warm micro-climate. Not only is the berry one of the better berries for commercial growing and selling, but this year, researchers at Purdue have discovered that it may be able to go into space with astronauts. In attempting to discover which produce might be cultivated on a space shuttle, it was determined that Seascape berries require little maintenance or energy, are not sensitive to the amount of daylight available. In fact, what they found with the Seascape was that with ...

Without a doubt, Jonathan Gold's description of these donuts is a prime example of why he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer, so it's impossible to write anything about them without providing an excerpt that shows how incredibly persuasive this man can be when enticing you to be enthusiastic about a food you might otherwise never bother to try: It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates cushion, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness, oozing from the sides, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home. This ... this is why he wins. Anyone who can use the word "miasma" in a description of food where the end result is that you de...

Just so you know .... I write like David Foster Wallace I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software . Analyze your writing! I'm sure this comes as a surprise to no one since these blog postings bear clear similarities to the works of David Foster Wallace. But it's best to make it official, just in case. Also, I actually am going to post something here soon ... just a busy schedule but I have tons of pictures saved up to write things about.

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...