Wow that was fast.

Lot 1's cute former chef

I don’t make it over to Silver Lake / Echo Park much anymore – it lost some of its allure once it got too trendy to find parking. But I’ve had it in mind lately to make a field trip to the new Lot 1 restaurant ever since I got a rave recommendation from a friend of a mine. “ze food is amazing! You weel lof eet!” (she’s French). And it did sound intriguing with items like a simple arugula salad with guanciale and grated jidori egg and a red wine pot roast with fava beans and candied rhubarb, not to mention a chocolate and fleur de sel mousse with olive oil. Simple but creative food – just my thing. Then I saw the Amy Scattergood feature in the L.A. Times about chef Josef Centeno (late of Opus) and his studiply named but delicious sounding lunchtime baco, and thought I would wait a bit for the post-publicity crowds to die down. Oh well, I guess I lost my chance, since Scattergood now reports that Centeno is leaving.

The story goes that he was walking down the street one day and ran into Eileen Leslie, who was putting the finishing touches on her new restaurant, which was ready to go except for the small detail that there was no chef. Enter Centeno and the buzz began, but these sorts of serendipitous events often end in tears – especially when there is a restaurant involved. After several months behind Leslie’s stoves, Centeno reports that “he doesn’t want to cook for awhile.” Ouch.

I know the feeling. What is it about working in a restaurant that can turn you off cooking? My own denouement came when I started as pastry cook at a super hip and much buzzed about mid 90’s Hollywood restaurant. After a few stints here and there, I got a call from a young chef about a new place opening up in a parking lot off Hollywood Blvd. Chef wanted an Alice Waters-y vibe, and I produced tarts and pot de cremes and delicate cakes served with fruit confits, staying as fresh and local as I could and earning raves for a lemon tart I adapted from Chef’s own. It was all very sun dappled and lovely until one morning Chef came into the kitchen, looked over my shoulder, and I caught a whiff of something on his breath – something like sour milk, or perhaps vomit, no, no – ughhh semen. From that point forward, things were never the same. I can’t explain it, and I do feel bad about it, but I felt small and mean and primal – my sensibilities all in an uproar – and well, how do you tell someone you don’t want to cook for them anymore because they smell like blow job? Quarrels and shouting ensued; I started walking out dramatically on a daily basis. During that time, the kitchen shifted focus away from earthly Alice and towards bad boy Marco Pierre White (read Bill Buford’s Heat for a fantastic portrait of this brilliantly annoying enfant terrible), and suddenly the pastry station was all about spun sugar, and one day I walked out in a huff and didn’t come back. All of this – from first phone call to final huff – took about 3 months to transpire. I thought I’d never cook again. While the desire to cook came back quickly enough, the desire to step into a restaurant kitchen again never has.

Here is a ridiculously rich and delicious chocolate tart that Chef taught me. Use the best chocolate you can find. For the baking shell, I recommend Lindsey Shere’s short crust, recipe below. If you are feeling fancy, serve along side some coffee creme anglaise, a strawberry, cut lengthwise several times and fanned out, and a sprig of mint tucked alongside. Or eat a thin slice or two with coffee, as you would a cookie.

Chocolate Tart

Preheat oven to 400^o

Combine, melt and blend in a bain marie or double boiler over simmering water (do not let the water touch the bottom of your pan)

9 oz good dark chocolate, like Valrhona of Callebaut

½ cup butter

pinch of salt

In electric mixer beat on high until ribbon stage:

6 egg yolks

¼ cup sugar

Fold egg & sugar mixture into cooled, but still warm chocolate. (Add just a bit of the egg mixture and blend into the chocolate before adding the rest).

Beat to stiff peaks

2 egg whites

1 tb sugar

fold 1/3 of the whites into the chocolate, then incorporate the rest.

Fill the tart pan, and bake at 400 for 8-10 minutes, until top appears cracked and cake-like but insides remain running.

Lindsey Shere’s short crust

2 c Unbleached all-purpose flour	¼ ts grated lemon peel
¼ ts Salt	1 tb Ice water; plus
1 tb Sugar	1/2 ts vanilla extract
½ cup unsalted butter, not too cold

Mix the flour, salt, sugar and lemon peel in a bowl. Cut the butter in pieces 1/3-inch thick and quickly cut them into the flour mixture until it is the texture of cornmeal. You can do this with a pastry blender or with your hands by rubbing quickly and lightly between your fingers. Combine the water and vanilla and add to the dough until just blended. Gather into a ball and wrap in plastic. Let sit for 30 minutes, then press into a 9-inch tart pan, making sure it covers the bottom and sides evenly. Wrap the shell in foil and set it in the freezer for at least 30 minutes. Bake it blind (no need to fill the shell with beans) in a preheated 375o oven for about 25 minutes, until golden brown.

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Goodbye Donna Deane…

She had the job I always wanted, as head of the Los Angeles Time’s test kitchen. But to tell the truth, I don’t think I would have had the stamina and savvy she’s shown over the last 28 years. Every week, for as long as I ‘ve been reading the L.A. Times Food section, she’s made my mouth water with her great recipes. Often, even if I didn’t try the recipe, I’ve remembered a technique or a tip. Now she’s leaving, a casualty, evidently, of Sam Zell’s massacre of a once great newspaper. It suddenly occurs to me that I should probably credit her for my becoming a serious home cook – Her recipes always sounded irresistible, the instructions made them seem doable, and the results were always a success.

Here’s one that I haven’t tried yet – I found the clipping under a pile of magazines I was in the process of throwing out. Six Gourmet magazines got the boot, but I’m hanging on to Donna’s recipe for this lemon upside down cake.

Lemon Upside-Down Cake

• 4 small lemons (about 4 oz. each)
• 1/2 c. plus 2 T. (1&1/4 sticks) butter
• 3/4 c. packed light brown sugar
• 1&1/2 c. flour
• 1&1/2 t. baking powder
• 1/2 t. salt
• 1 vanilla bean, split
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 c. milk

Cut three of the lemons into 1/8-inch thick slices. Remove seeds and set aside. You will have about 30 lemon slices. Grate 1 t. lemon peel from the remaining lemon. Set aside the grated peel; save the lemon for another use.

Heat 4 T. of the butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet or an ovenproof 10-inch saute pan until melted. Brush the sides of skillet with a little of the melted butter. Add the brown sugar, stir until it is moistened with the butter and spread it into an even layer. Arrange the lemon slices, slightly overlapping, to cover the bottom of the skillet. Set aside.

Heat the oven to 350°. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and set aside.

Cut the remaining 6 T. butter into a mixing bowl. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean with the point of a knife onto the butter. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until creamy. Add the sugar and grated lemon peel and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

Add half the flour mixture and beat until blended. Add milk and beat until combined, then add the remaining flour mixture and beat until blended.

Spread the batter over the lemons in the skillet to cover evenly. Bake 30 to 35 minutes, or until the cake is golden and the center tests done. Let the cake stand 5 minutes, then invert the skillet onto a platter. To serve, slice into wedges with a sharp knife. Serves eight. May be served with a lightly sweetened whipped cream, if desired.

Each serving: 498 calories; 5 g protein; 62 g carbohydrates; 3 g fiber; 28 g fat; 17 g saturated fat; 122 mg cholesterol; 274 mg sodium.

— From Los Angeles Times test kitchen director Donna Deane

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Oy vey!

I learned a few things about kosher meats yesterday, when I read the NYTimes story about an Iowa kosher meat processing plant and its management’s abuse of undocumented workers. I was then horrified to realize that I’ve bought many of this plant’s tasty kosher chickens at Trader Joe’s!. They are delicious, and cheaper than organic, and I naively thought that because they were kosher, they were, well, pure somehow. I’ve boycotted meat brands because of the treatment of animals before – this is the first time that I’ve stopped buying meat because of the way the humans working there were being treated.

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I wonder if there is a message in here somewhere…

This AM on HufPo:

Tom D’Antoni: Clinton and Obama Joint News Conference on Race/Gender

“TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY’S 9AM ET JOINT NEWS CONFERENCE WITH SENS. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY) AND BARAK OBAMA (D-IL)

Sen. Clinton: We have called this joint news conference today because Barak and I want to make something very clear to our fellow Democrats and to all of America.

Sen. Obama: For the past few weeks the two of us have been concerned about the tenor of the campaign. We do not want our supporters or anyone else to mistake what we say.

Sen. Clinton: First of all we are Democrats. Democrats stand for equal rights and justice, for all races, genders, sexual preferences, religious preferences…or no religious preferences. All of the legislation to insure these equal rights has come from Democrats.

Sen. Obama: We do not seek, as the Republicans do, to exploit divisions among people…to stoke latent prejudices and make political gains from them. And so we have come before you today to make a pledge. We don’t apologize for criticisms we have made of each other’s records or positions.

Sen. Clinton: No, they are an important part of the process of choosing a new President. What we want to make clear is that when we criticize each other, what we say is neither racist nor sexist. Therefore, we pledge here today that for the rest of the campaign neither one of us or our representatives will accuse the other of either racism or sexism.

Sen. Obama: This is new to America…an African-American and a woman, running for the highest office in the land, and against each other. We both acknowledge that there are race and gender tensions in America. We would be silly to say there weren’t. But I tell you here today, that I will never play the race card.

Sen. Clinton: And I will never play the gender card. We know that there are some Americans who will never vote for a woman for president.

Sen. Obama: And some who will never vote for an African-American. What is important in this campaign is that we will not make any statements which might be construed to appeal to prejudice. We’ll leave those to the Republicans.

Sen. Clinton: Also, we promise that we will not react to any statement by each other and make accusations of veiled racism or sexism.

Sen. Obama: We want our supporters and representatives to know that whatever we say is about what we feel is best for America. We’re going to appeal to our natural constituencies, of course, we’d be stupid not to.

Sen. Clinton: But at no time are you or anyone else to construe that what we say has an ounce of prejudice or pandering to race or gender. After the nightmare of the past seven years, we seek to restore respect for ourselves as Americans and for the United States on the planet.

Sen. Obama: Let that moral compass come from us, by example. And with that…

Sen. Clinton and Obama toether: Let the best candidate win!

And then I woke up.”

Yeah, and I fell for it!

And then I read my horoscope:

“Sure, you’re smart enough to know that life is not fair, but that doesn’t always stop you from seeking justice and equality as you journey through your days. By maintaining this delicate balance between realism and idealism today, you will be able to handle any situation, no matter how bizarre or uncomfortable it might be. Becoming a cynic might save you some disappointment here and there, but it’s much more rewarding to think that all people are equal and should be treated as such.”

Hmmmmm….

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My theory about Obama in Iowa…

Iowa is made up mostly of white guys. White guys don’t like strong women. White guys like to think of themselves as the Great White Friend to the Black Man. In the final analysis, they’d rather vote for a black man than a woman.

Actually when I was under 30, I would have voted for him too. He reminds me of a suave Julian Bond, with a modicum of that man’s intellect. There’s nothing particularly wrong with him, and he’s a great performer. But I’ve heard a lot about “hope” in my life, and hope just don’t pay the rent.

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Soup weather in Los Angeles!

After weeks of hot winds, fires, and relentless sunshine (in L.A. there can be such a thing) it is cold enough today to turn the heater on. This is in addition to the extra layers of clothing and the warm slippers.

Finally the weather cooperates with my favorite convergence at the Farmers’ Market: fresh cranberry beans and cavolo nero. I have my friends at McGrath Farms to thank for introducing me to the former, and the irrepressible and sadly deceased Dee Dee Throgmartin to thank for the later.

Learning to like kale and drop it into soups and vegetable braises was a culinary rite of passage when I first came to Cali and realized that veggies didn’t really come from cans. Ten years ago, when Dee Dee started bringing her bunches of cavolo nero grown from seeds she got from Italy to market, I immediately fell in love with them. With their pebbly texture and richly colored dark green leaves, they look fantastic. They taste even better, whether lightly sautéed in olive oil and garlic, or cooked for hours into a mysterious luscious mass, ala Suzanne Goin.

Now cavolo nero abounds at many a Cali farmer’s table, as have the wealth of recipes supporting their use. I use it for a kale, pancetta and crispy garlic dish I make to serve alongside caramelized cippolini onions for Thanksgiving. I throw it into everything from vegetable soup to frittatas. Sometimes I braise it with garlic and red pepper flakes, and serve it with poached eggs and grilled bread rubbed with fresh garlic.

But my favorite dish is Ribollita, and today is just the day for it. Ribollita can be made a variety of ways, with a variety of bitter greens and with canned cranberry (borlotti) or cannelini beans, but it is all the richer for the fresh ones that are making their brief appearance alongside the kale this year. (Last year the beans didn’t make it into the late fall and I had to rely instead on dried borlottis from Bob’s Red Mill Farms-still good of course, but not the same).

To me the magic of this dish is its simplicity and the sensuality of its preparation. First I roughly chop the vegetables for the mirepoix, and while that is cooking, I shell the fresh beans. The shells of borlotti beans have a distinct cranberry and cream mottled coloring that looks like marbleized Italian paper. So do the beans themselves, though that changes with cooking. Coaxing the plump beans, huddling together in a row, out of their hiding place can be an exercise in patience, but I enjoy the process while breathing in the aroma of the mirepoix on the stove and the mineral-y smell of the kale waiting patiently for its turn under the knife.

Like many simple dishes, the success of this soup relies on assembling the freshest ingredients you can find. There are two exceptions of this rule. Use canned tomatoes, but make them the best – San Marzano or Muir Glen fire-roasted are my picks. Then make sure you have a slightly stale ciabatta on hand. If you are like me and love buying those fragrant loaves but can only allow yourself a few pieces of toast before succumbing to carbo-phobia, this is a good way not to waste the rest of the loaf.

Finally, plan to spend an afternoon attending to this soup in a leisurely way. While the sweet, nutty perfume wafts through the house, read a book or call a friend, Maybe cozy up with a good movie. Then a few hours later, scoop some into a big bowl and eat to your heart’s content –it is rich with minerals and antioxidants. Nothing else required, unless you feel like a glass of good red wine.

Leftovers have sustained me all week long as a lunch I actually look forward to. It only gets better the longer it lasts, about a week to 10 days.

Assemble:

• About 1⁄4 cup olive oil
• a big handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves
• one small celery root, peeled and chopped, or 3 ribs celery, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 red onion, chopped
• coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1 -2 cans whole peeled tomatoes
• 2 -3 bunches cavolo nero, trimmed and roughly chopped
• 1 lb fresh cranberry beans, or 2 15-oz. cans borlotti or cannelini beans, drained
• 1 stale loaf ciabatta bread minus the pieces you’ve already eaten for breakfast

1. Pour a thick layer of olive oil into a soup pot and heat over medium-high heat.
2. Add parsley, celery root, garlic, carrots, onion, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, stirring every so often, until onion is transparent and slightly browned, 15–20 minutes.
3. Crush tomatoes and add to the pot. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook until thickened, about 20-30 minutes.
4. Add cavolo nero, and fresh water to cover.
5. Cover the soup pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered, until cavolo nero is tender, about 30 minutes.
6. Slice the loaf lengthwise, and tear bread away from the crust into pieces that are about 1″. then add to pot with a few tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, and more salt and pepper to taste.
7. Simmer stirring occasionally until thick, about 30 minutes more .
8. Serve drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil, if you like.

• If you are cooking with canned beans, you can puree an extra can of drained beans with 1/2cup of water in a food processor and add to the soup after step 5
• Add red pepper flakes to taste to the mirepoix in step 2.
• Add a parmesan rind to the pot at step 5
• Leave out step 6. Serve with slices of ciabatta toast rubbed with the open end of a garlic clove that has been sliced in half
• Chop some pancetta into cubes, “blanch” in boiling water for a minute or two, and add to the mirepoix in step 2

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This has been the week from hell down here in SoCal

As a friend mentioned today, it’s a good thing we are a rich state, or those of us who live in southern cali would all be toast by now. Here in Los Angeles, our canyons have been spared this time, but being sandwiched in between 12 out of control wildfires has been no picnic either. I’ve been breathing in chunks of particulate, wiping ash out of my eyes and off of my car all week. On Tuesday the heat was so oppressive, the air so still and the sky so low and orange I thought I was in the middle of some post nuclear nightmare. I can’t even imagine what it has been like for the folks who’ve had to deal with the winds, the flames and the smoke.

The bright spots in my week were:

1: a comment from thirithch on my post on Augusten Burroughs a few weeks back. Thirithch: you aren’t late to the party at all: In fact just last night in a class on memoir I’m taking, our instructor, the wonderful Amy Friedman, professed her disdain for Running with Scissors for all the same reasons you cite, so your timing is uncanny!

2. this picture that showed up on my flickr RSS today:

4durt: this picture arrived in the nick of time. It is so absurdly beyond cute, that I’m just going to stare at this photo until I start to feel normal again.

****

Goodbye Jack. You are missed.

god’s lute will beg for your hands

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A Dem Dares to Dream: Our next Secretary of State?

Hey,  it works for me.

I don’t really see him running this time out – why go there? Fake Steve Jobs has the ultimate analysis on this, as always.

But if Hillary ends up in the White House, who better to join her as her SOS? He’s got an Oscar, a Nobel Peace Prize and eight years experience in the White House. Plus, he’s popular abroad.

Then in eight years, when Hillary steps down…

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Hoo-ray for Tina Fey!

Girlfriend won an Emmy last night for best comedy for the show she writes, produces and stars in. Maybe the show will pick up a few more dozen viewers for its smart, subversive writing and crackerjack cast, including Alex Baldwin in the role he was born to play, and Jack McBrayer as the very peculiar Kenneth the intern.

 

 

Reasons to love Tina Fey

Will Arnett on 30 Rock

 

 

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17000 happy people dancing as one…

When I saw the red tail hawk cruising the canyon, I knew it was going to be a great night.

A pair of tickets to Underworld at the Hollywood Bowl had just landed in my lap and I was on my way to pick them up, then meet my date at Hungry Cat. We had a delicious gazpacho, more of a tomato broth than the chunky soup I’m used to, chilled to perfection and served with a timbale of avocado and Dungeness crab piled into the middle of the bowl. That, a market salad and one of their great cocktails, and we were off.

We even used public transportation to the bowl- a real live metro bus, followed by a shuttle to the Bowl that was crammed with happy concert-goers. It’s a big deal for a car-saddled girl like me, and I enjoyed the different views of streets I travel every day.

What a study in contrasts the show was!

Paul Oakenfold blew. I’ve had some great times dancing to his beats, so it was disappointing. He had live musicians- violinist and tabla player sitting raga-stylie, then a jazz saxophonist, and finally an oud – it was fake and pretentious and vaguely insulting to his artists, who toiled away in the shadow of Oakey’s huge black behemoth tower o’ turntables. He made me think of Wizard of Oz: pay no attention to the burned out DJ…..Plus, his visuals were stale: here are the fast moving clouds, here ’s the sweep through the forest canyon, now we’re in the desert, and Oh, here’s that Asian chick again flailing her hair around and squatting in my face in yet another lame fetish outfit. Like – where’s the beer luge, dude. The sound was distorted, the strobes flashed out at the audience in a really harsh way. Embarrassing, really.

Gratefully Underworld erased all memory of it with their boundlessly inventive Brit pop ambient energy. They’ve been around for so long, but they’re still as fresh as Oakenfold is stale. Karl Hyde was in rare form, dancing, leaping, singing away in an amazing silver jacket that seemed to have a life of its own, while Rick Smith and Darren Price bent over the consoles spinning those exhilarating beats. I fell hard for them, all over again. Great sound, brilliant use of the stage, gorgeous visuals choreographed to their beats. Pure sonic bliss. 17000 happy people (and at least two generations) dancing as one…A great way to say goodbye to summer.

Instead of taking the bus back to my car, we walked down Hollywood Blvd. taking it its fading seediness, punctuated by groups of hipsters and Goths waiting to get into various Sunday night parties.

I’ve decided I need to take pictures of the all the views that will disappear when the new W hotel goes up. The price of urban renewal, I guess.

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