In The West, 2.3 to 4.15.06
Friday
February 3
to 10
Topanga:
Les
Garagistes
Now
that I am back
in the land of sunshine and
hard-bodies, it’s time to A. erase the
ravages wrought by two weeks of sitting in one place (the car) and a
devil-may-care approach to my daily sustenance, and B. (actually more
important) get back to work on the salad book.
Because,
helloooooo,
it’s due
in a week!!
I
broke the back of the testing before
leaving New York, but it’s far
from finished, and of course I lost two weeks due to the fact that it
is notoriously hard to cook (even a salad) in a motel room. I did nail
two in Scottsdale, but I’ve still got six to go and only seven days.
Since I absolutely hate to waste food, that means it’s pretty clear
what dinner’ll be for the duration. Fine with me: I am so
ready for a little roughage.
First
night back I do Crab Cakes on
Butter Lettuce with Creamy Aioli
Dressing for our landlord in the canyon, Eric. He’s a crab cake
aficionado raised on the eastern shore, so his kudos mean I’m right on.
I always like to make the cakes as light as possible, so it’s a
delicate mixture, but eminently do-able. Next night, I’m down at my pal
Ronda’s in Calabasas. She also went to cooking school in England, so
there are two sets of pro taste buds on the job. I need them both: the
Vietnamese Shrimp Noodle Salad requires some pretty profound changes
from what I’d originally put on the page, but it’s finally pronounced a
winner. (This is why I really can’t do two at once: each step and
ingredient and ratio of ingredients and the overall flavor balance must
be closely examined and tweaked as necessary. It’s a good job for
detail-oriented people.)
Ronda
skips town for Mammoth and I
dog-sit for two nights (excellent,
since I get to take a decadent bath in her big tub; she has more exotic
bath products than the average spa). On my own, I test two more
salads,
then head up to Malibu the next night, to my wine-maker friends’ house
to test the Farro Salad with Radishes, Scallions, Mint, and Feta.
Mmmmm…I always thought farro would taste like hay but it turns out to
be really toothsome and tasty. Dutch and Andrea are Dutch (surprise)
and Austrian, respectively, and they are making wine in Malibu. It’s a
“garage” wine and we get to taste the new vintage straight from the
barrel. It’ll be in bottles soon, and it’s definitely ready.
This is a
very, very different wine than the one they made at their vineyard in
Vaison-la-Romanée, in the Côtes-du-Rhone, several years
back. Dutch’s grape of choice, Syrah, acts totally different when it’s
raised in Paso Robles. In France
it was a tart; here, it’s a slut. A
fat one.
Dutch
employs a technique that is
quite controversial
amongst the small
group of intrepids making Rhone rangers in Malibu: he adds a touch of
Viognier to soften the tannins. (I’m not sure why it’s so
controversial; There’s a somewhat famous wine in France that’s made in
virtually the exact same way—it’s called Côte Rotie.)
Tonight,
I’ll be back in the canyon at
John and Julie’s house, where
they plan to make Julie’s famous hand-job
kebabs to go along side my
hearty Greek salad with warm olive oil-and-oregano-kissed pita. The
kebabs got their name from the squeezing technique that’s necessary to
compact the ground lamb securely onto the skewers, but Julie says I
don’t do it right.
I
haven’t seen them since our fine,
wine-quaffing and pizza-making time
at the casa in Chianti last summer, and will enjoy reminding them of
their resulting nicknames: Jacopo
and Bubalina.
Mine
was Brigidini.
I
guess you had to be there.
Feb
11 to 19
Topanga:
Impossible Pink Creatures
I’m
settling into the winter-west routine and it feels good. This week, I
tested the last two salads for the book and sent it off on the deadline
day. Whew! Grilled Beef with Corn-Radish Salad and Chipotle
Dressing I did at Ronda’s. There is a reason that I so often test
recipes at a friend's house (beyond the desire for companionship): I
have no stove up at the sweet little pad in Topanga.
You
may ask,
“Why, if she’s
a cookbook writer, would she choose to live three months of the year
without a stove?” This is a fair question.
It seems that when, years
ago, our friend (and landlord) Eric decided to add a kitchen to the
rent-able apartment below his house, he didn’t feel that a stove (or
garbage
disposal) was necessary.
This is the way bachelors think: “Hey,
fridge,
microwave, sink. That’s a kitchen, right?”
But
the price
was right,
the view stunning, the garden a southern
California dream of lemon
trees, lavender, rosemary, and blue-gray succulents. And the
pool, an
azure blue to match the great big sky. So of course we decided to
compromise: a big gleaming grill with side burner for the patio just
outside our ten-foot sliding glass door, a convection oven, and a
little two-burner electric (aaaargh!) hotplate were purchased. There
are many things that can be cooked with this set-up (more when the
weather is clement, which it often is). There are also many things
which can not.
Thus,
here I
am testing the
second-to-last salad at Ronda’s house. It needs some adjustment (the
dressing almost blows our heads off). I’m
not all that great with hot and spicy flavors—I guess that’s why this
is one of the last to get tested. Ronda is engaged in making a whole
flock of adorable Valentine gift bags for her daughters to give out to
their classmates. Stuffed pink
creatures that have never been seen in
nature
(in any color), plumed pink
pens, and Hersheys kisses jostle with those little message-bearing
hearts; all are enshrouded in heavy cellophane and polka-dotted
satin ribbons. Ronda is the all-time maven of gift-giving and
gift-wrapping.
In one of her recent houses (with one of her recent husbands), she had
an entire room just for the purpose of 
wrapping.
I long ago gave up trying to equal her efforts. Her gifts from me tend
to come in a (nice) shopping bag.
The
very last
salad recipe,
Grilled Beef Tostada Salad with Black Beans, I do at home, out on the
terrace overlooking the pool and with the full glory of a Topanga
Canyon sunset as background. The next day, sadly, was the
swansong for
our incredible, 80+ weather, but at least I fitted in one last
terrace-dinner. C. will be trickling in from Richmond very soon, and I
hope there’s a little more hot in store for him.
Midweek,
I
revisit one of
my old-time favorite Venice hangs, Primitivo,
on Abbot Kinney. When
this spot first opened C. and I were there from Day One voting with our
dollars. It was just what our ‘hood needed: a rustic Mediterranean spot
serving a plethora of interesting wines by the glass and small plates
of earthy food. It obviously struck a wide chord, ‘cause it’s still
going strong. The funniest thing is that it’s also still full of women.
At 5:30 when I walk in it’s empty; in three minutes the bar is full –
with 14 women. Half an hour later some tables are filled, too. The
count is now 23 women and 3 men. Just down the street there is a
hard-drinking classic Venice
institution called Hal’s, and every night
the guys there wonder where all the women are. Hellooooo? They’re up
the street at the pretty place that doesn’t serve hard liquor.
Ummm....wonder
why? The bar is dark, in keeping with the clientele of
women-of-a-certain-age. My pet
bartender, Chris, makes me feel right at
home. He was supposed to be going off to Costa Rica over a year ago…now
he
tells me he’s really, truly leaving, in about six weeks.
We’ll have to frequent his bar frequently during that time to get our
fill of his quirky humor, which I’ve watched, along with his facial
hair, progress from naïve, hopeful, wannabe-different to that of a
bona-fide, crusty character, despite his youth. This
tweed-beret-sporting guy is shaping
up to be a true iconoclast. He and
his girlfriend plan to spend their first five months in Costa Rica
“catching every sunrise and every
sunset." Mi compadre!
I
order the
bacon-wrapped
dates stuffed with chorizo, to hold me over ‘till dinner. Now
that’s my
kind of food. Three crisp, dark and mysterious little pods on a plate
spattered with reduced balsamic. The
chorizo is chewy and fatty; the dates sweet and the bacon salty. What a
happy ménage-a-trois!
Dinner
that night is at
Billingsley’s, a complete throwback
steak-and-prime-rib joint on Pico
Blvd with formica and flocked wallpaper. That this place continues to
exist on LA’s tony Westside is some sort of miracle, but then I get
inside, check out the clientele, and see why: this is the crowd that
doesn’t want
the upscale
dining experience that’s so common here. I’m glad they’ve saved this
out-of-the-space/time-continuum
spot for me. A little plastic basket on
the table conceals two huge slices of their special cheese bread. It’s
orange and squishy and redolent of garlic salt, and it's goo-ood!
My dinner companion at
Billingsley’s is one of my
ex-husbands, and we hash over old friends’
current stories and discuss the endlessly-changing story of his
daughter, my ex-stepdaughter, who seems, finally, to have settled down
at college. I’m sure that when college ends, she’ll be off like a
rocket into fabulously uncharted territory. I think the most
interesting women are the ones who, when they were teenagers,
seemed
beyond hopeless. Like moi, of course.
Topanga
Feb
25
Desire
to
Drive, One
The
closest brush with death
I’ve ever had anywhere, to my knowledge anyway,
was driving a three-ton truck with air brakes over the Pyrenees in ’92,
when my first husband and I moved from the UK to Spain. The steering
wheel was on the wrong side, of course, and I was passing on a
four-lane, not a two-lane highway. In other words, I was in the left,
or fast lane, passing a vehicle in the right, or slow lane.
Unfortunately, this was on a steep downhill switchback, spiraling down
to the French/Spanish border from the high mountains, and I was
going
too fast. The
truck was ungainly and just as I pulled parallel with the right-lane
passee, the precariousness of the whole situation suddenly scared me
absolutely, positively to death. I came very, very close to slamming on
the brakes
with all my strength, which in a
vehicle of that weight, and with oncoming traffic
just a few feet away, would surely have been a terminal move.
But after
a split-second of decision-making, I gritted my teeth, gripped the
steering
wheel so hard that all the blood
fled from my knuckles, and stayed the
course. Finally and with a bloodstream overflowing with adrenaline, I
made it past the passee and back safely into the slow lane once again.
Where I stayed for the remainder of that journey.
Now
that I am settled in one
place, more or less and for the moment, it
seems like an appropriate time to reflect on and explore my desire to
drive. I believe it started in Europe and was motivated by laziness.
This may seem counter-intuitive. To me, throwing a couple of
small bags
into the back of the car is far easier than cramming it all into one,
lugging it to the airport, enduring the complications of air travel,
and then never being able to fit it all back into the suitcase for the
return trip. And this was before airport security increased by several
orders of magnitude. During the ten years I lived in Europe I never saw
any reason to fly when it was possible to drive. (There were also the
shop-ortunities to consider; wine and vinegar bottles and marble
mortars-and-pestles are notoriously difficult to pack for air
travel.)
This often resulted in my driving a car with the steering wheel on the
wrong side, since for most of that time I lived in England. This makes
passing on tiny two-lane roads, particularly in France, a dangerous
proposition. And pass you must, because farm vehicles are usually
sharing the road and going 30 mile an hour.
If
you are unlucky enough to be
in the passenger’s seat of a British
car which has just pulled out into the left lane to overtake,
say, a
tractor
in the right lane, this means that any oncoming traffic seems headed
directly at your body. The driver, over on the right side of the car,
can’t actually see oncoming
traffic until he or she is already in the
lane facing it. Edging out to take a look is not fun for the passenger,
who is often plastered against the seat speechless with fear. But in
spite of some hair-raising near-misses along these lines, I still and
always wanted to drive. Napoli?
Piece of cake? (In hindsight, driving
on the Amalfi coast road in an English car is not something I would
currently recommend.)
Desire
to Drive, Two
I
am discovering my nomadic
side. I love to nest and have done it so many times I get tired just
thinking about all the houses,
kitchens, and herb gardens I’ve created.
And yet there is a part of me (which seems to be gathering strength the
closer I get to fifty) that believes things are better over the
horizon. A better sunset, a more beautiful view; a truly
simpatico
local restaurant scene. Warmth.
I
read a biography of Martha
Gellhorn a few years ago, and was struck by her seeming
rootlessness,
her constant moving around in search of a better place. Gellhorn was
one of Hemingway’s wives,
after the one who lost his early stories on a
train and before Mary, who was at one time quite jealous of Papa’s
attention to Slim Hawks, later known as Lady Slim Keith, who was my
mother’s
neighbor and friend in Connecticut for a time in the eighties. (In
other words, Martha Gellhorn was, really, practically a member of the family.)
Gellhorn covered the Spanish
Civil War, moved from Cuba to Cuernavaca to Colorado, and was
constantly packing up her books and, sometimes it seemed incidentally,
her daughter, because she’d decided that place over there would be
better than
this one here. Her later years were spent in Paris, but I wonder
if
that
was because she’d finally found the best place, or if her age had
finally just slowed her to a stop. It seemed sad to me as I read it. I
felt she’d romanticized herself right out of reality and would never be
able to let herself declare “Eureka!”
I
have so many more places to
see. But perhaps it is time to admit that I don’t need to
actually live
in all of them.
Feb 27
Avocado Epiphany
The Santa Monica Farmer’s Market is just as
I remember it: socially sleepy,
fulsome, and riotous with color—in
February. In my mind’s eye
I see New York’s
Union Square Greenmarket. It’s a more recent addition than this market,
and beyond fabulous in several seasons of the year. But not right now.
This market is always fabulous, always different,
always tempting. Strange
varieties of vegetables wait for discovery:
broccoli Spigarello - and look! There’s the Romanesco broccoli I heard
about on KCRW. It seems to come in not just purple, but yellow, too.
East Coast aficionados poo-poo
the constant good weather in the West.
They say it makes time run together, so that you can ”have a cup of
coffee, turn around and all of a sudden you’re fifty!” Right now I
can’t bring myself to mind this sunny weather and plethora of bright
and tasty vegetables in February. In New York right now I’d have to put
on seven layers of clothing to do this. I walk past a man who is
offering samples: bite-sized chunks of creamy bright green avocado—a
variety I’ve never heard of. It is so good, and so simple, and so right, that I instantly realize I
have been insulting avocados for
years. On it, he says, is just lime
juice and salt. A whole beautiful
new world is revealed to me in those
four words. We know these things in our souls, we who love food,
but
sometimes we are tempted to gild
the lily.
The lily, I realize, is just
fine on its own. It doesn’t need olive oil, or tomatoes, or shrimp. It
is a thing of beauty all alone.
Of course if you are confronted by an out-of-season avo that takes
weeks to ripen in a paper bag on the counter, you might have to dress
it up. But what the hell are you
doing eating an avo out of season
anyway?
Photo:
Romanesco Broccoli
Feb 28
Salmon Serendipity
I
do love my cookbooks.
I
may have mentioned this. I am
afraid to count, but there are around a thousand, so clearly I can’t
bring them back and forth across country twice a year (which means that
I can never be truly
bi-coastal).
My
second husband once
complained, in therapy, that I had “too
many books.” My mother,
initially outraged when she heard we were parting ways, responded, when
she heard about this statement “Okay, well he’s history.”
So here I am with the
bounty of the farmers market at my feet, and I suddenly realize that
perhaps I am too dependent on
my cookbooks. After all, if I don’t know how to cook virtually every
dish and food by now after writing fourteen-plus
cookbooks and thirty years of
semi-professional cooking, Houston’s got a problem.
It’s not as though I
actually follow the recipes, I reply to myself, I just use them for
inspiration. I love to leaf through the pages and be reminded of some
dinner in Spain, some picnic in France, some season when I fell
truly,
madly, deeply in love with truffle oil, or monkfish.
The situation that caused
this internal dialogue had to do with some very, very beautiful
multicolored little potatoes in the farmer’s market. Suddenly
all I
could think about was a dish from the excellent book Parisian Home
Cooking, which I’d made many times. In my cross-referenced database
(5000 titles indexed by course, ease of preparation, season, and major
ingredient) I see that it contains salmon, leeks, small potatoes, and
bacon, and that it is one of my favorite
winter dishes. But I know all
these things already, and the page number isn’t 
much help now that
my cookbook collection, which grew and thrived in New York, London,
Spain, and for thirteen years in Los Angeles, is currently
located in
upstate New York.
So (alert the press):
I
had to improvise. And you know what? It turned out even better
than the
original. Suddenly I feel more hopeful about the peripatetic future and
my ability to cook in it.
Cookbooks I
brought on the drive: Bones,
Balthazar, The Ritz Cocktail
Book, Rogers-Gray Italian Country Cooking, Time-Life’s The Good Cook:
Outdoor Cooking, and Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories.
I think, now, that they’ll probably do me. And Alan Davidson’s new Fish
and Shellfish of SouthEast Asia, because this time when I go to 99
Ranch Market and stand dumbstruck in front of all those beautiful fish
with exceedingly strange names I am going to KNOW WHAT TO BUY.
Photos: Potatos
at the market; Salmon with the landlord
Mar
1
Bartender
Bonanza
When
we first sold the Venice Beach house, relocated all our equity East,
and rented the little apartment in Topanga Canyon for our winter
home-base, one thing I knew we would miss is our local Mexican, Lula’s
on Main Street. Our pet bartender (we actually have several of these)
knew our order: two Lula’s margaritas (made with 100-proof Triple Sec
he brought in from Mexico himself, and fresh lime juice), and a
quesadilla with all the trimmings. Possibly a fish taco or two, if C.
was feeling hungry (which was often).
It’s just too far away from Topanga, we reasoned, reasonably. Although
people do drive long distances in Los Angeles, they tend not to do so
after a few
margaritas. Or if
they do, it’s not for long.
In the exceedingly tiny village of Topanga (several post-hippie shops,
a feed barn, and a post office) there was one restaurant, called
Abuelita's (grandmother’s place). Was it safe to build up our hopes?
Soon after moving ourselves, 900,000
potted plants, and a few choice
items of furniture up to the little pad-with-a-view, we decided to
check it out.
I’m not sure, in retrospect and after yesterday’s experience, what went
wrong that night, but something did, terribly. There was no drama,
don’t get me wrong. There was just no there
there. There was no simpatico bartender, for one thing. The locals at
the bar seemed sort of like the off-night
contingent of some
middle-aged motorcycle club. The lighting wasn’t very good. And
the
margaritas were made with sour mix. We never went back.
And then.
Then, last night we were on our way back from a meeting of the
executive committee of the Malibu Wine Classic
(www.malibuwineclassic.com), and it was still early and we were still
hungry and thirsty, and there it was. Just sitting there.
“Let’s give it another chance,”
I piped up.
Photo: The Pad-with-a-View,
with our 900,000 potted plants and the landlord
demonstrating a David Caruso moment, while C. and Ryan look on.
Mar
9
A
Good Bartender
Let’s
examine, for a
moment, what makes a good bartender (this is, of course, only my humble
opinion).
A good bartender
does not look pained if you ask for freshly squeezed lime juice
instead
of (blecch) sour mix.
A good bartender tops up a
wine glass every so often without charging, or buys you a whole drink
every other visit or so.
A g.b. plays (my idea of)
good music, loud enough but
not too loud.
A g.b. has a sort of sixth sense that tells him or her when you want to
talk, how deep you want to
talk, and when you don't want to talk at
all.
A g.b. thinks you are a
very interesting person.
But the most important
contribution a good bartender can make to a person’s well-being is a
wonderful sense of belonging.
If you travel a great deal, as we do,
there is no warmer feeling than to walk into a familiar, well-lit place
in another town--perhaps our own and perhaps not--and see a smiling
face, a nod of recognition, an inquiring look, and a barstool with--at
least for now--your
name on it.
You are welcome. Whether you occupy it once a week or once
a year.
Here’s
my list:
Pat:
Mexican Radio in
Hudson NY
Brian:
The Stewart House in
Athens, NY
Chris:
Primitivo in Venice
(but not for long—brace yourself, Costa Rica)
Happy:
Hal’s in Venice,
Pastis in NYC, and now Makai in Santa Monica.
Rafael:
Lula's in Santa Monica
Nancy:
Pescadou in NYC
Anyone
at Philip Marie in
NYC
And
now, Charles, at
Abuelita’s in Topanga
Canyon.
I raise my glass to
you all.
Photo: Moi, at Lula's
Mar 12
Pork Ceviche
Our great friends Math and Mike, who live in Venice with their son Liam, have
offered up their beautiful guest house as a site for a party of our
pals. Since our pad in Topanga is so tiny, is a rather long drive, and
doesn’t have full cooking facilities, this is a fabulous idea. We
painstakingly assemble as many of our buddies as possible (always
difficult in LA because of everyone's all-consuming busyness), and I
start thinking about a menu (Math has to work on Saturday and Mike is
looking after Liam, so it’s going to be a pot-luck of sorts, with me on
the main course). 
In an obscure Italian pork
cookbook, I had read of marinating meaty ribs in pure lemon
juice, lots of it, for 6 to 8 hours before grilling. I have no idea
what effect this will have on the meat—it seems as though a cure of some sort will
result—but as usual I’m game to try anything and just hope for the best
(or for forgiving friends).
Friday night after I pick up C. at the airport, we stop in to Lula’s to see Rafael, then
collect the key from Math’s mailbox and bunk down in the guesthouse.
Saturday morning I’m off to Gardena to the secret Hungarian pork butcher
(it’s Eschbach’s, on Western Avenue). Happily it’s still there, with
amazing prices and the usual row of Slivovitz and other enticing
Hungarian products, but sadly, someone has bought out all their pork
ribs. I should have called ahead.
Luckily, right around the corner is the Chinese supermarket 99 Ranch, and they have more odd
cuts of pork than I’ve ever seen in one place. (Also, a fabulous
selection of fish and shellfish. I must make a seafood foray here
before we go!). The prices are not quite as enticing as at Eschbachs,
but I 
buy ten pounds of
spare ribs and 25 lemons and go back to Venice to start slicing.
An hour later I have carpal tunnel syndrome from squeezing lemons, but
I’ve also got two huge casseroles full of individual pork ribs soaking knee-deep in lemon
juice. C., Math, and I turn the guesthouse into a lovely dining
room, and after cocktails in the front house, we all move back to the
guesthouse and fire up the grill. Evidently, the curing process makes
the ribs cook more quickly, and they do indeed. The intriguing flavor
is not cured like ceviche, exactly, or like brined pork--it's hard to
describe--but is universally
voted by this food-centric group to be absolutely new and wonderful,
and something they’d all repeat. The professional chef amongst us
offers this variation: Pat the ribs ribs dry and toss them in a little
olive oil before grilling to get a better sear, then scatter with
chopped basil. He’s so right.
I can’t wait to try it again. It’ll be perfect at the house in Tuscany
this summer, and I’ll have lots of extra squeezing hands.
The party is so much fun, the conversation and kids so entertaining and
all the brought dishes so tasty, that we again say thanks for our peripatetic lifestyle and the wonderful friends we have on
both coasts. (We think they probably love us more because they only get
to have us for a part of each year.) We're truly blessed.
Photos: Eschbach's,
the secret Hungarian pork butcher in Gardena; an
anthropomorphically-evocative pork product at 99 Ranch.
Mar
13
Palm Springs, Part One
Bright
and early the next morning (well, after clean-up of the guest house),
C. and I are off to Palm Springs
for a couple of days, to soak up some sun and gaze at the changing
colors of the spare, steep, and rocky San Jacinto mountains. (As the
day progresses, the mountains go from grey to tan to brown to purple to
blue. Some people prefer the further-south communities like Palm Desert
and La Quinta, because they keep the sun far longer each evening than
Palm Springs proper, but I love the endless dusk and never get tired of
watching the show.)
Since
it’s Sunday afternoon, lots of open-house signs line the pretty,
bougainvilla-dotted streets of the neighborhoods between Palm Canyon
Drive and the mountains. For a little light entertainment, we visit a
few of the for-sale houses. Clearly, something big has happened to the real estate market here. Sheesh.
I smell a correction in the offing. Indeed, several of the agents we
encounter confirm that, after the outrageous boom of the last year or
two, the market is “softening.” (Note that no one in real estate would
ever admit that a bubble
might ever burst, even though we saw it in Venice in the early
nineties, which, after all, wasn’t all that long ago.)
Sadly,
it’s freezing here (59F!!!) on these particular two days that we have
scheduled for sun-bathing and extended outdoor magic-hours by the pool,
so we turn our attention to dinner. Palm Springs has always been a sort
of wasteland when it comes to
good restaurants. I’ve been coming down here since I was five
years old, and we always joked about the lack of good fare. But along
with the boom in the
housing market seems to have arrived a rather improved level of gastronomic possibility. I do
have one all-time favorite, Le Vallauris, but deem it too pricey for
this trip. Luckily, there is a little more to choose from in the
mid-range than there used to be, and we find Enzo’s, recently moved to the
main, touristy drag but possessing a nice bar and a nice, well-rounded
menu. The food is pretty nice, too. C’s
Checca, a dish that is ubiquitous and often uninspired, is packed with
bright, herbal flavors. My eggplant rolatini is meaty, light, and has
just the right level of cheesiness. Later on, we add David at Melvyn’s, the throwback bar at
the Ingleside Inn, to our list of good
bartenders.
On
our second night we are seduced by possibly the greatest table in Palm
Springs: up on the second floor of a complex right on Palm Canyon Drive
is a steakhouse called The Falls.
On the corner of the wrap-around balcony is a tall table with a fire in its center. Not only is
there a fire in our table,
a full moon lurks just above the palm trees. This moment is pure
photo-op. Could there be anything better? No steaks for us, though, so
we opt for the seafood tower and a tableside-prepared Caesar, which is
tailored just so, to our anchovy-centric tastes. It’s so, well, so Frank! We listen to Frank on the
i-pod back in our room at Casa
Cody to cement the retro-desert
ambiance. The full moon looks on approvingly.
We’ll
come back here. Many times.
Photo: The Tower at
The Falls in The Springs.
March
27
San
Francisco moment
The early-morning flight deposits me in Oakland and I take Air-Bart to
Bart into the city, then walk up from Union Square.
So funny to be in this lovely place for only a day! Later, the taxi
passes Washington Square, home of Fior d’Italia and some fantastic
polenta, and also the scene of my
one stint as a movie extra,
in the immediately-forgotten move Jade. I lost a shoe in the mud
running across the grassy square and then the scene didn’t make it. My
three work-related meetings are separated by lunch at Kokkari, a rustic
Greek restaurant near the Embarcadero. Only in San Francisco will you
see a restaurant like this: In Los Angeles, people prefer glitz and
shiny surfaces to rough wood and stone; in New York there’d never be so
much lovely empty space. My grilled
octopus is toothsome and slightly charred. Since it’s business I
forgo the retsina--which always
tastes so perfect in Greece and so odd elsewhere.
That I continue to order retsina outside of Greece (rarely, it’s true)
proves me either an optimist or a masochist. I tack on a fourth
meeting, this one with my genius
niece, Lily,
in Oakland on the way back to the airport. It is, actually, also
business (and not just family
business), so we talk about the recipe
development I will do for her upcoming book while slurping very fine Vietnamese shrimp-noodles
in a formica-and-fluorescent-bedecked little storefront, and sipping
one of Napa’s finest meritage wines, which her friend and co-author Pat
has brought along.
In a complete reversal of our usual behavior C. picks me up at the
Burbank airport. Long day, but great face-time all around.
March
28
Palm
Springs, Part Two: A Cheese-ortunity
Being in the desert again feels like a naughty weekend! C. is playing
golf with a friend from back east and I feel that, in order to be
supportive, I must go down with him and read a paperback or two by the
pool while he golfs. After the Monday meetings in San Francisco it
suddenly develops that a trip to Seattle will be necessary on Friday,
so this mid-week mini-trip is a gift of sunshine, brilliant blue sky,
luscious—as always--mountain views, and calm. I walk into town for some
exercise, since C. has the car. It feels like a completely different
place on foot. Your eye is slowed down and notices details never seen
in all the many times I’ve driven along Palm Canyon Drive. All the way
I feast my eyes on the San Jacinto mountains, so close you could almost
reach out and touch them.
Ever since C. found out about his high cholesterol, we’ve been going
cheese-less. I don’t really have to, since my cholesterol remains
alarmingly fine (alarming in view
of the way I’ve been socking away pork products, cheese, and butter for
years), but it’s a sympathy move that can’t hurt me. However, on
the walk from town back to the hotel, I pass a restaurant called El
Mirasol. I give in to the call of a lovely, shady table and order a
(daytime!) glass of wine. On the menu, there’s an item called “Queso
Fundido.” It’s listed as an appetizer, and when I’ve ordered it (melted
cheese, ok?) in the past the bowl of cheese has tended to be more of a
saucer-size. Today, however, there is One Pound of Cheese melted in
the very large bowl that arrives...and all for me! (I know this because I
asked the waitress to ask the chef).
I eat it all.
I sense that in the future, many meals-without-C. are going to turn
into opportunities for a solitary
Cholest-Fest.
March
30
Brentwood
Birthday
Today is my mother’s 81st birthday, and the birthday plan has morphed,
gradually, into something very different. Originally, we were going to
take her to dinner at La
Cachette, whose cookbook I co-authored with the adorable chef
Jean-Francoise, and whose sweetbreads
my mom has a passion for. But mom has been “poorly,” as they say in
England, for some time and instead of this being the first trip out to
a restaurant in many months, it turned into another stay-at-home event.
But we still wanted to make it special….so Plan B was that I’d prepare
her favorite dish, Coquilles St
Jacques (with lots of extra, in individual portions, for the
freezer). Then, on Tuesday of this week it developed that I had to fly
up to Seattle at 10pm on this night, for a meeting on Friday, so Plan C
came into being: we ordered in from a fancy Italian joint in Brentwood
Village.
C. was flying off to New York at the same time, but we were due to
return at different times so in
classic LA fashion we took two cars to the airport. Mom can’t
eat dinner before 8pm, because she has breakfast at 1pm and lunch at
4:30 (it’s a long story), so we wolfed down our Pollo Fantasia, rinsed
the dishes and dashed out the door. Not a very relaxing birthday
dinner, but the thought was there, and there were, of course, the presents!
March
31
Seattle
In the hotel room by 1:30am, I watch a little mindless TV and sleep
pretty soundly. My meeting isn’t util 10:45, so I can sleep in and wake
up slowly. I leave my bag at the front desk and head off. The town, of
course, is full of food-people because of the IACP conference that’s
going on. Tables in the lobby of the Sheraton are populated by pairs of people making cookbook deals.
I do not give in to the temptation to wave at everyone and say loudly
“Hi, I write cookbooks, too!” If I could afford to attend the
conference, maybe I’d be one of them. Catch-22, no? Lunch after the
meeting is with the same ladies I dined with at Kokkari in SFO on
Monday. Being food-centric too, they take their dining pretty seriously
and have booked
a table at Flying
Fish, where I have an adorable little crab cake with lemongrass mayonnaise, and a few
bites of a delicate Meyer lemon
tart. Mmmmm. The crab cake/lemongrass mayo is a combo that I
would have had to invent if this chef hadn’t done it first. Seattle
takes its identity as a fish-town
very seriously, and I wish I had more time to explore. I do have an
hour or so before heading back to the airport, so I walk through Pike’s Place market and see
tourists lining up to take pictures of the famous fish-throwing
fishmongers. It makes me a little sad because I want to be sure people
are buying the lovely fish
too, not just taking
their portraits. There’s a huge monkfish with its mouth open, which the
small kids think is a hoot. Will this put people off of eating
monkfish, I worry? OK, I am becoming too much of a worry-wart. In the
end both C. and I arrive back at LAX at about the same time and drive
our separate cars home to the canyon. Silly. Tomorrow is going to be an
exceedingly long day.
Photo: Pike's Place
Market
April
1
Zuma
Beach, Malibu
I stumbled in from Seattle at midnight last night, hoping against hope
that I wouldn’t have to be on the ground at the 3rd annual Malibu Wine Classic (for
which I’m on the restaurant committee) until 11am. But after I sift
through the 47 event-related e-mails that have arrived in the last 24
hours, it’s clear that I need to be there by 9am, after I’ve picked up 3 ½
gallons of donated coffee (this will not go far with 2000 people
projected to attend, but there are other coffee resources coming).
Guests for the first of two sessions aren’t due until 1pm. The
restaurants are supposed to arrive with their food and gear at noon.
Before then, 120 tables have to
be draped, signs posted, rental 
equipment,
spit-buckets, and ice distributed (blah blah blah). Thankfully,
the organization is amazing – 65 volunteers, many members of the
executive committee there to help, and my rental requests are all there
before I am. C., who got in from New York last night at the same time I
landed from Seattle, is on the winery committee, and his job goes
virtually without a glitch (except that somehow we’re missing a table
for one of the wineries, who have driven from Paso Robles and are
tired). We are not tired. Yet. Fourteen
hours later, after switching out the entire tent for session two, from
6 to 9pm, we’re in the bar at the Sunset restaurant, next to the
football-field-sized white tent that housed the event, doing a
post-mortem and poring through our goodie-bags (oh goodie! A big
spray-bottle of sunless tanner. Hey, it’s Malibu). The event has been a
fantastic success and raised a truckload of money for the charity, ChildhelpUSA. But next year, we
want walkie-talkies! After running the
entire length of the tent approximately every three minutes for twelve
hours, my feet feel like melons, possibly due to the fact that I chose to wear cowboy boots.
Another sartorial choice, my white
jeans, presented it’s own problem: all guests and organizers
were told to keep one glass all day long, rinsing it between tastings
(otherwise, of course, the clean glasses would have run out in ten
minutes). Cleverly, I wrap the stem of my glass in the ribbon that
holds my blue MWC credentials card, so my hands will be free to make
lists, note which restaurants need what, and generally maintain some
mild control over the teeming multitudes which are
(only partially, to be fair) my responsibility. This hands-free
upside-down transport of my tasting glass immediately results in little
droplets of very fine Central
Coast pinot noir dribbling all over my white jeans. After this,
I learn to wipe the glass with a napkin in between my occasional
tastings. Our hosts for that night, so we won’t have to drive home, are
Photsfriends and Malibu winemakers Dutch and Andrea, and they’re
accompanied
home by several of the visiting vintners plus 12 or 15 of their own
closest friends. Bottles are “sampled” late into the night, and there
are tango lessons. At this point, we are definitely tired. When I get
up the next morning (first, as usual), I pre-rinse 30 Reidel stems and
note twelve bottles of partially-consumed wine. We do see Andrea, but
Dutch has not yet made an entrance when we take off for San Luis Obispo
at 10am.
Photos: The tent,
pre-event; Sipping from my tied-up tasting-glass; The big tent on Zuma
beach, Malibu (adjacent to Sunset restaurant)
April
4
San
Luis Obispo: Falling Off the Bones
It’s birthday time again! This time it’s C.’s birthday, and in spite of
all our respective recent traveling, he’s got his heart set on spending
it with cousin Robert in San Luis.
We’ve visited many times, but not since Robert’s new house has been
(basically) finished. It’s a stunning
California mission-style cortijo that was constructed out of
insulated concrete foam blocks, so you could drive a truck into it with
no discernable effect. Although the huge, high-ceilinged great room is
furnished and all the window coverings are in place, Robert has yet to
officially move over from his mobile home across the driveway. He’s
been living in it for about seven years while he ruminated about,
designed, financed, and then finally, over the last two, actually built his dream house. 
We’re
happy to help him break in the kitchen, and in fact he’s made our room
ready for us, even if he’s not sleeping here yet. He’ll come over when
he’s ready, and meanwhile walks over a handful of stuff at a time: 3
wineglasses, a corkscrew, and the good olive oil just after we arrive.
What’s the rush?
C. has requested something “falling
off the bone” for his birthday dinner, and after we run through
the unavoidable slew of old-age jokes (like all boomers, we are shocked and appalled by the aging
process and hope to avoid it if at all possible), I choose my three-day short ribs for the
birthday centerpiece.
This is a recipe that originated with a restaurant called 44 by X in
New York; the short ribs made them famous. Perhaps inadvisably, they
published the recipe in the New York Times about 8 years ago and I
snarfled it up immediately and made it my own. Since then, I’ve eaten
at the restaurant several times and met the owner, who kindly gave me
an order of amazing macaroni and cheese to take home after a dinner
there. (No wonder I’m fixated on the place: the best short ribs and the
best mac n’ cheese, together in one centrally-located place. Well,
Tenth Avenue is a tad far West.) These ribs are labor-intensive, unlike
most of the cooking I do these days, but here the work is worth it.
First the ribs get rubbed with salt and garlic and hang out for an
hour, then they’re marinated in two bottles of Cotes-du-Rhone (thanks,
Dutch), leeks and carrots for 24 hours. Then the vegetables are scraped
off and the ribs (patted dry) are seared in a huge hot pan until dark
golden brown on all four sides. Then the marinade goes back over them,
they’re covered, and braised for four hours. After that the vegetables
are strained out of the marinade, it’s de-greased and reduced until
wine-dark, unctuous, and rich-rich-rich. Finally, just before serving,
the bones are removed from the tender ribs and they are grilled or
broiled until crisp and sizzling. The effect of all this effort is a crunchy, beefy exterior with an
interior that simply melts in your mouth. For a little lift, I
like to scatter them with a hint of lime gremolata, a bright flavor
counterpoint to the midnight-dark sensibility of ribs.
Falling off the bone? These ribs left their bones behind ages ago and
now we’re falling off our chairs.
And it ain’t
from the wine in the glasses.
Photos: Robert's
Great Room; Robert smiling; Setting the Birthday table
April 7
Venice
Beach: "Hey man, I sure
never voted for him."
C.'s
in New York teaching, so I take the opportunity to meet an old, good
friend at a place where I once spent a great deal of time: Hal's, the original and infamous
Venice watering hole.
(Once,
at a Cuban nightclub in Nice, I met the three-person flight
crew of a Saudi's sheik's private jet. We bonded over the fact that we
were all--on separate planes--flying to LA the following day. "Come to
Hal's tomorrow night," I beseeched them, painting a picture of in-the-know hipsters hobnobbing
with famous artists, movie people, psychiatrists.
When we indeed met there, 24 hours or so later, it was Monday, jazz
night at Hal's, and not only was Chaka
Khan in the room, she took the microphone for an impromptu
song. As I watched their jaws drop, in unison, I felt suitably
vindicated. The late and lovely Gregory
Hines, another long-time regular--along with Joni Mitchell--was
also in the room.)
Anyway, I met my old friend Michael, chef/caterer/designer, at the bar
at 5pm, thinking no one from my old days would be around at such an
early hour. But there were three recognizable faces, and, if not great
friends, they were familiar to me as the three people who always,
without fail, I see at Hal's, whether I go in twice a week as I used
to, or twice a year as I have in the last few. Bar flies, local
regulars, heavy drinkers, say what you will.
I've noticed an interesting trend in bar conversations recently. Apparently no one, anywhere, voted for
George Bush. This reminds me of Spencer Tracy's line in the
ground-breaking (for the time) movie "Judgement at Nuremberg." After
spending several months in post-war Germany hearing the case against
various high- and low-level war criminals (you
can see my dad driving him in from the airport in an early scene),
he tells Marlene Dietrich's character, that as far as he can tell
no one in the entire
country knew (what Hitler was up to). This is where we seem to
be
now. No one will admit to
having supported this dark character in our country's
ever-more-embarassing history, but clearly someone must have voted for him,
right? Even if it wasn't a
majority.
I drive home up the canyon nice and early, and indulge in my new
solitary-dinner tradition, the Cholest-Fest:
I sear up a nice fatty boneless rib-eye in butter and oil, finish it in
the oven for optimum tenderness, and serve it with a drizzle of truffle oil. Playing back-up is
a huge, fat California artichoke, whose leaves I dip in melted Irish
butter accented with a drop or ten of 25-year-old balsamic. Then I
watch two episodes of "Huff" on Tivo. Heaven. But I gotta tell you, if
C. is going to be gone a great deal, my cholesterol is going to end up
higher than his.
Self-control? Piffle. Or rather, Truffle.
February 9,
2006
From time to
time, this blog will host contributions from my other
half, a man of many tastes who cooked a broccoli raab and roasted
garlic soufflé for me on our first at-home. Through his
relationship with me he has taken on—perhaps inadvertently and not to
the extent it is manifest in me—some of my interest in food. This has
been very good for his spirit, if not for his cholesterol.
“It
is
fortunate
that
Brigit and I, in many ways, think alike. One such way is that our idea
of a good time is ferreting out unique and interesting place to eat.
Finding myself, as I have, in Richmond Virginia for a spell, and
driving past a distinctly unremarkable building advertising "Karen's
Diner" a number of times and feeling the pull of the Sirens, I had to
give in. So I pulled up, parked, and stepped inside.
“I found formica tables and counter, waitresses who have an uncanny
ability to make you feel like they are so happy to have you over for
lunch, and food that makes you think about what you are going to have
when you return--hopefully the next day.
“They serve just breakfast and lunch, There are three specials and a
desert every day posted on top of the regular menu. I hadn't had fried
Bologna that thick, ever, and not that good since I was eight years
old. They serve it with eggs or as a "burger," with fried onions.
“I had the BBQ platter three days in a row. Under the heading
"Featuring Comfort Food" there are a number of tasty sides including a
mac and cheese with just a hint of peppery after-bite. Richmond has a
plethora of places worth spending time at: Millie's is another. It’s a
"Diner" in the Shockoe Bottom area that’s worth the wait. And wait you
will, as it is slammed on weekends but MMM good. When Brigit visited me
here we didn't get to the aforementioned eateries, but next time..."
Karen's Diner, 2237 W Broad Street
Millie’s, 2603 E. Main St.