The Kogi Truck September 7, 2011

I don’t know if the Kogi truck was the first food truck in LA, but it was certainly the first one that I heard about that had people following it on Twitter and waiting in line for two hours for a Korean barbecue taco.  I was intrigued but not intrigued enough to hunt down the truck and wait in a two-hour line.  So imagine my thrill when I found the Kogi truck parked in front of my house!

Actually it was parked in front of my neighbors’ house.  I went to investigate, but the truck workers either ignored me, didn’t speak English, or pretended not to speak English when I tried to question them.  To their great relief, my neighbors came out and explained that they were having a party that evening and the Kogi truck was catering, and would we like some tickets so we could enjoy Kogi fare too?  Yes, we would!

Was the food as good as the hype?  I thought so.  I ordered the tacos – one short rib and one spicy pork.  Both were delicious — intensely flavorful.  The meat was juicy and highly spiced.  It didn’t occur to me that I was eating Korean bbq in a taco until I remembered later that the Kogi truck was a fusion truck.  My tacos didn’t taste Mexican, they didn’t taste Korean — the whole was better than the sum of its parts.  My daughter had a tofu burrito — large chunks of soft tofu in a spicy marinade with cabbage.  I also tasted the sliders — not a patty, but chunks of spicy pork (the same that they use for tacos and burritos) with sesame mayo, cheese and cabbage slaw on a small bun with a shiny top.  The last thing I would have ordered was a quesadilla, since that’s our dinner of last resort at home, until someone mentioned that Kogi’s “blackjack quesadilla” was written up in Food and Wine.  Game on.  I had to taste it.  It was fantastic.  A flour tortilla was filled with caramelized onions, spicy pork, and two kinds of cheese, and topped with a salsa verde.  And it was huge.

Everything was so good, I don’t know what I’d choose next time I encounter the truck.  Would I travel across town and wait in line for two hours for it?  I don’t know if I’d do that for anything, no matter how good.  But if the Kogi truck ever pulls up near your house, it pays to be a nosy neighbor!

Wendy’s Word Meets Open Culture September 6, 2011

Two great blogs together — Wendy’s Word and Open Culture. Will there be enough air in the room? Uh, yes. Wendy’s Word doesn’t require much air, and Open Culture, well let’s just say that Dan Colman, of the great Open Culture blog, is modest and doesn’t take up the air he deserves.

I jest about the two great blogs thing. But I really did spend part of a day with Dan Colman, and he is genuinely nice, talented, capable, indefatigable, and extremely modest. All of which gives me a good excuse to introduce you to his blog.

Open Culture is an incredibly informative blog. Every day, there’s at least one posting of a video clip or link on a vast array of subjects, including classic film, philosophy, art, science, and much more. For example, there was recently a 1970′s clip of the Velvet Underground singing Sweet Jane along with a current one of Lou Reed singing it with Metallica. There was also a clip about a graphic novel about Richard Feynman’s life. Such is the diversity of Open Culture.

But Open Culture’s raison d’etre is to provide readers with easy access to free educational content on the internet. There is an exhaustive (or should I say exhausting) list of free educational resources available on the web. Everything from college courses to foreign language podcasts to classic movies and literature available as free mp3′s.  Classes or lectures are available from every school you never got accepted into for college — like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia.  Best of all, they’re free, and no pressure to get a good grade!  Just the great lectures without the stress of schoolwork, finals, or tuition.  Check out today’s posting.

I guarantee you will love Open Culture.  One of my friends frequently forwards me postings he loves, and I have to remind him that I’m the one who introduced him to Open Culture in the first place!!

Books About Food September 4, 2011

Yes, I have read more books about food.  I would hate to disappoint.  Here’s the latest fare:

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, by Anthony Bourdain.  Bourdain is always entertaining, and this book is no exception.  It’s not as good as Kitchen Confidential or A Cook’s Tour, but I still enjoyed it.  The book is a bit of an apologist for Kitchen Confidential, explaining that he was angry when he wrote it.  No need for apologies — Kitchen Confidential was insanely funny and informative.  It gave an insightful look at just how grueling restaurant work is.  Medium Raw seems like Bourdain’s attempt to justify his selling out and becoming a celebrity chef (without the chef part, since he no longer has a restaurant) since he mocked celebrity chefs so mercilessly in Kitchen Confidential.  Medium Raw goes over some of the same ground as A Cook’s Tour — eating around the world — but in less detail.  If you’re only going to read one Bourdain book, I would not recommend Medium Raw, but I enjoyed getting his perspective now that he’s older and had different life experiences.  And like the other books, Medium Raw is funny.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, by Lisa Abend.  At first, I hated this book.  Probably because I hated the idea of El Bulli.  I love to cook and eat, but I don’t think food is “important.”  I don’t think it should be taken that seriously, or manipulated so intently.  But I got into the book, and I ended up liking it very much.  The book follows several stagieres, or young chefs doing unpaid interships at the restaurant for the season.  Reading about the stagieres’ backgrounds and motivations was interesting, but more interesting was their attitude about El Bulli.  Some revered Ferran Adria, El Bulli’s chef, and wanted to continue making avant garde cuisine.  But others disliked the drudgery and longed to cook, rather than making these high-concept creations that didn’t really involve actual cooking.  The book gives you a sense of what it’s like to be a stagiere — the long, unpaid hours, the sacrifice to the stagieres’ personal life, the constant pressure to be perfect and to get noticed by Adria and his team, the pressure of not wanting to disappoint diners who have traveled to this remote part of Spain to eat the meal of their lives.  After reading the book, I had little desire to eat at El Bulli.  I’d rather not travel to another continent, brave a treacherous mountain road, and pay a fortune to be forced to eat rabbit tongue and other dubious creations.  That’s just too much pressure for me.

Blood, Bones, and Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton.   I would have liked this book better if it wasn’t for Anthony Bourdain.  His quote on the front cover said that it was “the best memoir by a chef ever.  EVER.”  Really?  I’ve read alot of chef memoirs – and I mean a lot.  You’ll see many titles listed if you look in this blog’s book index, and those are only the ones I’ve read since I started this blog — I’ve read many other before that.  So I can confidently say that it was NOT the best memoir by a chef ever.  However, it was pretty good.  Hamilton had a tough childhood – her parents’ divorce bounced her around and ultimately left her living on her own too young.  She got into drugs and drifted about — but always maintained a strong work ethic, so she was able to work and support herself throughout.  And then there’s her crazy love life – she’s a lesbian but marries a man with whom she’s having a relationship but who also happens to need a green card.  Although their marriage has problems, he provides her with the loving, effusive family she sometimes longs for.

Ultimately, she became the chef and owner of Prune restaurant in New York.  I enjoyed reading about her rise and respect the fact that she is entirely self-made.  She is also a good writer — she received a masters’ degree in writing along the way.  But I found her unsympathetic and complaining at times, so I didn’t love the book as much as I probably should have — or at least as much as Anthony Bourdain thinks I should have.

Eggs for Dinner September 1, 2011

Sometimes, when I’m stuck on what to make for dinner or I have no groceries, I fall back on the old standby — eggs.

Eggs for dinner used to mean frittatas.  I had a great recipe from Patricia Wells’ book, “Trattoria.”  You don’t need a recipe to know what ingredients to use, but rather for the technique.  Pretty much all frittata recipes have you start the eggs on the stove, add fillings (which have been cooked separately, although I sometimes cheat and cook the filling, remove it to a plate, and cook the eggs in the same pan.  I’m lazy that way.), and finish under the broiler, but Wells gets the timing just right.  A trick I learned from Wells is to run a knife along the sides of the pan to loosen the frittata before putting it in the broiler.

I love frittatas, and so does the rest of my family.  You get your protein and your veggies, and you can cook a frittata for four people in one pan.  But lately, I’ve switched from frittatas to omelets.  Frittatas do have their down side.  They can be difficult to unmold, you have to cook them in a broiler-safe pan, and the pan is often difficult to wash.  Omelets have none of these problems.  The only problem with omelets is that you have to make them individually.  But how delicious they can be!

This omelet is filled with sauteed mushrooms, green onion, and some fresh thyme.  I also threw some fresh thyme in with the eggs, just to gild the lily.  And cooked in butter, of course.  It’s the butter that makes the omelet, in my opinion.

I haven’t thrown over frittatas for good.  But the humble omelet is so satisfying.

 

Spring Reading May 22, 2011

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. Renee is a concierge of a hotel particuleur in Paris who hides her intellect in keeping with her social position. Paloma is a precocious 12-year-old who hides her intellect to fit in with other kids. That is, until a wealthy Japanese man moves into the building, discovers their secrets, and befriends them. This book is beautifully written, as the two misfits ponder the nature of beauty, language, wealth, and what’s really important in the world. The transition from solitary musing to sharing their thoughts with a kindred spirit is heartening.

Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, by Kim Severson. I’m a sucker for food books. Kim Severson was a food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. She writes about the eight women cooks who are her heroines and who got her through the hard times of alcoholism and figuring out who she was and what she wanted to do with her life. Some are famous – Ruth Reichl, Marcella Hazan, Alice Waters, Rachael Ray – and others are not. It’s fun to get the low-down on these revered chefs. But I also enjoyed reading Severson’s coming-of-age story about herself.

Comfort Me With Apples, by Ruth Reichl.  I’ve completed the trilogy.  Comfort Me With Apples is the second in Ruth Reichl’s trilogy of memoirs.  The first, Tender at the Bone, is about her upbringing, coming of age as a person and a cook, and ends with her becoming a food writer.  Comfort Me With Apples is about her transition from freelance food writer to esteemed restaurant critic, with a large dose of personal history about her marriage, fraught relationships with men including but not limited to her husband, and her desire for a child.  The third, Garlic and Sapphires (reviewed on this blog), is about her experiences as restaurant critic of the New York Times.  The fun about Comfort Me With Apples is Reichl’s encounters with young chefs whom we now know to be mega-famous, such as Wolfgang Puck, Mark Peel (owner of my favorite special occasion restaurant in LA), Alice Waters, Jonathan Waxman (whom I always see on Top Chef Masters).  I love reading Ruth Reichl because she seems fearless — she’ll travel anywhere and eat anything.

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan.  Winner of the Booker Prize.  Composer Clive Linley and editor Vernon Halliday are thrown together after the death of their common lover Molly Lane.  They discover other lovers, namely Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, who has a huge secret.  When Halliday is tipped off to this secret, it causes a huge moral dilemma and the possible end of Clive and Vernon’s longtime close friendship.  The ending seems dumb and arbitrary, although you can see it coming, but upon thinking about it later, perhaps the ending is farcical rather than dumb.  It did win a Booker Prize, after all.

The Last Resort, by Allison Lurie.  I enjoyed this very fast read, but it also made me mad.  It’s about a well-known professor and naturalist who thinks he’s dying so plans to commit suicide.  Meanwhile, his wife suspects something is wrong and makes plans for them to go to Key West for a few weeks.  Characters get caught up in each others’ lives in a semi-soap opera-ish and comic way.  The main character, the professor’s wife, is so bland that I care nothing about her, and I can’t see why any of the other characters care about her.  She’s described as being totally devoted to her husband — her life’s work is helping him with his important work.  Like Dorothea in Middlemarch, but much less interesting.  Can she see that her husband is a pompous jerk and if so, does she regret devoting her life to him?  We can’t tell.  A little more effort in character development would have made this book much better.

Homegirl Cafe May 14, 2011

Father Gregory Boyle has been getting alot of press here in L.A. lately, with the recent publication of his memoir, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, and the good sales of Homeboy Industries chips and salsas now appearing in grocery stores.  Homeboy Industries is a social service organization founded by Boyle that works with former gang members, helping them with tattoo removal and mostly by employing them.

This is a good excuse for me to finally blog about Homegirl Cafe, which has been a favorite of mine for the past few years.  Homegirl Cafe, a division of Homeboy Industries, is a training program for girls who are at risk or who have formerly been involved with gangs, teaching them how to cook in and run a restaurant.  They even have their own garden.  But that’s a side benefit for me.  I go to Homegirl because the food is terrific, and I like the atmosphere — brightly painted, original artwork, always bustling.

I’ve only been there for lunch, which features Latin-stye salads, sandwiches, and tacos.  I was once there on a weekend and was pleased to see it just as bustling as on the weekday.  My favorites are roasted corn (sweet, creamy, tangy, and spicy all at the same time), the fruit salad (mango, jicama, orange, and avocado with a hibiscus dressing), Ana’s salad (because it features the roasted corn, along with queso fresco, roasted poblano pepper strips, jicama, and avocado), and I recently tried the tofu salad (soft tofu mixed with mint, red onion, jalapeno, and lime) which has now been added to my list of favorites.  Although the salads are my favorite, the sandwiches and tacos are good too.  I can rarely resist the drink called Angela’s Green Potion, a limeade with spinach and mint.  Very refreshing.  The coffee is good too, made with cinnamon and orange peels.

I am lucky enough to have Homegirl Cafe reasonably close to my office.  It’s one of my “go-to” places when I’m meeting friends for lunch.  I get a delicious lunch that happens to also be healthy, and am supporting a good cause at the same time.  Ideal!

Smoothies May 9, 2011

The weather warmed up (temporarily) just when Whole Living magazine published a bunch of smoothie recipes.  Here’s one that I love:

Carrot, Mango, and Herb Smoothie

1 c. carrot juice

1 c. orange juice

2 c. frozen mango chunks

handful of fresh mint

about 4-5 ice cubes

Blend until smooth.  Yum.

Book Update May 3, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about books, and as a result, I’m starting to forget what I’ve been reading.  Part of my original motivation to start a blog was to remember (and share) what I read!  So here are my brief synopses.

Dragon Tattoo series (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked Over the Hornet’s Nest), by Steig Larsson.  My husband brought home the first movie and I watched it just to humor him.  Now I’ve read all three books and saw the first and third movies.  They are compelling.  The setting (Sweden) is so different from what we’re used to – the landscape, the customs (they are constantly drinking coffee!), and country characters – that it seems exotic.  The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is unusual for her combination of aloofness bordering on hostility and superior hacking and self-defense skills.  The sexual mores of the characters are looser than typical American books.  But mostly, the action keeps you reading late into the night.  There are flaws.  The tone can be sanctimonious and preachy.  There are actually footnotes about Swedish politics.  The overarching message is that men are mostly all misogynists, using sex as a weapon against women, yet the author uses sex as a ploy to keep us reading.  The third book was utterly boring until about page 250.  Yet the series was a good read.  The movies stay true to the books.  I had no problem following the first movie without having read the book (in fact, it helped me keep the characters, with their unfamiliar Swedish names, straight when I read the book), but I don’t think you’d be able to follow the later movies without having read the books.

American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld.  A fictionalized version of the lives of Laura and George Bush.  An interesting story that made me want to read up on Laura Bush, to see what events were real and what were made up.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Affect Our Lives, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.  What our friends do affects what we do.  Not really that surprising.

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott.  This book starts out, “On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.  These are desert days.  Better to go out by our own hands than to endure slow death by scolding at the hands of the Bush administration.”   My first thought: oh, she’s an older writer.  My second thought: Crap, I’m going to be 49 this year – she’s my age.  Next thought: Please!  A little less self-dramatizing.  Bush has come and gone and we’re still here.  Next thought: But if you’re going to end it all, eating yourself to death is a pretty funny way to do it (reminds me of the wonderful French movie, La Grande Bouffe).  This was pretty much my thinking all the way through the book.  Anne Lamott is annoying – she’s so self-righteous with her extreme liberalism.  But she’s funny about it.  She’s well aware of her insecurities and neuroses and laughs about them with us.  Her writing is beautiful and touching.  The situations that she writes about strike a chord, particularly when she writes about the perils of raising an adolescent.  Can relate.  You need faith to raise an adolescent while keeping your sanity!

Oh The Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey. A memoir of a kid with rich and famous parents who go through a nasty divorce.  Wilsey gains an evil stepmother, is shuttled from school to school, gets in a lot of trouble, and comes out the other end as a writer and editor of McSweeney’s.  The book is incredibly moving at the beginning and end (yes, that was me, crying on the exercise bike as I was reading), but the middle gets maddening.  Wilsey is so bad that I wondered why I was bothering to read his book.  How many times can you steal your mother’s car and expect to get sympathy from your readers, bad childhood or not?  Wilsey redeems himself just in time.  The book was so good that I passed it on to a friend.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.  Heartbreaking.  This is Joan Didion’s account of the year in which her husband unexpectedly dies and her daughter and only child is in and out of the hospital, comatose for part of that time, with what started as pneumonia and turns into a full-body infection.   I can’t imagine anything worse.  That Didion can write so beautifully about such a horrible year is a testament to her strength as a person and talent as a writer.  The book stayed with me, and I was talking about it to a friend.  The book is vague as to what happens to Didion’s daughter.  My friend told me – wait: SPOILER ALERT!  — that Didion’s daughter died after the book was completed.  I can only repeat, heartbreaking.

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald.    Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize.  This novel is about a group of people who live on barges in the Thames river.  Anyone who chooses to live on a barge is likely to be an interesting character, as are Fitzgerald’s characters.  There’s Nenna, a single mother with two daughters struggling with the desertion of her husband, Richard, the super-competent leader of the barge-dwellers who’s socially awkward and has his own marriage problems, Willis, the down-and-out artist, and Maurice, with his less-than-reputable career.  Together, they’ve created their own society.  But it’s hard to maintain their marginal lifestyle, as they learn.

The Last Town On Earth, by Thomas Mullen.  It was interesting to read this book after Philip Roth’s novel, Nemesis, about the polio epidemic.  I guess I’m a sucker for public health-related fiction!  (My day job.)  This novel is about the 1918 flu epidemic, and is based on true experiences.  A small town decides to quarantine itself from the flu — no one goes in or out.  Of course, this is almost impossible, and when a soldier approaches the guards and refuses to leave, they are faced with a dilemma that ends in gunfire.  This happens at the beginning of the novel, so I’m not giving anything away.  What ensues from that incident, as well as how the town copes with the effects of the quarantine, drives the story.  The protagonist is a gentle half-boy, half-man, who struggles with his guilt over not being able to enlist in the army because of a physical disability and the moral dilemma that guarding the town poses.  You don’t have to be a public health nerd like me to love this book.

Noodles – Part 2 – Japanese April 10, 2011

Continuing my Asian noodle adventure from my last post, I’ve had some wonderful ramen in a few places.

My youngest daughter recently did a history project on Japan and one enterprising mother took a group of girls to Little Tokyo after school.  I met them for dinner at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo.  We each ordered a bowl of ramen and an order of gyoza to share.  Plus, the other mom and I ordered sake – hey, she had just spent an afternoon with a group of adolescent girls and I was coming from a long day at work!

The gyoza were like none I’ve ever seen.  Long, almost like crepes, and steamed.  I’m not quite sure what was inside.  At first, we thought they had brought us the wrong thing.  They were good, but I don’t think I’d order them again.  The ramen, however, was wonderful.  Delicious broth, with pork, egg, and Japanese veggies.

 

 

 

And then there’s Ramen Jinya.  Ramen Jinya is in the same mini-mall as the Marshall’s that I frequent (a little too frequently), so it was only a matter of time before I tried it.  Terrific!  It has become my daughter’s and my standard Saturday lunch place.  The ramen is as good as the ramen at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo, if not better.  There are several types of broth and all the ones I’ve tried so far have been fantastic – flavorful and cloudy without being overwhelming.  The pork chashu is so tender, it melts in your mouth.  There are also greens, pickled something or other, and standout noodles.  My daughter and I always share a ramen and an order of roll sushi, and if they come at the same time, the waiter tells us to eat the soup right away so the noodles don’t get soggy.  I love that they instruct us how to eat so we get the most out of the food.  When I met Jonathan Gold a few weeks ago (this exciting event was chronicled in a recent blog entry) and he learned I lived in Studio City, he asked if I had been to Ramen Jinya.  Or rather, he said, “you’ve been to Ramen Jinya, I’m sure…”  to which I could happily say, “of course!”  Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos (of the ramen, nor do I have any of Jonathan Gold) because I’m too busy eating and sharing a lovely experience with my daughter to take pictures.  All right, I keep forgetting.  But trust me, the ramen is fantastic.

Noodles – Part 1 – Korean April 10, 2011

Perhaps my favorite thing about LA is the ability to find all kinds of ethnic food in authentic settings.  My Asian noodle experiences are a good example.

One Saturday, I had to take my daughter to a volunteer event in Koreatown.  If I had to wake up early on a Saturday and drive to Koreatown, then you better believe I was going to plan a food excursion to make up for it.  I scoured the blogosphere and found three good options for Korean noodles.  I’m sure there are many more – in fact I know there are, because I’ve been to other places but don’t remember their names or precisely where they are located.  So the blogosphere it was.  I called the three top candidates to make sure they were still open and they answered in Korean.  Either they did not understand my questions  (Are you open for lunch today?  Where are you located?) or I couldn’t understand their answers, but I hung up the phone from all three with no idea what they said.  I took that as a good sign.

We ended up at Olympic Noodle.  To say that it was a nondescript storefront would be to play up its curb appeal.  As we walked in, we were greeted by a friendly Korean woman who seated us.  We were the only non-Asians in the place.  We ordered dumplings and soup.   There were pots of kimchi and pickled vegetables on the table.  While we waited for our food, a Korean woman at the table next to us took some of the kimchi and vegetables from our jar and put it on a plate and encouraged us to try it.  I guess she figured we needed teaching.  I was delighted to be taken in hand.  The kimchi and pickles were delicious.  Then our food came.  The dumplings were divine.  I love dumplings so I often order them, but I have high standards for dumplings.  These were crispy on the outside and filled with flavorful and juicy meat and veggies.  Although we promised to bring our leftovers home for my younger daughter, we made a pact to tell no one about the dumplings since there most certainly would be no leftovers.  The soup was good.  Steaming, with hand-cut noodles and chicken.  The portions are huge – we shared one bowl and we couldn’t finish it.

When we were paying the bill, the woman at the table next to us who had helped us with the kimchi asked the waitress to ask us if we liked the dumplings.  Yes we did!  We left Olympic Noodle with full stomachs, leftover soup, and a feeling that we were super-cool to have discovered this authentic hole-in-the-wall with terrific food.