The meat section at my local Gelson’s is pretty spectacular: if you name a cut of meat, they probably have it. And on Friday night I was craving lamb and, studying the lamb options there, I saw a giant leg of lamb for $70 and a rack of lamb for $40. Those prices would seem to make lamb prohibitively expensive, yet there was another lamb option there for a measly $10.
Last week I was suffering from a pretty nasty cold. I sent out my newsletter, as I do every Monday, and mentioned that I was going to Roboto Jinya for ramen to cure myself with intensely porky broth. (This is possibly sacrilegious as any good Jew worth his kosher salt is meant to cure him or herself with chicken noodle soup; pork broth is a slap in Judaism’s face!) A reader named John responded that Judaism and Japan should be ignored in favor of Thailand: “Adam, for a cold you need some Thai chicken coconut soup. Works every time.”
I didn’t want to believe the myths and legends surrounding the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger. I’m a man of the people: if it’s not listed on the wall, I don’t want to eat it! But when I wrote about In-N-Out Burger a few months ago, all you secret menu advocates slapped me on the wrist and said, “You’re not a man of the people, you’re a damn fool if you don’t order your burger ‘double double animal style.’” And so, on our most recent trip to In-N-Out, I followed your orders and did as you said.
One thing I know to be true about cities is this: they’re best judged by their neighborhoods.
I fell in love with some of my favorite cities–Seattle, Atlanta, New York–by visiting off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods with hidden-away restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, book stores and movie theaters. In Seattle, there’s Capitol Hill and Ballard; in Atlanta there’s the Virginia Highlands, Little Five Points and East Atlanta; in New York there’s the West Village, the East Village, Williamsburg and Park Slope. In all three of these cities, you could easily go there as a tourist and miss the best parts: you could stay downtown and see the Pike Place Market or the Coca-Cola museum or (midtown) Times Square and never venture into the parts that make these cities so beloved. Then you miss the whole point.
I’m kind of digging this L.A. winter. I was worried it’d be too hot and that I wouldn’t be able to cook my cold weather comfort food. Instead, it’s just cold enough to make a big pot of soup–like this Italian cabbage soup called Ribollita–and to feel good about it. Served up with lots of Parmesan cheese and toasted bread rubbed with garlic, this makes for a cozy, cheap and relatively healthy weeknight dinner regardless of your coast, east or west.
On Saturday, this blog turned eight. If you had a baby on the day that I started my blog that baby is now eight; in other words, your baby is not a baby. And neither is this blog.
At the beginning, the blog seemed like a means to an end–a way to get noticed in the food world–but the older I get and the older the blog gets, the more that I’m realizing it’s an end in itself. Every week, I get to share stories and recipes and pictures and videos and rants about lettuce and you mysterious people out there, whoever you are, read what I write and react. Even though this space that I carved out with my blog is virtual, it now feels so populated with real people–people who come up to me on the street and say things like, “I made your dinner rolls for Thanksgiving, they were a hit” (that happened in Silverlake)–the blog seems more like a real building that people visit every day, leaving traces of themselves with comments and ReTweets and Facebook wall postings. Without you, this blog would be a lonely place. It’s a shared effort and I wouldn’t still be doing it if you weren’t there to keep me company.
If I do a post on Friday, it’s usually because I have a weekend breakfast that I want you to make. There was that time I told you how to make eggs, biscuits and bacon; and let’s not forget these banana walnut waffles. This weekend, all you’ll need are a few stray Yukon gold potatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper, some slivers of garlic, finely chopped rosemary (use the fresh stuff) and a hard Italian cheese (Pecorino or Parmesan) and you can have this breakfast ready in no time.
