September 2013

Marcella Hazan’s Immortal Tomato Sauce Recipe

While Craig was gone these past nine days, I found myself watching a lot of True Blood on HBO Go. I’m still finishing up Season One, so no spoilers please, but I found myself quite choked up at a moment that was a subtle one, as far as the series goes. Sookie, the protagonist, is mourning the loss of a relative (see, I’m not spoiling it either) who–before dying–made a pecan pie, half of which remains in the refrigerator. At the wake, Sookie freaks out when someone tries to remove it; at the end of the episode, she eats the pecan pie and cries. What got me was this notion that through our food we live on even after our death. The ingredients that we use are merely objects, but how we combine those objects–with our touch, our sense of taste–is a manifestation of our spirit. It’s also true of the recipes we leave behind. And so, in the real world, we mourned the loss of Italian cooking legend Marcella Hazan this weekend and last night I could think of no greater tribute than to make her celebrated tomato sauce with butter–a sauce that every home cook should know.

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Reasons To Make A Crumb Cake This Weekend

1. Because it’s the weekend and you can eat whatever you want and not get fat.

2. Because crumb cake works equally well as breakfast, as an afternoon snack, a post-dinner dessert or a late night treat.

3. You have four sticks of butter in your refrigerator and you don’t know what to do with them.

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Beating Jet Lag

Here’s some great advice on Kottke.org about beating jet lag by changing your diet. This will come in handy in five weeks when I make the 19 hour journey to Perth!

Stuffed Eggplant with Lamb and Pine Nuts

Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem is so popular Julia Moskin of The New York Times did an article about “Jerusalem fever.” Do I have Jerusalem fever? Well, I’ve been cooking from it gradually, making that fattoush a few months ago, and that beet dip I posted about yesterday. The beet dip was for this week’s Clean Plate Club and the entree, also from Jerusalem, is the one you see above: eggplant stuffed with lamb and pine nuts.

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Beet Dip

“Dip” is a funny word because, really, does it make you hungry? It connotes a drop in the road or a dippy person. It’s also kind of retro. “How about some chips and dip,” says a mom on a black-and-white TV show from the past, doesn’t matter which one. Oh: it also connotes chewing tobacco which my college roommate used to spit into a cup. He’d leave the cup around our dorm room and every so often I’d glance into it and want to puke. So dip, yeah. It’s not the sexiest food word.

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My Heart’s Aflame For Chengdu Taste (My Mouth Too)

This is the place. I’ve been in L.A. for two years, stalking my way around the San Gabriel valley, slurping noodles at Tasty Noodle House and tearing into salted egg yolk pastries at Sea Harbour. Secretly, I was looking for a place that would put our favorite New York Chinese restaurant, Grand Sichuan, to shame. The only thing that was in the same ballpark was Chung King where I went with Zach Brooks last year. It was ok, but it didn’t blow me out of the water. I’d pretty much let go of the idea of supplanting Grand Sichuan since most of my San Gabriel experiences were Cantonese. Then, last week, I met up with Ganda and Zach for lunch at a place that Kat Odell recommended during my podcast: Chengdu Taste. And the rest, as they say, is history.

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Let’s Talk Breaking Bad While Looking At Pictures of Food From The Oinkster

What you are looking at is a pastrami sandwich from The Oinkster in Eagle Rock. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while. I started a post about it on Friday, but kind of lost my motivation; then, this morning, I started to write one again but found myself reading Breaking Bad recaps instead. Which got me thinking: why pretend that I want to talk about this pastrami sandwich when all I want to do is talk about Breaking Bad? So, on the surface, this post will look like any other food blog post, but really it’s a chance to talk Walter White. (Spoilers ahead.)

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Pici (Or: Handmade Pasta For Idiots)

For those of you who aspire to make pasta at home but don’t have the time or the will or the resources (like, a pasta machine), here’s a recipe for you. It’s called Pici and it’s one of the more satisfying things I’ve made for dinner in recent memory. You may be thinking: “Adam, didn’t you just post a pasta recipe two days ago?” It’s true; and on this particular week when I made the pici, I’d only had that other pasta dinner three days earlier. But watching David Chang’s Mind Of A Chef on PBS (a pretty excellent show), I started to get a hankering for noodles. In Japan, people eat noodles all the time; why couldn’t I have noodles for dinner a second time in one week? Damn it, I deserve it! Only these noodles–ah, pasta (Michael White yelled at me for calling pasta “noodles” once)–would be handmade and would only take me 15 minutes. Don’t believe me?

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