Clarity of Flavor

12 Jun 2012 7 Comments

by scolgin in Cooking Tips, Observations Tags: , , , , , , , ,

One day recently, I was reading a restaurant review by one of the great treasures of the L.A. culinary scene, our Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer, Jonathan Gold. If you don’t know Jonathan or his work, he is a grizzled hippy Jewish rocker who used to write concert reviews for the L.A. Times, and at some point transitioned to food — and now is one of the country’s most celebrated authors on all things edible, the only food critic ever to win the Pulitzer. He brings a literate rock & roll sensibility to his reviews that is perfectly suited for Jim Morrison’s City of Night.

The makings of a perfect dinner.

Anyway, in this particular review, he was praising the fresh, focused cooking of whatever restaurant it was (“seasonal, well-sourced produce presented in a way that lets its virtues shine through undisturbed”) against the prevailing trend of molecular cooking and the “restless mutation that modernism needs to survive”. He went on to point out that ” in California, the taste of a Cara Cara orange straight from the tree will always eclipse the flashier pleasures made possible by a packet of xanthan gum.” More

The Myth of 27

08 Jun 2012 13 Comments

by scolgin in Recipes, Video Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

It’s always been a symbolic number in my life — 27.

I remember sitting with my best friend, Dan, at his house in Topanga close to my 28th birthday. Dan was a few years older than I. “27 has been a really hard year,” I said — tired and disillusioned. “Oh man,” he replied, “I’m just getting over 27.”

Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons in Topanga, 1969

27 is, of course, the year that so many talented young artists perish. Browse the obits, and it truly is astonishing — Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, Brian Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Heath Ledger, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse. It’s often morbidly referred to as the “Forever 27 Club.” More

More Tiny Little Fishies

05 Jun 2012 10 Comments

by scolgin in Cookbooks, Recipes, Video Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I don’t know what it is about small fish that is so appealing to me.

I remember being in Italy as a child, and looking on in horror as my parents dug into platefuls of tiny fried fish, uncleaned and with heads intact! (Why this was more objectionable to my 11-year-old sensibilities than the squid tentacles I was gobbling with wild abandon that same trip I’ll never know.) Fast forward a quarter century of so, and I can’t get enough of the small fry.

Italian-style “fritto di mare” fried whitefish

I buy teeny, tiny “ice fish” — no longer than a nickel and pale white — at the Japanese market, coat them in a light tempura batter and make fish fries. I buy smelt or other little fish, and recreate the fritto misto that traumatized me as a child in Italy. I purchase silvery sardines to pickle or throw on the grill. I can’t remember when it all changed, perhaps it was the climbing-a-mountain/crossing-a-new-frontier aspect it. But whenever and however, I became a devotee of diminutive dabs. More

Black Monday

01 Jun 2012 11 Comments

by scolgin in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: , , , , , , , ,

We returned Monday afternoon from the obligatory Memorial Day pool party/barbecue tired and sunbaked — a family sluggish in the hangover of four barbecues in four days, beginning with the optimistic pop of a pale ale bottle opening Friday afternoon and ending with the fizzle of a yawn 72 hours later.

It was as I was tending to my afternoon duties around the house that I first noticed an ominous sign out on the property: an explosion of white feathers down by the garden. More

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