15 Oct 2015 4 Comments
in On the Road, Recipes Tags: Baja, Casa Tres Coronitas, Don Schneider, fish tacos, Mazatlán, Mexican cuisine, Mexico, Puerto Vallarta, tacos
“There’s something wrong with your blog,” a friend said to me one day.
“Oh yeah,” I replied with a raised eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“There are no fish tacos on there.”
Could it possibly be true? That of all the posts on my blog, and more specifically all the times I’d written about tacos, that I had overlooked the Baja fish taco??
Baja fish tacos
“It’s true!” said friend who alerted me to the fact. “I looked through the entire site, no fish tacos.”
No fish tacos! More
10 Oct 2015 11 Comments
in Recipes Tags: architecture, humor, Little Osaka, Sawtelle Japantown, softshell crab, Southeast Asian cooking, Vietnam
I’ve been on a softshell crab kick lately. Our local fine butcher, Jim’s, gets them on Friday. And for the past couple months, I’ve been a familiar face.
“Ur gonna turn into a giant softshell crab,” my pal Bob texted me after I sent him a photo of a soft-shell I was eating at a sushi joint in L.A.’s Sawtelle Japantown neighborhood.
Crab close up
Yes, softshell crabs are one of my favorite things. And the thing is, they’re only available fresh for a few short months each summer. When I see ’em, I eat ’em. More
02 Oct 2015 2 Comments
in Humor, Recipes Tags: Andreas Viestad, Baja, cooking, humor, New Scandinavian Cooking, Norway, sandwiches, shrimp, Topanga
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, I was looking in vain for the Dodgers game on cable, and stumbled across “New Scandinavian Cooking” with Andreas Viestad.
Andreas Viestad fixing to smoke some trout in the mountains of Norway
It’s one of my favorite PBS cooking shows, and it was just beginning.
“Dad!” 5-year-old Imogen said as we wandered into the bedroom, “Is that a cooking show!??” More
25 Sep 2015 16 Comments
in Recipes Tags: humor, Italian cooking, Italy, Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana, risotto, seafood, sizzling rice soup, Venice
I’m a big believer in the ol’ saying, “If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.” I often spring it on my children when something hasn’t gone the way they were hoping, and they roll their eyes at me.
One lemon that life keeps giving me over and over again is burnt rice. About one out of every three times I make sushi rice, I space out and forget to turn it off and it burns.
Crispy shrimp risotto fake out
If it isn’t too burned, I’m able to salvage most of the rice and it has a nice woodsy nutty smoked taste that works well with sushi. Also if it’s not too burned, the “burnt” part comes off with a wrist twist of the spatula in crusty golden brown strips. If you put it in a 200 degree oven for 40 or so minutes, it dries out and becomes the hard stuff the Chinese fry to drop into sizzling rice. More
18 Sep 2015 14 Comments
in Humor, Recipes Tags: Attempts in Domesticity, hákarl, humor, Iceland, Icelandic cooking, lamb, rotten shark, Saveur, Sigur Ros
My 11-year-old son Flynn is obsessed with Iceland.
“I think I want to learn to speak Icelandic,” he declared to us at some point.
He now has two different Icelandic apps on his iPhone and paces around the house working on his pronunciation.
“Kveðja!” he says cheerfully by way of an Icelandic goodbye to our 5-year-old daughter Imogen as she heads off to summer camp.
Svið (singed sheep’s head)
Why Iceland? I take some responsibility, having introduced him to the Icelandic band, Sigur Rós, and taken him to one of their very dramatic concerts.
I’ve always been a bit intrigued by Iceland myself. I’m Irish, I like cold and dramatic northern landscapes and broody people who drink a bit too much and write mournful poetry and music. More
skinny girls & mayonnaise 