Magnificent Moo Shu

When I was a kid, my family used to go to the Twin Dragon restaurant — a mere mile from my home, it was the best gig in town, shy of driving all the way to Chinatown which we did on the weekends sometimes for dim sum.

Moo shu with support act, Mandarin chicken

Moo shu with support act, Mandarin tangerine chicken

By today’s Chinese restaurant standards of Szechuan vs. Cantonese vs. Fujian vs. Shandong, etc., Twin Dragon was pretty old school — sweet & sour pork, wor wonton soup, pressed duck. But back then, when most Chinese joints were serving chop suey and egg foo young, it was pretty special. They made a mean spicy kung pao chicken with whole blackened chilies, a rocking tangerine chicken with bits of chewy peel, a sublime three-flavor sizzling rice soup, as well as some unique specialties — I recall the chicken with pine nuts standing out, and remember my parents once ordering a big plate of jiggly jellyfish which they tried without success to get the kids to eat. More

Why I Don’t Like Frog Legs

The main reason I don’t like frog legs can be summed up by one very vulgar photo, for which I apologize in advance.

Here it goes:

IMG_5936

As part of our large recent meat purchase from my meat purveyor friend in Portland, my pal Donnie got a rather large box of frog legs. More

Butterbeer & Kreacher Comforts

My son, Flynn, is something of a Harry Potter fanatic. We originally read the seven books together when he was in kindergarten and first grade, and the moment we’d finished, he promptly launched back into them and read them all over again. He’s now 10, and is in the process of re-reading the 759-page seventh book, “Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows” — for the ninth time.

Flynn at the barber shop with his book while Dad gets his hair cut

Flynn at the barber shop with his book while Dad gets his hair cut

Every so often, he gets out his Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook — composed mostly of foods actually mentioned in the books — and finds things he’d like to make. Usually it’s something sweet, often “Rockcakes,” the scone-like lumps served by the gentle giant Hagrid when Harry and his friends would visit him in his groundskeeper hut. But on a lazy Sunday afternoon, he had something else in mind. More

The Best Kind of Labor

While the rest of the Los Angeles swarmed the Labor Day weekend beaches to beat the heat, see the big waves and watch Laird Hamilton shoot the Malibu Pier, we elected to stay on the mountain, be satisfied with our Pacific breezes and almost-ocean views, and do what most people do for the holiday — barbecue.

The day's star attraction

The day’s star attraction

To be more precise, smoke. When I don my pit master hat, I usually default to one of two things — North Carolina pork shoulder or Texas brisket — or sometimes both. This weekend, it would be the latter. Like a morbid cartoon, I caught a particular pork shoulder winking at me from the meat aisle at the grocery store, and was smitten. More

The Dump

I used to complain to my wife about the fact that her sister — a caterer — would often drop by and “gift” us large quantities of food leftover from one of her jobs. There would be big Glad bags of pasta salads, large chunks of picked over cheese and half cakes.

I called it “the Dump,” and came to resent coming home to discover a fridge full of leftovers from someone-I-didn’t-know’s wedding that I was now responsible for either eating or assuming the guilt of throwing away.

Heirloom tomato & corn risotto with parmesan scallops, straciatella

Heirloom tomato & corn risotto with parmesan scallops, stracciatella

We don’t see her sister often these days, and it’s probably been nearly a decade since we last received a drop off. But our friends, Kristine and Simon, just moved to Lake Tahoe, and were back in Topanga to pack up. We invited them to dinner, and Kristine showed up with a canvas bag full of stuff. More

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