03 Feb 2015 13 Comments
in Eating Out Tags: humor, Japanese food, Kula sushi, Little Osaka, Sawtelle Ave., sweet shrimp, uni
There’s an outpost of a popular Tokyo revolving sushi chain called Kula located in the Little Osaka neighborhood of Sawtelle Avenue in West L.A. that I like to visit.
Imogen enjoying her salmon at Kula
Every plate is $2.25, the quality is unusually good, and so you get a great sushi lunch for $12-$15. You can really go nuts and spend $20. More
30 Jan 2015 9 Comments
in Food, Humor Tags: 2015 predictions, food, food trucks, humor, Jonathan Gold, King's Hawaiian Bread, lists, Portland, sous vide, Toshio Tanabe
On the more or less one-year-later heels of my wildly popular “Food Trends for 2014” post of a year ago — okay, it was Freshly Pressed, which meant I got about 12,000 page views I wouldn’t have normally gotten — I present my thoughts for what may be on the horizon in the coming year for the foodie universe.
Here are some of my predictions:
• Detritus
Where last year I predicted an explosion in foraging, with well-meaning chefs and hipster home cooks appearing hunched over in woods, urban parks and even unsuspecting back yards, this year I imagine a new trend in plating where chefs scatter dirt, leaf duff, twigs and other miscellaneous detritus they discover over the top of their dishes. I did read an article recently about a chef in Tokyo who was actually using dirt in his food. I tried to make it up, folks, but I couldn’t — it had already happened.
Tokyo chef Toshio Tanabe trying to explain why his dirt tasting menu is a good idea
23 Jan 2015 23 Comments
in Observations, On the Road Tags: beer, food, humor, Japanese cooking, matsutake, mycology, Sonoma, tempura, wild mushrooms
Fungi is a fickle kingdom. Predicting where and when a particular mushroom will grow is like betting on the stock market.
Willa with amanita coccora — the only edible mushroom in a family of deadly beauties
Some mushrooms appear only in years with late soaking rain, others only when there is an early rain followed by a dry spell followed by another rain. Some mushrooms only grow where there is something dead under the dirt, while others cannibalize nearby poisonous mushrooms, transforming them into prized edibles. More
16 Jan 2015 19 Comments
in Humor Tags: Charlie Hebdo, chickens, coyotes, food, humor, Malibu Feed Bin, Mammoth Mountain, Topanga
It had already been a tough week.
Enjoying our ski vacation in Mammoth, we were hit with the news of the terrorist attacks at the satirical paper, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris.
I had once purchased the URL, chickensacrifice.com, thinking I would do some sort of satirical online publication. I never did.
It was about 4 a.m. on the morning of January 13. I was returning in a daze from the bathroom to my bed when I heard a strange whimpering sound from outside — something like a cross between a baby crying and an owl. More
02 Jan 2015 15 Comments
in Starlets Tags: bourbon, food, Francis Ford Coppola, humor, Monty Python, Mr. Creosote, New Year's Eve, pork belly, Topanga, zabuton
Our annual New Year’s Eve dinner with a small handful of friends commenced at 6 p.m. on December 31st with a matsutake and lardo pizza and copious amounts of champagne.
Through the several hours of the carefully planned and sourced meal, we would dine our way through seven courses (pizza not included), six or seven bottles of pinot noir and a magnum of Francis Ford Coppola-autographed 1980-something Neibaum-Coppola cabernet (you can’t keep that stuff forever), some French and Australian wines, a bit of mescal and more. A bit foggy as I write…
Here are some of the highlights. Happy New Year! And see if you can find the Monty Python joke somewhere in there…
The menu
skinny girls & mayonnaise 