03 Jul 2012
by scolgin
in Pork, Recipes, World's Best Sandwiches
Tags: bacon, barbecue, BBQ, burgers, cooking, grill, marmalade, recipes, summer, Tabasco
There is a condiment unlike any other — a glistening concoction that will transform your burgers from fine to sublime, and that will have your summertime guests kneeling at your feet in reverence, O’ God of the Barbecue. And I will share it with you, here, now, just in time for the 4th!
Bacon onion marmalade
This is not a condiment for vegetarians or the tentative. I call it bacon onion marmalade. And it is the anecdote to mediocre summer burgers. You may even want to bring a little stash with you when someone invites you to their barbecue. More
29 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Observations
Tags: burgers, contest, cooking, ethics, food, Los Angeles Times, meat, New York Times, Pork
Periodically I enter contests. I don’t know why, because I rarely win. (You may still remember my entry to the Los Angeles Times “Best Burger” contest, which I was certain I would win until I discovered it was actually a “Burger with the Most Facebook Likes” popularity contest.) But hope springs eternal.
A couple months ago, my pal and sometime-Skinny-Girls-sidekick Nat sent me a link to a contest in the New York Times. “You should enter this,” he said. It was an essay contest on the ethics of eating meat.
More than an actual desire to win (the prize in this case being not a car or a trip to Hawaii but simply that your essay got published online), I enjoy entering these sorts of contests because it is a good impetus to think and write about things I might not otherwise think and write about. And though I often think and write about an ethical approach to eating meat, I had never gotten down to the actual marrow-bones ethics of it. (Nice recipe for marrow bones here, by the way…) More
22 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories)
Tags: ancestry, cooking, Dublin, food, Irish food, plantains, potluck, pub food, summer
It was the last day of school — a foggy gray June morning, the day before the solstice, the kids already adapting to their summer schedule and rising late, slogging off to class with sleep still heavy in their eyes.
The Ancestor Feast, Ms. Denmark’s 2nd grade class, Topanga, CA
My son, Flynn, had recently been studying ancestry in his second-grade class, interviewing grandparents and making family trees. For the last day of school, they would be having an “Ancestor’s Feast,” in which they — or their parents, who were invited too — would bring in a dish honoring the country, or “a” country, of their ancestry. More
12 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Cooking Tips, Observations
Tags: butter, Cara Cara orange, cooking, food, Haagen-Dazs, Jonathan Gold, L.A. Weekly, LA Times, rib eye
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
01 Jun 2012
by scolgin
in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories)
Tags: barbecue, chickens, cooking, coyotes, food, hawks, Memorial Day, owls, pool
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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