• Mo-Chica & A Sunday Supper at Lucques

    Mo-Chica & A Sunday Supper at Lucques

    Zach Brooks, who created the blog Midtown Lunch, moved from New York to L.A. over a year ago. From my perspective, he’s been like the canary in the coal mine; the fact that he not only survived the move but is flourishing out here gave me inspiration to move here too. And, of course, once…

  • A Trip To The Santa Monica Farmer’s Market

    A Trip To The Santa Monica Farmer’s Market

    To get to the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market from where I live, you have two choices: you can take highways (the 101 to the 110 to the 10 West) or you can take streets. If you do take streets, there are probably many speedy options; streets that take you far west with minimal traffic. Of…

  • Setting Up Our New Kitchen

    Setting Up Our New Kitchen

    The last time that you saw our new California kitchen was in this post, “Our New Kitchen.” But that was our kitchen the way it was set up before we arrived. Now that we’re here, big decisions had to be made: where do I put the plates? Where do I put the spoons? Where do…

  • Lisa Fain’s Seven Chile Chili

    Lisa Fain’s Seven Chile Chili

    There are two chili recipes in Lisa Fain’s incredible and indispensable new “Homesick Texan Cookbook.” The first is, according to Fain, “an all-day affair,” a real-deal Texas chili (that means no beans) that requires careful shopping (seven different chiles–anhcho, pasilla, guajillo, chipotle, chiles de arbol, cayenne, and pequin–are employed) and five hours of simmering on…

  • Two L.A. Sandwiches & A Burger at Bay Cities, Café Tropical & Umami

    Two L.A. Sandwiches & A Burger at Bay Cities, Café Tropical & Umami

    Stand back, mere mortals. You are about to encounter a sandwich that is not meant for the meagre constitutions of wimpy humans. This is food for giants, food for gods. “God” is even in the sandwich’s name: meet The Godmother at Bay Cities in Santa Monica. A sandwich with so much meat on it, if…

  • Food Shopping For The First Time In California

    Food Shopping For The First Time In California

    Do you remember that game show where couples would race through a grocery store trying to buy as much as they could in 60 seconds? “Supermarket Sweep”: that’s the name of it! I remember watching that when I’d fake sick and stay home from school to watch “The Price Is Right” (the major perk of…

  • Saved By Ramen at Robota Jinya

    Saved By Ramen at Robota Jinya

    Maybe because of all the stress of moving (and don’t kid yourself: moving is stressful), last week–having survived the ordeal of flying with a cat (I gave her a test sedative the week before which worked almost instantly; the morning of the flight, I gave her the pill at 7, went to a diner, and…

  • Peppadewed Pork Chops with Cauliflower

    Peppadewed Pork Chops with Cauliflower

    One of the best things that I made before I packed up my New York kitchen and moved to California is the dish you see above. I’m calling it Peppadewed Pork Chops with Cauliflower, but the truth is I didn’t use Peppadews; I used pickled red jalapenos I’d been testing for my cookbook. However, the…

  • The Farewell New York Meals

    The Farewell New York Meals

    Anthony Bourdain has said that, for his last meal, he’d want the roasted bone marrow with parsley salad that Fergus Henderson serves at his London restaurant, St. John. It’s fitting then that, for my last meal as a New Yorker, there was that very same dish. Only it wasn’t prepped by Fergus Henderson; it was…

  • Zankou Chicken

    Zankou Chicken

    In 2003, a funny thing happened. My parents were visiting Atlanta, where I was attending law school, and they were staying at a nice hotel in Buckhead. They asked me to meet them there for a drink and, as often happened when I’d sit with my parents in a hotel lobby sipping a gin and…

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