Happy Birthday to Golden State

Monday night at Golden State was pretty much like any other night at Golden State.  You walk in, you're greeted with earnest warmth, you invariably run into someone you know, and mouthwatering food, Scoops ice cream, and a ridiculously good beer list are all at your disposal.  Except last night, the kitchen guys relinquished the grill so that Mexicali Tacos could take over, and instead of burgers, they were vending cachetadas, vampiros and other awesome/exotic combinations of grilled tortillas, melted cheese and copious amounts of meat (more details on the food here).  After all, it was a celebration:  The Golden State turned two years old on Monday!

It was good to be there.  I've felt like a part of Golden State since the very beginning.  I was there at Jason's mom's house, when Samir made the very first incarnation of The Burger, and then expected us to put into words how delicious the thing was in focus-group-esque questionnaires that helped determine the menu that the cafe still offers today. (We also got a taste of the legendary beer affogato:  Jolly Pumpkin's dark ale, mulled with spices, reduced to a syrup, and poured hot over Scoops brown bread ice cream. Unholy good.)

When they painted the outside of the shop, I dragged myself out of bed and up Fairfax to come take photos.  I hung around during back-and-forth with contractor after contractor.  Over months, I heard every detail of city codes, regulations, and licenses, and began to wonder if the restaurant would ever open. 

Open they did, and I was there the first night (pictured above).  It became my go-to when I was hungry for food and socialization.  I could walk the three blocks from my apartment and know I'd be among friends.  Jason would chat about beer, I'd get updates from Jim as he went from newlywed to homeowner, to dog owner, to dad, and when they were busy, Rene would entertain me between grilling burgers with his absolutely nonsensical conversation.  I even did a stint behind the counter one afternoon!  After my first taste of the Golden State Salad, I chided Jason and Jim about my new least favorite thing amidst a menu of knockouts.  We almost got in a fight that day, but now it's our joke:  they threatened to name it after me, and now every time I go in there, they offer me a Sassooni Salad.

When I did a blog mash-up with Food Marathon, taking him through my hood, I made sure gstate was on the itinerary.  We were greeted there by my dear friend Nick -- Jim's brother visiting from New York, and after a bunch of other friends showed up still reeling from dinner at animal, an after-hours dance party erupted in the place.

Jim and Jason kindly contributed to No Cookie Left Behind the last 2 years (though they had to hold down the fort at the restaurant during the actual event); they've been nothing but supportive.  They hooked me up with bake sale contributor Kristin Feuer of Bakelab (back when it was Laurel Avenue Bakery) after she brought them a box of cookies, unprompted, to sell at the restaurant.   And after the 2009 bake sale, satisfied, but totally spent from a full day of bake sale action, nothing felt better than plopping down in their familiar dining room, sipping a cold beer, and watching the Lakers beat the Magic in the playoffs. 

It's pretty amazing.  A couple knuckleheads don't have a mite of experience with restaurants, but have excellent taste and undeniably keen intuition.  And within 2 years, their place is named one of Jonathan Gold's 99 Essential Los Angeles Restaurants. Though I don't live in the neighborhood anymore, the Golden State is essential to me, too, and for me it's also a source of great pride in my friends.  Here's to many more beers, many more burgers, and many more years of success for Jim, Jason, and the Golden State Cafe.

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Golden State Cafe is located at 426 N. Fairfax Ave., 1 1/2 blocks north of Beverly.

Irlandais

I hate green beer.  I don't see the point of adhering to a theme at the lowest, least clever level.  Also it looks gross and unappetizing.  (I also hate green mac and cheese, and green butter, and all the other green things our otherwise incredible commissary at work manages to churn out on Shrek days.  Come on, we're adults.  Is this really necessary?)

When it comes to unnaturally green foods, I draw the line at grasshopper pie (though you won't get me to scoff at this truly incredible fresh mint ice cream (I know it looks pale yellow in the photo.  Trust me, it's beautiful pale green.  And insanely good.)).  I like to weave in themes other ways.  More subtle ways.

So, after a delightfully Irish coworker invited me to an office hallway St. Patrick's Day celebration, my thoughts didn't go in the direction of sickly green hors d'oeuvres or sweets.  As usual, they went to cheese.  I decided to take a classic French recipe for gougeres, fluffy savory cheese puffs, and replace the cheese with an Irish cheddar.  Delicious idea.

I came home with a pretty special cheese:  it's an Irish cheddar, but flavored with porter beer, giving it the look of chunks of cheese marbled with deep brown porter.  In the store, it seduced me with its prettiness, but when I got home, I freaked out a little.  What if this brown cheese makes my gougeres look like little turds?  I forged ahead, resolving that I would take them anyway:  if they are delicious, and I have put work into them, what's a little turdish-looking-ness among friends?  Better than throwing away perfectly good food.

Well, it turns out they look beautiful and not at all turd-like!  A deep golden brown, with pockets of gooey cheese and a sprinkling of cracked black pepper on each.  This is my way of cooking for St. Patrick's Day. 

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And if you're hankering for a little more Irish-ish, how about some fancy cranberry fennel soda bread?

Irish Porter Cheddar Gougeres
adapted from Gourmet

1 1/2 cups coarsely grated Irish Cheddar cheese with porter

For pâte à chou (cream-puff pastry)
1 cup water
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 jumbo eggs, or 4 to 5 large eggs

black pepper

In a heavy saucepan bring water, butter, and salt to a boil, then lower heat to medium.  Add flour all at once and beat with a wooden spoon until mixture pulls away from side of pan, about one minute.

Transfer mixture to a bowl, and beat in all but one egg, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition (You can use a mixer for this, but a wooden spoon works fine).  Batter should be stiff enough to just hold soft peaks and fall softly from a spoon. If batter is too stiff, in a small bowl beat remaining egg lightly and beat into batter a little at a time, until batter is desired consistency.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Lightly grease 2 baking sheets or line with parchment paper or foil.

Stir cheese into pâte à chou.  Arrange level tablespoons about 1 inch apart on baking sheets. Sprinkle tops of gougères with black pepper and bake in upper and lower thirds of oven, switching positions of sheets halfway through baking, 30 minutes, or until puffed, golden brown and crisp.

A note on yield:  The original recipe says it makes about 40.  I must have been generous with my tablespoons, as I got about 32.  Guess it depends how big you want your gougeres.

We Jumped Over Fire

I celebrate new years three times every year: our western one, in the middle of freezing cold winter, Rosh Hashana, which lands in fall, and the one that has always seemed the most right to me, Norouz, Persian New Year, celebrated on the first day of spring.  It's a celebration redolent of sweet rebirth:  painted eggs, sweets on the table, fresh fruit everywhere.  The scent of fresh herbs and hyacinth waft through the day's traditions.  And on the eve of the last Wednesday before Norouz, you light a fire, then you jump over it.

Somehow this particular tradition -- a holiday known as Chaharshanbe Soori --  had escaped me until now.  I mean, my family doesn't even go camping, so I suspect getting a fire lit outside, let alone the grave dangers involved in jumping over it, were just too much for us.  But tonight, a sweet coworker named Saba invited me to her home to share in a tradition she holds on to from her own days in Iran.  I had no idea what to expect, but I'm so glad to have experienced the warmth of the fire and of Saba's hospitality.

 For me, tonight was a whole new way of doing Persian.  In my head, the associations with Persian events are words like overdone, super-fancy, formal, and stuffy.  But, tonight, the setting was Saba's cozy-artsy apartment in Franklin Hills, and the event was much more personal.  Not that the spread was not impressive:  Saba's home is peppered with accents from the old country, all with a unique touch.  Her gorgeous old silver tea set was a find at an antique shop in Tehran, and the beautiful but quirky miniature painting of a dainty Persian dancer in traditional baggy pants standing on her head?  Saba painted it herself, natch.  There are bits of beauty in every corner of this home.  Little dishes of dried fruits, nuts, and Persian sweets covered the coffee table, and she whipped us together a homey version of the traditional Norouz dish of sabzi polo mahi, which sat in my heart much more comfortably than the giant mounds of rice I'm used to at Persian parties.  An avocado and cucumber salad, and a bowl of some of the freshest leaves of basil, tarragon, and mint I've ever seen completed the spread. 

 sabzi polo with perfect tahdig, lemons from Saba's tree

And, oh the company!  As we sat on Saba's deck watching the fire burn, she and her friend Asal (Persian for honey) -- a San-Francisco-based artist in town preparing for an opening in Tehran -- fed my endless hunger for stories of current life in that city: this world of thrift store shopping, daily protests in the streets, conversations with cabbies, tea made from leaves freshly picked, pimps decked out in their finest standing on street corners in the middle of the night, and a youth population perfectly well versed in sex, drugs, and rock and roll -- all the delicious details CNN does not cover.  I got to speak Persian (nothing new, but lately it's been especially fun), and these lovely women even complimented me!   All the while, Asal's husband Bijan kept the vibe going as our DJ for the night.

Like any good Iranian hostess, Saba would not let us leave without tea and a little dessert.  I'll tell you this: I might never again eat ice cream without a sprinkle of rosewater on top.  But before we got dessert, we had to do the jump.  You start with a mantra you direct at the fire:  "my yellow is yours, your red is mine".  It's a pledge that as a one year comes to a close and spring pops up all around us, we'll feed the fire all our sickliness and cowardice, and leap into the new year with all the heat and glowing life of the fire.  The world seems rife with challenges right now.  Sometimes it seems like they're too overwhelming to even begin to know how to deal.  Tonight, a declaration of the fire within us all is a good place to start.


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Oh, and since the sabzi polo page on this blog has now surpassed the homepage in hits, let me give you people what you want:  Here is my detailed sabzi polo recipe, and here are a couple photos of the delicious finished product.  Let me know if you have any questions!

Secret Places

Have you been to 55 Degree wine shop in Atwater Village?  Nice place, lots of wine, blahblahblah.  But did you know that if you step towards the cash register, there's a stairway that goes way down to a cellar that is a secret wine bar?  It's a treasure.

It's a pretty special space.  Much larger than the store itself, it's cavernous, and yet with its dim light, it's intimate.  It's a place for telling secrets.  Order a drink from the lovely person behind the counter -- in our cases, it was a flight of cavas, whose Spanish names the British barmaid lovingly pronounced with an Italian accent.  Maybe pick up a bite to eat from the food truck outside, or just grab a handful of almonds from the counter.  A few sips in, you'll find yourself sharing things you'd squeezed super-tight not to let out.  Your non-judgmentalness muscle will be challenged as your companion starts sharing taboo secret things of her own.  As you dip into the glass of mineraly Santa Barbara Giallo that you probably didn't need after the generous flight of bubbly, you'll find that that muscle is stronger than you'd even imagine.  And so are you.  Which, maybe, is a fact worth sharing.

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55 Degree is at 3111 Glendale Blvd., just north of Glenfeliz.

The Coolest Kids

Without question, my friends are cooler than me.  I discover so much through them.  They expand the world of this little suburban Persian-Jew-girl in ways I could never imagine.  For the most part, I've only seen the coasts of our great nation, and I tend to follow the vacation mantra of "beachy and Spanish-speaking".  But, this year alone I will be going to a tiny mining town in Arizona called Bisbee for the wedding of two friends, and have even agreed to brave the snows of Missoula, Montana later this month.  Who am I?

And just this past weekend, my friend Kit introduced me to a truly amazing place, and totally off the beaten Tannaz path.  For her birthday, this extremely cool kid managed to round up 50 of her closest friends to trek out to a honky-tonk bar in the desert called Pappy and Harriet's, and I was one of them.  Five miles up a windy road from Yucca Valley lies Pioneertown, a 2-block stretch built as a movie set for westerns in the 1940s.  As amazing and kitschy and perfect as you'd imagine, it's the home of Pappy And Harriet's Pioneertown Palace.

I loved having a night like I'd never have in Los Angeles:  cowboy boots and twangy acoustic guitar jams are usually not my scene. But when a place has a vibe as warm as Pappy's, you don't mind the fact that it's the only bar for miles.  Barhopping isn't an option, but it's fun to be committed for the long haul to one bar and everyone in it.  And when the night's headliners, an Austin country rock band called Deadman, covered The Band's "The Weight", this city girl was dancing along with all the cowboy hats.

But you want to know about the food.  Well, it was pretty good.  Steaks and ribs were grilled on a outdoor mesquite fire, but they weren't amazing.  Tacos and quesadillas were great, made even better with homemade salsa.  But the chili -- chunky, smokey, and assertively spiced -- was the real prize. (Especially over nachos.  That's right.  Chili nachos.)

The homemade pecan pie was insanely good, and potent cocktails came poured in jam jars.  I enjoyed my margarita (well, all three) immensely.

Next morning, my friends continued exposing me to new worlds.  I'm not a hiker, but Joshua Tree is amazing.  Crazy Flinstones geology, furry Dr. Seuss trees, and badass climbers showing us up as they scaled the faces of terrifyingly large (and flat!) rocks.  I'm working on this coolness thing, but I'll never be as cool as that.

Photography Therapy: A Cry For Help

They say that obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.  As for me, I can put words together fine, but I can't take a picture worth a damn.  My crutch?  Hipstamatic.

Seriously though, can we talk this through?  I'm having an issue.  See, I am MTV generation through and through.  I have the shortest attention span of them all.  So I totally get that, for a food blog to actually be read, you could write like David Foster Wallace himself (still makes me sad), but you better have awesome pictures.  Hello, it's called food porn.  And, the fact is, people are actually doing professional-quality photography out there.  I look at blogs like Gastronomy or Sinosoul, and they go to restaurants, with their unpredictable and often low light, with the stigma of being that guy taking pictures of his food, with the fact that you are actually there to enjoy your food by ingesting it, before it gets cold (and clearly they do), and yet their photos are mouthwatering -- delicious things bouncing off the screen in vibrant technicolor, fancy depth of field focusing your eye on just the right bit, blurring out all the rest.

I have a little Canon point-and-shoot.  (Before that, I had a little Sony point-and-shoot, which I think I may have liked better, but then I got mugged.)  And my photo processing consists of little more than hitting the 'Enhance' button in iPhoto.  Sad, but it's all I know.  My only saving grace is that my kitchen at home gets quite bright.  Now you know why there are never dinner posts around here.

I am very interested in improving this situation.  I would love nothing more than a dslr camera, the know-how to wield it honorably, and the photoshop (or whatever) skills to take its photos to the next level.  But I don't even know where to begin.  Furthermore, there is the catch-22 of the inability to learn how to use  a dslr without having one, but the hesitation to commit to a very expensive piece of machinery without the foggiest notion of what to do with it.  On top of this, I guess there's this whole lens thing?  Evidently, you shell out for a fancy camera, but you can't actually use it without a lens as well?  This is a strange and confusing world.

So, you can see that I need some help here.  I'm standing at the bottom of the hill, looking way up.  I need a mentor, I need handholding, I need advice.  I need a photography sensei.  Tell me people, what's a photographically-remedial food blogger to do?

In the meantime, I have discovered Hipstamatic.  It's a cop-out, and it's amazing.  A 2-buck iphone app that takes my crappy photography skills, and seals them over with its own flavor of untouchable I-meant-to-do-that coolness.  It eschews the invasive world of gigapixels and high-def and gives us the beautiful retro-sexy blur that we crave.  I know it's splashed all over facebook so much it's a cliche, but the fact is, it's pretty awesome.

So for now, you're gonna see some Hipsta-shots in these parts.  Because it makes my blog pretty.  But, really, I want to learn the ways of the true masters.  Someone, please, show me the way.

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Incidentally, if we're going to talk LA food blogs with amazing photography, we really need to mention eat drink & be merry -- he really elevates it.  For one, I can attest that his Sunset Junction photos are a lot more beautiful than the real thing.  And he does all these actual professional photo shoots at local restaurants, butcher shops, bars.  Lovely stuff.

me and my beach

(that's my niece.  isn't she amazing?)

The beach is my natural habitat.  I used to think everyone loves it as much as I do, but spending time with charmingly water-timid Chicagoans in Puerto Vallarta and a few other choice friends and relatives, it turns out there are some weirdos who just aren't into it.  Bizarre, I know.  For me, it started early.  Summer would hit and my parents and their friends would round up the kids, pick up sandwiches (from Agoura's own Italia Deli if my sister had anything to do with it -- Bay Cities ain't got nothing on these sandwiches), and trek off to Zuma.  It was perfect.  The first glimpse of the ocean fills me with so much euphoria that it bubbles over and I feel like I might overflow.  I am about two shades darker in the summer.  And I must say, all that sand and salt make my hair amazing.  I could lie in the sun until it sets.  And nothing is better than that feeling when you've swam past the crazy waves and feel like you've mastered the ocean, you lean your head back until your ears are under water, you close your eyes, and the world disappears.  I really, really love the beach.

So, it was 80 degrees this weekend (That's right folks, 80 degrees in January.  Yeah, keep hating on LA.), and I had an extra day off.  I basically forced a beach day to happen.  Oh my.  So good.  Admittedly the one-and-half-hour drive back to the east was not so good, but it was worth all 90 minutes.  So, here's how we did it:

We had everyone from grandparents to little kiddies in tow.  Lunch was at Malibu Seafood, because it's super casual, has a beautiful view of the water, and the kids can run around.  Now, don't show up famished because that'll just lead to grumpiness. (Admittedly, grumpiness might happen anyway, but we do our best.  As stated, some people don't love the beach like I do.  Let's focus on the positive.) You order at the counter, but it's a tiny shack of a place, so you stand in line a good long time, then have to wait for food a while after that.  But, it's great.  Far less of a scene than Neptune's Net a little ways further up PCH, and the fish is really fresh and tasty.  There are plenty of fried things, which are all delicious, not least of which is perfectly cooked steak fries, but there's also shrimp cocktail, scallop ceviche, steamed shellfish, chowder, and a whole set of grilled fish plates.  (There's also an ahi burger, but it's just ok, which is what you get for ordering an ahi burger.)  No alcohol is sold on the premises, but as the lovely woman at the counter will tell you, the 76 gas station a quarter mile up the road sells wine and beer.  You kind of need a Corona or Pacifico to go along with your fried fish and ocean view.  You're on your own for limes, though.  One family brought their own tablecloth and champagne flutes.  Charming, if a little weird.

ladybugs!

After lunch, we crossed the street to the glorious beach.  Water was icy of course, but who cares?  It's a Monday in January, and my feet are in the Pacific Ocean.  Stones were skipped, shells were collected, anomones were poked.  Bizarrely, a million little ladybugs swarmed through the sand and tickled our toes.  And two children got completely soaked.  What's better?

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Malibu Fish and Seafood is at 25653 Pacific Coast Hwy in Malibu. (It's way out past Pepperdine. Plan accordingly.)

I don't know about your parties,

but at ours, the boys conduct necktie lessons

and then there's cobbler.

We're wild like that.

(purveyor of necktie)

(baker of cobbler)

Yuzu for What Ails You

Let's talk about one of my best friends.  I've known Jessica for fourteen years.  We met in my sophomore year of college.  We lived together during my senior year.  We've traveled together, watched countless romantic comedies together, gone out, stayed in, gossiped, processed every life event of the last decade and a half together.  We've laughed a lot and cried some, too.  And I am thrilled to report that when Jessica gets married this summer, I will be her maid of honor.  I really do feel honored -- she's that kind of friend.

Jessica's mom, a source of much folklore in our circle, is Korean, and so since my formative college days, Jessica has been responsible for initiating me into the world of Korean food.  It started with packages her mom would send her:  giant 70s orange tubs of brown, swampy fermented bean paste inhabited our fridge.  At odd hours, Jessica would heat dried fish -- small whole fish pounded flat and dried like jerky -- directly on the stove's burners.  The pungent reek would take over the apartment.  It got better though -- Jess also introduced us to delicious sheets of crisp toasted seaweed, and smushy little Korean mochi with a bit of sweet bean paste in the middle.  Later came all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue, fancy Korean coffee shops, and short rib soup you eat with scissors.

So, you can imagine my excitement when for once, I had a new Korean food to share with her.  I was introduced to Korean yuzu honey tea, or yujacha, a year ago, and instantly fell in love with the stuff. Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit with all the familiar and beloved brightness of our own lemons, but with a novel flavor -- a little sweeter, and a bit more complex.  You make the 'tea' (not really a tea at all, more like an emulsion of sorts) by scooping a bit of yucheong, a honey yuzu marmalade, into a mug, then adding steamy hot water. 

The next time I saw Jessica, I was jumping over myself to tell her about my amazing Korean disovery.  And Jessica, all cool, was like, "Yeah, I have a jar of that stuff in my fridge right now."

WHAT?

Fourteen years and bff status, and she's been holding out on me.

Despite my rage, we got over it, and while I'm a little sad for the lack of yuzu tea in my life the past 14 years, I'm happy that I have it now.  It's delicious always, but particularly perfect when you have a cold, as I did last week.  When you've finished the tea, you're left with a prize of slightly bitter yuzu rind at the bottom of your mug.  As if the steaming cup of hot beverage and the citrus contribution weren't healing enough, the pith (white part) of citrus rinds contain bioflavonoids, which, according to an old doctor of mine, break up congestants.

Most of you don't have a Jessica, but you have a Tannaz.  (And I mean, Jessica wouldn't have told you anyway.)  Your Tannaz is telling you, go have some yuzu tea.

good idea

(by way of Barbara Hill Design, in turn by way of my new blog crush, seesaw.)