I ate the best kale salad I've ever eaten in my life on Friday.

The restaurant I got it from is located right downstairs from my gym, where I stopped in with a friend after we took a very intense yoga class. Later, during a delightful drizzly afternoon in Laurel Canyon, we pondered the recipe, among other things.

I had thought that the kale was blanched, perhaps -- the texture was so interesting, cooked but not soft. Today I found the recipe and for a moment, rejoiced. Until I started really reading it. This was going to require math. And a lot of it.

The All Hail Kale Salad apparently calls for 6 bunches of kale to serve 8. Now, I'm fairly certain I could tuck away 2 servings a day for a couple days, so maybe I could halve the recipe. But then that means changing the rest of the recipe. How does one measure 1/2 an ounce of ginger, I ask you? And how many cups is in 1 1/4 quarts of Ginger Papaya Dressing? And how many cobs of corn does one roast to acquire 1 cup of roasted niblets? And am I going to be swimming in corn salsa if I make it as directed?

Recipe math is always tricky, too, because even if you get all the numbers right, the chemical reactions may be totally off. For example, I suspect that the enzymes in the papaya are what makes the kale have such a unique type of bite in this salad -- soft but maintaining the rough integrity of the leafy green. So if I halve the papaya in the dressing, will the kale soften as much? Questions, questions, questions. The questions are actually the way I talk myself out of running out to try and make this right this second. I'm sure I could spend the time to figure it all out on the internet. Or just suck it up and swim through kale for a week.

Or maybe one day, I'll feed an army of friends and loved ones this dish at a potluck. Until then, you taunt me, All Hail Kale salad.

When I was very young, my mother reveled in the kitchen, working side-by-side with my father to recreate delicacies that couldn't be found in America. Traditional, complicated foods were plotted and savored with some regularity. Deep fried fritters that required a strange powder for the dough to hold were prepared in our little kitchen and doused with honey. The skins of the oranges we snacked on after dinner were saved for weeks so that we could make dried slivers of zest to tuck into rice, along with pistachios and barberries and saffron. We would pick the stems from leaves of parsley while watching The Cosby Show, before my father would take a big mezzaluna to chop it down into a fine mass along with other picked over herbs, before my mother would fry the herbs until they turned a very dark color, and they were ready to be stewed with onions and meat for several hours before being served with rice. There were nights when we would sit at a picnic blanket in the living room, smacking and sucking marrow out of bones, eating a mash of beans and meat with our fingers, using thin lavash bread to scoop it up.

Then came the doldrums, roughly the years surrounding my grandfather's long illness and his death. With his passing, something in the house unraveled, the tie to fatherland grew dim, and my mother's enthusiasm for filling the house with the smells of her childhood home seemed to wither for a time. And so, the cooking began to fall to me.

There was one dish that I made for many years, at the direction of my mother. Chicken with onions and turmeric. It is exactly what it sounds like, a most unenthusiastic recipe that filled our bellies without flair or nostalgia. Sliced onions were briefly sauteed before raw chicken and a heaping tablespoon of turmeric were added to a pot. A cup or two of water was added and a long simmer was set under way. I'd make a little pot of white rice and a salad of lettuce and tomato dressed with lemon and olive oil and that would be that. I was probably 11.

I later joked that eating this chicken so frequently made me become a vegetarian for 10 years once I turned 15. That might be true.

Tonight I came home somewhat late, and decided to bank a bit of cooked protein for the remainder of lunches this week to tie together all the loose bits of leftovers in my refrigerator right now. I'd thawed some chicken, but I cook chicken so rarely that I hardly know what to do with it, really. So I made the chicken with onions and turmeric, slopping it together in the pot on a sort of auto-pilot that hadn't grown rusty in the many years since I last made the dish. Then that yellow smell filled the house, and I remembered how long it had been.

As a new gym devotee, I've been trekking over to West Hollywood pretty regularly to take pelvic-thrusting dance classes and ambitious yoga classes. It's been really great, except for one thing... the gym is a bit of a commute from my place and, though I kinda love driving, the route can be a dangerous gauntlet when one is hungry and feeling entitled to a bit of a splurge post-workout.

I'm not typically tempted by fast food, but a lot of weird L.A. favorites lie between my apartment and the gym. If I were giving directions on how to get there from my house, they might include "turn right at House of Pies," to give you an idea.

But that's only if I take Franklin across town. Usually, I go on Sunset. Which means there's a standing battle on every commute: me vs. Zankou Chicken. I don't know what Armenian magic is wrought on these birds _ on appearance alone, it seems like they should be no different than your average grocery store rotisserie. The restaurant itself holds no charms, whatsoever. It's located in a fairly sketchy mini-strip mall, where there seems to be a screaming match over one of the few parking spots almost every time I'm there. The hard, plasticized seating tends to be greasy to the touch and I have to make a mental note not to inspect the floors too closely. There's a stuff-in-the-grout problem down there. And the employees working the register are ladies who have eyebrows that are either drawn on in an unflattering angle that makes them appear angry or... they're just truly pissed off to be there. Either way, I don't think they have ever smiled at me.

But the chicken is amazing. It comes with a little, bitty cup of a garlic paste that is completely delicious -- and I actually tend to avoid garlicky foods. And there's a little salad, a little tahini, a little hummus. Really, it's almost impossible to talk it up without overselling it, because it's a really simple meal. But the siren song of that chicken makes me have to squeeze the wheel and floor it past the corner of Normandie and Sunset with some regularity.

Also en route:
_ Toi, my favorite Thai restaurant in L.A., a title earned by nostalgia rather than epicurean assessment. They have my favorite vegetarian pad see ew, but I mostly love Toi because it's open until 4 a.m and we used to eat there after coming up to the big city from the burbs to see a band.
_ YogurtLand... it's a whole land of yogurt. And toppings. And pleasure. Sprinkly my ashes into the sliced almonds, please.
_ In N Out... note to future self: the protein-style double-double is still a double cheeseburger, albeit sans bun.
_ The Griddle... though there's always a million people outside and the wait can be brutal, this is easily my favorite breakfast place in LA., with really great huevos rancheros. It is also kindof a dump.

You also have to go through Little Armenia and Thai Town... And then there are all the places I go past in my neighborhood, which I happen to think has some of the best restaurants in town...

Ah, but it's a small price to pay to get to take classes in this fine facility.

(full disclosure: I have not taken the pole-dancing class.)

Though I've been an apartment dweller for the last decade, I do spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about having a garden. This is among my more unreasonable pastimes because, unless I marry well, it's unlikely I'll ever own a plot of land large enough to host it.

This nesting desire-cum-tree-planting desire manifested, for a short time, as a semi-serious Farmville addiction. You know Farmville, the game your 8-year-old cousin can't stop thinking about at the dinner table as she rearranges her dinner into perfect rows and makes clicking noises every time she "harvests" a spoonful of mashed potatoes and eats it. It was fun to play for a time, but I had to stop before Dr. Drew showed up at my door.

So, now I think about what my real garden would have. I think I'd want a big orchard actually, too. That way I could have lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangerines... and all manner of nuts, like almonds, walnuts, pistachios... It would be nice to grow my own salad vegetables, too. And to have a berry patch. And grapes growing on arbors. Look at me, I'm quite fancy with my multiple arbors, aren't I?

But if I had limited space in my fantasy yard, and had to choose between garden or hot tub, I would choose hot tub. For the record.

Ugh. Two reasons I wish I hadn't ordered Thai for dinner tonight:
1. Tub Tim Siam is the best Thai place in my delivery area, I've established this. But it is still greasy as hell.
2. The apartment smells like Thai takeout in what I fear is a permanent way, despite repeated spraying of orange-scented Lysol.

When I was 11, we took my first trip to Iran that I wasn't in diapers for. Customs officials around the world met my families deepest, darkest food fantasies while rifling through our luggage in search of contraband.

It was a long flight to Germany, then to Iran. We flew Luftahnsa, and I remember feeling cold for the whole flight, and that my mother was furious that we were seated one row ahead of the smoking section. I also remember dutifully eating the hard, dark brown bread with strange cheese they served in-flight because my mom told us that this was the sort of food her father had eaten in Germany, where he was educated.

Because each passenger was allowed two suitcases, my mother, me and my younger sister each lugged two massive suitcases to Tehran. That was the first flight I'd ever been on where you got off the plane and stood on the tarmac _ I had only experienced travel in the cool confines of American terminals. Ever the anxious child, as we stood in the middle of the night on a runway that smelled of fuel, I kept whipping my head around, certain that we were standing in the takeoff path of a zooming jet. We rode a very quiet bus in to the terminal, where everyone seemed anxious for what lay ahead of us: customs. After we managed to get our hulking suitcases onto carts and get in line, we watched as bored, sweaty customs officials rifled through the suitcases of the people ahead of us under unforgiving fluorescent lights. Everyone looked so wan and tired. There was a large sign greeting arrivals at Mehrabad Airport in those days, with Ayatollah Khomeini's beatific-seeming visage and the words Death to America on it. I felt offended but kept this to myself _ after years of playing the de facto (and sometimes unintelligible) translator to the numerous newscasts we watched in my home, I knew this was a common refrain.

Customs officials were flipping through books, asking if travelers intended to resell the 8 pairs of Levis in their suitcases that still had tags on. Many terse words seemed to be exchanged and I remember assuming the travelers' innocence and pitying their lack of foresight -- we had snipped tags from all the new clothes we'd brought as presents for our family, careful only to leave the small plastic tag-holders so that they would know they were not receiving hand-me-downs.

Our turn came. It wasn't long before our customs official became quite amused with our suitcase. He picked up the jar of peanut butter -- Jif, because my mother is quite choosy (and because she wanted to fatten up my cousin who was a picky eater). Laughing, he showed it to other customs officials. He picked up the salami, beef jerky and other meat products my uncle had come to miss in Iran, after spending his college years in the States. There was more laughter. I hoped they wouldn't see the pièce de résistance: in my mother's carry-on was a cold Big Mac, a food that I'd never eaten as an American citizen, but her brother had fond memories of. The customs official joked that Iran had food and asked if we were afraid of starving. My mom said no, playing nice. He then asked if we'd been back since the Revolution. My mother said we hadn't, and it was my first trip. He took pity on us, or deemed us to be the harmless weirdos we are, and let us through without further scrutiny. I breathed a sigh of relief that my most valued possession, the Donkey Kong handheld game in my backpack, had survived the trip without being confiscated.

When we came back to the States, we went through customs in Los Angeles. Again, we lugged all sorts of foods that are hard to explain and smelled a little funny to the table in front of a bored customs official. He was a tall white man, a little sweaty, a little tired, wearing a variety of uncomfortable things: a tightly tied necktie, a belt that must have dug into the underside of his considerable gut, and plastic gloves in the dog days of August in a windowless corner of an airport basement in Los Angeles.

"Tokhmeh? Pesteh? Badoom?" he asked, in accented Farsi. My mom, my sister and I giggled at this big white man asking us if we were smuggling in toasted seeds, pistachios or almonds into the country _ which did not amuse him. So as not to undermine his sense of authority, my mom dutifully showed him everything in our suitcase, trying to explain what things were.

"What's this?" he asked, raising a small mass of piroshkies wrapped in many layers of plastic. Knowing me, I'm fairly certain my mouth watered involuntarily at that moment, as it does now remembering it.

"Piroshki," I chirped, feeling very protective of one of my favorite foods. "It's like a jelly donut, but with custard or cooked ground beef in it," I said, underselling it a bit. My mom had brought a bag home for my dad _ they've been sweethearts since they were 15, and on their dates they would often go to a special vendor to get their piroshkis. I breathed a sigh of relief when he let us through.

My parents recently returned from Iran, bringing back a bunch of food souvenirs once more, including two favorites. Iranians eat lots of seeds and nuts, and one of my family's favorite snack foods (sold in movie theaters and the like) is berenjak, a mix of puffed basmati rice, sesame seeds and shahdooneh, which are hemp seeds or pot seeds, I'm not sure which. The seeds are toasted and salted, and the mix seems tart with lemon juice to me, but I'm not sure how it's prepared. To eat it, you scoop some into a saucer and dip your tongue into it, letting the tiny bits stick to your tongue. It's not the most attractive thing to watch, but the crunch and snap of the seeds and rice are endlessly satisfying.

Berenjak: from top to bottom, sesame seeds, puffed rice, shahdooneh.

Something we've only discovered in recent years are the delicious crackers of Iran. Again, it's the same ingredients in a sense: finely milled rice flour, sesame and shahdooneh.

From left to right: sweet, cardamom-scented morning crackers with sesame; savory shahdooneh crackers and sesame crackers.

Killing me: http://nyti.ms/i7veho

"New rule: If you're paying less than a buck for a taco you can't be shocked that the meat in it isn't really meat. Your 'meal' costs less than gum. There's a reason taco spelled backwards is O Cat." -- Bill Maher, "Real Time..." Jan. 28, 2011.

It's been years since I've had a cold. My body tends to find more creative ways to be uncooperative and fail me, but this sniffling, sneezing, getting chills and feeling achey stuff is so foreign that I hardly know what to do.

Feed a cold, right? Is that what they say? Sure. It just so happens that I also feed a perfectly healthy body. But let's not quibble. Sniffle.

When I first started feeling icky, I went to my refrigerator with one word in my mind: healthy.

After recently wishing I had fresh fennel and teasing out that craving with brown sugar fennel ice cream in San Francisco, I had stocked up on my favorite crunchy vegetable, which happens to be favored as a digestive aid by the Italians. I also had some delicious ruby red grapefruit in the pantry. Which are the two ingredients I need for one of my favorite salads.
Segmented grapefruit, sliced fennel, salt, pepper, olive oil.

If I were feeling a bit fancier (or even the slightest bit energetic, really) I would have put this over baby arugula and topped it with parmesan shavings and toasted pine nuts. But just like this, it made me feel like a million bucks. For a few minutes.

The next day, I was still feeling fairly terrible. Call me Californian, but there is no comfort like Mexican food if you ask me. I decided that if I was going to feel like crap, I might as well have a drink to take the edge off. I proceeded to pick up tacos from my favorite stand (which happens to have won a James Beard Award and is within spitting distance of my apartment). They serve them with these pickled jalapenos that I love; they are so spicy that I bet they cure diseases by scaring them out of the body.

I mustered the energy to try and recreate the Michelada Classica that I liked so much from Loteria Grill, and I think I definitely got it right but I need to get the Dos Equis lager next time instead of Corona Light (which is truly awful).

Carnitas tacos from Yuca's, two jalapenos. Michelada cocktail with Tapatio, Worcestershire, lime and a rim of salt and crushed boullion.

I proceeded to pass out immediately after eating this last night. And haven't quite recovered yet.

"Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light." -- my teabag is trying to enlighten to me

Growing up bilingual means knowing some things are so hard to translate that they will never be communicated properly, and sometimes the more effort you put into an explanation, the less understood it ends up being.

This feels particularly true in the kitchen. The hardest thing to explain to my adventurous food-loving friends who have asked me how to cook Iranian dishes is the concept of jah oftadan, which means "falling into place." You just have to keep cooking the food until it hits the right flavors, long after individual elements are thoroughly cooked enough to be edible. Though cookbooks will tell you that it's an hour or two for flavors to fall into place, they lie to sate marketers and publishers. Few Iranian dishes can be pulled off without 4 to 5 hours of straight simmering. On rare occasions, I've overdone it and overcooked dinner. But rarely.

If it wasn't clear before, it should be apparent now why European and American cooking is conceptually refreshing to me. The appeal lies in their embrace of the concept of overcooking as a flaw -- steaks are served medium rare, pasta is served al dente and the French like to cook a la minute for fresh fare, fast.

Maybe part of the intrigue is the mouth-wateringly long wait it takes for foods stew in their own juices, allowing for unlikely marriages of flavors like cinnamon and eggplant. It's fairly normal to not see a scrap of dinner before midnight at many Iranian dinner parties. The hunger and excitement such food repression creates is immeasurable.

A facet of jah oftadan goes beyond the melding of tastes, and deals with consistency and tenderness. You never want a soup or stew to be ab o doon jodah, which literally means "water and bits separate." When I think of this phrase, I can almost see my mother in my head, frowning while spooning at a bowl of Campbell's style chicken soup, allowing the broth to drip and splash before bits of carrots plopp into the bowl. You want herbs to have cooked into melting smoothness, meat that requires little chewing and beans and vegetables that are mushable with a spoon.

I tried to capture the difference with pictures of an ash e joh or barley soup that I made this week. It's made by browning stew beef with onions and turmeric. Add various beans (dried kidney, white, lentils, split yellow peas and garbanzos in this pot) and water to the pot, boil an hour. Add barley, boil an hour. Add a huge mess of herbs and spinach, boil for an extremely long time until everything is perfect.

Ab o doon jodah. See how you could fill a spoon with a wad of very green herbs or a hunk of beef and a bit of water, never getting everything the soup has to offer in one great bite? No good.

Ja oftadeh. See how the greens have boiled down into an olive-colored base for the broth and the soup is dense enough to stand up to its fried medley of garnishes (onions, garlic and mint)?

Perfect. I now have a massive pot of this in the fridge and a bunch of it frozen for cold days... assuming we get any more of those this winter. Oh, California.

Equally perfect but much less labor intensive is this black cherry Jell-O, morello cherries and whipped cream dessert parfait.


You are so beautiful... to me.

San Francisco, what a treat. I didn't take any pictures. I forget the names of the places we went, though I'd been to the taqueria in the Mission that Shannon and I went to with Rebecca before. And there was a place with skewered chicken hearts that were truly amazing. And a stabbingly great show, where we got real close to the stage and sang along like we were still teenagers. There were donuts at a donut stand: I ate the spiced chocolate donut and made my friends try it. It was awesome. There was ice cream at Humphrey somethings. I couldn't get through the buttery scoops of Vietnamese coffee or brown sugar fennel, but loved them both quite a lot. I feel like I lost my breath for a second there. There was other food, but it wasn't the best part. Good times.

My friend Carrie in New York sent me a very good-looking recipe for a lemony escarole soup recently and it came to mind this week while I was feeling a little under the weather. My fussy stomach and tired brain had me craving something clean, simple and light, and her recipe basically calls for a stewed head of greens doused in grated hard cheese. Perfect.

Carrie's recipe, and at one time this was Carrie's haircut but she pulled it off better.

Doesn't the word gorgability have a fantastic ring to it?

Less perfect than this lovely piece of mail was my brain function while at the Whole Foods in Glendale, shopping for the recipe. Blame it on feeling yucky, but I not only failed to get escarole, I got radicchio instead. I can't explain why. They don't look anything alike, taste anything alike. I don't use either in cooking very often, though I like both quite a lot. As I stood in front of the wall of organic greens, watching the water mister go on... and then off... and then on... I absently picked up a bunch of scallions (why? no idea.) walked up and down the aisle twice and finally asked the hippie employee where the radicchio was. She showed me, I put two heads of it in my cart, and continued to wander around the store for long enough to spend $100. So, 20 minutes.

It's like she knew I was going to blow it without a visual -- that is clearly not a round bulb of radicchio.

I got home and realized my error, but was feeling a little too weak to fight it. So I decided to make a radicchio soup in the style of Carrie's escarole soup. Also, because I didn't get chicken broth (though I definitely stood in an aisle staring at it for a time), I browned red onions to boost flavor and I added some whole fennel seeds. I'm always trying to add fennel to things and it seemed like maybe they'd like eachother, the fennel and the radicchio, as paesans. I love fresh fennel and kindof wished I had some after I got home with the wrong groceries. I wonder if fennel is easy to grow; I would grow that if I had a garden. And lemons. I digress.

I struggled against the urge to dump some balsamic vinegar on this and carmelize the radicchio and onions and fennel seed. Maybe next time.

Escarollin' with it.

As if the grated parmesan on top wasn't enough, I thought a little toasted olive bread topped with Swiss Emmental cheese would be this meal's fat and protein content.

Raddichio is fairly bitter, but cooked down in this way I didn't mind the slight bitter aftertaste at all -- in fact, it felt almost medicinal in my diminished state. I love the purple color of the broth. The dish inspires me to try a different recipe altogether -- some day, I should make an Italian Radicchio-Onion Soup in the style of French Onion Soup. Maybe the balsamic vinegar would be good for that base to draw out more flavor, deepen the color to mimic ze French version. Little crocks with cheesy Fontina toasts on top. Ohh, sounds yummy.

Thanks, Carrie. I enjoyed it tons, even if I did it all wrong. I'll write you soon, xoxo.

Sadly, no trip to Whole Foods is complete without serious regrets. In addition to TWO trips to the olive bar (almond-stuffed olives are such a sick weakness with me), there were some pretty eye-popping budgetary failures.

Olive loaf, made by local favorite La Brea Bakery. $8.

Tiny pasta that suckered the girl who's always nostalgic for New York. $8.

I once read that anxiety induces cravings for crunchy food.

I just ate an entire celery heart.

Draw your own conclusions.

If you've ever been to Costco, you know what this is.

An admission: the quarter-pound Hebrew National all-beef hot dog is one of the more cherished delicacies of my upbringing. Let's be clear: it's a boiled meat product in a smushy white bun, typically loaded up with sodium-rich condiments. Even if this thing is blessed by all the appropriate religious officials, it just can't be healthy. It is 360 delicious calories of Meat.

Oh, how I love it. It was the reward for a successful trip to Costco (and before it was called that, Price Club). Oddly, as an adult, it reminds me of my grandfather, may he rest in peace. My father's father was a military man, very disciplined but very sweet. When I was in the third or fourth grade, he came to live with us for a time. Every day, he would do morning calisthenics in his bedroom, counting his exercises out loud. Like clockwork, he made his bed, combed his silver hair and shaved his face using a little brush and a little bowl of lather. Sometimes, he'd let me work the brush. He could recite hundreds of poems, and would sit for hours during the day, reading and writing in journals. He would tell me stories from Shahnameh, though I don't remember them; I remember the sharp smell of his French cologne and the way he'd play with his voice to entertain me, and giggle at his own silliness. He enjoyed a quiet, rigorous life _ and I admired him a lot.

His diet was unadventurous. Every day, he would eat cornflakes for breakfast, with a spoon of sugar sprinkled carefully on top. For lunch, he would have one Costco hot dog plain, with a fork and knife. No bun, rarely a smattering of ketchup. And for dinner, every night, if he could get it, he would eat baghali polo ba maycheh, which is a rice pilaf with dill and lima beans, paired with a lamb shank stewed in onions, turmeric and saffron. Every once in a while, after a meal, he would indulge: one scoop of vanilla ice cream. Though he would protest if you gave him a big scoop, he would quietly run his spoon along the bottom of the bowl to catch every last bit.

No matter how many times I tried to turn him on to the things I loved eating at the time, he would express smiling disinterest _ which, in hindsight, was the correct thing to do when dealing with a precocious child's palate (rainbow sherbet, anyone?). I used to fear he wouldn't like America or staying with us if I couldn't get him to like junior Western cheeseburgers from Carl's Jr. or all-you-can-eat salad bars. But really, he was like so many of the parents of his generation: torn between homeland and his children who had left it for far-flung places. He wasn't going to while away the end of his life in an unfamiliar land for seasoned criss-cut fries, despite my youthful conviction that they made life -- anywhere -- worth living.

Nowadays, I take my dog with a bun and ketchup. In my grown-up defense, the bun is one of those fake white buns that's secretly whole wheat but they somehow mill it to look, taste and feel like white bread (yeah, I don't really buy it either) and the ketchup is organic and from Trader Joe's. Thank god these kosher delights come in packs of 4 and no more. Though, now I have four spare hot dog buns and don't know what to do with them.

"If you're trying to lose weight or save more money this year, go on an austerity plan as it comes to spending: don't hang out with the spenders and the eaters." --self-help guest on CNN, for the segment on resolutions.

Stick a fork in it, 2010 is done

I spent New Year's Eve at a whisky club, sipping Manhattans in downtown Los Angeles. It was a stellar evening. Understandably, I wasn't feeling particularly imaginative when it came time to cook the first dinner of 2011, but luckily, the meal was already in the works for a couple days. I'd thawed some chicken thighs I bought from Costco and marinated them in my completely incorrect recollection of Thomas Keller's Buttermilk Fried Chicken recipe. But it came out great: Buttermilk + 1tbsp each of smoked paprika, granulated garlic, cumin, salt, pepper.

I paired it with an arugula, pine nut salad and pappardelle with baby portobello mushroom and Marsala sauce.

Don't make fun of me for pairing this with a diet Coke.

I really kindof needed a carb-heavy, fried meal after ringing in the New Year with cocktails, but this still didn't feel terribly unhealthy. The Marsala sauce is thickened with a dark blonde whole wheat flour roux and part-skim ricotta cheese. And the boneless, skinless thigh was coated in light Panko crumbs and fried in no cholesterol special vegetable oil.

A couple photos and tidbits for you that have been adding up in the camera. Out with the old, in with the new...

This was a recent Sunday lunch. Celery, the world's best peanut butter, golden raisins, shredded coconut. Coffee with milk.

Oh artichokes, how I love thee, let me count the ways... 1... 2... 3... 4...

The consistency of this was awful, but the flavors were great. Fava bean and dill stew with lamb shank and roasted potatoes.
This is a delicious vat of frothy Mountain Dew. Just kidding, trick photo. This color is a result of the bergamot-scented Shiseido bath salts I bought in Little Tokyo with biscuiterie.

What we actually ate in Little Tokyo was amazing: ramen at Daikokuya. The bright red bits are this really sharp, fresh pickled ginger that is served in a little pot on the table, alongside pureed garlic that you add to the bowl yourself. The soy-tinged white of the egg protects a perfectly creamy yolk. The noodles and green onions fill a massive bowl of steaming pork broth. Underneath it all, somewhere, are tender pieces of buttery kurobuta pork.

oh, and I finally got a picture of my lentil recipe up. Looks pretty.

I entered a lentil recipe contest. There'll be pictures of other eats here, as soon as I find my camera. For now, enjoy the lentils.

The best of this, the worst of that _ it feels like most of what you read this time of year are these superlative sorts of arguments that take place in polar realms. Nothing like a good list, I suppose. Maybe that's why I was really excited to see an especially listy gift come into play at our annual office giftswap. We have this really fun tradition of stealing eachother's bounty -- there are a lot of rules that you don't need to know to understand that I swooped in and stole a cookbook today from a sweet man who works in the back office. He looked fairly shocked that I robbed him. Don't worry, he got another gift.

And I got the new Food & Wine cookbook, which takes the BEST recipes from the 25 BEST cookbooks of the year and compiles them all into a very attractive cookbook. That's a double-best, for those keeping score. No more than a few Food Network cookbooks made the list (Emeril, Bobby Flay and the Neelys), and they are on equal footing with recipes from Thomas Keller, Lidia Bastianich and Gerald Hirigoyen (whose tapas book has made me swoon at the store a number of times, though I have yet to buy it).

Some recipes that have already caught my eye:
7 1/2 Hour Lamb Malbec with Rosemary and Lemon
Thomas Keller's buttermilk fried chicken (honest to goodness, the picture made me a little weak-kneed)
Quinoa Paella with Chicken & Chorizo
Cafe Au Lait Creme Brulee
Cinnamon & Cardamom Buns

The fruitcake has always offended me. Those strange, chewy, brightly colored bits inside that dry brick of so-called cake. I like fruit. I like cake. People shouldn't do such things to things I like.

That said, fruit desserts are frequently a disappointment in my thinking. In the sacred hierarchy of the course eaten last, I'm a custard/panna cotta/flan fan first, a chocolate fan second and somewhere down the line, close to last, I am a fruit dessert fan. I feel fairly certain I could go the rest of my life without eating another piece of apple pie and be quite content.

But I've been messing around with that orange cake recipe I found in Saveur, which I thought might make a good cake base for pineapple upside down cake. I had a mango that I thought I'd try as a cake topping instead of pineapple, but the mango I poked at for days went from hard and unripe to rotten in the space of what must have been one golden hour, so I missed my shot. Instead I segmented an orange and added some currants and golden raisins to a bit of melted butter and brown sugar in the bottom of the pan. I should have used more oranges, but I was timid because I feared they might burn or stick or something. But they worked out really nicely. And I think I've got a nice fruit dessert recipe that I'll keep.

Orange cake, with currants, golden raisins and orange segments.

I also tried to make kimchi again. I didn't have an Asian pear, so I added a couple sliced red bell peppers for a bit of sweetness and crunch. Otherwise, I followed this recipe to a T.

I tasted it today and the cabbage hadn't softened quite enough to meet my liking, so I added a bit more rice wine vinegar. I suspect that the "quick" style recipe means there's not going to be as much fermentation as I'd like. We'll see.

I feel completely certain now that the croque madame is not a chicken sandwich.

The only Food Network show that I DVR is "Alex's Day Off." (I'm pausing for applause. That there's only one DVR commitment to this channel is something of an achievement for me.)

This morning, I found that she does the croque with a fried egg, too! Her sandwich is, of course, a touch fancier than my little open-faced eggy sammy, but not by much. She basically makes a cheesy bechamel to put inside two slices of bread, along with sliced ham. And on top, along with more bechamel and gruyere, she likes a perfectly fried egg.

There's no sign of a couple ingredients I tossed in, but I do like my Dijon mustard and lemon on this sandwich, so maybe I'll incorporate those into my bechamel instead of bay leaves like Alex does... Hm, actually, I wonder if lemon juice would curdle the bechamel or something.

One thing for certain: she also makes a champagne cocktail called a French 75 (a raw sugar cube, splash of gin, orange juice, lemon juice and champagne). I want one.

"And the winner is: lowered taxes and more spending. Wait, that wasn't an option. That would be like 'Hey, you know how we'll all get in shape after New Year's? Laziness and bacon.'"
-- Jon Stewart (Daily Show, Dec 7, 2010)

In a rare break from a recent spate of Zone bar and instant ramen meals, I went to Loteria Grill tonight before we went to a show in Hollywood.

The Michelada Clasica made me swoon. I love Mexican food and beer, and I especially love it when my beer tastes like Mexican food. The Michelada is a beer cocktail served on ice in a salt-rimmed pint glass, and it should always be served the way Loteria Grill does it: with Worcestershire sauce, Tapatio, Maggi (which I had to Google: it's boullion!) and fresh lime juice. It really hits the spot on a hot August day, but the spicy-ness of the Tapatio warmed me up tonight.

The tacos I chose from the broad-ranging menu were easily the tamest: shredded beef and carnitas. I prefer the carnitas at Yuca's but the beef at LG was juicy and tender. On the way home, I told myself that next time I'm getting a shredded beef burrito _ which is something I never order. Though, I might be too curious to order something I've already tried.

In images: Munzallet Bi Aswad

Step 1: Bake a layer of eggplant. I think next time I'll use split Japanese eggplants for this.

Step 2: layers of ground beef, fresh tomato slices, green bell peppers. And under it all, half-baked eggplant.

Out of the oven, served on (overcooked, oops) rice.

Extreme close-up: the eggplant mushed up a lot.

I topped the whole thing with a mess of pomegranate seeds, scallions and fresh mint.

Just got back from Jon's Marketplace, this crazy multi-ethnic grocery store at Hollywood and Vermont.

It's in an interesting borderland of hospitals, an art park and the big Scientology center, a swath of land that lies between the snazzy, celebrity packed Los Feliz neighborhood and the interesting side of Hollywood (with Zankou, Arclight, Amoeba...).

Shopping carts are not allowed to leave the store, which means they don't need to have employees lurking in the parking lot gathering them, and they don't need to worry about people taking them beyond the lot itself. There are a few homeless people in that part of the neighborhood.

The employees speak no English and are extremely nice. Everyone in the store is a little older, a little foreign-er and the stuff in there is considerably cheaper than your average grocer. The bell peppers are also a little smaller, the meat displays are at least 30 years old and today's promotional sample was Hot and Spicy Ramen bowls. I was served by a very bored young woman who was slapping around a small microwave next to a stack of styrofoam bowls. The cheap, awkward to eat soup was hot and spicy, and each bowl is 440 calories. I took 2 for a dollar.

Today's finds at the store are all the things you could find in my mom's kitchen growing up: barbari bread, pita bread, Persian sour cherry jam, pomegranate syrup, bulgarian feta cheese, royal basmati rice, dried fava beans, Lea&Perrins. There's also King Kelly California Orange Marmalade, which I accept no substitute for now that I'm back in California and spoiled for access. It's less bitter, fresher and more local than Dundee's.

There's also a slew of Goya products that make me feel like I'm back in New York: their Manzanilla olives are small, firm, green and perfectly briny but not too salty. Capers and roasted peppers, to stock the pantry.

I realized recently that hummus is the only Arab food that I regularly make, though my Persian pantry should be amenable to a lot of crossover. I have this really beautiful cookbook called "The Arab Table," and in it was a recipe I've been wanting to try because it uses one of my favorite ingredients: eggplant.

The Munzallet Bi Aswad seemed like it might be a forgiving recipe because author May Bsisu says it's "prepared slightly differently from one country to the next." The version she makes (and I made this afternoon) is the Syrian version, which is flavored with pomegranate syrup and served over white rice.

Basically, I roasted some eggplant, topped it with browned ground meat, onions and garlic, on top of that a layer of tomato slices, and on top of that sliced green bell peppers. Cover it all with blend of beef stock and pomegranate syrup. Bake in the oven for an hour, which is what I'm doing now. I'll post pictures after it's ready for supper.

(Update: I messed with the recipe, adding 2 tsp pomogranate syrup and 2 tbsp tomato paste, inspired by my friend Amanda's recent story about a fix her mom suggested to a completely different recipe. Gave sauce much more body and flavor. )