New Posts Delayed

But the good news is that they’re delayed because I’m getting published. I just finished a profile on John Apodaca, classic cocktail aficionado, for LA2Day (will go up next week), and turned in a feature on the Dos Carlitos restaurant and tequila bar for the Santa Barbara Independent last week. I have two more projects in the works for LA2Day for which I must go to a beer-making class (such hard work!) and a bakery, and I’m working on a super secret, very “hush hush” project for “a social networking site” which will keep me very busy for the next two weeks.

So, when I have a moment - or when the need to procrastinate paid labor overwhelmes me - I will post again! Until then, I'll keep linking to my articles as they are published. Cheers!

Obama-fest 2009

Anglophile LV LIVE in Downtown reporting.

Today, right now in fact, President Obama is set to speak at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex in downtown Los Angeles. Since it’s 6 blocks away from where I work, I climbed up Lucas Street to get a glimpse of the event, and maybe even a peek at the man himself. The Man. The Myth. The Legend. Sorry, had to do that.

Apparently Villaraigosa and Governor Schwarzenegger are there also, but the only Mayor I see is the one in the cheap suit with the plastic Antonio mask using a loudspeaker to shout out to the laughing Mexican families gathered on their fire escapes across from the complex.

When I first arrive, around 12:10, the air is festive, like the parking lot of a football stadium before a playoff game. Fans with Obama hats and shirts walk around the building, since they don’t have tickets to get in, just to be in the excitement. There’s a man selling souvenirs two blocks downhill from the event, who I walk past with a polite shake of the head. I’m not buying Obama today. A platoon of black-clad cops carrying riot helmets pass me in pairs, tightly grouped like Roman soldiers. A cluster of Mexican women chatting to eachother in Spanish sell snack food out of cardboard boxes. An attractive young black woman wearing a bright blue Obama hat with matching blue flip flops, carrying a large bag makes her way around the building. Definitely a reporter. I follow her to the side of the building and she is joined by two less attractive companions. Crew.

The Learning Complex is a school, and the noise coming from its courtyard sounds like lunchtime at any high school: boisterous. News crew trucks are parallel parked next to minivans. The two large Mexican families have hung two flags from their fire escape balconies: 1 Mexican flag and 1 United States flag. A little girl in pink waves a mini Mexican flag. For a moment, a gust of wind makes the flags wave together and look like one big red, white, blue and green piece of fabric. Everyone is smiling.

I’ve never seen so many smiles. Even the usually surly cops look filled with good will. I see more Obama-merchandise. Vendors sell “Obama art”, copies of LA Times photographs in cheap frames. Women carry Obama-totes and wear Obama T-shirts with the words “Progress” on the front, and “Si, Se Puedes – Obama ‘08” on the back. A middle-aged blonde woman poses with arms in the air, beaming, while her friend takes a picture of her standing beside a police vehicle. Another middle-aged blonde woman is being given a hard-sell by the fast-talking man with the “Obama art”.

Black people, Mexican people, and blonde teacher-type people gather together on the street corners across from the complex. Young Mexican boys play on the steps of the rundown apartment building, pretending to shoot each other. A group of young, tough looking Mexican teenagers patrol the area in a pack, looking slightly disgruntled at the cop cars, and shout rap lyrics in fluent English (I guess the school system is accomplishing something after all). A Rastafarian is playing a jubilant “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on his saxophone while the phony Villaraigosa panders to his fans in Spanish (how like the real thing).

Now people are coming with more causes on their shirts than just “Obama.” Armenians For Obama carry a sign to recognize the genocide, and apparently earlier in the day there were illegal immigrant activists protesting for immigration reform, though I didn’t see them.

Apparently, holding a notebook makes me look like someone who knows what’s going on. Three people so far have asked me questions:
“Is this the place?” --Yes.
“Where is the entrance?” –Over there, I think.
“Are you writing a parking citation for the cop car?” –No, but they really have some coming.
“Which way do you think he’ll come in?” --I have no idea. (though I suspect he is inside already)

By now, it’s 1pm and I need to get back to work, but the sense of anticipation and the festival-like atmosphere make me want to stay.

A woman next to me turns to a complete stranger to say “Everybody say he gonna land in a helicopter on the football field they got over there.” She turns to her little boy who has been running amuck, and fidgeting when caught. She scolds him, “Somebody gonna snatch you—watcha gonna do then?!”

We watch two men on the rooftop of a far building check for snipers. At 1:15 we hear sirens, but it’s just Los Angeles noise. No Obama. Not yet anyways. And me? I have to get back to work, because Obama is sooo not worth getting yelled at by my boss.

This is LV, signing off.

What's Hot? SpiceMonkey

It's been a while since I last plugged my go-to recipe site: Spicemonkey. It's hosted by my very talented friend who does crazy things like Indian-Mexican fusion beans and rice (seen above). That girl knows her spice and describes the floral scent of habaneros with unabashed affection. I can't even get close enough to a habanero to smell it - I'm still treating Jalapenos and Serranos with extreme caution! In addition to her world-rocking recipes, there are a bunch of mine also. I haven't devoted this blog to my cooking endeavors, because they all go to Spicemonkey (with the exception of the catastrophic failure that was imagawa-yaki).

So check it out, and seriously, you have to try the beans and rice.

Trip Planning: Solvang and Santa Ynez

I have suddenly become Trip Planner Extraordinaire for my friends and family, and while I’m really enjoying the role, it does come with some drawbacks. Monday night my cousin called—wait, let me preface this:

My Grandfather is in his mid-nineties and doesn’t stay up past 7pm for anything. So when I get a phone call at 10pm at night on a Monday and my cell phone says “Grandad’s House,” I think the old man must be dead as a doornail, or pretty close to, and someone is calling to tell me the news. I’m mid-way through washing my hair when the phone rings and have a good 10 minutes of thinking how a person could or should react when they hear about the imminent demise of a grandparent before I’m able to check my messages. That was not fun.

So when I get the cheery chirpy voicemail from my North Carolina cousin asking where to get the best Pea Soup—I’m ready to KILL HIM. Apparently he and his wife are visiting, staying at Grandad’s house in Goleta, and were planning on driving up to Solvang the next day. So, Tuesday morning I restrained the urge to yell at him for scaring the dickens out of me and gave him my best tips for where to eat and drink in the Valley:

From the 101 North, hang a right onto Hwy. 246. The highway goes through Buellton and on to Solvang – the most-like-Disneyland place on earth! I’m waiting for the giant ambulatory stuffed animals to appear any minute.

For breakfast, hit Paula’s Pancake House or Olsen’s Bakery. They are right next to each other on the main road, Mission Drive, and are both good picks; the former for omelets and Danish pancakes, the latter for kringle, a Danish pastry everyone should try.

My Lunch-date place of choice is The Chef’s Touch, also on Mission Drive. Instead of sausages and aebleskivers (the fare at the Danish themed restaurants), Chef’s Touch is more of a foodie experience. The chef/owner uses seasonal ingredients for inspiration, and just has fun with it.

My cousin wanted to hunt down some semi-precious stone marbles for our family board game (Wahoo!- it had a blip of popularity in the 70s and dropped from the shelves soon after, to such an extent that my family makes our own wood game boards because we can’t find them anywhere else). I sent him to my friend Joelle at the Mystic Merchant on Copenhagen Dr, who, if she doesn’t have them in stock, will at least be able to order them for him. The Mystic Merchant has a geology department’s selection of geodes and crystals, not to mention jewelry, and Joelle knows the stories of everything (and everything has a story).

After a good dose of Solvang, I figured they would probably need a drink. I put them back on Hwy. 246 towards Santa Ynez with instructions to turn right on Refugio Rd. Kalyra winery, offering Australian style wines in a cute aussie-style tasting room, and the stunning Sunstone Winery are my picks for two of the best wineries in the Valley. Sunstone is possibly the most beautiful winery I have ever seen, and they’re committed to “gentle production techniques”—which is probably good. Most importantly, their wines rock. All of them. Try them if you don’t believe me.

I also pointed them in the direction of Roblar Winery and the small town of Los Olivos on Hwy. 154. Roblar has some *killer* reds, and Los Olivos has art galleries (Judith Hale is my fav), Panino’s sandwich shop, The Wine Cask (stocks hard-to-find wines like Seasmoke) and what used to be Patrick’s Side Street Café. God only knows what it’s called now. You know how it is with small towns – if a restaurant changes its name once, people always refer to it as “the place that used to be…”. I think they even have the old sign up so locals don’t get confused, or rather, so locals don’t confuse visitors when they’re giving them directions.

For dinner though: Ballard Inn. Forget there are any other restaurant options. It’s just Ballard Inn. Unless you’re poor, but even then, save up the dough because Chef Budi Kazali makes some of the tastiest and most original food in Southern California. And he’s a nice guy too.

Next Up: a joint post by me and my boyfriend where we answer our friend’s question on where to go and what to do on a road trip to San Diego. He’s got the local knowledge, I’ve got the…blog. Together, we’re quite a team.

Southern (California) Living

Last night I had a hankerin’ for collard greens and coleslaw.

Which is odd, since I’ve never had collard greens.

I’m not Southern. Not one single gene is from South of the Mason-Dixon line (I actually need to google where that line is…). But some instinct deep inside told me that I could make collard greens as good as any belle of the South. So I went to my favorite inspirational website, AllRecipes.com, and looked up a top rated recipe for collard greens – and then tweaked the hell out of it to make a pretty wicked dish of greens, bacon and spicy sausage, and coleslaw on the side to relieve the heat.

This is not my picture (wish it was).

SoCal Collards
Serves 3

1 tablespoon garlic olive oil
6 slices turkey bacon*
1/2 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon pepper
1 bunch fresh collard greens, chopped
2 cups low sodium chicken broth (if using buillon cubes, go with ½cube for 2 cups)
1 pinch red pepper flakes (or a packet leftover from the last Dominos delivery)
2 big sausages, grilled (I used Italian)
*Note: If you’re using real bacon, just use the bacon grease to cook everything and forget about the olive oil.

1. Use a deep skillet to cook the turkey bacon until browned. It’s not oily, unlike bacon, so you may need to add a dash of garlic oil. Remove from pan.

2. Add the 1Tb garlic oil, garlic and onion to the hot pan. Cook until slightly browned on the edges. It’s ok if the onions begin to caramelize.

3. Add the chopped collard greens and cook down for 5 minutes. Then add the 2 cups of chicken broth and red pepper flakes. I add the fresh ground black pepper at this point too. Simmer for 45 minutes, or until greens are tender.

4. Using a grill, cook the sausages for around 7 minutes on each side to serve along side the greens.

SoCal Coleslaw
Servings: 2

½ bag of broccoli slaw
3Tb diced red onion
2 TB mayonnaise
1 tsp olive oil
1 Tb sugar
¼ tsp salt, pepper to taste
2 tsp white vinegar (or to taste)

1. Mix ingredients together. Taste. I like my coleslaw more on the tart/salty side than the sweet side so I added more salt and vinegar. That's it!

Next Stop: GRITS. I wonder which aisle they're in at Ralphs...

Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition

So, I'm like, TOTALLY doing a makeover on my blog. It's gonna look FABULOUS dahling. The first step is already done, and that's to change the name to AnglophileinLA.com. Now, if you type that into the location bar, it will lead you right back here. The old one still works too, but use the new one. It sounds better.

Step 2 is the reeeeeally exciting one. I've enlisted a pro-blog designer to make my blog beautiful. We are currently working out the details, so no news yet, but I'll keep you posted. Get it? Posted? Blogs = posts? You know you love me.

The Dark Side of Downtown L.A.

L.A. is a creepy town.

Imagine the following in your best Rod Serling voice.

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination, the 10, the 110 and the 101 Freeways. That's the sign post up ahead, your next stop...Downtown L.A.

Submitted for your approval or at least your analysis:

It’s Ash Wednesday and people are walking around with black smears of soot between their eyes, but that isn’t what is unnerving Lauren VanMullem. She works in a big blue building directly across from The deVille Motel in a cubicle that is hotter than Hell, but that doesn’t make her uneasy either. No. What’s creeping her out is seeing children frozen in perpetual plummet from the ceiling of the Civic Center metro station, the demonic figures scrawled on the walls of 7th and Figueroa metro station, and the shifty-eyed Mexican next to the woman giving him the evil eye high above her head on a mural. And the statue of a businessman putting his head through a slab of marble at the corner of 7th and Figueroa. And the fact that no one, in her 1 ½ years of working in the government building, has ever stopped the elevator at the 5th floor.

There was nothing on the fifth floor. An abandoned empty space. Dingy, stained, deserted. Except for a message scratched onto one wall with a thin sharp instrument: "Tell Bob I'm on the 6th floor."

"Just a prolonged nightmare in which fear, loneliness and the unexplainable walk hand in hand through the shadows. In a moment we'll start collecting clues as to the whys, the whats and the wheres. We will not end the nightmare, we'll only explain it - because this is the Twilight Zone."

Redwood Bar and Grill

Yo, ho, ho, I’ll have a bottle of rum please. And coke. And the Redwood burger with everything on it.

When my boyfriend invited me out to lunch at a burger joint, I expected, well, a burger joint. Not the inside of Captain Morgan’s galleon, complete with sails, ale barrel tables and a real human skull holding court over the hard liquor.

When I stepped indoors out of the bright overcast day, I was struck by the darkness of the restaurant. It’s not lit by candlelight, but the dim orange glow of the wall sconces gives that impression. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed the dark wood walls, reminiscent of a 1970s living room except for the white sailcloth and heavy rope rigging draped across them. Paintings of storm-tossed tall ships lined the front walls, while the back walls enclosing private booths sported paintings of sultry mermaids with large, very bare, breasts. My boyfriend didn’t notice the latter until I pointed them out. Either he is very savvy, or needs his eyeglass prescription checked.

Not only did the interior nail the atmosphere of the black belly of a brig, it smelled like it too. In any other eating establishment, the smell of brine, fish, and human sweat would have sent me right out the door, but here it just aided in the suspension of disbelief. I was in a pirate ship eating fish and chips with vinegar and a heavy dusting of pepper, and stealing bites of my boyfriend’s $12 dollar Redwood Burger (voted the Best in Downtown by the Downtown Daily News). Its half pound of beef was clearly hand-formed, moist, with a slight blush in the middle, covered with swiss cheese, bacon, tomato, onion, pickles and lettuce. The only interruption to the nautical charm (did I mention there’s a full sized cannon?) was the modern juke box embedded in the wall – but who can object to a juke box that plays Boston songs?

My dining experience was topped off by the pirate sitting in the booth next to us. He was grizzled, browned by the sun, talked to himself in a constant low growl, and was every bit the ancient mariner. I could smell him from where I sat. Ok, he wasn’t a pirate, just another half-crazed homeless man in downtown L.A. But he was courteous to the waitress, though he had to interrupt his dialogue with himself to say “please” and “thank you,” and the waitress was courteous to him. I will think of him as a pirate. He’d make a great pirate.

316 W. 2nd St. Downtown Los Angeles
Hours: M-F 11am-2am
Happy Hour M-F 4pm-7pm

Live bands & DJs at 10pm almost every night
P. 213-680-2600

Food Memory

I hadn’t realized how traumatic my early experiences with food were until I was assigned to write a “favorite food memory” piece for my Food Writing class. Some classmates’ food-memories were handed in early and read aloud, and were what you might expect: Watching her grandmother make pie from scratch; Helping her mother make tomato sauce. They were all standing in warm, sweet-smelling kitchens as the new, young recipients of culinary wisdom passed down through generations. The kind of comforting clichés that inspire a life-long love of food.

I have nothing like that.

From the ages of eight to thirteen, my mother and I lived with my Aunt’s family on their ranch in the mountains between Buellton and Lompoc; since the wineries came, the region has been dubbed the more mellifluous “Santa Rita Hills.” My most memorable experiences with food are from that time because, in my aunt’s house, sustenance bordered on the bizarre.

My aunt stored her potatoes for months…or years…beneath the sink next to the pesticides. Her pantry—if one braved the smell of her rashed, puss-encrusted blind poodle who slept there—was used for the preservation of vintage Spam and canned carrots. I learned early to check sell-by dates and to avoid family dinners whenever possible; and when not possible, I ate lightly.

For fresh vegetables, my aunt, cousin and I used pick-axes to crack the adobe dirt of the yard to plant seeds. My aunt used a ‘survival of the fittest’ model of farming. Gophers and mice were permitted to pilfer what they could before snarling ranch dogs rushed at them. I planted corn one summer, and when the fat ears stretched out from their stalks, my mother and I shucked them for popcorn—letting fly colonies of black ants across the kitchen counter. In the fall, the hard-packed dirt of the vegetable garden was layered with apples on which dogs, horses, and rodents gorged themselves. The humans and birds opted for the sweet sun-burned pink apples on high branches. Eggs came spotted with blood and excrement from the nesting boxes of hardy chickens and, occasionally, we would drill into a giant egg from the nearby ostrich farm and pour the watery mass into the largest skillet for a family-sized omelet.

I knew where to hold my breath in the rooms and hallways where mice decomposed in the walls. When odors of dead rodents or dog-scared-skunks weren’t wafting through the kitchen, it smelled like medication and sugared cereals. My uncle was diabetic and my aunt couldn’t bear to be deprived of cheap cereals and Albertson’s cakes (two for five dollars). My cousin’s teeth were permanently stained Hawaiian Punch red. My mother’s idea of healthy cooking was to heat frozen diet dinners and vegetables in the microwave. We went out to eat frequently, but our options were limited to two steak houses, two diners and Baker’s Square; the waitresses of these establishments knew us by sight.

My early years were not gourmet.
.