Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Happy Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rat!

Last night as Andy and I feasted on crispy duck in steamed buns following the Chinese New Year’s Parade in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, we looked back over the day’s events and discussed our favorite moments. Mine, as always, were the same two:

1. Admiring the dragons in the parade. There were more this year, all fearsome and frolicsome and resplendent in an array of colors and designs. I loved every one of them, from the gargantuan ones powered by at least two dozen people whose legs were all we could see beneath the flashy, satiny bodies, to the tiniest, being tugged and tossed this way and that by small children who had yet to understand what all the fuss was about.

2. Feasting on red bean paste cakes and sweet sesame balls when we first hopped off the Metro and strolled up the hill into Chinatown. While the meal of Peking duck and braised tofu was tasty, there’s nothing quite like the “welcome back to Chinatown” feeling I experience when I stop by one of its numerous bakeries for these simple pastries which have no Western counterparts. They’re uniquely Asian and quite good. The red bean and lotus pastes are so richly, sweetly dense that once you have a mouthful, you have to stop for a moment to savor before swallowing. And while you’re doing so, you pause and look around at this chip of real estate that transports you to another country, across the ocean. It’s a great way to slow your step and begin to breathe in the atmosphere that pervades Chinatown. Plus these protein-packed sweets carried us through the rest of the day, shopping, sightseeing and parade watching, until it was time for dinner.

As much as I look forward to those sweet, dense pastries, I could return to the bakery and pick up more for dinner, and just forget all about a sit-down meal. To my mind, they’re a great way to begin a new year, Chinese or otherwise.

A Sushi Chef of One’s Own

It’s great having your own hair stylist, someone who knows your preferences and who understands what cut and color look best with the structure of your face and the tone of your skin.

Well, I guess it’s great for some. As for Andy and me, we enjoy having a sushi chef of our own, and he’s conveniently located right in our neighborhood at our favorite place to eat in all of Los Angeles.

If there's any red snapper in the house, it always finds its way to our table,
whether we ask for it or not!

Kuru Kuru, a little sushi restaurant in a strip mall, is nothing fancy, but it's the pot at the end of our dinnertime rainbow. The portions are generous, the prices reasonable, and the fish, indisputably fresh and lovely. We often see the same people there, whom we know by face if not by name or occupation. The staff is friendly, and the lady at the door hugs us each time we come and go, holds our hands, pats our backs and speaks to us all the benevolent English she knows. On Andy's birthday, she trotted out a dish of green tea ice cream with a candle in it and sang to him.

And the sushi chef . . . ah, the sushi chef! He knows our tastes and our penchant for adventurous eating. We sit at the bar most every time we go and chat with him as he works. If he isn't terribly busy, we’ll say, "Fix us something good, John. Use your imagination." And he will, without fail, present us with a dish that is amazing in its balance of flavors and textures and elegantly simple in its presentation. He seems grateful for the opportunity to flex his creativity and quite modest about his achievements.

Once when we said, "Fix us something good, John!" this is what he came up with: an octopus and cucumber salad with a sweet and tangy sesame sauce and a delicate seaweed garnish. Yum!

We don't take this bit of good fortune for granted. Not only do we enjoy a healthy, satisfying and reasonably-priced meal, but we get the opportunity to learn more about sushi and sashimi than we could on our own, short of becoming sushi masters ourselves. Wouldn’t it be great if all education could be so pleasant, effortless and delicious?

Every sashimi plate includes only what's best the day we're there.

To this rare group of people at Kuru Kuru in Burbank, and to all who run business the way they do, we raise our nigori and say, "Kanpai!"

Hog Wild

At Sunday night’s Epiphany party our group convened to cap off the Christmas season with a potluck and to catch up on everyone else’s holidays. My good pal, Chuck Taggart of Gumbo Pages fame, brought his amazing Pork & Pork & Pork & Beans to share. Have this even once, and you’ll never settle for mere pork and beans again. In fact, if I ever find myself on death row, that dish will be one of the components of my final meal.

As Chuck and I compared notes on the contents of our luggage when we returned to Los Angeles after Christmas, he from New Orleans and I from Memphis, we concurred that an awful lot of pork was involved. My suitcase was stuffed with packages of country ham and bacon and a big ol' hamhock. His haul was similar, but included tasso, the secret ingredient in many fine Cajun and Creole dishes, along with Zapps potato chips and lots of booze.

In case you’re wondering, yes, you can buy pork in Los Angeles, but those mass-produced packages of Uncle Tater’s or Little Willie’s bacon will be essentially flavorless and injected with water, which is why it shrinks to nothing when you cook it and tastes like nothing when you eat it.

As we cooed over our devotion to pork, I said, “There’s only one thing better than bacon.” Chuck looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles. I paused for effect, then said, “Bacon topped with bacon.” He sighed and said, “Thank God! I was about to ask, ‘Who are you and what have you done with my friend, Carol?’”

The challenge is in reconciling a love of pork with the need to eat more healthfully, and this is where the good stuff comes in. Andy and I refuse to cast out pork like some demon bent on our destruction. Instead, we hold to the wisdom of Pete Wells, who contends in the pages of Food and Wine magazine that bacon isn’t a meat but rather a condiment.

He certainly has a point, especially as it relates to good quality bacon. The flavor is distilled smoky, salty, sweet porkiness, which we savor as we would any fine wine or food: a tiny bit at a time, over a long period of time. In fact, since Christmas we've been sharing one strip of bacon about every other morning.

Half a strip?! That sounds rather spartan, but when you eat the really good stuff—like what Chuck and I packed back to Los Angeles from home—and enjoy it over the course of a meal, it's amazing how satisfying a mere half strip of bacon can be, how the flavor lingers and how the aroma and the memory goes with you. Truth be told, I enjoy a smaller portion much more, because I don’t mindlessly wolf it down.

According to Aesop, “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.” He must have been buying his bacon at a chain grocery.

There’s a fable in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Home Grown

As I prepare to head home to rural Tennessee for Christmas, my thoughts turn to our family farm and the food traditions with which I grew up. Because as a farm girl I was well acquainted with the cycle of birth, life and death so early and so intimately, I’d say it has made me less squeamish than most when it comes to such matters, and it has taught me that it’s possible to develop respect and regard for an animal I know will end up on my plate.

This is the time of year when we’d select one fattened hog and one fattened steer to be butchered, packaged and labeled, then divvied up among the deep freezers of my grandparents, my uncle’s family and my family. This represented the bulk of the meat upon which we’d feed until the next winter.

After all the tidier pieces of meat had been put away, on a cold, cold night, we’d all convene in the smokehouse to make sausage. My mother would sew casings out of old flour sack dishrags (recycling on top of recycling!) and bring them out to the smokehouse, where my father and brother were grinding the hog trimmings with fat and seasonings. Then I, with my tiny hands, would take the squishy ground mixture, redolent of fresh pork, pepper and fennel, and stuff it into the newly-stitched casings. And my uncle would bind the ends with twine and hang the brand-new sausage with the hams to while away the months until it was needed.

I was an adult before I ever bought prepackaged meat in a grocery, or for that matter, cans of tomatoes, green beans, black-eyed peas or relish. Those things had always come out of the deep freezer and the stash in the hall cabinet. And when I finally did start bringing these items home from the grocery, they were never as satisfying as those I’d had a hand in putting up as a child.

This represents a vanishing way of life that organizations like SlowFood are working hard to reacquaint people with. Perhaps it isn’t practical for everyone to raise all their own food, but to the extent that we can, we should try. Even if it’s just a couple of pots of herbs on the kitchen windowsill, every little bit we grow for ourselves reconnects us with our initial bond with the earth from which we came.

Yodeling pickle anyone?

As I troll the offerings at one of my favorite websites, Archie McPhee, I’m astonished by the number of bizarre food-related gifts that are available. Can you imagine receiving any of these things for Christmas: gummy haggis, a yodeling pickle, a t-bone air freshener, or a sushi shower curtain? The bacon products alone boggle the mind: bacon-flavored toothpicks, a bacon wallet, bacon bandaids—that’s bandaids that look like strips of bacon, not bandaids for your bacon—and bacon air freshener for your car. (As if the yodeling pickle wasn’t strange enough, there’s also a remote-controlled, hopping AND yodeling lederhosen. Can you imagine? Surely, everyone needs one of these!)

Why is it that these things have such appeal? What urge is it that causes us want to inflict them on our friends and family? And what do those poor—and probably hungry—workers in third world countries think of these oddities they’re creating for those unfathomable Americans? (And how is it that I can use the word “unfathomable” twice in about week in this blog? It’s unfathomable.)

I’m not going to try to make sense of this right now. Perhaps there’s just no sense to be made. But if you’re intrigued by the idea of having your very own yodeling pickle or gifting someone with a gummy tapeworm or a corndog air freshener, check out www.archiemcphee.com. Don’t you think sushi pencil toppers would make great stocking stuffers?

She Ain’t Heavy . . . She’s My Earthling

A couple of days after Thanksgiving, we visited the Griffith Park Observatory and mused over one of the new exhibits in the revamped and expanded facility, one devoted to the individual planets. In each planet’s section, you can read up on its attributes, then step onto a plate in the floor and learn how much you weigh on that particular planet. On Mars, I rang in at a whopping 350 lb. (Aieee! Waaaaay too much Thanksgiving cheer!), while on Mercury, I weighed a waifish 20 lb., and thought perhaps I should rush home and tuck into those Thanksgiving leftovers.

I also observed women who wouldn’t step onto any of the scales because they didn’t want those around them to know what they weighed—not on ANY planet. It didn’t seem to matter that others might not be interested in trying to do the math and convert some stranger’s weight on Neptune into her weight on Earth. Those women weren’t going NEAR the interplanetary scales. Children and men had no problem leaping onto the scales and telling everyone around them how much they weighed all over our solar system.

Don’t worry—I’m not going to rant about how poor self esteem and skewed self image are epidemic in this country’s women (We all know it's: a. true and b. sad). I’m just saying if you’re concerned about your weight, sure, do something about it. But also take a minute to do a little math and find out what you’d weigh on Mercury. Best to keep these things in perspective. Moderation—and cultivating a sense of humor—is the best defense against both weight problems and low self esteem.

And if you exhibit a sense of humor when your jeans split because you have a big butt, you’ll impress people with your attitude!

Nectar of the porcine gods

One of the most prized possessions in my kitchen, right up there with my grandmother’s bowls, my well-seasoned iron skillets and my red, outboard motor-sized KitchenAid mixer, is my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. Both a food AND a condiment, bacon makes everything taste better—even more bacon! And the drippings perform double duty as both a cooking fat and a seasoning. What a way to multitask!

Each time I dig into that can, I reflect on the layers of hardened drippings like I would the rings of a tree. With each layer I scratch through I wonder, what was going on the day I poured in this layer? and this layer? and this layer?

I may not live in the rural South anymore, and I may be a big city girl, hobnobbing with the occasional high-profile chef and food celebrity, but I cling to my can of bacon drippings as an anchor to my cultural and culinary past—and as a way to enjoy a darned fine meal. None of that tofu-based faux bacon stuff. You’ve got to have your standards, right?