Unorthodox Meals: Cassis Dijon Zucchini Pockets

I tend to eat out a lot on the weekends. I’m usually with the Cute Gardener, trying a new restaurant, from a never-ending list perpetually compiled throughout a life spent reading newsletters like Eater LA and magazines like Food & Wine for fun. Because of this, I have to watch what I eat during the week in order to make sure that my physical body’s health is balanced and consistently restored.

During the week, I make sure I stick to a relatively simple diet, absent of meat and filled with yogurt and greens, maybe some fish here and there, and plenty of antioxidant-rich probiotics and superfoods like berries, nuts, chia seeds and cacao nibs sprinkled over everything. My main meal of the day comes once only and is typically accentuated by small bites throughout the rest of the day, keeping it under 1,500 calories on the whole. This keeps me fueled and burning fat and allows me to turn into a complete glutton on the weekend and eat whatever the heck I want.

So while at home during the week I need to get creative with my green foods and enjoy creating special recipes that are vegetarian, unique and tailored to my specific palette. There is certainly a lot of trial and error that goes into this because in my quest to create new things, I am typically just pulling ideas out of my head for whatever is currently in the fridge. Sometimes, my experiments work and sometimes they dismally fail but that’s part of the fun of cooking and learning and fine-tuning the flavor-prediction skills.

My recent foray into creating a new kind of veggie wrap turned out surprisingly savory and all with the help of a slightly sweet yet hearty gourmet cassis dijon mustard and some zucchini squash.

CASSIS DIJON ZUCCHINI POCKETS

Ingredients

½ small white onion, diced

3 garlic cloves, diced

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small tomato, chopped

5 medium zucchini, skin on, sliced into ¾ inch. coins

¾ c. water

½ c. shredded, organic white cheddar

2 tablespoons gourmet berry flavored mustard of your choice (I chose cassis!)
Wheat pita bread

Salt and pepper to season

Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil, salt and pepper on medium heat till onions are limp and garlic is browned.

Place the sliced zucchini into the pan in one layer and sauté for 2-3 minutes. Pour in the water. Put a lid on the pan and steam on medium-low heat for 15 minutes.

 

Take off lid, turn heat down, season all with plenty of salt and pepper, mix around the zucchinis and then sprinkle the cheese over the top.

Cut a whole pita into two halves and spread the mustard on the inside. Stuff with zucchini mixture and enjoy! You will have enough for two whole pitas (four halves).

Coachella Carb-A-Thon

This is the camping version of my blog where I road test the lower brow forms of my foodie landscape looking for the gems in a weekend spent at Coachella where I finally gave up on the food and looked forward instead to the pre-fest morning breakfast runs to get much needed fuel for the daily seven hours of dancing and walking.

We started innocently enough with subs from town before heading in. Turkey, provolone and tons of peppers to carb load for the dancing that was sure to follow.

This seriously scared me. I had the bite of one end before deciding to abort the whole meal further. But they were scarfed down rather quickly by the lot of my friends who were ooohing and aaaahing over the mess of it.

 

See “scared” comment above. Although I can pretty much justify eating ANY kind of pizza, and this one had that spice of outdoor festival special seasoning that made the tomato sauce good, I stuck with my one bite rule again.

Town Center Café in Palm Desert has been serving this classic hybrid greek scramble for a while now and it’s famous for it. Where else can you get perfect, fluffy scramble eggs mixed with the most tender gyro meat and fresh tomatoes in a world of otherwise traditional breakfast restaurants? The unassuming place has a heavy local following and I can see why in this dish alone. Tabasco added woke me up for Day Two of dancing and walking. 

This was my downfall. A simple grilled cheese sandwich with good cheddar thinly sliced with the addition of three fried mozzarella sticks in the middle. How can you not want to bite into a melty, salty chunk of hot mozzarella in the middle of all this? The bread was brioche like, soft and thick. It came from the Manglers Meltdown truck, which looked like one of those old carnival rides at a fair where heavy metal is played at blast speed throughout the ride. 

  

My favorite almond croissant at my old haunt Il Sogno on El Paseo. We scored the last three from the plate on the counter, thankfully. Yes, this was to be another day of dancing that needed an energy boost…

 

Il Sogno lured a friend with this apple tart, made of sweet, consistently plump, non-sweetened apples poached in something deep and mysterious on a simple, thin and dense crust.

Poached eggs and green pepper egg sandwiches are other usual choices amongst our bunch.

Sometimes during weekends outside your norm, you need to eat things you normally wouldn’t but secretly crave. Like chipwiches and mimosas...as different exclamation points at the beginning and end of the day. 

On day three, we sent our friend into the VIP area. She had been slumming with us this whole time and then we discovered that the Coolhaus ice cream sandwich truck was inside her area. So she went on a mission to bring us back samples of the reputed items. We tried snickerdoodle with mint ice cream, strawberry ice cream on oatmeal, and bacon ice cream on a dark cookie. A bite of each was pretty yummy but the bacon one just tasted a little gross. I am getting over that taste combination of bacon in juxtaposed textured foods and flavors.

I tried to support my inner missions about food by trying the Green Truck’s grass fed burger. But it wasn’t good and didn’t last in my possession very long. The bun was dry as was the burger and the shredded pile of cheddar was skimpy. I had expected more. A burger was already ten bucks, but with each addition of cheese and anything else you had to pay another three dollars per item. Price didn’t mesh with taste at all.
 

We survived the in between hours with snuck-in candy sticks.
 

The last morning called for a trip back to Town Center for more greek scrambles and a few bites of a waffle to get us through another day.

I woke up this morning heavily craving yogurt, water and a whole legion of greens…which I will be partaking in heavily for the remainder of this week.

Unorthodox Meals: Heartstring Melty Mac and Cheese

A big problem of mine, being a foodie and a lover of cooking, is that I live alone and although I love cooking for others, especially those I love, I am usually hard pressed to want to cook a meal for myself. Part of it is that I come from a family that on my mom’s side was from Iowa, the land of huge one crock meals, and my grandmother needed to feed ten kids on a daily three meal basis. This means I have some strange in-bred peasant casserole mentality when it comes to cooking and I tend to make enough food to feed an army of snot nosed kids every time I turn on the stove. I always pre-think that the recipe amounts look paltry until I have a finished meal that could feed my neighbors, for weeks.

So I am a little boring when it comes to cooking for and feeding myself, only have mastered a slim repertoire of meals for one that actually only really do feed one.

One of them is my Heartstring Melty Mac and Cheese, something so heart-attack inducing that I don’t cook it often, but that I instantly run to when it rains really hard, which it did for about three days last week in Venice Beach. Pouring rain, a pile of newspapers to catch up on, and a cheesy bowl of noodles became sweet elixir to the hermit side of my heart.

Heartstring Melty Mac and Cheese

1 cup of whole-wheat corkscrew pasta (the corkscrews work best at catching various textures of cheese in its squirrely nooks and crannies)

2 cups shredded organic, sharp white cheddar

1 tablespoon organic 1% milk

1 teaspoon each of salt and pepper

1 tablespoon fresh lemon thyme

2 tablespoons butter

Boil water with a dash of olive oil and some salt. Cook the pasta till done. Strain the water from the pasta and return to the pan and place heat on medium low. Add the milk and butter and stir till butter is melted. Add the cheese and fold in till melted and mixed well. Season with salt and pepper and mix in the thyme. Put into a broiler safe bowl dish and put under the flame for half a minute till top browns.

Serve and enjoy!

Unorthodox Meals: An Affair With Fava

I am currently embroiled in a love affair with fava beans. The interesting thing is that I never tried them until meeting the Cute Gardener and being the recipient of his lovely, homegrown variety interspersed in a perfect bowl of pasta. I remember the scene in Silence of the Lambs when I eat them now, where cannibal Hannibal Lecter was remarking upon eating them with chianti and flesh. I can see why he'd choose them, they are rich, meaty and sensual in a land of otherwise nubby legumes and I just can't get enough of them. 

I got a special big bag bounty of them last week and crafted an original savory meal from them that informed my lunches for three blissful days. This made a batch big enough for three or four meals.

First step requires de-podding the beans. It's simple with favas. You snap off one crisp end and pull the string down one whole side which creates a seam to split apart of pop them out of.  I came out with four cups worth.

Next, I sauteed a pound of ground turkey in a pan started with two tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon each of salt and pepper,  half a tablespoon of cumin, one tablespoon of curry powder and one squirt from a tube of harissa chili sauce till browned.

I made a pool in the middle of the pot and added some more olive oil and sauteed the favas till they crinkled up with translucent shells. Note: some people, okay, maybe most, take these skins off the beans first but I am too damn lazy for all that work and don't mind the taste and the texture of the skins staying on, so choose your battles...

The result was a nice, warm and spicy bowl with a side of cold, snap peas. A lovely hearty and healthy meal for one!

The beauty of this recipe is that I ate a simple bowl of the concoction on day one followed by the addition of the mix to an omelet and then to a cold salad on pursuant occasions. This would be good thrown into many things.

A Non-Conformist's Oyster Easter Brunch at Gjelina

Sancerre for him and a bitter “Visionary” made with sherry and champagne for me. Even typical red girls know that oysters call for whites.

I am not a big believer in organized religion. Maybe it’s because I was traumatized in Catholic School when I would get in trouble for being different or arguing with the priests in the confessional about why I needed to be a good “Catholic” rather than a good “human,” a point they incessantly spoke of during sermons. The nuns didn’t appreciate my attempts at non-conformity either, like the ear piercing and hair cutting stations I would set up in the mornings in the bathroom, tantalizing my peer girlfriends to come in and spice up their identities in the otherwise non-descript world of blue plaid uniforms. I don’t need a sectarian group title or a church habit to know that I believe in good and bad and which one I should toe the line with in order to have an enlightened life. I know there’s something bigger than me out there that runs the natural order of things and that when one is walking with righteous action, one tends to have a simpler, more drama free and soulfully fulfilling life. So when it comes to holidays like Easter, I tend to use the occasions to do things like sleep in later or ignore the rest of the world in my hermit hole of a house while they carry on with their colored egg and candy hunts and other consumerist displays of celebration.

But this Easter something got into my system. I woke up with a craving for a proper Easter brunch, well maybe not proper exactly, but something along those lines nonetheless. So I rallied the Cute Gardener to walk with me to Gjelina, a place that’s been on our "to visit" list forever, with the bait of fresh oysters and an offer to treat.

After a fifteen-minute wait we got a table for two. I have never been able to get into Gjelina at night, there’s always a forty-five minute to an hour wait, so I didn’t consider this time so bad. We started with a burrata plate that came with braised artichokes adorned with orange zest and pistachio pesto. Could have done without the artichokes that didn’t taste like much and would have savored the rest of the textures and flavors in the dish.

Great combination of fresh and yummy kumamotos, kushi and shigoku oysters with the usual toppings although this mignonette had a real pepper kick, which surprised me pleasantly.

I had high hopes for the pizza but they fizzled upon sight (and charred taste) of the burnt crust. I did manage to keep my hopes up and enjoy the non-burnt bites I could get that were filled with gruyere, caramelized onion, fromage blanc, arugula and two exquisitely cooked sunny eggs.

Now that’s an Easter-worthy way to eat an egg. A few weeks ago on Iron Chef, the ingredient was eggs and I loved one of the female judges remarking that a softly boiled egg that runs all over the plate was just about the sexiest thing in the world. I couldn’t agree more and both my boyfriend and I agreed that even though we would not come back to Gjelina for lunch, dinner or pizza anytime soon, we might stop in for breakfast or dessert. The breakfast menu boasted some very creative egg-y concoctions that would be worth trying like Moroccan baked eggs with merguez, chili, tomato sauce, cilantro and spiced yogurt or the simple poached eggs with snap peas, faro, lemon and mint pesto.

And the desserts were fantastic including a bitter chocolate beet cake and fun pink, beet gelato and a melt-in-your-mouth, simply orgasmic butterscotch pot de crème.

Lured by the Promise of Poutine

Artist Tim Shockley's "American Pig" bin for this year's Coachella Music Fest

My favorite kinds of wine bars are the ones that exist to handle exactly the kind of experience I had at 3Twenty last week. The intrepid researcher that is the Cute Gardener found this relatively new place located a block away from LABART, a gallery where we were to celebrate with our artist friend Tim Shockley later in the evening, as he would unveil his design for a recycling bin amongst other international artists for this coming weekend’s Coachella Music Festival. We needed a place that would flex to our desire for a quick drink, a few bites and an approximate sense of timing.

3Twenty has only been open since June and at 6 p.m. we were the only people there for a while. Because of these two points we were showered with some extra perks as the staff seemed happy that patrons spending real dollars had chosen their place. Even though we ordered our own bottles of wine, the nice sommelier kept bringing us last bits of various grape blends as he cleaned the wine machine as not to waste the wares; a fact that was appreciated by all. They were also kind enough to inflate our table with extra chairs as impromptu guests continued to arrive as well as a child, a fact that didn’t make them wince but had them going out of the way to find special forms of carbonated beverages that she could enjoy.

Flexible, friendly and not-too-serious, we appreciated their grace in handling our band of traveling art types.

I never put too many expectations on wine bar food, as it is not the real reason I go to them. I am usually looking for some casual glasses of vino before or after dinner or some other event but at this one, we chose to sample the menu items after being intrigued by the presence of Lamb and Goat Cheese Poutine on the menu. I am a fan of poutine, which was introduced to me by a Canadian friend last year in its proper form of gravy covered French fries with cheese curds. The beauty of the dish had been how it turned into a starchy pile of nacho-type potato and fluid bliss. But this poutine was a gourmet metamorphosis and not really true to its name. A pile of skinny stiff fries with a pile of shredded, strong lamb meat and two dollops of goat cheese was hardly a poutine but tasty enough nonetheless.

The mussels were a pleasant surprise in their ultra tender flesh accentuated by the addition of ale to the mix, rather than the typical wine.

The bacon wrapped shrimp tasted only of bacon and bacon not rendered well enough.

The chickpeas were novel and interesting in their popcorn-type application but were a bit dry with the hard rosemary spears all over them. The gruyere cracker made the trio equally dry but saved a bit by the plump, hot olives.

Although the experience was fun due to the company, I won’t be clamoring to go back there again because there always seems to be another wine bar around the corner somewhere…although I still haven’t found one with food better than Chef Matt Smith’s at 3rd Corner in the desert.

Pizza Piqued at Pizzeria Mozza

Pizzeria Mozza has been on my list of restaurants to try ever since my friend Kandee would wax poetic about its luscious pies to me while I still lived in the desert. When I finally moved to L.A. I tried the pizzeria’s sophisticated older sister Osteria Mozza first, as it was the setting for my first date with the Cute Gardener. So, I was a little prejudiced with good feeling about the place when we finally ventured into the Pizzeria Mozza in Newport Beach on a recent trip to see the OCMA Diebenkorn show and the Beall Center for Art and Technology on the UC Irvine Campus. 

I loved the bustling joint immediately with its liquor bar and mozzarella bar and a square modern space of no nonsense tables and chairs within. Despite the fact that it was chock full of Orange County stepford families and realtor-type professional looking women rather than the usual array of L.A. hipsters (both kinds of crowds not up my ordinary alley), I settled into my glass of Arnies, Brandini, Piedmont 2010 steeping in the good smells coming from the kitchen.

We have taken to a good pizza-hunting mission lately and have a system where we order a regular basic pie as well as a more complex one to test out in new places. Having already been here before, he suggested that I just choose one that particularly called out to me and he would choose a separate entrée of the non-pie variety for us to try.

I also couldn’t help but throw in an order for salt cod fritters. These soft and moist pieces of fried fish were delectable with a permeable heat in the mouth at first that turned into a sharp, red pepper flake tinged tang on the bite’s tail end. Dipped into a soothing, butter yellow aioli, they were a surprising highlight of the meal.

The pizzette with English peas, ramps, green garlic and guanciale was one of the most flavorful I have had in a while. Zesty, savory, deep and bright at the same time and the unusual combination of toppings was refreshing. It is also my favorite crust of late as it was spongy and firm, salty and buttery, and although very flat, it was able to hold up to the weight of its toppings. Quite a feat in the land of flat bread yeast.

My boyfriend enlightened me to the fact that we Americans have come to have warped perceptions on the basic Panini. It’s not, as we think, a sandwich of flattened, grill marked bread but actually just any sandwich with “small bread” included. So his tuna Panini came in a hot ciabatta bun and although he ordered a braised tuna with capers and anchovy version, we got whatever the chef apparently wanted to make that day: a glorified tuna salad. Perfectly fine with good tomatoes and bits of hard-boiled egg, it was tasty but not what we had intended.

For dessert we ordered the olive oil cake with pine nuts. What actually came was more like a fruitcake, panettone reminiscent with studs of cherries and raisins and other none-too-welcome bites. I didn’t mind. I felt the sweetness went well with the grilled pine nut garnish but would have liked what I originally thought I ordered more.

Although the pizza wins for my current “best” pizza eaten in the last year, I am a bit mystified about the two dishes that came out different for us than what we had ordered. Were the chefs out of certain ingredients and just decided to do whatever the hell they wanted? Is the Mozza brand so renowned now that those in charge feel we are so lucky to be there that we will take anything that we can get? A little presumptuous I think, for an industry where signs go up and down as fast as loyal patrons’ palate changes.  

More on the Eternal Hunt for pizza...

Ditching School Kind of Day at the Cairo Cowboy

I have known Mel since I was twelve and we would ride the streets of the Coachella Valley on my Honda Elite Scooter as I would whisk her around in the summers between junior high and high school to our volleyball practice and her gymnastic sessions. She was and remains one of my lifelong best friends.

We were always very different on the outside. As a child she was a sports girl who didn’t wear much makeup and could fly around the gymnastic bars like nobody else I knew. I was the artist freak with a different colored hair every week prone to romanticizing about France and art nouveau. As adults nothing much has changed, me with my wrap dresses, red wine palate and paint on my clothes and she with her seriously muscular limbs, penchant for long camping trips in the natural world and a lust for beer. When we first reconnected a few years ago, it was a scene of me driving to Las Vegas to pick her up at the airport and then to a hotel where our mutual friend was renewing her vows. The first thing she made me do was stop off at Whole Foods for a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon that she boldly carried through the Venetian pool guard’s station and out into our elegant cabana. Her realness has always been the thing that soothes me.

A few weeks ago, she flew in to visit me and I took the opportunity to try out a new place near my home that was just waiting for me to have a companion like her. I am a sucker for Mediterranean food and she is a vegetarian so we walked to Windward Circle in Venice on a lazy, “ditching school” kind of day in the middle of the afternoon to sample the Cairo Cowboy.

Mel bought a sixer of Coors from the liquor store and we were welcomed into the quaint and tiny place, with our libations and no corkage fees, by two jovial staff members who served us a bowl of the freshest baba ganoush and pita triangles. I never drink beer unless it’s an elixir for washing down hot and spicy Thai or Indian food or I am in Europe and it comes smelling of hearty wheat fields with a blackened hue. But it seemed appropriate to do so while she was here, taking me back to our youth and the adventures we shared.

She ordered a pita stuffed with falafel, adorned with pink pickled jicama.

I had the gyro, which was mouthwateringly tender and stuffed with refreshing tzatziki, cucumber and tomatoes.

It was the perfect waste of a weekday afternoon, the kind I reminisce about often when remembering those long ago carefree summers we shared. Good friends and good food in unexpected places are simple gems in an ordinary structured adult way of life, and are the moments to cherish forever.  

Decadent Dinner with the Deer Hunter

The Cute Gardener and I have started a tradition where we spend a day doing some serious decadent food shopping and then create a culinary buffet to share that same night. For New Year’s it was caviar and champagne tasting. Earlier this year, we took a trek to Beverly Hills for an afternoon of pillaging the fine food offerings and had a Rodeo Drive worthy buffet. Last week, it was taking a trip to the random warehouse open house shopping day at Epicure Imports in North Hollywood to find a spread compatible with a newly arrived Blu Ray disk of The Deer Hunter.

What to eat with one of my favorite movies that pulls on the heart strings and features some of my all time favorite actors like the oddly eccentric Christopher Walken, the dashing and deep Robert DeNiro and a young and innocent eyed Meryl Streep? Why, foods equally rich and poignant compatible to producing the same strong emotions as the aorta-wrenching Russian roulette scenes and dramatic crescendos. 

A dipping plate handcraft from wood by him was poured with three kinds of olive oil and a pool of balsamic vinegar for the soft and fresh baguette. 

Small finger pots were filled with dried apricots, green olives, dried figs and plump, green grapes. 

A cheese plate was laid with an ashy covered Bonne Bouche cheese that creamily swam between the borders of its pungent rind; a hard, cantaloupe colored mimolette (that I had tried for the first time ever in Napa last summer on the Lub Farm); and a soft Epoisses Berthaut cheese in a wrinkled, tangy skin. 

The meat plate contained tart and acidic Coppa rolls; a tub of duck liver pate infused with chicken fat and port wine; and a beautiful slabs of meaty pork pate crusted with extra spicy peppercorns. 

A veggie plate of vegetables from the Cute Gardener’s garden was added to accentuate the meal filled with crisp snap beans, green peas and sumptuously smoky sautéed fava beans with just a hint of warming cumin. 

My favorite dish of the evening was the fava beans, but that is because aside from his luscious pasta dishes, my boyfriend has a green thumb gift of growing the yummiest veggies and cooking them up just right.

The spread lasted almost as long as the film even though the last few bites were peppered with my tears, being the sap that I am. I have seen The Deer Hunter more than any other movie in my life and still can’t get through it unscathed by the need for a soiled hankie.