July 21, 2010
spicy squid
saeyoung, very concerned for her white shirt
despite her facial expression, she really liked her noodles
oh, hi marcus
ban chan
su jeh bee
I’ve been meaning to go to this restaurant since Saveur featured a picture of Ma Po Kkak Doo Gee’s banchan in their Los Angeles issue. I went with my two favorite people–my sister and Marcus. I love dinners with both of them. I feel almost selfish getting to spend time with them at the same time.
Everyone ate a little too much. I, as always, was the last one to stop eating. The banchan was, as promised, very good. My favorite was the ggeng neep. I think it’s related to the Japanese shiso leaf. Marcus said it tasted like toothpaste.
I’ve been craving Korean food lately, which makes me wonder—am I becoming my mother???!!
July 3, 2010
This is how I know I’m reaching equilibrium. When I first started my job it was hard for me to muster up the energy to cook at home. Really, it was hard for me to muster up the energy to be a person in the world. This week I all of a sudden had a desire to cook dinner for Marcus and me. I’m coming back to life friends. Yay for fancy meals with wine without occasion.
short ribs with fig and pickled cherry gastrique, oyster mushroom purple potato hash with runny duck egg
multigrain salad with feta, olives, and pickled grapes
cheese plate
making sauce!
 
June 27, 2010
A recent discovery via radio:
A person in the butterflies, nervous, anxious, manic beginning stages of love (more than the beginning for the lucky few) grows their hair and nails more quickly and burns more calories throughout the day.
Amazing.
eat your heart out lan! the best bloody mary ever! do you see the size of that shrimp on the rim of my cup?
garlic clams, oysters rockefeller, beer boiled shrimp and mussels at Brophy Brothers. our first night in santa barbara was happily ended with a seafood feast.
my mahi mahi
seafood pasta
abelskivers. pretty much the most exciting part of solvang
random sandwich place in santa barbara wine country. we spent the afternoon wine tasting and came here to soak of the wine in our bellies before heading back down to santa barbara
La Super Taqueria. My tamale with chicken, raisins, almonds, egg whites, plantains, and mole. Not sure what the egg whites were doing there but a pretty incredible tamale. apparently julia child really liked this place.
cheese stuffed pasillas and grilled pork for marcus
butternut squash soup at via maestra 42. thank you for the recommendation gracie!
milano sandwich
portobello sandwich
this is just one of the ways marcus is amazing. nancy sent me an article naming McDonald’s as having the perfect fries according to many scientific and well researched criteria. I mentioned to marcus that i wanted to verify this for myself and on our way back to los angeles he abruptly, and without warning veered off an exit after seeing a McDonald’s. Thank you Marcus for indulging all my silly cravings.
For our road trip I made Marcus a panini sandwich with fresh figs, brie, white truffle oil, and prosciutto de parma. The mention of balsamic reduction irritates marcus but there’s some of that in the sandwich as well. Marcus called this a sexy sandwich and i’m inclined to agree. Yay for figs! The season isn’t quite here but I can feel it around the corner. I want figs up to my ears, jammy luscious delicious figs. I want the brown turkeys and the calimyrnas and the black missions and the adriatics. i want them in my breakfast yogurt with honey, with marscapone cheese, with tissue thin prosciutto, with a slosh of wine, with pork, grilled at a barbecue, wrapped in bacon, in a pie, under my pillow, impaled on my fingertips, catapulted into Marcus’ mouth, between my toes, behind my knees, braided into my hair.
May 3, 2010
American Rifle 3
Ruggles Cafe
Roasted Pepper Soup and Turkey Panini
Tomato Basil Sandwich and Turkey Panini
Amazing! Passionfruit Mango Sorbet in an orange rind! This was so exciting for me. An orange rind!
Goode Company Texas BBQ
chicken, brisket, baked beans, and coleslaw
Both Marcus and I have had one of the most stressful months of our lives. Seriously, April…you’ve really bulldozed through us. But April is done and we capped off the month with a trip to Houston where Marcus was invited to perform American Rifle 3 at Temporary Space. It’s so exciting that Marcus is performing outside of Los Angeles and the performance was, of course, amazing. This was the most violent/frightening performance I’ve ever seen him do. I cried when I first read the script for the performance. If felt horrifying in a very necessary way. People throwing him against a wall, falling suitcases, Sunset Strip murders. And because it is at the core of American Rifle, everything was tenuously balanced, uneasy, and wobbly. I was so proud of him and so glad that I got to go to Houston to see it.
In addition to Marcus’ performance we wanted to treat our trip like a well-deserved vacation, to pamper ourselves a little. And when I say “pamper” what I mean is eat and nap.
On the top of our list of things to do in Houston was to eat Texas BBQ. It seemed like a thing we should do. We drove all over Houston to find a recommended restaurant only to arrive after it had closed. Thankfully we found Goode Company BBQ which tasted pretty excellent to me. My hair smelled like brisket even after I took a shower.
I think I’m still recovering from April. I think it will take all of May to settle down from the anxiety but Houston definitely helped.
April 14, 2010
The most exciting thing about granola bars is the seemingly endless combinations that can be made. I get little overly excited about it. Sure, I could have made one variety and called it a day but this just isn’t my way.
I made 3 varieties:
cherry, apricot, white chocolate, and walnut
date, blueberry, honey roasted peanuts, and peanut butter chip
fig, currant, almond, chocolate chip
I made them for Marcus to take to the desert with him. For the next two weeks he’ll be working at Coachella and from everything I’ve heard it seems like it will be an exercise in endurance and one of the things I’ve learned about Marcus is that sometimes he’ll forget to eat. This is a no-no. This is where the granola bars come in as a portable energy source.
I used 2 different recipes. I used a smittenkitchen recipe for a chewier more toothsome granola bar and an alton brown recipe for a more standard granola bar.
April 3, 2010
clam boyfriend
oysters, prawns, scallops, abalone, clams, bigger clams, baby octopus
Korean mixed rice with clam juice on a shell! mixed table side
koreans love grilling everything! steamed egg, dduk bok ee, seafood
korean pancake, sweet potato tempura, creamy corn stuff
abalone porridge
hand-cut flour noodles
Sometimes I question the logic of how much food served in a Korean meal. The general pattern is banchan (small plates), a substantial meat course (most reasonable stomachs would stop here), a starch course (usually a noodle or rice dish), and then something sweet. A great many places only serve things by fixed menus and you just order the small, medium, or large course and so you don’t even have the choice of eating lightly.
Marcus and I walked to Koreatown yesterday. It was a rigorous 1.8 miles and I’m not going to lie, I was a little grumpy about it. Hunger does not bring out the best in me. In fact I’m pretty sure I’m fairly monstrous when I’m hungry. But in the end I’m glad Marcus insisted that we walk because:
1) it was nice to walk through MacArthur park into dramatically different territory after crossing Vermont. This is the amazing thing about Los Angeles. In less than a mile you’re all of a sudden in a different country. Walking makes me feel like I really do live in a city.
2) I love walking but have generally considered it something I like to do alone with headphones. Also I like to do this at night. In my neighborhood. Apparently this is unwise. But walking with Marcus felt perfect and sweet and will now be my preferred method of city wandering.
3) We desperately needed some form of exercise after our gluttonous (also, glutinous. ha!)meal
We went to the Flaming Clam Grill on 6th and ordered the smallest portion, which could easily serve 3. The meal started with abalone porridge, cucumbers and carrots, a salad, a korean pancake, sweet potato tempura, and some sort of mysterious creamy corn thing. Then the waiter(s) stacked clams, scallops, steamed egg, and dduk bok ee on the grill. Dduk bok ee has rice noodles with vegetables in a red pepper sauce. Marcus kept calling them rice babies which I found hilarious. They also put cheese on the dduk bok ee. Highly unorthodox and unexpectedly delicious. After all those things had been cooked the waiter poured the grilled clam juice into a bowl of rice with seaweed and sesame seeds and red peppers and grilled that on a shell. And after that, oysters and prawns and abalone were added to the grill. At this point we thought we were done and felt quite round and full. But no, the waiter then brought out a pot of flour noodles. I think we were almost angry at the amount of food that we were intaking. Marcus actually made me stop eating at some point, scared that my stomach might burst.
This morning I woke up, still full.
March 10, 2010
sorry for the fuzzy photos
Here’s the unfortunate truth. I’m writing a thesis. It’s due terrifyingly soon. I’m unsatisfied in my progress. Also, I am catering, and teaching, and taking classes, and trying to maintain all the various relationships in my life.
An additional unfortunate truth: Marcus works a dizzying palate of jobs.
I feel stretched thin and anxious and tense in all my fingertips. It’s hard for both of us, I think, to slow down, to relax, and to take time to just enjoy each other’s company. This is why planned date nights are amazing. It’s awful that relaxation with Marcus has to be such a scheduled thing but it is necessary nevertheless.
Marcus is a dear.
He suggested that we cook dinner at his place tonight and so we shopped at Trader Joe’s together and bought ingredients to make steak and roasted potatoes, brussel sprouts, and red onions. We set off fire alarms, cooked in dual cast iron skillets, and ate our meal over an aerial map. I like that we’re both not steak people but felt enormously satisfied by red meat tonight. I like that I now know that Marcus likes his steak medium while I like mine rare. I like that we struggled with butter knives in the absence of proper cutlery.
Afterwards we had Scoops!
February 20, 2010
I’ve voiced my reluctance towards blondies and their close relative the brownie before. There’s something crass about them. Unreasonably sweet and dense to the point of being clumsy. And also, I don’t like the way they look when cut into squares–all those raw edges make for a very inelegant dessert. But when it comes to baked goods my opinions are apt to change. A few weeks ago I had a blondie at MILK and shamefully (shamefully!) inhaled the poor blondie.
Marcus is performing American Rifle 2 at LACE tonight so I thought this might be a good opportunity to re-assess the blondie, especially since Marcus has listed them among his favorite baked goods (with the condition that there isn’t too much “stuff” in them).
But if I’m going to put the effort into making a blondie, I’m going to make it my own. Yes a blondie is generally known to be a “leftover” dessert. People just put all the leftover chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, nuts, m & m’s, etc into them. I say no to this.
The first kind I made was with a marbling of matcha green tea and because white chocolate and green tea is one of my all time favorite pairings, I added Valhrona white chocolate chips into the batter. I’ve already eaten 2. The bitterness of green tea with the creamy white chocolate and buttery blondie batter just makes a ridiculous amount of sense.
The second variety I made with a combination of tart and sweet dried cherries, semi-sweet chocolate chips and a few peanut butter chips, with the hopes of mimicking something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve yet to try these but I sort of don’t know what could go wrong with the flavor combination.
I also solved the problem of raw edges by using a square mini cake pan so every blondie has chewy edges and things look neat and clean.
I feel like I’m tooting my own horn in this entry. Sorry.
Ingredients:
8 tablespoons (4 oz) of butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg
1 cup of all purpose flour
pinch of salt
1. preheat oven to 350
2. grease either an 8 by 8 pan or use a mini square cake pan like i did
3. melt butter in microwave for about 30 seconds
4. blend brown sugar into butter until fully combined
5. whisk in egg and vanilla
6. with a wooden spatula fold in the flour and salt
7a. at this point if you’re making the green tea marble, split the batter in half. add about 3/4 cup of white chocolate chips into one half and mix in 2 teaspoons of matcha green tea powder into the other half.
7b. if making cherry chocolate peanut butter blondies: stir in 1/4 cup tart cherries, 1/4 cup sweet cherries, 1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, 1/4 cup peanut butter chips
8a. for the green tea marble: spoon alternating amount of batter into prepared pan and with a toothpick swirl the batter without overmixing
8b. spoon equal amounts of mixture into prepared pan
9. bake for about 20 minutes
February 15, 2010
Whatever. I don’t care that Valentine’s Day is an invented holiday for Hallmark. Blah blah blah.
I totally think Valentine’s Day is great. What’s wrong with an excuse to have a nice evening with someone? I don’t even buy Hallmark cards. And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t lose sleep over it. Not that there’s anything wrong with feeling morally flummoxed about the whole thing. Good for you.
For our first Valentine’s Day Marcus and I made potato gnocchi. Notice, I used the verb “made”, not “buy”. This was a labor of love. I’m talking boiled potatoes, pureed in a food processor, kneaded with flour, rolled out into long cylinders and then cut individually. Maybe more labor intensive than necessary. Sometimes store bought is just more worth it. We also made a tomato sauce that came highly recommended from Marcella Hazan’s dearly loved “The Essentials of Italian Cooking”.
But really Valentine’s Day is about the dessert. We had port poached pears (ooohhh alliteration!) with lavender honey ice cream and oreo cream cheese ice cream. Poaching sounds so fancy but it’s almost embarrassingly easy–you just let it simmer. And the color is so gorgeous. Everything should be poached in wine! Cereal. Eggs. Shoes. Pajamas. Hair.
Ingredients:
4 Bosc Pears
1 cup Port
3/4 cup sugar
2 strips of orange peel
2 strips of lemon peel
1 cinnamon stick
2 cups of water
ice cream for serving
1. in a medium pot combine the port, water, zest, cinnamon and sugar and cook at medium heat for about 10 minutes
2. in the meantime, trim 1/4 of an inch from the bottom of the pears and peel them
3. add the pears to the pot and bring the whole thing to a boil
4. lower heat to simmer and leave for 1 hour, stirring occasionally to make sure that all gets cooked through
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