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 Until Christmas, I'd never heard of a gourmet treat coming from Redwood City, a town long mocked by its Bay Area neighbors as Deadwood City. (I suppose it was asking for that when it chose the dull city slogan "Climate Best by Government Test.") But thanks to St. Nick, I've learned about a Redwood City bakery that makes exceptional biscotti.
La Biscotteria is the name, and biscotti is pretty much its game, though it does sell panettone. It started out making classic anise biscotti, and then, in the '90s, introduced versions with lemon peel, orange peel and raisins. The raisin flavor is quite traditional, designed to go with wine rather than coffee. All flavors but raisin are avaiable dipped in chocolate (white chocolate, in the case of the lemon biscotti).
They're excellent: fresh, crunchy and buttery, not over-sweet and not stingy with the almonds. I've just about finished my chocolate-dipped anise biscotti, and lemon is next on the list.
-- Charles Perry
Photo by Charles Perry
 For the uninitiated, these odd little things --clothespinned to a line at Penryn Orchard Specialties' stall at Wednesday's Santa Monica farmers market -- are hoshigaki. They're Hachiya persimmons that have been peeled, dried and hand-massaged using an old Japanese method. Penryn's Jeff Rieger has been making hoshigaki for four years now, selling them around the holidays, along with fresh persimmons, mandarins, clementines, Asian pears and other fruit. "It's an old Japanese food art," said Rieger as he enthusiastically described the process of air-drying the fruit, which is massaged both to stretch and smooth the exterior and to help bring the fructose to the outside to form the distinctive light coating of natural sugars. Although some California farmers have been producing hoshigaki for decades, it's still a very specialized market. Not so in Japan: My sister, who lives in Tokyo, e-mailed that she can buy them at her corner grocery. (OK, I need to go visit her.)
They're furiously addictive: sweet, floral and faintly spicy, with hints of cinnamon and lemon. A rich, dark orange in color with what looks like the faintest dusting of powdered sugar on the outside. Hoshigaki have an incredible texture -- tender, moist and dense, and not the slightest bit leathery. Although you can dice them and add them to baked goods, Rieger suggests eating them plain, biting into them while holding the dried base of the stem, maybe with a demitasse of espresso. He's right: Why mitigate the taste, or the highly pleasurable sensation of eating a whole one, slowly, while holding it delicately in your fingers? H is for happy too.
Hoshigaki, Penryn Orchards, Wednesdays at the Santa Monica farmers market, (916) 769-5462. About $3 each, or $33 a pound; sold in boxes of nine (boxes range from slightly under a pound to almost a pound and a half).
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 Macarons -- I thought Parisians might be over them, but I couldn't have been more wrong. On a recent visit, they were still everywhere. At Ladurée, they served as ornaments on Christmas trees, and at Sadaharu Aoki, they decorated little domes of green tea cake. At Pain et Sucre, the Marais shop opened by former Pierre Gagnaire pastry chefs (which also has an impressive display of marshmallows,  right), there were pistachio-and-griotte (sour cherry) macarons on skewers. Yes, macaron kebabs.
I happened to be walking past Pierre Hermé on Rue Vaugirard near closing time, and it was swamped as usual, by locals picking up holiday dinner party treats and Japanese tourists who already had stormed Sadaharu Aoki and were weighed down by bags of pastries.
I scanned the macaron selection, which included flavors such as 25-year aged balsamic vinegar (for 8 euros apiece!); black truffle (also 8 euros); white truffle, macadamia and hazelnut; and olive oil and vanilla. And then I saw the chocolate and foie gras -- really beautiful red macarons burnished with gold dust and filled with chocolate ganache and a daub of foie gras in the center. But I really wasn't in the mood to stand in line for precious macarons in weird flavors, some of which cost nearly $12 each. (Yes, the dollar is that bad, but the price in euros is outrageous too.)
So I left the shop ... but didn't make it past the Cacharel store before I thought to myself: "Who am I kidding? Chocolate and foie gras?!" I slipped back into the store just before they drew the silk curtain over the sliding glass door, and I bought a chocolate-and-foie-gras macaron, among others.
The verdict? Yes, I love chocolate, and yes, I love foie gras, but I don't need to eat them together. Though I'm certain Pierre Hermé's chocolate-and-foie-gras macaron is the most beautiful macaron in Paris (really, it made the gold-leaf-covered macarons at Ladurée look ham-handed), my favorite is still the plain chocolate macaron from Gérard Mulot.
-- Betty Hallock
Photos by Betty Hallock
Anothe r giant has fallen. The Sirloin Burger, long a jewel in North Hollywood's burger diadem, is locked and its phone is disconnected. It had been in business at 6733 Lankershim Blvd. since the early 1950s.
I first learned about the Sirloin Burger in the late '70s when I was living nearby, about two blocks from the Palomino country-western club. It was right up the street from the Pal, and I soon started taking my lunches there.
It was one of a kind. Its sign showed a cross-eyed-looking chef; inside, the counter clerk kept track of orders by moving tiny tiles around on a sort of checkerboard. The neighborhood had long been grimy and neglected, but people kept on making pilgrimages there for the distinctive burger.
The patty was meaty and charcoaly and (unusual for a California burger) it came without tomato or lettuce. There was nothing else on the bun but a lick of Thousand Island and a lot of caramelized onions. The approved way to eat one involved cutting the sweetness with a dash of hot sauce. In the '70s, the sauce tasted like Tabasco. By the '90s, it tasted like a Mexican sauce such as Tapatio.
The Sirloin Burger also made decent deep-fried chicken, and some people liked its spaghetti (a sign boasted how many times all the spaghetti it had sold would go around the world). I always found the sauce excessively tomatoey, in the Boy-Ar-Dee mode, and the pastrami was dry for my taste. It's the burgers I'll miss.
-- Charles Perry
A TV writer-producer named Kevin G. Boyd has had an inspiration: ultra-premium drinking water selling for a very, ahem, splashy price -- around $38 per 750-milliliter bottle. The water comes from the highly regarded English Mountain Spring source in Tennessee and goes through a nine-step purification process. And then it's packaged in glazed bottles hand-decorated with sparkly Swarovsky crystals.
Wow. How Hollywood is that?
The brand name? Bling H2O, of course. (Warning: mildly racy home page on that website.) You can buy online, so if none of your local stores is selling Bling H2O, you can still order yourself a bling-y New Year's.
P.S. If you can do without the bling part, the company also sells the same water in 500-milliliter screw-top plastic bottles.
-- Charles Perry
 Joe Miller's Spanish tapas bar, Bar Pintxo, opened yesterday at noon, providing respite from the light rain for the holiday shoppers at the nearby Santa Monica farmers market. With high ceilings, high wooden tables and bar stools, walls lined with wines, chalkboard menus and a sushi-style case displaying the tapas, it's a very welcoming little (30-seat capacity) spot. And if Miller has his way, it'll be a respite not only for shoppers but for the farmers too -- at least on market days, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Miller was just in from shopping himself, grabbing a few tapas on his way back to the market, and said he wanted to encourage the farmers to stop by after they're done packing up. "I'd love to have them all come down for a glass of sangria," said Miller. (It makes sense: Miller's 16-year-old Venice restaurant, Joe's, has always had a menu largely reliant on local produce.)
 If not sangria, maybe slices of baguette topped with foie gras mousse, caramelized onions and pomegranate seeds; or cherry tomatoes stuffed with marinated tuna, garlic and parsley; or endive with Roquefort cream, anchovies and walnuts. There were 15 tapas on the printed menu this afternoon, but Miller says that's just the beginning.
Bar Pintxo, 109 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica; (310) 458-2012. Open noon to midnight, every day. (Website still under construction.)
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
 There are certain things -- odd kitchen implements or ingredients -- that I tend to pick up by a kind of culinary reflex, bring home and then don't use. This is because I don't know what to do with them, or I haven't found the right recipe -- or the other ingredients for the recipe I do have. Copper canelé tins, smoked black cardamom pods, mulberry molasses, a blissful Mason jar of prunes that have been soaking in Armagnac for upward of two years. (That's going to be fun.) And dried fava beans. Lots of dried fava beans.
I have a bag of them that I picked up at a farmers market here last year, another that I brought back from a market in Seattle, and yet another bag that I found at a tiny corner grocery store in Paris' 4th arrondissement, two doors up from Eric Kayser's bakery in the Latin Quarter. I brought them back, but hadn't found any recipe that called for them. But then, a few weeks ago, Martha Rose Shulman's new cookbook, "Mediterranean Harvest," appeared on my desk. It's a terrific book, containing over 500 recipes from Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East. So far I've started curing olives using her method, and have already put up about 10 pounds of preserved lemons. (She's got a great Sauces and Condiments section.) And then, on Page 309, I found a recipe that called for dried favas.
Shulman's recipe is simple: The favas are just simmered in salted water until mushy, then allowed to rest before you add a generous pour of olive oil. Shulman says the warm purée, served with greens cooked with garlic (you can stir them into the purée), is a signature dish of Puglia. If I'd known that (and how easy it all was), I'd have picked up even more bags of dried favas than I did.
"Mediterranean Harvest," by Martha Rose Shulman, $39.95 (Rodale Trade Books, 2007)
-- Amy Scattergood
Photo by Amy Scattergood
 The new year is just about upon us and so is the question of what to do on New Year’s Eve. For me, it’s not an all-consuming thing. I’d be happy spending the evening with a glass of Armagnac and a good book. But others close to me want to celebrate. In past years, we’ve gone to Spago or Valentino for either Christmas Eve or New Year’s, and had a swell time. But, for me, the very best New Year’s Eves have been the quieter ones.
There was the year two of my writer friends were in the money and said they’d buy a big tin -- and I mean huge -- of caviar if we made blinis. And so six of us sat in front of the fireplace with Champagne and that huge tin of caviar on ice and piles of warm buckwheat blinis dripping with clarified butter. For the first time in our lives, we could all eat as much osetra as we wanted. A one-time extravagance, it was wonderful fun. Some of us fell asleep in front of the fire, and toddled off home much much later.
Another of my favorite New Year’s Eves was the one we spent at a friend’s cabin on the Russian River up north in Sonoma County. We feasted on piles of chilled Dungeness crab with a fresh ginger and rice wine vinegar dipping sauce with premier cru Chablis. And for dessert, we had dark fragrant gingerbread with drifts of softly whipped cream. Fun.
And then there was the year my husband and I were housesitting in Berkeley. The Russian River friends brought a bushel of oysters from Hog Island Oysters and we all pitched in to shuck them. We were terrible at it to start, but quickly got the hang of it. While I didn’t break the record I set when I was up at the Oyster Farm slurping oysters, I must have eaten a good three dozen of the small, briny belons. Meanwhile, two beautiful chickens with black truffles tucked under the skin were roasting in the oven. They’d turned a deep gold by the time my husband basted them with butter one last time. As he closed the door, he turned a lever he hadn’t noticed before, not realizing that doing so set off the oven cleaning mode. How would he know? We’d never seen such a high tech oven before, or even one with a self-cleaning mode.
Once launched, the oven basically blasts away at extremely high heat until everything on the inside is incinerated, and during that process the oven is in lockdown. We pressed our noses to the glass, and could see the chickens inside getting browner and browner. Disaster! None of the geniuses on hand could figure out how to disable the cleaning program and unlock the door. We unplugged the oven. We shook it. We poked thin wires inside in hopes of jiggling the lock. We tried to unscrew the hinges. In the end, we somehow got it open, but broke the latch (and subsequently had to pay the repair bill). Hey, but we managed to liberate our truffled birds before they’d shriveled and burnt. You want crisp skin? This is one unconventional way to achieve it. And believe me, those birds were worth it.
This year, after reviewing my options, I’m staying close to home, spending the evening with friends from the neighborhood. We’ll have lots of excellent Champagne and wine -- and great music. Dinner will be a potluck built around a huge pot of Provencal daube. And you can be sure no oven cleaning -- or funny hats -- will be involved.
-- S. Irene Virbila
Photo by Bryan Chan
 Before there were food blogs, before there were blogs, period —heck, before there was even an Internet, there was John Thorne. He’s still around and, even today when the number of people writing personal essays about food has metastasized, there is nobody who does it better. For almost 25 years, he has published his work irregularly in a newsletter called Simple Food. (Newsletters, children, are what the self-published used before there were websites.) If you want to check it out for yourself, it is still going today and, almost as good, much of the best of his more recent work has been collected in “Mouth Wide Open,” published this month by North Point Press.
Thorne is a master of the deeply thought personal food essay — as opposed to the off-the-top-of-the-head rant so common today. He can take his affection for two ingredients as seemingly uninspiring as cod and potatoes (as he does in one of the essays collected in this book) and spin them into nearly 10,000 words that seamlessly weave history, cooking and literature into an altogether fascinating whole.
It must be said that Thorne is a better writer and eater than he is a cook. But actually that is one of the pleasures of reading him. He doesn’t propose himself a culinary authority; he’s just a guy who is hungry — for good food and good stories. And he manages to turn up both with regularity. Among the diverse topics collected in “Mouth” are bagna cauda, marmalade, beef kidneys and smoked kielbasa.
Thorne is nothing if not critical — in the best sort of way. He can be cranky, and to admire his writing is not always the same as agreeing with it. At this point I ought to confess that included in “Mouth” is an essay he wrote in 2001 that included references to me and to my first book “How to Read a French Fry.” He liked it, pretty much, I think, with certain reservations and suggested improvements. But coming from Thorne, that meant a lot.
"Mouth Wide Open,” by John Thorne, North Point Press, $26.
-- Russ Parsons
Lou Amdur, owner of the wine bar Lou on Vine, has a passion for creating homemade liqueurs, particularly the fruit ratafias (infused brandies) and vin de noix, or green walnut wine, traditional in southern France.
Lou first learned about them reading Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France decades ago, then tried them during a trip to the region. He puts a local spin on these French classics by taking advantage of Southern California's abundant seasonal produce. At any one time, he has several concoctions working in jars he stashes beneath his kitchen sink.
Fortunately, Lou loves to share what he's learned. On Sunday, he and his wife joined a group of friends at my house for a ratafia-making party. Think arts and crafts for adults where everyone takes home a jar of ratafia that will be ready to drink on Valentine's Day.
Over the years, Lou has made ratafia with several different fruits. The best, he's concluded, are high-acid citrus such as blood oranges, kumquats, quince and bitter lemons. For the base alcohol, vodka (a reasonable substitute for the distilled grape spirits found in France) or brandy is traditional.
On Sunday, we used Satsuma tangerines, at their peak right now, and Armagnac for a touch of luxury. Lou's recipe calls for fruit zest, fresh-squeezed fruit juice, simple syrup, one whole clove (lightly toasted to bring out the flavor) and one cardamom pod (also lightly toasted). More fruit creates a more interesting ratafia, he says. The Satsumas were easy to peel, so the real work was scraping off the bitter white pith. With everyone pitching in, it was half an hour of chaos and then a quick assembly job (see recipe below).
When we sat down to brunch, Lou poured everyone a glass of his vin de noix. Made with green walnuts available in early June, vin de noix is far more complicated to create and has a longer gestation period than the simple ratafia we made. Still, it was an example of the delicious possibilities. The earthy, black walnut wine was just sweet enough, not cloying. Rather than the syrupy viscosity of commercial liqueurs, it was thin, like an intense eau de vie. It tasted so delicious with the brown sugar pecan and oatmeal cake I served that I poured a little right on the cake. 
Recipe: Ratafia reflects your personal taste. We based our proportions on a 750-ml bottle of Armagnac. We used 12 tangerines, each about the size of a child's fist, which gave us 2 cups of zest cut into strips the size of toothpicks and 2 cups of juice. We added 1 cup of simple syrup made by dissolving a cup of sugar in an equal amount of water, threw in the clove and cardamom pod and muddled the whole mess to release the flavors. Using quart jars from Cost Plus with rubber seals and wire closures, we divided our ratafia into four parts with equal amounts of zest in each jar. Lou instructed us to keep our jars out of the light to preserve flavor and color, and to shake them every day or so to keep the ratafia mixed. When it's done, filter out the solids. To retain the fresh flavors and acidity, refrigerate it once you've opened the jar.
-- By Corie Brown
Photo by Corie Brown
 For years, one of the things I’d smuggle back or ask friends to bring me from Italy was bottarga di muggine, pressed dried roe of gray mullet from Sardinia. It looks something like a pair of twin flattened sausages, and it's usually sold vacuum-packed. Good-quality bottarga tastes like the very essence of the sea and it can quickly escalate to a craving.
That's why I found myself on a couple of occasions tramping all over Milan hours before my plane was to leave, looking for some bottarga to take home with me. Now, though, you can find it at La Bottega Marino in West Los Angeles (310) 477-7777. Whew!
In this country, the fish roe is mostly served in spaghetti alla bottarga, shaved over warm, buttery spaghetti. That’s a fabulous simple dish and I’d be happy to use the last of my bottarga making it. But recently, I picked up a new Sardinian cookbook, the only one I’ve found that deals exclusively with the cooking of Italy’s second-largest island, and discovered more uses for bottarga in its pages. That alone is worth the price of “Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey” (Rizzoli, 2007, $39.95) from Sardinian-born chef Efisio Farris of Arcodoro in Houston.
Tomatoes are still hanging in there at the farmers market, so it’s not too late to make his bottarga with celery and tomatoes. The recipe is easy, but the flavors together are magic. Basically, you take a celery stalk, slice it thinly on the diagonal, mix with a big handful of halved cherry tomatoes, some tender chopped celery leaves, a couple of tablespoons extra virgin olive oil and a generous spoonful of grated bottarga. Season with salt and pepper, divide onto individual plates and garnish with bottarga shavings and a drizzle of olive oil.
More ideas from his book: calamari stuffed with ricotta and bottarga, fennel and crabmeat salad with bottarga, fettuccine with zucchini, zucchini blossoms and bottarga, bottarga and raw artichokes . . .
I think I'm going to have myself a bottarga fest.
-- S. Irene Virbila
Photo by S. Irene Virbila
 "Twenty dollars for that?" huffed a visitor as she left the first Los Angeles International Chocolate Salon, held Sunday in a little building east of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Well, $20 did seem a little steep for an event with 23 booths, where just over a dozen were giving out tastes of chocolate. (On the other hand, three booths provided samples of wines they figured go well with chocolate, and that might improve one's mood.) And it's a little hard to sell an event as top-drawer to people who've just had to wander through a quarter of a mile of ragged construction sites to reach the building. But there were things to appreciate.
The idea was that this event, sister to a salon held in San Francisco, would introduce you to high-quality chocolates you might not know. In truth, not all the names were quite new -- if you're into chocolate at all, you're very familiar with Guittard. But that company did offer a few new wrinkles. Who knew the San Francisco old-timer was making its own single-origin chocolates, from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Madagascar? It's also going for the extreme chocolate market with a 91% bar that was too bitter even for a lot of chocoholics.
It was also selling chocolate wafers (pistoles) for baking. A lot of the attendees were home bakers and candy makers, to judge from the brisk business being done by a booth selling antique chocolate molds.
L'Artisan du Chocolat and Mignon Chocolate were the top classical chocolatiers at the event. L'Artisan has a more polished French style -- everything really looks exquisite -- but both were clearly using top-quality ingredients. (Mignon has the more interesting history, having started out 93 years ago in the Ukraine and relocating to Tehran after the owner survived four years in a Siberian labor camp. Its new home is Glendale.)
For unusual, Venezuelan chocolates, you could go to Chuao Chocolatier, a Carlsbad-based company that considers a chile-spiked chocolate bar to be its signature product. Well, it didn't do that much for this cowpoke, but I really liked Chinita Nibs, a bar to which caramelized cacao nibs and nutmeg gave a very appealing crunch and perfume.
The most unusual were at Decadent Tastes, a Monterey outfit which splits its efforts between wine fillings and Asian fusion fillings based on candied ginger. I found the ginger refreshing in the same way as mint chocolates, and the ginger-lemon grass version was the chocolate I'll remember longest from this event.
The jolliest-looking display belonged to the Chocolate Covered Company, which specializes in dipped fruits for corporate gifts. It was the only one to have a seasonal tree and snow motif.
E. Guittard Chocolate Company, (800) 468-2462; L'Artisan du Chocolat, (310) 880-9396; Mignon Chocolate, (877) 9-MIGNON; Chuao Chocolatier, (888) 635-1444; Decadent Tastes, (831) 643-0908; Chocolate Covered Company, (877) DIPPED-2
-- Charles Perry
Photo by Charles Perry
 The crosnes are back at Weiser Family Farms. But don’t count on being able to buy any until after the first of the year. Because of a very late, very small crop, the first harvest will be going only to restaurants, and even they will have to order them in advance to ensure getting any.
Little corkscrew-shaped tubers, crosnes are very popular among French chefs. Raw, they taste a little bland and crunchy — kind of like a miniature jicama. But they really shine when sautéed briefly, revealing a bittersweet edge that perfectly complements butter’s sweet, nutty flavor.
The Weisers planted them at the pleading of chef Alain Giraud, and last year's first harvest created quite a ruckus when it appeared at the Santa Monica farmers market in early October. This year's harvest is just now showing up. What happened?
So far, the Weisers are the only farmers in California —and one of only a handful in the nation — who are growing crosnes. So any ripple in their supply spreads quickly. And this year there was more than a ripple. First of all, Alex Weiser says, they concentrated the entire crop in their Lucerne Valley farm rather than spreading it into Tehachapi, which naturally made them somewhat later. And then there was this year’s extended warm fall. Since the crosnes form the edible tubers only when the plants start to go dormant, this delayed the crop even more.
And then there were the rabbits. While the Weisers were distracted harvesting an extremely abundant fall potato harvest in Lucerne, the little varmints dug under the fences around the crosnes field and feasted on the plants’ green tops, further delaying the forming of the tubers.
“I’m going to get a shirt made up that says ‘Farming Happens,’ ” says Weiser. “But I promise we’ll have them on time next year. I’ve already made plans. Of course, I say that every year.”
-- Russ Parsons
Photo by Wally Skalij
 Anyone who haunts Surfas, EuroPane or the Cheesestore of Silverlake probably knows the wonderful cellophane-wrapped caramels and marshmallows made by the Little Flower Candy Co. They've probably also noticed that, for most of the last year, the candies have been absent from the shelves. Owner and candy maker Christine Moore, we were told, was on maternity leave; she'd also, it turns out, lost the lease on the Hollywood kitchen where she'd been making her confections. Well, her candies are back, and not only in specialty stores and online, but as of this weekend, they'll have shelves of their own. Moore is opening her own shop in Pasadena this Saturday morning, she says, at 7 a.m. I went by to check it out, after finally finding her sea salt caramels (they operate like hard currency in my house) at the Cheesestore and calling the number on Moore's website. The painter was still stenciling the sign, everyone was wrapping caramels like mad and Moore -- happy, overwhelmed -- was scrambling to organize a business in a space she'd found only six weeks before.
It'll be a "super soft, almost underground" opening, says Moore, but there will be espresso drinks (City Bean coffee), house-made pastries -- and plenty of Moore's signature candies. Moore hopes to turn the shop (a 1938 building that used to house Bee's Knees Bakery, tucked midway between Old Town Pasadena and Eagle Rock) into a neighborhood deli eventually, though at the moment she doesn't even have plates. But she's good at improvising: She trained as a pastry chef, not a candy maker, and started making sea salt caramels at home after she quit work (Campanile, Les Deux Cafes) to stay home with her first child (she now has three). With a highchair in her new office, coloring books piled on the cafe furniture she just bought off Craigslist and newly made caramels wrapped in pretty bow-tied bundles all over the kitchen, Moore's new shop already has a welcoming feel. Tomorrow morning, we're all welcome.
Little Flower Candy Co., 1424 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 304-4800. (Click on the website for contact information for other stores that carry the candies, including EuroPane.)
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
 Last summer the Northridge Thai Temple had to stop hosting food stalls on weekends because neighbors complained about parking problems. But there's another place around here that sponsors Southeast Asian food stands, in Duarte.
It's a much smaller operation, only five or six stands, but the quality of the food is very high -- for example, very tender sates with a sort of spiced sugar crust, topped with a dab of peanut sauce, and empanadas (called pastels) that come with their own little cup of spicy coconut sauce. (Yes, one place does make that concentrated meat dish rendang, but it seems to sell out early.)
There are even things you might not have seen at an Indonesian restaurant, such as Dutch sausage rolls or little quail-egg-sized buns with a bit of pineapple in the middle. Sometimes there's a Balinese stand where you can get, say, spicy beef, a sweet hard-boiled egg (cooked with jackfruit), a chewy corn pancake and yellow coconut rice for $6.
If you don't know what to order, just stand around looking puzzled and somebody will probably come up and offer to explain everything. It's a very friendly, relaxed crowd. However, since this is a small operation, tables can fill up and you might want to order your food to go.
Unlike the Thai Temple, this operation is in a business area, so it hasn't had to face parking complaints from any neighbors. It's held in the parking lot of the Duarte Inn, down at the end of a driveway that's also the parking lot of a mini-mall. (You pass an Indonesian import shop and an Indonesian restaurant on the way.)
Indonesian hawker stands, Duarte Inn, 1200 Huntington Drive, Duarte; Saturdays, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
-- Charles Perry
Photo by Charles Perry
 On a short visit to Iowa last week (20-degree temps, Huckabee and Hillary and Obama bumper stickers, horizontal universe) I took a detour off I-80 to tiny Newton, home of the Maytag Dairy Farms. If you look (very) closely at the picture on the right, you can see a gray hillock behind the farm; underneath it are the cheese caves the dairy built in 1941 to make its famed blue cheese.
The dairy was started in 1919 by E.H. Maytag, son of the appliance company founder -- the appliance company and the dairy have always been separately owned and operated -- who owned a herd of prize-winning Holstein-Friesian cows. After Iowa State University in Ames began experimenting with making blue cheese with homogenized cow's milk (instead of sheep's milk), Maytag decided to build a plant to make blue cheese at his dairy. (Midwesterners take a very pragmatic approach to their hobbies.)
 The cheese is made the same way now as it was then: handmade in small batches, the wheels salted and punched with little holes so the distinctive mold can grow, then aged for six months in the caves. After aging, the wheels are trimmed and cut using the same wedge-cutter the dairy's used for the last 65 years. (A local engineer made the cutter; he came back a few years ago and had his picture taken with it.) Though the cows were sold in 1991, the dairy (which is still owned by the Maytag family) uses locally produced milk for its blue cheese, the only cheese now made by the company. (It once made Cheddar and Edam too.) Dense and creamy, mellow yet intense, it made a terrific snack with a few water crackers. And with the Iowa caucuses only a month away, it seemed as though it might even be an omen of more blue to come.
Maytag blue cheese, Maytag Dairy Farms, P.O. Box 806, Newton, Iowa, (800) 247-2458.
-- Amy Scattergood
Photos by Amy Scattergood
"Ask not for whom the Napkin of Shame comes. Sooner or later, it will come for you."
I don't know how this Nov. 20 item by Frank Bruni on the New York Times' Diner's Journal blog got by me (especially because it was blogged to death by other food bloggers), but once I saw it, I was riveted in the way only authorial pride can rivet. "I suppose I knew it already," Bruni wrote, "but a recent visit to the restaurant Fiamma in SoHo hammered home this lesson: Ask not for whom the Napkin of Shame comes. Sooner or later, it will come for you.
"What in the world am I talking about?" Bruni continued. "What’s up with this upper case Napkin and why is it a badge of uppercase Shame? Excellent questions, with answers that have nothing to do with keyboard problems.The Napkin of Shame, as I have come to think of it, is part of a fancy-restaurant ritual I’ve never made peace with. The Napkin of Shame is what a server carries to a table on which a section of the cloth has been splashed with sauce or speckled with wine. A server unfurls the Napkin of Shame and stretches it over the soiled terrain, a bit of patchwork that makes the table look clean again."
Very nicely said, Mr. Bruni. But that's my Napkin of Shame. At least I wrote about it, upper case and all, in my 1999 book "American Appetite." OK, so the book is out of print, so it won't be so easy for you to check it out. Touché. Anyway, it's right there on page 266. I included it as part of an anecdote about my husband being made to borrow a restaurant tie at Bouley in New York. "And there's nothing more embarrassing," I concluded, "than a restaurant tie, unless it's receiving the Napkin of Shame." (Note the use of upper case.) Then there's a footnote, explaining what it is.
Yes, I know that ideas are out there in the collective unconscious, and that the same idea can occur to dozens of people at once. That's why I expected that if I Googled the phrase, I'd get a grillion hits. But I didn't -- I just got 423, and almost all of them referred to Bruni's item. (One leads to a blog called Ashkeling, on which an undated entry recounts a visit to El Bulli in which the Napkin of Shame is called upon to cover up some kind of basil foam incident. Another refers to an Amazon reader review of my book -- see! I'm not making it up.) I'm not suggesting Mr. Bruni ever read my book -- hardly anyone did, or it wouldn't be out of print! But you have to admit, that's some coincidence.
It's probably my own fault, because here's a confession: It's my mom who first conjured the phrase, years before "American Appetite" was published. Yes, Mom, I should have attributed it to you. As penance, next time I'm in a white-tablecloth restaurant, I'll purposely spill my wine and suffer the Napkin of Shame as penance. Until then, I think it belongs to Frank Bruni.
-- Leslie Brenner
 Holidays mean lots of family time, and this year a couple of board games for food lovers are just the thing.
Modeled after Trivial Pursuit with some Pictionary thrown in, "What's Cooking" is moderately fun -- especially the "What's a Spatula?" category, in which you have to draw a kitchen tool specified on a card and your team has to guess what it is ("shrimp deveiner," "tea kettle"). The "Foodie First" category asks you to name as many items as you can in 30 seconds (traditional Mexican dishes, foods that begin with the letter O, etc.). "Melting Pot" wants to know in what country a particular dish originated; "Renowned Restaurants" asks where you find particular restaurants. Finally, the "What's Cookin'?" category lists ingredients, and you have to name the dish it makes. It's in this category that the game loses a bit of its "foodie" cred. To wit: "4 c. tart cherries, 1 1/2 c. granulated sugar, 4 Tbsp. cornstarch, 1/4 Tbsp. almond extract, 2 pre-made pie crusts, 1 1/2 Tbsp. butter" is the question; "Cherry pie" is the answer. Oh, please! Pre-made pie crusts? 4 tablespoons cornstarch? And what's with those weirdo abbreviations?
"Foodie Fight" blows "What's Cookin'?" out of the water. The questions, which are much sharper, are more fun for food geeks. For instance, a question that starts "What tiny songbird ... " separates the gastro-know-it-alls from the pikers. (The pikers have to wait to hear the rest of the question to attempt an answer; the know-it-alls will shout out "ortolan" right away.) There are smart food and wine pairing questions, real cooks' questions like "Which is the preferred cooking method for tougher cuts of meat -- dry-heat methods or moist-heat methods?"; and just plain silly stuff: "What did James Cagney smash into the face of actress Mae Clarke during a breakfast scene in the gangster film "The Public Enemy" (1931)?" (Again, serious types shouldn't need more than the first five words.)
So while "What's Cookin'?" would more likely appeal to your big extended family, "Foodie Fight" appeals to more dedicated foodists, with plenty of inside-baseball-type questions like "What sausage company founder writes award-winning, meat-focused cookbooks?" And the author, Joyce Lock, seems to have seriously good taste. Take the question whose answer is "Food blogs": "What are 'Gastropoda' and 'Chocolate and Zucchini'?" The latter, of course, is the popular blog that spawned a cookbook. And the former? It's the blog from Regina Schrambling, the Food section's New York correspondent. How cool is that?
"What's Cookin'?," $24.98 at amazon.com; "Foodie Fight," $18.95 at surlatable.com.
-- Leslie Brenner
Photo by Leslie Brenner
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Until Christmas, I'd never heard of a gourmet treat coming from Redwood City, a town long mocked by its Bay Area neighbors as Deadwood City. (I suppose it was asking for that when it chose the dull city slogan "Climate Best by Government Test.") But thanks to St. Nick, I've learned about a Redwood City bakery that makes exceptional biscotti. 
corie.brown@latimes.com
Noelle Carter is the Times' Test Kitchen manager. A native Californian, she got her first degree in film from USC and worked in the film industry before succumbing to her passion for food and going to culinary school. She loves exploring regional and historic American cuisine.
noelle.carter@latimes.com
Betty Hallock is assistant Food editor and joined the Times in 2002. She formerly worked at the Wall Street Journal in New York. betty.hallock@latimes.com
Susan LaTempa is the Times' acting Food editor. susan.latempa@latimes.com
Rene Lynch is a Times Web deputy and staff writer. rene.lynch@latimes.com
Russ Parsons writes "The California Cook" column for the Times' Food section. He is also the author of “How to Read a French Fry” and the newly published "How to Pick a Peach." russ.parsons@latimes.com
Amy Scattergood is a Times staff writer and “The Saucier” columnist. Scattergood grew up in Iowa, has degrees in theology, poetry and cooking, and, when she isn't writing about food, is trying to get her two young daughters to cook it themselves. amy.scattergood@latimes.com
S. Irene Virbila is the Times' Restaurant Critic. virbila@latimes.com