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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
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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. 
