Speculoos slowly spreading through L.A.

Some say Speculoos is the new Nutella. It looks like peanut butter but tastes like the gingerbread, cinnamon-flavored cookie it's made from, known as biscoff. (You may know the flavor from those cookies handed out on Delta airlines.) The popular Belgian cookie via paste is making its way over the Atlantic and now it's coming to food trucks, slowly but surely.

If you've been fortunate enough to have stumbled upon the spread while abroad, chances are you've returned home with a new sugary obsession to share. Lotus Bakeries introduced Speculoos to the U.S. market this year; but even so, most Americans don't know about it yet. A gradually increasing number of food trucks are looking to change this. Wafels & Dinges in New York sells its own version (called Spekuloos) and offers the spread as one of many waffle toppings, as does L.A.'s Waffles de Liege.

In the height of the food truck boom, will Speculoos ever really catch on, on the street food scene? George Wu of Waffles de Liege believes it will. "If the popularity of Liege waffles grows," says Wu, "more people will get a chance to try Speculoos, and as a result, more people will talk about it and experiment with it on different food; and before long, it'll be a kitchen staple like Nutella."

Fingers crossed, Waffles de Liege's use of the cookie-made-spread will cause a domino effect of sorts among other Southern California food trucks and thus the spread of scrumptious Speculoos.

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-- Caitlin Keller

Photo credit: Elsie Fang Photography

Attention, carnivores! May is National Barbecue AND Burger Month!

Imagine my surprise when I showed up at work and found not one but two wonderful e-mails in my inbox. As if our (finally improving) Southern California weather were not enough, apparently May is National Barbecue and National Burger Month!

Needless to say, I can barely contain myself. I don't know whether to go out to dinner to celebrate ... or give myself some sort of smoky facial by hovering over the grill tonight.

In honor of this holiday, we're going to compile some of our favorite burger and barbecue recipes from the L.A. Times' test kitchen's archives.

In the meantime, I'm curious to know what you think are the best joints in town. Where can you find the best burgers and barbecue in Southern California?

I've already picked some brains to get the list going -- and most are around Los Angeles, so we need to broaden the range. Add to it. Challenge it. I double-dog dare you.

Here goes....

A Super Bowl stadium built entirely of snacks; I gained 20 pounds just watching

The Big Game Snack Food Stadium - Watch more Big Game Bonanza

Help! My eyes are bleeding! I just watched a 2-minute, 37-second video in which an announcer gives a play-by-play of the building of a 110,428-calorie Super Bowl stadium made entirely of fatty snacks.

Sponsored by Break Media and done in the noble pursuit of "meaningless Internet spectacles," the snack stadium -- snadium? -- consists of a butter-frosted field; stadium seating made of cookies, crackers and wafers; a Hershey bar jumbotron; cold-cut-and-cheese stadium trim; Slim Jim goal posts; hot dog, burger and doughnut fences; Twinkie and Ho Ho tailgaters; a hoagie blimp; and football teams consisting of carrot sticks and uncooked Vienna sausages.

Whew. Since Break Media dubs itself "the Internet's premier entertainment community for men," this borderline psychopathic display of food-based craftiness makes perfect sense. What else will men obsess over if not wrapping a burger in a glazed doughnut and dipping it in frosting while casting come-hither glances at a bunch of uncooked Vienna sausages with green olive football helmets?

Oh, right. Beer. And the big game itself, of course. I'll be watching with a few male companions of my choice and I'll be wearing a miniskirt made of guacamole and a top crusted in corn chips.

-- Jessica Gelt

Video credit: Break Media

Harissa, the ingredient essential to Tunisian cuisine

We recently wrote about Tunisian food, specifically about the way Tunisian Jews might celebrate Rosh Hashanah. An essential ingredient in Tunisian food, and one mentioned in the story, was harissa. A reader wrote to ask about it.

Harissa is a sauce based on chiles, hot but not searing. There are many varieties, but many have garlic, salt and oil. It can be used as is on a sandwich or stirred into soups, spread on chicken or as a marinade. It goes into Tunisian couscous.

Many gourmet markets and cooking shops sell it, often in tubes. You can find recipes for it in Middle Eastern cookbooks.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: Alain Cohen, left, makes harissa for his shop, Got Kosher? Provisions on Pico Boulevard.

Credit: Christina House / For The Times

Bellying up to Kentucky Fried Chicken's double down

We were dubious when we first read that Kentucky Fried Chicken was coming out with a new sandwich that does away with the bread in favor of two fried fillets. And that the "sandwich" part of the sandwich involved was made of cheese, something called Colonel's sauce .. and bacon?

Could that possibly be true?

After all, this was the fast-food chain that seemed to be going all healthy on us, setting off stampedes for its new grilled chicken offerings.

We lobbed a call to a media representative. And the rest is a good news-bad news story. First, the good news. The sandwich does indeed exist, and it is called the double down. It is made of two Original Recipe fillets, bacon, Swiss and pepper jack cheese and something called the Colonel's sauce.

The bad news? The sandwich is only being tested in Providence, R.I., and Omaha, Neb. But if it does well  -- and really, why wouldn't this sandwich do well? -- it could head out West. 

-- Rene Lynch

Photo: Kentucky Fried Chicken

No tomato shortage here: tomato conserva revisited

I feel for Northeasterners who are suffering a tomato shortage and are having to resort to B.L.P.s (that would be bacon, lettuce and plum sandwiches). But I'm also grateful that we aren't enduring the same here in California. And so this year, I won't forget to make tomato conserva.

In an article from a few years back, Max Withers was inspired to preserve the essence of tomatoes by the late Patience Gray's "Honey From a Weed," in which she described Puglian salsa secca, the strained puree of tomatoes, left out to concentrate in the Mediterranean sun.

Armed with a Paul Bertolli recipe (see the jump), he turned 20 pounds of tomatoes into 4 to 5 pints of tomato conserva. (You can make the stuff with as little as 5 pounds of tomatoes.) The pureed tomatoes cook for several hours in the oven. During that time, you need to stir the tomatoes periodically, but like Withers says, "If you need a nap, just shut off the oven until you get up. After all, the plates of salsa secca that adorn Puglian rooftops have to rest when the sun goes down."

-- Betty Hallock

National Mustard Day: Do condiments deserve holidays?

Like Trident missiles during the Cold War, the proliferation of quirky and often corporate-sponsored food holidays continues unchecked.

We've recently celebrated (or maybe we haven't) such delicious holidays as National Doughnut Day (June 5) and National Crème Brûlée Day (July 27), and we're prepping for (or maybe we aren't) National S'mores Day (Aug.  10) and National Sponge Cake Day (Aug.  23). But last Saturday's National Mustard Day demands we ask: Do condiments deserve their own holidays?

In Wisconsin, the answer was a resounding yes. The Mustard Museum, which has been located since 1986 in Mount Horeb (also the self-proclaimed Troll Capitol of the World) has proved so popular that owner Barry Levenson is relocating his 5,000 mustards and 1,500 antique mustard pots, bottles and tins to a larger venue in nearby Middleton (about 8 miles northwest of Madison).

Sure, I like a dab of Gulden's Spicy Brown on my sandwiches, a dip of French's classic yellow on my pretzels, a dash of Mendocino Hot & Sweet as the base for my vinaigrette. But now that mustard has its own holiday (celebrated the first Saturday in August), where will the madness end?

"A man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard," Mark Twain once wrote. Funny, I must've missed the celebration for National Turnip Day.

-- Elina Shatkin

Photo: A shop assistant in Dresden, Germany stacks jars of mustard bearing a photo of President Obama. Credit: Norbert Millauer / AFP/Getty Images