All along Metro Rail routes, eateries to stop you in your tracks

With gas prices at a record high, we've got to make do with our public transportation options: three light-rail lines (Gold, Blue, Green) and two subway lines (Red, Purple) stopping at 62 stations and totaling 73.1 miles of rail. True, those slender threads don't go everywhere — and the trains never seem to run often enough or late enough — but if you're in the know, there's a gold mine of dining and entertainment options within walking distance. Just hop off and explore the possibilities. To dig up the nuggets, Times staff writer Jessica Gelt spent three days riding the rails. Read more here.

Meyenberg goat milk butter

So here's what I found at the Cheese Store of Silver Lake the other day: a big silver rectangle of Meyenberg goat milk butter. Made in California's San Joaquin valley by a company that has produced goat milk since 1934, the prize-winning butter is lightly salted, so pale it's almost white (rather like lardo, a very, very good thing of which to be reminded, I might add), and slightly but distinctly reminiscent of chèvre in taste. 

Spread thickly on slices of baguette, with a sprinkle of Hawaiian black sea salt, the butter is amazingly smooth and has a cool tang to the finish, not unlike goat cheese. It has a lower melting point and is less rich than butter made from cow's milk — a good thing, really, if you put as much butter on your bread as I do.

The emissions problem of cows has been in the news lately.  Anybody know what the carbon footprint of a goat looks like? Given the otherwise beautiful efficiency of those animals, you'd think it would be a pretty good one.

Meyenberg goat milk butter, $7.99 for half a pound. Cheese Store of Silver Lake, 3926 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 644-7511.

— Amy Scattergood

Photo by Amy Scattergood

Will brake for fruit carts

Street vendors can stamp a town with the kind of intense flavor that goes way beyond the food they sell.  In Seattle, you can buy an espresso from a cart that rivals what you get at most of the city's high-end coffee bars; in Rio de Janeiro, vendors crisscross the beaches with grilled shrimp and whole pineapples, dismantled on the spot, that you remember for years (in my case, 15 and counting).  Here in Los Angeles, there are the fruit carts that pop up, in parking lots and along bus stops and sidewalks, like their umbrellas, bright and inviting and staggeringly colorful.  This morning I found a cart next to a bus stop near the corner of Beverly and Alvarado.  As I watched the umbrella flutter above the gorgeous rows of whole fruit, a young man cut pieces of fresh pineapple, mango, watermelon, jicama, cucumber, coconut and cantaloupe.  He put them into a plastic bag, then doused them with chile, salt and a generous squeeze of fresh lime.  It's these last touches, plus the unexpected crunch of the jicama and cucumber, that transform this from a pretty portable fruit salad to something miraculous.  A plastic fork.  A perfect summertime breakfast.  (The hotter it gets, the more chile.)

Fruit cart, corner of Beverly Blvd. and Alvarado St., $4 for a large bag of everything, with extra chile.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photo by Amy Scattergood

Taco libre!

Last night a group of taco fans (loyal, aggrieved, stubbornly hungry) gathered in East L.A., lining up for wobbly, sauce-drenched, carne asada-loaded paper plates at the Tacos El Galuzo truck parked on Whittier Boulevard.  Parked legally, that is, for the final hours before the new city ordinance went into effect at 12:01 a.m. today.  Now taco trucks must move every hour or face misdemeanor charges, $1,000 in fines and-or 6 months in jail.  These new regulations apply only in unincorporated parts of the city, but as the folks at saveourtacotrucks.org, which sponsored the gathering, point out on their website, that's 65% of the county. 

The taco crowd was good, especially considering that the Lakers were playing Game 5 only a few miles away.  And the gathering was upbeat, proving that a heady taco al pastor can generate more civic goodwill than a questionable city ordinance.  Saveourtacotrucks.org founders Chris Rutherford and Aaron Sonderleiter (looking tired, overwhelmed by the enormous publicity their site has generated, and a bit sauce-spattered) said they've received more than 9,000 signatures on their petition -- but no comment from District 1 County Supervisor Gloria Molina. 

"I'm curious to see what the next step will be," said Sonderleiter, a schoolteacher from Highland Park who started saveourtacotrucks.org with a $6 investment in the domain name ("that's almost two nights' dinner"). 

So are we.  And not just the next step by the city -- but the next steps, and routes, of the trucks themselves.  News from your favorite taco trucks? Comment below. 

Tacos El Galuzo, 5555  Whittier Blvd., Los Angeles (as of 10 p.m. yesterday).

-- Amy Scattergood

Correction: As many readers have pointed out, the new regulations apply to unincorporated parts of the county of Los Angeles (I incorrectly referred to the city of Los Angeles).

Photo by Amy Scattergood

Denio's Farmers Market and the Roseville Livestock Auction

I was up in Sacramento recently visiting the in-laws and decided to check out Denio's Farmers Market and Swap Meet in nearby Roseville. The market, open since 1947, sits near Roseville's rail yard, a historically significant transport hub for agriculture from the Central Valley.

Denio's is a massive marketplace -- sprawling almost 70 acres -- with aisles and aisles of fresh produce and local food products. You name it: tons of fresh fruits and vegetables (I sampled my first fresh cherries of the season), local honeys (I loved the blackberry) and cured olives, as well as stands carrying vegetable plants and herbs for the garden. The swap meet component (by far the larger part of the operation) contains everything from clothing and antiques to tools, machinery and parts for almost anything. (Need a part for your John Deere? Odds are you'll find it.)

Across the street from the market, you'll find the Roseville Livestock Auction. The bidding starts at 9:30 every Saturday morning for general livestock, including pigs, goats and sheep. (The cattle auction starts at 12:30.) The facility auctions poultry on the first and third Sundays of the month; horses and tack the second Saturday of the month.

If you're like me and fantasize about the farming life, it's a great place to go. You can score some tomato plants for your garden along with your dinner vegetables, or go crazy and buy a chicken or two. Now I know where to get that pet pig I've always wanted...

-- Noelle Carter

Photos by Noelle Carter

Bevy of bivalves

“Scam” is such an ugly word, so loaded with implications of illegality and wrongdoing. So I’ve been working hard trying to come up with another description of my judging of the Pacific Coast Oyster Wine Competition. I’ll let you know if I come up with something.

For someone who loves both oysters and wine as intemperately as I do, it’s a little hard to believe that someone would actually offer to let you consume as much of both as you’d like, all in the name of science. But that’s exactly what Jon Rowley does every spring. Rowley is the marketing genius who introduced the world to Copper River salmon. He also dabbles in other things, great peaches and oysters being among them. And every spring for the last 14 years, sponsored by Taylor Shellfish Farms in Washington, he convenes a panel of judges in three West Coast cities to determine which wines go best with raw oysters.

Here’s how it works: About a dozen oyster lovers gather at Water Grill in downtown L.A. They pour the wines, five at a time, 20 in all, and they bring as many oysters as you want. Yes, you read right: As many as you want. You slurp an oyster, taste a wine and then rate it on what Rowley calls the “bliss factor,” which is basically a highly scientific term for “how much you like it.” At the end of the tasting, the scores for all of the judges are totaled, then combined with the results from San Francisco and Seattle, and a winner is named.

The best wines with oysters tend to be extremely crisp and slightly light in body. Oysters seem to emphasize any bitterness in a wine, so wines with a lot of oak rarely do well and neither do varietals such as Gewürztraminer, which has a slightly bitter finish that is delicious in the proper context but not with oysters. The best wines don’t necessarily make the best oyster wines. A lot of times strong varietal character will overshadow the more delicate aspects of oyster flavor. Instead, oysters want a wine that refreshes the palate.

The winners tend to be dominated by Sauvignon Blancs with the occasional Pinot Gris thrown in for interest. As an added bonus, these lighter wines rarely cost more than $15 a bottle. Repeat winners include such wines as the Sauvignon Blancs from Kenwood, Geyser Peak and Dry Creek (labeled Fume Blanc). This year’s competition is not yet completed, so it’s too early to name a winner, but my favorites out of the tasting were the Sauvignon Blancs from Simi, Clayhouse, Kathryn Kennedy and Clos du Bois.

The big question, of course, is how many oysters? I stopped counting after four dozen. It was taking all my concentration to come up with an alternative to “scam.”

UPDATE (4-28): Final results are in and the top 12 wines, in alphabetical order were: Amity Vineyards 06 Pinot Blanc (OR); Chateau Ste. Michelle* 06 Columbia Valley Sauvignon Blanc (WA); Clayhouse Vineyard 06 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Clos du Bois Winery 06 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Covey Run Winery 06 Fume Blanc (WA); Dry Creek Vineyard* 06 Sonoma County Fume Blanc (CA); Girard Winery 06 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Kathryn Kennedy Winery* 07 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Robledo Family Winery* 06 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Simi 06 Sauvignon Blanc (CA); Van Duzer Vineyards 07 Pinot Gris (OR); Willamette Valley Vineyards* 07 Pinot Gris (OR). Asterisks represent wines that have also won in previous years.

-- Russ Parsons

Photo by Russ Parsons

Paella Saturday at La Española

Just off the 110 in Harbor City, down an industrial side street, in a maze of concrete with a USDA sign on the rear parking spot, La Espanola Meats Inc. does not immediately look like the Spanish food oasis that it is.  But walk through the door and you'll see racks of wines and Spanish olive oils, refrigerator cases of cheeses and charcuterie, shelves loaded with Marcona almonds and Jerez vinegar, whole jamons hanging from a stand in the back.  And on Saturday, if you walk into a side courtyard, you'll also find some amazing paella, made that morning on a pan so big its contents serve 80.

The specialty store has been around since 1982, founded by Juana and Frank Faraone.  Juana, who is from Valencia, Spain, began making paella in 1995.  In the beginning, she explained this past Saturday, she just put a homemade sign in the middle of the street.  It didn't take long: Now most Saturdays the patio is filled with repeat customers, most speaking Spanish, many of whom have been coming to eat paella for most of the last 13 years.  The portions are enormous, loaded with chicken and seafood, roasted peppers and beans and saffron-shot Valencia rice.  It's easy to see why locals tend to make an afternoon of it.  Juana says sometimes she makes three batches on a Saturday, depending on how many people call in during the week.  Her son-in-law Alex Motamedi, who manages the store, kept bringing out plates of tapas from the store's interior: thinly sliced jamon serrano, wedges of Idiazabal cheese, Marcona almonds and anchovy-stuffed olives, even some of the prized jamon iberico.  A local woman shared her homemade slices of lemon cake; Alex opened more wine.

Inside the store, you can find not only the Spanish products that the store imports, but also a wealth of the charcuterie that La Española makes in the small adjoining plant.  Beside a gleaming German sausage-making machine, Alex showed off the chorizo (they make four kinds) and morcilla, or blood sausage (two kinds).  In the rooms in the back, a pair of employees cut jamon Serrano, slice by individual slice, on a machine.  All of which makes for pretty great patio tapas during the week, if (sadly) you can't make it for the paella. 

La Española Meats Inc., 25020 Doble Ave., Harbor City, (310) 539-0455. Store hours are Monday-Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Paella is $8.50 and served only on Saturdays; we suggest you call ahead and let them know you're coming.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photos by Amy Scattergood

To celebrate or not celebrate

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

What I ate for Thanksgiving

After weeks (months, years) of cooking, for my job, for fun, for stories and families and friends and just the normal repeating cycles of daily sustenance, I decided on my Thanksgiving menu: nothing.  With the kids out of town, I declined the kind invitations that came my way and, on the single biggest feast day in this country, I fasted.  This was not for any political, religious or social reason (though it could, probably even should, have been), but out of sheer fatigue. 

My dog and I hiked up Runyon Canyon (right), walked along the beach, watched football. No turkey, no cranberry sauce, no dishes or performance anxiety. (Note to PETA: I fed my dog.) It was difficult not to think about food, especially in my line of work, but for the most part I managed. I was grateful for things: food, of course; that my daughters were eating a feast in a cabin in Mammoth; and that their world is one filled with a relative privilege that many do not have. Also empty freeways and the happiness of strangers at rest. At sundown, I broke my fast with a bowl of soup, an approved method in many of the world's religions, which recognize that hunger is a problematic, most difficult subject.

Here's a picture of my soup. It's chocolate soup, made with 71% Valrhona chocolate spiked with cayenne and cinnamon and frothed by pouring it back and forth to mix it, as the Mayans and Aztecs did. A quick thumb through "Larousse Gastronomique" (my cultural and religious reference guide) revealed that in the early days of European chocolate, the church set so little store in the New World food that they didn't even consider the consumption of it to be breaking Lenten fast. A happy fact for many contemporary Christians. I don't know if that's still the rule, but it worked for me. Add that to the long, long litany of things I was thankful for this holiday. 

-- Amy Scattergood

Photos by Amy Scattergood

Intermezzo at Surfas

Since I live about four blocks away from Surfas, I go there quite a lot (farro, fun, whatever). But when I'm home testing recipes, it seems as though I wind up going there about every hour, between needing new supplies and running out of (or forgetting) others. Yesterday it was ancho chiles, a vat of peanut oil and bittersweet Valrhona chocolate. This morning it was parchment paper and a thermometer for deep frying. Good thing the cafe stocks pick-me-ups for those of us getting frazzled from all our picking up. This morning's happy interlude came in the form of a double espresso (Caffe Umbria beans) and a chocolate canelé (made with Valrhona bittersweet, the very chocolate I bought yesterday). Demand for their canelés, which come in vanilla, chocolate and banana, got so great that the cafe out-sourced -- they won't say where, though the new place uses the same recipe. Either way, they're still some of the best in town. The espresso's pretty good too. Now if my laundromat and bank only had espresso. They did in Seattle!

Caneles, $1.95 each; double espresso, $2.50. Cafe Surfas, 8777 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City; (310) 558-1458.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photo by Amy Scattergood

Froma on Melrose grand opening

Melrose Avenue just got its own gourmet store.  Froma on Melrose had a soft opening two weeks ago and has been getting a steady stream of customers since, maybe people taking a break from shopping for Christian Louboutin shoes or vintage T-shirts to pick up a pound of squid ink trofie pasta, some Arbequina olives, chocolate-covered fleur de sel caramels in an edible chocolate box by Charles Chocolates, an espresso made from Danesi beans or a bresaola, goat cheese and arugula panini from the impressive panini menu -- or even a box of fresh figs from the Santa Monica farmers market.  This morning Froma had its formal opening, where customers could sample the charcuterie and California cheeses (and maybe the duck confit and Camembert panini) with the co-owners.

And who might they be?  Sommelier Francine Diamond, who is from Quebec, and German-born Ca' del Sole executive chef Soerke Peters.  Diamond's husband, Cut steakhouse general manager Matteo Ferdinandi, will be "keeping a close eye" on the place, according to his wife. Diamond's wine expertise will come in handy in the fall, when their pending liquor license will allow them to put in a wine selection and hold tastings.  A little Lambrusco to go with that La Quercia Rossa prosciutto?

Froma on Melrose: Purveyor of Fine Food, 7960 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 653-3700, www.fromaonmelrose.com (website currently under construction).  Hours: Monday thru Saturday, 10-8; Sunday, 11-7.

-- Amy Scattergood

Photo by Amy Scattergood

Luigi Ortega's Mexitalian pub food

"Luigi Ortega’s prides itself on unauthentic Mexican food," says the menu at this new east Pasadena restaurant. To tell the truth, Luigi Ortega’s really has more of a South Philly Italian feel than a Mexican one, despite all the tacos and burritos on the menu. It also offers pizza, pasta, hoagies and a long list of cheese steaks made on Amorosa rolls imported from Philadelphia.

The walls are covered with murals of Philadelphia and New York and mounted with TVs tuned to sports and old "Ren & Stimpy" episodes. There’s free wi-fi, a wide stock of rare root beers and ginger ales, and a lively young crowd (it’s across the street from Pasadena City College). According to its website, www.luigiortegas.com, it’s the first of an envisioned hundred or more branches nationwide.

The main focus is combining cheese and hot peppers, so the Italian dishes are spiced-up versions, such as Dr. Death’s Suicide Pie, a pizza that includes a few drops of Luigi Ortega’s own cruel habanero sauce. (You can buy a bottle for $7.99.) So maybe the quintessential item here is Luigi Ortega cheese bread: mozzarella, crushed red pepper and plenty of garlic on a good, fresh roll.

Luigi Ortega’s Café, 1655 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 396-9669. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday and noon-9 p.m. Sunday.

-- Charles Perry