Now that we're squarely in fall, Saving the Season's Kevin West and Bettina Birch of Bee Green Farm return to Surfas on Saturday to conduct a demonstration on autumn preserves. The in-depth demo, starting at 11 a.m., will focus on fruits of the season (persimmons, apples) and comes in time to start thinking about your Thanksgiving table.
West and Birch will be making fresh persimmon butter (no canning required), spiced apple-persimmon chutney with Birch's own Fuyu persimmons and Arkansas Black apples, and something to liven your Thanksgiving dinner: not cranberry relish but cranberry jam with orange peel and candied ginger.
The demo is free, open to the public, and no reservations are necessary. West and Birch promise there will be an all-you-can-eat tasting to follow.
"I've been really thinking about this a lot. Soup is the portal to home
cooking," says Anna Thomas, author of the "Love Soup" cookbook. "You cannot make too terrible a mistake with soup. Don't we want to know how to take care of ourselves a little?"
Though she's hardly a familiar name today, Thomas is the one who in the early 1970s lured many a hungry idealist rebelling against a meat-and-potatoes childhood into the kitchen with "The Vegetarian Epicure," a seminal book that came out of nowhere to sell more than 1 million copies.
More than 30 years later, she has another new cookbook, "Love Soup," a collection of 100 soups and dishes to eat with them, that she hopes will lure a new generation into the kitchen in much the same way her first book did. Like so many cooks, she worries that people are losing touch with an essential skill and is determined to do her part to halt the decline.
The Ralphs supermarket downtown starts selling Homegirl salsa today. It's the salsa made by women in Homeboy Industries' Homegirl Cafe & Catering job training program, and the move is part of an initiative by Ralphs Grocery Co. to help the L.A. gang-intervention agency learn how to commercialize its products.
In the highly competitive supermarket world, anti-gang agency Homeboy Industries is getting a break. Normally, it would be almost impossible for a start-up food company to even get a meeting to pitch a new product to a major supermarket chain.
This will be the organization's first venture into a major food retailer. Initially, Ralphs will sell two types of salsa, Homegirl Mango and Homegirl Molita, for $3.99 a pound at the deli counter. There are plans to expand to packaged salsa and hummus in the refrigerated case.
Chicken, fake and real, looks to be a target of several consumer and nutrition groups.
The
Center for Science in the Public Interest is acting as co-counsel on a
lawsuit filed today by an Arizona woman accusing Quorn Foods Inc. of
not disclosing on labels the fact that some people have serious
allergic reactions to the main ingredient in its Quorn line of meat
substitutes.
The lawsuit seeks to have Quorn disclose that information
on its package labels.
Quorn is derived from a protein-rich fungus, which the company grows in large vats. The fungus, Fusarium venenatum, was discovered growing in a field in Buckinghamshire, England, in the late 1960s and developed as a food product.
Meanwhile, the vegan-oriented Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine says it is readying a lawsuit against the giant KFC fast-food chain under California law for failing to warn consumers that the chain’s new grilled chicken product contains a dangerous carcinogen.
Food editor Russ Parsons recently spoke at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach about farmers markets, seafood and sustainability. "I think that the real meaning of sustainability is figuring out a way you can do better in the real world. All of the good intentions in the world don't matter if you can't follow through on them."
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."
It took basketball legend Jerry West a while to warm up to food. Raised as one of five children in a West Virginia mining family, his idea of a good dinner was one where he got to the food before any of his brothers. Even after he joined the NBA, he said he was slow to discover restaurants. He couldn’t afford them, he said. In the early 1960s, when he started, salaries were so low players had to work summer jobs.
“I couldn’t afford to go to restaurants, because I didn’t have any money,” he said. “Professional basketball wasn’t quite as glamorous in those days as it is now.”
Now, seemingly much to his surprise, West is getting into the restaurant business … in a way. He’s lending his name and a bunch of memorabilia to a steakhouse being opened by the Greenbrier resort back in his home state. The goal is to have the as-yet unnamed restaurant up and running this fall.
“I certainly wasn’t looking for a job,” said the 71-year-old West. But when his old friend Jim Justice asked him to help out after he bought the struggling property this spring, West pitched in. He has a vacation home on the Greenbrier property and lives there three months out of the year, when he’s not at home in Bel-Air. “So I figured, what the hell, I’ll do it.”
For non-basketball fans, West is a icon in his sport, literally. An all-NBA selection in 14 years of the 15 years, he played for the Los Angeles Lakers and was named to the league's 50th anniversary All-Star team. A silhouette image of him driving to the basket is the center of the NBA logo (in fact, that’s his nickname: “The Logo”). After retiring as a player, he became general manager and built both the "Showtime" Lakers that featured Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as the Shaquille O'Neal-Kobe Bryant team that won three straight titles in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Of course, you shouldn’t expect West to be manning the broiler at his new place. His role will mostly be stopping by and shaking hands when he’s on the property. But as a lover of steakhouses, he has some definite opinions about what he wants his place to be. As part of his research for the project, he hosted a couple of visitors from the resort on a weekend tour of several Los Angeles restaurants: steakhouses Cut, Boa (where he liked the meat) and Mastro’s (where he liked the sides) as well as his old favorite Dan Tana’s (“I’m practically a piece of the furniture there,” he said.)
A great steakhouse, West said, has to have three components. “The first thing and most important is you have to have great meat. And I think the ambience is so important. Then there’s the service, the feeling of congeniality. I love Dan Tana’s and I’d love to have that kind of clubby feeling, but maybe with a little more elegance.”
West is also a compulsive collector of wine, mostly first-growths and Wine Spectator- and Robert Parker-approved reds. He keeps fully stocked cellars at his homes both here and at the Greenbrier. “I’m crazy about it,” he said. “I’ve got more wines than I’ve got sense.”
We're Californians. We like our produce fresher than fresh. We want it picked that morning, if at all possible. And we love our farmers markets. It seemed like a no-brainer to launch an interactive map that featured every single farmers market in Southern California.
But that was just the starting point. We wanted this to be a resource where we could share details about when the season's first crop of mulberries, or white peaches, would be coming to market. We also wanted to know which markets are kid friendly, and which offer a more chef-y vibe. What were the best markets for grazing -- whether it be samples or prepared foods. We also wanted it to showcase one of our favorite features -- Russ Parsons' Cooking through the Seasons -- as well as our timely reports from our Market Watch columnist, David Karp. We wanted it to also link to our ever growing collection of recipes from the Times' test kitchen, as well as any food news.
Quick. It's the last week to pick up some fresh sour cherries. I found a 2-pound box of sour cherries from McMullin Orchards in central Utah at Sis, an Armenian deli and market in the Los Feliz area over the weekend.
They came in a hinged clear plastic box complete with the leaves. Smaller than Bings, they have a tart/sweet taste with some depth. What do people do with them, I asked Sis owner Jack Gurdzhyan. "They make jam and preserves, mostly," he said. "Russians infuse vodka with the cherries to make a liqueur too. Until three years ago, you couldn't get them in this country fresh." The variety is called Balaton, described on the McMullin website as "a newer variety, becoming more and more popular as a fresh eating cherry."
Me? I decided to make a cherry pie. I more or less followed a recipe in "Chez Panisse Fruit" by Alice Waters and company . But instead of the organic vegetable shortening in the pie crust recipe, I substituted leaf lard I'd bought in Seattle earlier in the year and still had frozen in my freezer. The lard came from Wooly Pigs at the Seattle farmers market and comes from a farmer who raises the curly-haired Hungarian Mangalitsa pig prized for its abundant fat. For the crust, I used basically half butter and half lard -- and what an incredibly flaky crust it made, even in this heat!
(Incidentally those little white dots you see in the photo are tapioca pearls. The pie is supposed to be slightly thickened with instant-cooking tapioca. I had some tapioca in my pantry, but don't think it was the quick-cooking kind and not all of it integrated into the filling. Nevermind, it still tasted fine.)
The cherries have a very different texture and flavor from Bings. They're softer and less meaty, more juice than flesh, really, and make a truly excellent pie.
The season for sour cherries is just three weeks long, so hurry if you're going to find some still available. If not, don't worry, Sis sells Armenian sour cherry jam all year long.
Sis Deli & Grocery, 1800-1/2 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 665-6406.
