Pie and pie and more pie. And still more pie. And cake for Thanksgiving

Key lime pie for Thanksgiving? Banana cream? Lemon meringue? Cake of any sort? These all sort of baffle Susan Sarich, the owner of SusieCakes bakery. She's a purist, and her shop expects to sell about 500 apple, pecan and pumpkin pies today.

That's not to say the popular Brentwood bakery will refuse to take your money for banana pudding or red velvet cupcakes. They also have layer cakes decorated with a turkey, and turkey-shaped butter cookies frosted for the day.

"People like variety," Sarich conceded Tuesday afternoon as the employees in the bakery piled pies in the front window, decorated cookies and baked batch after batch -- as many pies as they could get into their ovens for the holiday.

Sarich will miss being with her family in Chicago, where pumpkin pie will be on the menu for Thanksgiving. So why didn't she open her shop there? "That's a question my mother asks me every week when we talk," she said with a laugh. But it was her goal to spread the baked goods of the Midwest to California.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: The pie-making at SusieCakes. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

 

No way to get rid of your Thanksgiving guests: Food poisoning

It might well be enough work dealing with the relatives on Thanksgiving, never mind food poisoning. So here are some tips from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on food safety.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo credit:  Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Food Forward picks up grant to pick more fruit

Food Forward, the organization that harvests fruit trees all over Los Angeles and gives the produce to food banks, was awarded a $25,000 grant to move forward itself. Jewish Venture Philanthropy Fund-Los Angeles awarded the grant last week.

Rick Nahmias founded Food Forward 10 months ago and has an e-mail list of volunteers with more than 700 names. The group has picked nearly 65,000 pounds of fruit for food banks to distribute, he said Monday at a forum on hunger.

Nahmias says there are thousands of trees all over the county that need harvesting -- from a few trees in a backyard to former orchards. While citrus season is upon us, he says, Southern California has something to harvest all year long.

Food Forward has had five "picks," as it calls them, in November. Two are planned so far for December. For information call 818-530-4125.

 

-- Mary MacVean

 

A cookbook meant to bring into the grocery store

After working all day, do you find yourself wandering the aisles of Trader Joe’s, trying to figure out what products to put together to make dinner? Wander no longer. The authors of “Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s” feel your pain, and they are doing their part to ease your confusion.

“The Trader Joe’s Companion,” by Deana Gunn and Wona Miniati, is just a bit bigger than a Zagat’s guide. And if that’s too big for pocket or purse, it can live in the reusable shopping bags that sit in your car. (Of course, you have to do the work of remembering to bring them into the store.)

And while the book is geared toward what’s sold in one particular grocery store chain, you could use it elsewhere, though in some cases you’d have to adjust the products a little.

The authors are not associated with the company; they call themselves “very devoted” fans with busy lives who use many of Trader Joe’s prepared sauces, precut vegetables and other products. For instance, their black bean soup uses canned beans, frozen crushed garlic, jarred salsa and bagged diced onions, among other ingredients.

The book also has a handy bunch of blank pages in the back for notes.

-- Mary MacVean

(Photo by Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)

Movie popcorn equals three Quarter Pounders with butter?

Would you order three Quarter Pounders just for yourself -- or for your kid -- and then slather the buns with 12 pats of butter and wash 'em down with some sugary pop?

Well, that's what you are doing when you settle in with a popcorn and a soda at one movie theater chain. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that a medium popcorn at this chain contained a whopping 1,200 calories, 60 grams of saturated fat and 980 milligrams of sodium.

1,200 calories? That's an entire day's caloric allotment for some.  

Even worse: That's the calorie count without the "buttery" topping. Find out which chain, and see if your local movie theater was included in the study:

Does this make you mad?

-- Rene Lynch

Photo: Matthew Staver / Bloomberg

Baking really needs the baker's attention

Most bakers know that if they're about to tackle a complicated cake, it's a smart idea to turn to Rose Levy Beranbaum, whose patient directions and baking-science acumen can make even the toughest cake manageable. So for a story about her new cookbook, "Rose's Heavenly Cakes," I thought I'd try some of the simpler recipes to see what difference all of her research makes for those cakes that are almost second nature to many home cooks.

Just because it was an easier cake, however, didn't mean I could pay so little attention.

It was a weeknight. Our two teenagers needed help with (or nagging about, depending on your perspective) homework, and we had half a dozen friends coming to dinner so we could talk about how our kids might prepare for the SATs. So with half an eye and a wandering mind, I set out to make Beranbaum's English gingerbread cake.

The first glitch should have been a warning to slow down -- I destroyed two pages of the beautiful book by spilling corn syrup on them. But I soldiered on and put the baking pan in the oven and set the timer. Ten minutes later, I saw that the two eggs and the 2/3 cup of milk were still sitting on my counter.

After I screamed and then decided I had enough fruit for a fruit salad as an alternative dessert, I figured there was no harm in pulling the pan out of the oven and trying to fix the cake. I dumped the hot batter into a big bowl, whisked it hard to cool it and added the egg and milk. Back into the oven.

Though I'd certainly never feed it to Beranbaum, the result got eaten, the homework got done (mostly), and we decided on an SAT prep class. And I'll be making another gingerbread cake soon.

I called Beranbaum on Monday, and she thinks the reason I ended up with a cake at all was likely because it was the eggs I forgot. Had those been in the oven, they would have started to set and the cake would have been unredeemable.

And perhaps the gingerbread was more forgiving: "I don't know if you could get away with this with another cake."

"I love these mistakes," she very generously said, because they cause her to think about things from a new perspective. In fact, she said, her white chocolate buttercream recipe in the new book was the result of trying to make a dark chocolate cake with white chocolate; the lack of cocoa solids in the white chocolate meant the cake didn't set. "But I ended up with the most fantastic buttercream," Beranbaum said.

But generally, she said, multi-tasking and baking are poor partners.

What's your biggest kitchen mistake?

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: Ben Fink

Enough pie to reach the sky in KCRW contest

Bring on the pie! And the pie ... and the pie. One hundred and fifty pies. Sour cream apple blueberry. Apple and more apple in every variation, including one with bacon and smoked paprika. Lots of pumpkin pies (no surprise in November). Maple sweet potato pie with pecan brittle topping. Chocolate banana cream pie. Savory duck pie.

Welcome to the KCRW-FM (89.9) "Good Food" show pie contest, an event inspired by host Evan Kleiman’s summer project of baking a pie (almost) every day. Kleiman, the emcee at Saturday's contest, wore a pie pin embroidered by her friend Jill Smolin. She introduced herself as "your pie god," to lots of cheers.

'EAT: Los Angeles 2010' hits the shelves soon

Finding not just good food but the right food for the moment in this sprawling multicultural city can be enough work to make me stay home and eat oatmeal for dinner. Or go to the same spot over and over. So I, for one, am happy that "EAT:Los Angeles 2010" is scheduled to hit stores Dec. 1.

The second edition of the guide has more than 1,200 listings, from food trucks to fancy restaurants, all over the city, with 250 new listings. "I really was surprised that we had more new places than had closed," says editor Colleen Dunn Bates.

The 2010 guide also has a new section of a dozen tours of top food-loving neighborhoods such as Little India, Abbott Kinney Boulevard and Boyle Heights. The book was written by a group of food writers, including Linda Burum, an expert on international foods who writes for The Times; Amelia Saltsman, author of the "Santa Monica Farmers Market Cookbook"; and Pat Saperstein of Eating L.A.

Bates says there's been an increase in neighborhood gourmet markets such as the Larchmont Larder and the Oaks in Hollywood. She also took note of the food trucks trolling the city, found via blogs and tweets. While "EAT: Los Angeles" includes some of them, she says they're not so easy to keep track of.

-- Mary MacVean

Lunch with Alice Waters in Larchmont elementary school's garden

When Alice Waters talks about improving school lunch, she doesn't just mean making the chicken nuggets more nutritious. She wants to see a table set, maybe with flowers. She wants children to have enough time to have conversations as they eat.

"There are lots of wonderful gardens that are happening in schools, and some progress is being made in the kitchens," Waters, chef-owner of the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., said in the garden at Larchmont Charter School.

And eventually? She'd like to see high schools in which the students run the cafeterias and work in them alongside teachers and cooks. She'd like lunch to be served, for free, to everyone.

"That's a dream. We haven't gotten there yet," she said today at the Larchmont Charter School, an elementary school that served lunch to Waters, chef Mark Peel, City Council President Eric Garcetti and other guests to celebrate its affiliation with Waters' Edible Schoolyard program.

Larchmont Charter has two schools and one of them gets its lunch from the Farmers Kitchen, a project of the organization Sustainable Economic Enterprises of Los Angeles. They served the same lunch to the adults who were visiting: cheese quesadillas with salsa, black beans, green salad, fruit salad and cookies.

Growing and eating it all on the family farm

When Greg Nauta of Rocky Canyon Farm kills a cow, he gets two tri-tips. That’s doesn’t put him in a good position to sell to customers looking for tri-tip in quantity, so he needs people willing to cook all the other parts of the animal.

Fortunately, chefs such as Ben Ford of Ford’s Filling Station in Culver City are interested in doing just that.

They, along with farmer Phil McGrath and moderator Evan Kleiman, talked Thursday night on a panel at the Santa Monica Library called “Eating the Whole Farm,” about a revivial of “nose to tail” farming and cooking practices.

Ford said he is buying whole rabbits, deer and pigs for his restaurant, adding that doing so gives him and his staff a new “reverence” for food animals.

McGrath noted that eating seasonably requires people to try new foods, to adapt to what's available, and that people are coming around to that idea.

“I remember back in the day when nobody would buy a beet. People were afraid of beets,” said Kleiman, host of the KCRW show “Good Food” and chef-owner of Angeli Caffe on Melrose.