El Churrero -- the Churro Man -- sidesteps tamale carts, squeezes between bumpers and beggars, working 24 lanes of idling vehicles.
He walks through shimmering exhaust clouds, hawking sombreros teetering atop his head and sweets held aloft in a blue basket. His churros are warm and moist. "Churros here," he yells. "If they're not hot, you don't pay."
Deciderio Mauricio Cantera first waded into the sea of traffic at the gateway to California in 1968 and set eyes on the bored and the hungry as they waited, fidgeted and honked, inching toward the San Ysidro Port of Entry.
This isn't a traffic jam, thought Mauricio. This is a swap meet on wheels.
To American border crossers, the ragtag knots of vendors have long evoked wonder, pity and annoyance -- symbols of disorder and desperation at the shabby entrance to the developing world.
I came to Barbados for the flying fish sandwiches.
Not that this small island at the easternmost edge of the Caribbean doesn't offer other attractions. Like perfect weather. And beaches that come in two flavors -- Caribbean, which has a sea that is turquoise and tranquil, and into which the sun sets spectacularly every evening, and Atlantic, where the coastline is rocky and the sand is the color and consistency of cake flour.
Then there are the Barbadians themselves, people who are the very definition of friendly locals. And the fact that 300 years of British rule have left the island with some interesting Anglo-Caribbean quirks, including stone churches straight out of "Jane Eyre" and cricket players with dreadlocks.
Still for me, it was the flying fish sandwiches. And the macaroni pie. And the pepper sauce. Definitely the pepper sauce.
Because in my mind, the most compelling reason to travel anyplace is food. And Zagat -- holy book of the foodie traveler -- has proclaimed Barbados the Culinary Capital of the Caribbean. Read more here:
Terminal 1 at LAX: You know it for those long, long security lines for Southwest Airlines. But now it is also home to a Pinkberry, one of the frozen yogurt chain's more than 40 outlets in California. You still have to make it to the passenger gate level, but for froyo fans, knowing a cold, creamy one awaits might make the lines a little more tolerable.
Not everyone is feeling the economic crunch. Check out this story in today's Business section about one area in California that is doing just fine, thank you very much:
In the wine country north of Santa Barbara, the global economic crisis has drained wine sales, sapped tourist spending and siphoned away hotel profits.
But five years after the Santa Ynez Valley was featured in an Oscar-winning film, the region is still feeling the upside of "Sideways." The offbeat comedy about the wine-soaked adventures of two hapless buddies drew crowds of connoisseurs to the region's wineries, vineyards and restaurants.
And to the delight of merchants and wine makers, the continued popularity of the 2004 film has helped soften the blow of the worst recession in a generation. Visitors continue to snap up maps that mark the wineries and restaurants shown in the film. Even today, tourists request the same hotel room and restaurant booths where the movie's bottle-tilting heroes, Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), sleep, eat and drink -- a lot. Read the rest of the story here:
Reporting from Pemberton, Australia -- The treasure lies in the Great Southern Forests region, in groves of oak and hazelnut trees, away from the typical tourist spots of Oz. Sometimes, I think I am the sole proprietor of this secret, but then I remember that Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià and Michael Mina know it too -- so well that they're already using Western Australia's Périgord black truffles, this black gold, this diamond of the kitchen, in their restaurants around the world.
France has historically been king of the Périgord truffle, but unexpectedly low yields there, coupled with a huge projected harvest from the Southern Forests township of Manjimup, have turned this corner of Australia into the promised land for foodies, chefs and mycologists, the branch of botany whose focus is fungi.
Linda e-mailed me yesterday evening looking for a recipe from our archives:
"I was looking ... for a cookie recipe from Harris Ranch Restaurant, but did not locate it. Could you help me find the recipe for Pecan Thumb Print Cookies? Thank you, Linda"
We tracked down the recipe, which originally ran as a Culinary SOS on Jan. 11, 2006. We had written:
"Travelers driving between Southern California and the Bay Area on Interstate 5 have made these cookies a popular fixture at the Harris Ranch Inn & Restaurant in Coalinga. Chewy in texture, they have a pecan pie flavor and taste like a buttery lace cookie, although they have no butter."
Enjoy, Linda!
The recipe follows the jump. And click here for more Culinary SOS recipes. If you have a favorite restaurant recipe you'd like to request, feel free to e-mail me at noelle.carter@latimes.com. I'll do my best to track down the recipe.
According to Viji Anton Shook of Rancho Palos Verdes, Stella! in New Orleans makes the most divine Sazerac with Cognac and Absinthe. So Viji wrote to Culinary SOS for help:
The drink is smooth with honey overtones making it a perfect elixir for a hot summer night. I would love to recreate a bit of New Orleans here in LA. Would you be able to get the recipe? Thank you.
Actually Viji, thank YOU. We love it when Times Test Kitchen Manager Noelle Carter has an excuse to test a cocktail recipe. Here's your recipe. Cheers!
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.”
Copia's gardeners were startled by the dark red dripping down my arm, but all I wanted was more information on the tree I had just been standing under.
Here's how the night started:
As we pulled up into Copia's lot, we eyed grapes on haphazard vines clawing their way up the surrounding fence. If this is what passed for weeds in Napa, we couldn't imagine what Copia's gardens would hold. We noticed the manicured gardens fronting the two tracts near Copia's main building. The weather was inviting and the gardens vivid, so before going deeper indoors to Copia's formal exhibits, we stepped among the careful plantings.
