Monday Night Dinner in MDR

Dinner last night inspired me to write a haiku to commemorate the occasion. We took D’s aunt and uncle (wrapping up an abbreviated version of their annual trek out West) to C&O Trattoria in Marina del Rey. None of them (my boy included) had been there before, and it had been years since I’d graced the place with my presence. I was a little dismayed when we were led in to the dining room and I saw that the seats were nothing more than your standard green plastic chairs…I was worried that I recalled the restaurant being much better than it actually was.

However, Raymond and Janie quickly put my mind at ease. They loved the atmosphere, said it was just their kind of place. The hot, buttery garlic rolls didn’t hurt, either. They both got the special pasta, linguini with clam sauce. It had clams in the shell, too, which apparently is a very very good thing. D and I know nothing of such things. He got the Fettucine Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto, I the Pappardelle avec Wild Mushrooms & Chicken Apple Sausage. Everyone seemed pleased as punch…or maybe it was just the chianti? I sure am glad I drink red wine now. Raymond advised us early in the night to always get the house wine, said you can’t go wrong. In wine as in gambling, the house always wins. And I win doubly--wine never gives this little girl a hangover!

Still waiting for that haiku, are you? All right, you’ve been good. Here ya go:

Rolls of Garlic Sate

(Outside, the Ocean Winds Whip)

Red Wine Freely Flows

Another Random Emily Musing

I think I wrote this one sometime this summer:

"There’s something so sad, somehow, about seeing a middle-aged man, sitting in front of a receptionist’s computer…temping. Ready for action, dressed in his nicest shirt and tie, sitting quietly with his hands folded, watching the bustle of big business around him while he reads the morning paper. How did he get there? What string of bad luck led him to the point of seeking out temp work filling in for the receptionist at a medium-sized private equity in Santa Monica? How does he feel about it? Ashamed that he is forced to temp…or happy to have finally gotten the call for duty? I imagine him waking up at 6 every morning, showering and ironing his shirt and pants…and then waiting by the phone. Maybe he showers the night before, just to make sure he doesn’t miss a call? I want to smile at him, show him some friendliness just in case he is hating the fact that he is here right now, but he doesn’t look up from his paper."

Found: An Old Emily Musing

I just found this little piece--I named the file  simply "10-23" (October 23, 2007):

Today I counted down the minutes, as I do every day, until I could break free and suck some life back into my nearly lifeless, corporate body. When 6PM came, I cut my shackles and headed home. 

What greeted me when I went out the door was not the usual unspoken unclean smog of Los Angeles, but something dirtier, heavier. My eyes felt itchy and dry. The fires, which had up until now been beyond my periphery, seemed ever closer.

I quickly got into Lainey and forgot about the air as I rocked to the Beach Boys on my Workout Magic playlist and got cooled off by my A/C. As I battled through Hollywood traffic, I wondered if it was bad to curse the GOD-AWFUL driver who happened to have the enormous “God Bless” Sign in the back of his car. Should that REALLY give him license to swerve manically in and out of lanes without signaling? I’ll have to meditate on that one.

As I drove up Cahuenga towards the freeway, I thought of little beyond getting into the left lane to get onto the 101. I missed it. Why ANYONE would INTENTIONALLY take Cahuenga past the freeway entrance is beyond me. It gets ridiculously backed up and takes 10 times the amount of time. I was busily swearing at the snail’s pace of the traffic (as the 101 traffic running parallel streamed steadily along) and not paying attention to anything outside, when suddenly I reached the peak of the hill.

The skies had been just dark up til now. It’s late October at 6:30, so I wasn’t questioning that point. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have remembered that yesterday wasn’t quite so dark…

But when I got that peak, I saw something odd. The horizon looked different. It looked like that silhouette time, that David knows I love so much. But this wasn’t the regular white-blue silhouette against the sky. These silhouettes stood against an orange-red sky, beneath the smoke, above the horizon.

I became breathless. I had to turn off Diana Ross on my iPod because I could not think of anything but this sight I was seeing and all that it represented. Suddenly I was reminded of all the lives that had been displaced in the last 48 hours; all the homes that had been built from hard earned money that were suddenly and cruelly burned to the ground. I realized that all of my money troubles, which I had brought onto myself, were nothing compared to the devastation that so many of my fellow Southern Californians were suddenly faced with.

I was at the stoplight at Barham, much sooner than I expected. There was a man there holding his cardboard sign, like so many other intersections throughout the city. I didn’t even look at the sign, but simply felt relief at the fact that I had cash in my wallet to give him. I needed to do something, anything, to help someone other than myself right then. I fumbled in my wallet and pulled out $2. I rolled down my window and the man said, “God bless.” Just like that fricking bad driver’s car.

I turned the corner and started down Ventura. The skies weren’t red anymore…they were just back to that same smoky black night sky. I really hope that guy buys himself a burger or a taco or something. How many drugs can $2 buy you on the street, anyway?

Turning Over a New Beaf

Beaf=Blog Leaf. Like Vlog refers to Video Blog...oh never mind.
Mmmmboy it has been awhile.
I have been struggling a lot with this blog and its purpose, for me and the world-at-large. Because, you and I both know everyone and their mom reads it. Hello Kazakhstan!
I think what has been a struggle is that I really want to say something neat and unique and cool every time I write, and neat, unique, cool things regarding FOOD just don't happen to me every day. To be perfectly honest, they DO happen a lot more than the 10 previous entries in this blog over the past 10 months, but it has really gotten hard to get up the desire to write when TV or books or sleep were alternatives.
As much as I LOVE food (and you know I do) I think that if I want this whole blogging thing to work, I need to encompass a bit more of Emilyworld outside of my kickass vintage kitchen. Shoot, I still need to do a blog about that!
MY POINT IS...if I want to do this blog regularly, and my multitudes of fans demand new material regularly, I need to write about more than just food. Like music, something I've been studying for umpteen years. And movies. And books. And life as a twenty-something. And...and. Yes.
So, this is my intro to a new chapter of Em the Epicurean. The name change will come shortly. Until then, kisses, my dears.
Cheers!
Em

Tofu Peanut Kale Scramble, take one

Gentle Reader,

Haha...imagine if I went all Miss Manners on you. No freaking way, dudes.

Yahoo often has a link on their front page for recipes...generally easy-peasy ones for the harried cook with no time and a desire to cut calories. They don't usually inspire me--I have enough cookbooks, Cooks' Illustrated issues and recipes that I've already stuffed into my kitchen, all right? However, for whatever reason, today I took the plunge and printed out another recipe to add to my ridiculous collection. The recipe can be found here. If you don't feel like reading my ramblings about making it, you can just stop here and go on to live a relatively good life. Just in case you were wondering.

All right, getting back to tonight's dinner. What really drew me into this recipe, I guess, was the sauce. Peanut Sauce in any form is pretty splendiferous in my book. The sauce in this recipe was basically perfect, and super easy. I used white vinegar, fyi, and did not find any issue with that as substitute for rice vinegar. I'm glad I didn't buy rice vinegar just for this--if you are like me and don't have that in your kitchen stock, don't even sweat it. One thing I will say is more a criticism of my skills: MAKE SURE the ginger is really finely minced. I chopped it sort of half-ass fashion, because I don't have the greatest knife wielding skillz, and there were points in eating the dish where I got a bigger ginger taste than I wanted. The smaller the pieces, the more all of the flavors are able to just meld together so one doesn't pop out and hit you over the head like the ginger did to me.

So, this dish is called Tofu with Peanut Ginger Sauce, but upon close examination of the recipe, I came to the conclusion that those were all supporting players to the star of the show, the greens. With that in mind, I decided to spice things up a bit in that regard--the "BAM" factor, if you will. I love spinach, but I decided to dive in and substitute kale instead. You might remember my earlier post about M de

 Chaya in which I sang the praises of their kale with peanut salad--that is sort of what I was going for here. Thing was, I had never worked with kale, EVER. How different could it be?

The answer is, well, not too different.  I assumed that the kale would wilt like any normal green, and it did...slowly. The recipe instructs you throw all of the veggies and sauce in at once, but if you do that, and don't have a gargantuan pan, you're apt to end up with a mess. Whether you use spinach or kale or any other green, I would split it in half and allow the first group to wilt before adding the rest. One beef I have with this recipe is that they don't mention that at all. They are asking you to throw four cups of greens into a pan but they don't warn you that they won't necessarily fit right away. I don't consider myself an expert cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a bit of experience at a stove and knew that...if these recipes are really meant for anybody, though, they should TELL people these things and don't just make them find it out for themselves once a cup of their spinach has ended up on their stove and/or floor.

Here is another beef with this part of the recipe, by the by. (Sorry, by the way, veggies, for the figure of speech, but that's all it is-ain't no cow in this cookin'.) Because you're going to be working so hard to make sure the greens wilt, you're not going to have a lot of room in your pan for those there mushrooms and scallions to cook very well. I ended up with some barely cooked sliced mushrooms, which didn't really gel with the rest of the dish. I would suggest tossing the mushrooms with a small amount of olive oil and nuking them for about 15 seconds. It will give them a chance to soften up a bit without overcooking everything else in the pan.

This is the finished product as I made it 

tonight:

Sorry for the lack of finesse-I really need to learn how to take good food photos. You'll notice that you see a lot more kale and mushroom in there than tofu--that is another fault of the recipe as it stands. It calls for one 14 oz container (standard size), but I would say that for it to stand up to the amount of greens called for, I would almost double the tofu...or else leave it out completely. This dish would do extremely well as a side accompaniment to chicken breast, or else as one of several veggie dishes merged together to make a meal. In spite of Yahoo's claim that this makes a great weeknight meal, I just don't buy it on its own. Overall, though, it is a really delicious dish. I urge you to try it out, and make your own substitutions, with different greens, veggies, and maybe even a different protein. I swear, anything will taste good with Peanut Sauce. :)

And friends...as a final note, let me apologize for once again falling off the side of the earth for a couple months. Life has been busy, with travels and recitals galore (ok, two recitals and two weeks on the East Coast), and my prime blogging time, during my slow workdays, is not allowable in the new work digs. HOWEVER, David and I will soon be moving to a lovely little flat closer to work and I will have some more TIME to do things I enjoy. At the top of that list is baking, cooking and BLOGGING...and I promise you a big chocolate cake if I do not stick with it post-move. Deal? Really, you win either way. Actually, you'd probably prefer the cake....

Until next time, my sweets!

Cheers,

Em

I'm ba-ack!

Hey...is anyone there? Where have you guys BEEN? It's been FOREVER!

OK, OK. My bad. Did I not mention I am notoriously bad at keeping any habit up for long periods, even those as glorious and addictive as blogging about foodie goodness?

Miss me? Well, I missed YOU, my lovelies!!

You're probably wondering what inspired me to get back to the grindstone after my self-imposed blogger exile...all it took was a fairly basic, but YUM meal from Curry Land on Lankershim. The place itself doesn't seem much bigger than my walk-in closet, and thus I've never been inclined to eat there--takeout's the name of this game.

Although they inexplicably changed their name from Curry House to the aforementioned "Land" a few months ago, everything else remains the same for this little Indian gem of the East SF Valley. Every time we have ordered from here, the food has been consistently good. I realized tonight that we were enjoying a total comfort food dinner, though I certainly was not having flashbacks to nights during my childhood where I curled up by the fire with a hot plate of Chicken Tikka and samosas. As I've mentioned in the past, I was a very picky eater growing up and never would have touched most of the items on CL's basic menu...so what is it about the stuff that makes me feel like I've practically crawled back inside the womb? Every bit of the Sag Paner (spinach with paneer cheese-basically the most delicious creamed spinach you can imagine accompanied by cubes of cheese slighter softer and milder than feta) and Sag Aloo (potatoes with more spinach-I guess we were in a Popeye-fying mood tonight) made me feel like putting on my fuzzy slippers and watching, I don't know, "Pollyanna" or something (or would it be "Bollyanna"? Woah, just came up with that, I swear!). Pile those two entrees on some of CL's basmati rice (which seems to have just a touch of saffron in it for color) and you can just plan on mopping up that puddle of happy that is me.

OK, now, to be fair, the meal was not perfect. Along with the two veggie dishes, we ordered Chicken Dansak, described as "chicken cooked in thick lentil sauce with a touch of lemon juice." The chicken was tender, which was necessary in order to cut through the enormous chunks; however, the "thick lentil sauce" was less than impressive. There was little flavor beyond its indistinguishable heat, and no indication of lentils beyond a less-than-desirable graininess in texture.

Another snafoo is actually because of my own faulty memory. Every time we've ordered from Curry House/Land, I've been taken in by the list of delicious naan and insist on ordering some...and every time, I've been disappointed. Rather than the warm, fresh, well-seasoned naans I've come to expect in every Indian restaurant (when I eat THERE), takeout naan comes across as slightly stale, with none of that delicious doughiness. Tonight's choice was garlic, and the garlic meagerly sprinkled on top of the bread seemed bottled rather than fresh. Perhaps third time is the charm, and I'll leave my naan intake to restaurant visits from here on out.

A couple basic things I've learned about Curry Land/House: 1) order plenty ahead of time. The first two times we went there, we waited an inordinately long amount of time for our food. Tonight it wasn't bad, but there were only two people eating in-house. Other times, it's been much busier. 2) Stick to veggie dishes. To each their own, of course, but I've found that the vegetable dishes have been consistently good, while the meat dishes seemed lacking. Not bad, but not worth giving up another serving of Sag Paner, ya know?

Well, I think that is all for this installment. I really have missed you. I hope this wasn't too terribly written--I am feeling really rusty. Tomorrow promises to be another exciting dinner out, so I hope to write about that as well. Glucklichen Freitag und Wochenende!

Cheers,

Em

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

IRISH CREAM SHAKE

Rice Dream drink (Vanilla)

Rice Dream ice cream (Vanilla)

Bailey's Irish Cream (Mint Chocolate)

Green food coloring

York Peppermint Patties, ground

Mix at will and drink up!

 

Cheers!

Em