Category Archives: Eats

Kale

Posted on by

When we go to the Super King on San Fernando Road, not far from us, I’ll pick up a couple bunches of every kind of greens they have. All of them. Turnip greens. Dandelion greens. Collard greens. You name it. We love greens and could eat them every day. And Super King must have ten varieties. Each packed with nutrition.

Well, I pick up every kind but one. I really don’t care for kale. It’s bitter, for one thing, the only green I know of that is bitter. And it’s hard to chew, for another, the only kind I know of that is hard to chew. It has no more nutrition in than any other green, I checked. When I found that out I stopped buying it for good.

So why the hell is it so popular? And why so hip? Why did someone decide the least palatable of greens is the one that everyone on the westside with too much money insists be on their plate? I mean what is wrong with those people? Haven’t they even eaten dandelion greens or collard greens before?

Well, no they haven’t. They have never been poor. I guess kale is the green that separates the people with money from the people eating collard greens.

Besides, kale is gluten free.

Musso and Frank

Posted on by

Went to Musso and Frank yesterday and had a tasty meal. Sometimes you get delicious stuff in there, sometimes you wish you’d ordered something else, but that’s not the point. You go for the vibe, the history, that ancient coolness which is such a rare thing in this town. They plow under everything in Hollywood and build something new. Almost nothing is saved. And even if something is saved, will anyone notice? Or care? Los Angeles is where people come to start all over again, it’s a whole city full of people who’ve cut loose from their families, their exes, their pasts, themselves even, and pretend all of that never happened or they never knew those people back home or never had been a male cheerleader, a hit man, a mom. And we pretend the old neighborhood never existed, the old restaurant, the old film studio, the old anything…it just gets plowed under like the time I saw Tiny Naylor’s in Hollywood being leveled by a bulldozer. I stood there across La Brea helpless, all the times I’d been there passing before my eyes, and all the times I might have been there going up in a poof just like that, unfulfilled. The bulldozer reared back, lowered the blade again and pushed right through the dining room. Again and again. Tiny Naylor’s lay there, a disemboweled heap where once incredibly hot waitresses held trays piled high with hamburgers. The men would stare. Their dates pretended not to notice and seethed. The bulldozer plunged into the wreckage and scooped up a mess and let it drop into a big dumpster truck. Dust filled the air. I couldn’t watch anymore and wondered why L.A. ate its own past for lunch like that. Ate it and digested it and used the nutrients to raise new shopping centers, apartments, schools. There’s a school now where once a famous bowling alley once stood. The school was needed. There’s always another bowling alley. And too bad about Tiny Naylor’s , but there’s always Norms. Of course our Norms is now a hospital. Hospitals are needed. And there’s always Astro. Norms we used to go to when we were punk rockers and broke. We’d have spent all our money at the Brave Dog or the ON Klub and walk to Norms the next morning after scraping together a few 99 cents breakfast’s worth of spare change and the odd crumpled beer soaked dollar bill or two. Then we’d walk back to the house, smoke whatever dope was left and listen to loud records all afternoon, laughing and not worrying about a thing. Reagan was president and the world was going to end any minute.

Sometimes for dinner we’d scrape enough together for the Old Spaghetti Factory. We’d walk down there on a Friday night as Sunset Boulevard began filling up with Friday night cruisers. We’d order extra bread and fill our pockets. You could live on bread back then. Bread and beer and weed. On the way home we’d stop on the Sunset Boulevard overpass and watch the Hollywood Freeway come to life, white lights coming at us, red lights disappearing around the Scientology Celebrity Center on their way to the Valley. Dusk fell and the city turned to blackness and light and the craziness of the 1980’s.

That Old Spaghetti Factory is gone now. Just a shell where a restaurant used to be. They had to leave it like that, a shell. Whoever bought it was not supposed to tear it down. Historical designation. Like that helped any. It looks like a monument to post-war Berlin, like a B-17 dropped a big bomb square on the thing and everyone inside eating spaghetti is in heaven now.

Musso and Frank, though, hasn’t changed. Not one whit. Not even the waiters. Certainly not the wallpaper. Or the menus. Or menu. What Charlie Chaplain once ate you can eat now. What Bogie once drank you can drink now. What Orson Welles once complained about you can complain about now. That’s what Musso and Frank is. Continuity. Between it and the Pantry you know what was then is still now, only a little more expensive. Continuity is a rare thing in this town. Studios hire editors to maintain continuity in their movies, so one scene looks like the next, the curtains, clothes, who’s holding what beer and with what hand. It’s all fake, of course. One scene was shot weeks after the one before it. But you can’t tell. It’s a nice trick. LA’s like that. Stuff looks like it’s always been here.  It hasn’t. That hospital was once a Norms. That public storage warehouse was once a silent movie studio. That school was where Robert Kennedy was shot. But you can’t tell. Continuity. That’s a take. Let’s break for lunch.

After Musso and Frank (they have valet parking now…that’s different) we wandered over to Hollywood Forever cemetery. Parked the car by Johnny Ramone’s grave with the big bronze Johnny Ramone on top. Kids kept coming up, carloads or straggling little groups. They looked up at Johnny and held back tears. We looked the other way. The Fairbanks are down there, Douglas senior and junior. Their crypt lies at the far end of a long reflecting pool, and everything is marble and perfect. A perfect pair of swans glided across the water, and the rain came down and the swans never noticed.

(2013)

Rock’n’Roll Denny’s

Posted on by

Before the recession I didn’t drink PBR. I had class.

Before the recession I didn’t use coupons, either. Well I did, but not so seriously. And I couldn’t calculate them so well. I didn’t know that two boxes of x with a fifty cent coupon is still less per y than one box of z even without the coupon. No, I didn’t. And when I saw the little piles of coupons that crazy ladies leave on the shelf I ignored them, like they weren’t even there. Yesterday I found a better coupon in the pile. And I left my not as good a coupon in return. I’d joined the coupon underground without even realizing it. Before the recession I didn’t belong to the coupon underground. I would never have belonged to a coupon underground. I had class.

I take a sip from my PBR and think.

Before the recession I ignored restaurant coupons. Now we have them in the car in a little folder. Coupons for everything, everywhere. All kinds of food. Denny’s even. Denny’s. Before the recession I didn’t eat at Denny’s. Not even Rock’n’roll Denny’s. I had class.

I’ve only eaten there twice since the recession. Three times if you include the Cypress Park Denny’s. Which we aren’t. We’re discussing the much hipper Rock’n’roll Denny’s. It’s in Hollywood, right off the 101, on Sunset Blvd. With that kind of propinquity it ought to be one of the hippest places on the planet but jesus effing christ it’s a goddamn Denny’s so let’s get real Brick. Wasting people’s time talking about a Denny’s. Even if it’s a rock’n’roll Denny’s.

Before the recession I didn’t talk to myself in my own blog.

We still call it Rock’n’roll Denny’s but I dunno, it doesn’t seem like a rock’n’roll Denny’s anymore. Now it’s just another stupid Denny’s. It’s changed. Those were different times back then. The poets they studied rules of verse, Lou tells us, and the ladies they rolled their eyes. Except we didn’t, really. No rules of verse got studied, and ladies rarely rolled their eyes. We just raised holy hell at noisy underground holes in the wall and drank too much beer and smoked too much of Pope’s dope and wound up at Rock’n’roll Denny’s because we had the righteous munchies and the parking lot was fairly safe. Rock’n’roll Denny’s used to be full of characters and denizens and Wild Man Fischer. I miss Wild Man Fischer. He’d sing for you in the parking lot if you didn’t run away. Sing Don’t Be a Singer.

Wild Man Fischer. Don't be a singer.

Wild Man Fischer. Don’t be a singer.

A sad tale it was, too. Liars and swindlers and chiselers, Frank Zappa broke his heart. He’d sing that broken heart out there right outside the doors at the Rock’n’roll Denny’s, and I’d give him a buck and try to get away. There were eggs in there with my name on them. Eggs and hash browns and bacon and wheat toast and a big glass of orange juice and keep coming with the coffee. Sometimes the waitresses were gorgeous. I’d watch them walk away in their little skirts and comfort shoes and dream tiny little dreams wide awake.

This is the final draft of this magnum opus. The first draft was shorter and a mess and had an altogether different ending that went like this: Rock pspsrt svissossssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssm. That’s it. That last word has only two vowels and a train of sibilants. Looks like a snake crawled across the keyboard.  But there was no snake. I just fell asleep. I didn’t fall asleep at the keyboard like that before the recession. Though class had nothing to do with it. I just went to bed earlier. You can’t blame the economy for everything.

Vegans

Posted on by

I was sitting at a bar last nite and within three minutes the lady next to me told me she was a vegan. She spent the next ten minutes talking about food. Then about Whole Foods. After that about a macro-biotic diet that means you will never die. But I like the lady, otherwise I would have moved to the other end of the bar. They weren’t talking about food down there. They were talking about all the things you do that don’t involve eating or cooking or shopping at Whole Foods.

The funny thing about vegans is that while they never shut up talking about food you can’t talk about food because if you did you’d mention something offensive and they’ll make that disgusted Vegan face and start talking about their food even more. It’s like talking to hardcore Christians and mentioning Jews which makes them talk about Christianity even more. You can’t stop them.

Christians don’t party, though. Not like we party. But vegans, if you can get them to stop talking about food for a minute, will party. That’s why they’re fun. But then they’ll smoke pot, and get the munchies, and start talking about food again. And I start looking at the other end of the bar, where omnivores are talking about everything under the sun and laughing. Laughing. You can’t talk about organic produce and laugh. Vegetables just aren’t funny. You can’t talk about fruit and laugh. Fruit’s not funny. Except for bananas. Banana peels are funny. But nobody eats banana peels. Not even Vegans. Not even raw foodies. Not even Fruitarians like Sky Saxon, who said God spelled backwards is dog.

But Sky probably did smoke a banana peel or two in his time. You don’t write a “Mr. Farmer” high on life.

Baloney salad

Posted on by

I can remember my mother making baloney salad–Oscar Mayer bologna, pickles, onion pushed through a kitchen meat grinder. The grinder was a big solid steel thing that you’d vice clamp to the counter and turn the crank. It was so 19th century I can’t believe this was in my lifetime. In fact, our meat grinder was probably not much different from the one patented in 1845. It had revolutionized sausage making and made hamburger stands possible, but we made baloney salad. Being the eldest, my job was to turn the crank. Watch your fingers my mother warned. I was probably six or seven, and all my younger siblings watched, amazed, as the baloney came out a ground up mess. Then the pickles went into the grinder, the crank would go round and round, and unlike the bologna, I could feel the pickles being pulverized, like the fingers my mother warned me about. Then in went the onion with a satisfying crunch. You mix ’em up together in a bowl and add lots of mayonnaise. Baloney salad. We loved it. Not sure about now. Within a few years there were astronauts on the moon and it was all space food sticks. Then microwave ovens. Now people post pictures of food and we all gain digital sustenance. I don’t post pictures of food. Or cats. I do post pictures of manual meat grinders, though.

Meat grinder. Ours didn't have the high tech grill attachment. We didn't go for any of that fancy stuff.

Meat grinder. Every kitchen of tomorrow had one in 1845.

Fish boil

Posted on by

I went to a fish boil in Wisconsin once. Take a cauldron, add fish and potatoes, bring to a boil, toss gasoline on the fire, the cauldron boils over, fish oil causes a flare up for a few seconds, then eat the fish and potatoes. I asked why not add a carrot or onion. Got cold Norwegian stares. Everyone ate in Lutheran silence, then went out to their cars and drove home. That was it? I thought we’d missed something. No, that was it. Oh. Silence. So how’d you like it? The fish was good, I said.  It really was. And the potato was too. The Norwegians really know how to boil fish and potatoes. I liked when they threw the gas on the fire too. Yah, sure, he said, that was exciting. Continue reading →

Turkey

Posted on by

So as always, I just went out to get the turkey. I always wait till Thanksgiving Eve, because I prefer a fresh turkey. The frozen ones are so plebian, so hoi polloi, so common. So I went to the Ralphs on Colorado in Glendale, since our Ralphs is now an empty shell where a Ralphs used to be. Made a bee line for the turkeys. Unfortunately the frozen turkeys were no longer common, they weren’t even uncommon, in fact they were gone. The fresh turkeys were gone too. All that remained were two organic, free range fresh turkeys for those easily guilt ridden, but $66 for a turkey seemed nuts. They had lots of hams, though, and even more chickens, and I briefly considered getting a roaster and a lot of breading. Instead, I got back in the car, and after a winding but traffic free excursion through hills with fabulous views of Forest Lawn, I made it to the Vons on Los Feliz. We used to shop there ages ago, but apparently Glendale is rich now, as the prices were ridiculous. But they had turkeys, lots of turkeys. Frozen ones. Ran out of the fresh ones days ago the guy at the meat counter said. He picked a bird out of the cooler. This one’s thawing nicely already. Just soak it in the sink and watch TV all night. Sigh. A people’s turkey. Feeling the Bern. I dumped it in the cart and headed towards produce. And what beautiful produce it was too. Lush and green and ripe and snappy apple red. All I needed were Brussels sprouts. They had one. One single Brussels sprout. It looked like an absurd little cabbage. All about were the bits and pieces of sprouts, like there’d been a Brussels sprout riot. I considered getting the last one and letting my family fight over it, but no. I even looked for frozen Brussels sprouts, but they too were gone, meaning there are more than a few people in Glendale who can’t cook. No one seemed to be interested in the frozen Brussels sprouts in butter sauce. So I wandered about doing some last minute shopping and marveling at all the beautiful women doing their last minute shopping too. Suddenly the Vons in Glendale, in the wrong part of Glendale at that, is a babe magnet, like an Armenian Beverly Center. Though they were of every race and color, actually, lovely, and young enough to be my daughters. Grand daughters. Life, even in a post-racial society, can be cruel.

In the car again, heading up Brand. How would I face my family tomorrow without Brussel sprouts? The only time anybody ever eats the damn things is at Thanksgiving when it’s the law. Somewhere in Atwater it hit me….Gelson’s. Maybe they would have them. They would be solid gold, but they would have them. Which they did. They even had parking. I grabbed two packages full of the things. Gelson’s wraps their Brussels sprouts in little mesh bags. Very neat. Not a hint of a riot. The pall of familial holiday disgrace fell away and I walked though the aisles full of confidence and swagger, two big mesh bags of Brussels sprouts dangling from my hand in one hell of a manly metaphor.

Incidentally, you can spend $120 on a turkey at Gelson’s. I saw one, eighteen pounds, $120. That’s twice as much as the organic free range bird at Ralphs. Maybe these turkeys were organic, free range and veterinarian-assisted suicides.

What an inane post. I wrote it in my head as I drove between stores. Maybe I need a hobby.

Cheese curds

Posted on by

The cheese curds came today. This happens every December. A UPS guy shows up with a box of cheese curds. They arrive from Wisconsin. I have no idea if they are eaten anywhere else but Wisconsin. And though I love them now, I had never heard of them until my first visit to Wisconsin in 1980. Have a cheese curd, the locals said. A what? A cheese curd. I politely declined. I had never heard of cheese curds. No one outside of Wisconsin has. (We’ve never heard of sheepshead, either). They looked wrong, these cheese colored smooth lumpy things. Imagine a coprolite made of cheddar. You eat them.

Then we ran into a lady from Wisconsin last Sunday who decided that it as not good enough to merely eat them. She decided to deep fry them. So the previous summer, she had brought the curds all they way (all the whey?) back from Appleton, on Lake Winnebago, just for the occasion. She carefully breaded each little curd, heated up a pot of oil to the deadly point, then plopped in the curds in one after another. That’s when it got weird. Rather than emerging as some kind of coronary inducing delicacy at the Wisconsin State Fair, the curds lost their shape completely, broke free of the breading and glopped together in some sort of weird cheese food blob. It floated atop the hot oil, formless and oozing and scary. It was disgusting, she said. But was the blob alive? I didn’t ask. Not all ladies from Wisconsin think like my wife from Wisconsin does. All this lady from Wisconsin did was dump the cheese blob down the garbage disposal, where the blades cut it into thousands of tiny slimy pieces and dumped it into the LA sewage system where, sanitized, it awaits El Niño and rebirth.

As for the curds we received today, we will serve them the way nature intended, cold and weird and vaguely disturbing. Tasty, though.

A cheese curd. Normally they come in little herds, packed in a vacuum sealed bag.

A cheese curd. Normally they come in little herds, packed in a vacuum sealed bag.

Valentine’s Day

Posted on by

So late last nite we weren’t able to get into any restaurant–it was like Disneyland on a crowded day–so we celebrated Valentine’s Day at Philippe’s, which is actually kinda romantic in a rough hewn old punk rocker kind of way. They even let us keep the beer glasses. I watched some rotten kids pass by on their Valentine’s Day dates and remembered going there 35 years ago and looking at all the old people and thinking they must have been coming here for thirty years and that seemed like forever. I felt a twinge but it was just my back. We clinked glasses, toasted us, and ate our French dip sandwiches, which haven’t changed an iota since the stoned age.

Corned beef and cabbage

Posted on by

Never have cared for corned beef and cabbage. Or boiled potatoes. Irish cuisine…. The Irish can do many things–sing, write, tell stories (some even true), fight, be funny, blow things up–but they can’t cook. Thankfully my mother’s mother-in-law, who’d come from Austria-Hungary when she was twelve years old and could scarcely speak understandable English seven decades later, was a terrific cook. The Germans can do lots of things too, some of them scary, but their cooking never hurt anybody. So we were fed fairly well, with dishes learned from Grandma Wahl, even in the seventies, when inflation and recession–stagflation they called it–reduced America to Hamburger Helper.

I vividly remember St. Patrick’s Day as a kid. I’d always refused to wear green, figuring that anyone half-Irish didn’t have to, and some kid named Smith or Thompson or Smith-Thompson would pinch me and I’d think how just that week several Smiths or Thompsons or Smith-Thompsons had been blown up in Northern Ireland. And then, that night, my mother (a full-blooded Nelligan, and her mother a Kelly) would serve us corned beef and cabbage for dinner. I distinctly remember her saying how she could never stand corned beef and cabbage, but my father requested it. I supposed boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage was a minimalist treat to someone raised on a myriad varieties of each, from scalloped potatoes with cheese and gravy drizzled lightly across them, to sauerkraut. But I hated boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage. I love potatoes every other conceivable way–they are my favorite food–but plain boiled is kind of an insult. So our supper every St. Patrick’s Day was my least favorite meal all year, one I liked even less than fish sticks on Friday. It wasn’t until my Sioux Indian wife insisted we go out for corned beef and cabbage on my holiday (can’t we just stay home and drink whiskey and listen to Bing and the Undertones? No?)–that I learned to barely tolerate boiled cabbage. Apparently her home town of Milwaukee (her parents had been born on the reservation, but she was born in a pleasant suburb of Milwaukee), where there haven’t been any Irish since Spencer Tracy moved to Hollywood, is just awash in green and corned beef and cabbage every St. Patrick’s Day. All the bars serve it up, free. Anything that sells beer, I guess. And as for me and corned beef, well, it was better than Spam, I guess, but not as good as pastrami. I would rather have a kielbasa (we used to get incredible kielbasa from a Polish butcher in Flint a zillion years ago), or a hamburger, or carnitas, or nothing. I remember feigning an upset stomach once or twice on Saint Patrick’s Day, and sneaking out later to raid the fridge. Faith and begorrah, I did.

And now I avoid, if at all possible, eating corned beef and cabbage every March 17. Just like I avoid going out to see people who aren’t even slightly Irish sing happy Irish songs and smile happy Irish smiles and talk in incredibly bad fake brogues. It’s a kelly green minstrel show all over Los Angeles every Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s embarrassing. Hell, the very same people who go into conniption fits about cultural appropriation every Columbus Day or Cinco de Mayo or ethnic holiday of your choice become a greenface Stepin O’Fetchit on March 17. Top o’ the morning to ya! and green beer. Any excuse to get shitfaced, I guess. You know those Micks, always shitfaced. Which a lot of them are, actually. But at least they’re not smiling that stupid happy Irish smile. Well, unless they are drunk. Faith and begorrah. The hell with it. I’m staying home and watching Barry Fitzgerald movies.

But back to corned beef, here’s a bit of history of the dish, and the part it played in the Potato Famine.

The Celtic grazing lands of Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.— Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

Which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose, to avoid a meal of corned beef and cabbage. Wrap the fact that I simply don’t care for corned beef and cabbage in tragic history and moral outrage, as if eating corned beef and cabbage is some sort of genocidal act. You read it here first.

But it’s not. I just don’t like corned beef and cabbage, and this is a blog, and people get carried away in blogs, and say overwrought and ridiculous things, which then prove embarrassing at cocktail parties when people bring it up. Eventually someone catches you with a big steaming plate of corned beef and cabbage, and you splutter between mouthfuls.

I will drink the whiskey, though. No argument at all.

National-Corned-Beef-and-Cabbage-Day-March-17-1-1024x512