Mud and Stuffing

And Then There Was Mud

The fire danger gave way to threat of mudslides at the beginning of this week. I had no idea that the Emergency Broadcast System could activate while replaying a recording on the cable DV-R box. I was watching a cooking show when I suddenly found myself looking at instructions for evacuation if I were in Yorba Linda, California. Next, I was on the shopping channel and somewhere else before I realized that my recording had been turned off. That happened three more times before the end of the recording. I really think that if I were in the flooding area, I would notice an impending river of mud. They seemed to be on top of the situation there, if the sandbags are any indication. For us, the rain was mostly a relief – save for all the skidding cars on the road. It made he temperatures much cooler (I finally put on my coat the day before Thanksgiving. I think that may be a record). The gray skies are a nice change. If we can’t have real autumn, I’ll take a little gray now and then. Thanksgiving makes more sense when it’s cool and damp than when it’s a blazing 90 degrees.

Stuffed with Stuffing

As always, I really enjoyed everything about the Thanksgiving Holiday. I like all of the holiday specials on the Food Network, even if I’d seen them many times. Though this year, I must admit to being vexed by the Dear Food Network mini series of specials. In it they had fans go meet their favorite chefs and learn to overcome their recipe disasters. I was particularly peeved over the Ina Garten segment on desserts. She flew in the participating fans to her house in the Hamptons by helicopter for a party in her new barn (not the kind of barn one normally conjures up, but one in which five star parties can be held). On top of that, one of the participants FIRST got to hang out with Tyler Florence. I asked him for help with my disastrous hush puppies years ago, but do I get a call – no! Granted, hush puppies aren’t typical Thanksgiving fare that I know of. They usually involve a fish fry. But I asked first. Boy, that episode really burned my biscuits. Not that I make biscuits for Thanksgiving either. We usually cheat by throwing brown n’ serve rolls in the oven after everything is heated (That’s if we remember we even bought them. There were a couple of holidays in a row they were still in the pantry when the guests left). Where was I? Oh yeah, I was really ticked off. I watched anyway. Our meal was really good and most plentiful where leftovers were concerned. I am seldom tired of them when they finally run out.

I didn’t do my usual photo shoot of food while I cooked. Actually, I was going to make a little video of my kitchen doings, but I was really taking it easy during the whole time I was cooking. In other words, it didn’t look pretty in here. I don’t want to horrify anyone. Perhaps I’ll make one during the Christmas baking. However, we wanted to show everyone something we were thankful about. We decided on this. In case you can’t see, we’re eating steak sandwiches. Very traditional.

From Spring 2007

Bush Vs Brentwood

There was a short but intense skirmish in LA’s Entitlement Zone. For a long while, Jon and I were working in retail in the Entitlement Zone (defined as a geographical area from Robertson Blvd west to the ocean and encompassing from Beverly Hills to Malibu west and south to Rancho Palos Verdes where consumers are used to getting everything they want from a retail or service even if they have no idea what that is or are completely unprepared for the transaction. For example, if I went to my post office back in Philly with a brightly wrapped gift and no shipping box or shipping information and announced that I wanted the gift mailed, the postal clerk would not only toss me out of the line, she/he may chase me down the street while flinging the box’s contents at me. In the Entitlement Zone, the clerk selects a shipping box, packs it and helps fill out the label while a line of people wait. This kind of service with endless patience gets old after a few years. President Bush was in town for some sort of Republican function in Bel Air. That’s not a large portion of the Zone, but his travel plans caused a monumental disruption to the entire area. We thought our commute would be affected, but the street we were on was cleared mid-way to UCLA. We found out the extent of Bush’s travel arrangement when we spied Marine One parked on a ball field a short distance from Sunset Blvd. Then were the Secret Service dudes and a phalanx of LAPD motorcycle cops. And they were all there to guard an empty helicopter. We couldn’t imagine how much firepower he had riding with the car. Our colleagues never saw any of this. They were caught in the mother of all LA traffic jams when the 405 was closed as was Sunset Blvd while Bush was on the move. There were no signs indicating why everything was standing still and goodness knows the Entitlement Zone doesn’t listen to AM news radio. They just do what they always do – try to plough through as if nothing was going on. There were near accidents and a lot of screaming and cursing. I don’t blame the Secret Service for closing the roads to traffic. In that neighborhood, someone driving a Hummer while on the phone, listening to an ipod and drinking coffee is likely to broadside the presidential limo and then be annoyed at being made late for a massage.

We got a kick out of seeing that big helicopter. And I have a soft spot for the Secret Service. I had more than one opportunity to interact with them while I worked at the Center City District in Philadelphia. The first time was during the wedding of Max Kennedy (son of Robert) to Victoria Strauss (heiress to the Pep Boys fortune). The Secret Service was with Ted Kennedy, and I was part of Papparazzi control. They were very polite and professional for being really heavily armed.

Kitchen Adventures

Here are a couple of my little blogs on my cook adventures. Since we'll be doing the cookie thing soon, I'll post more on those next week.

The Dough That Ate My Fridge

I’m still experimenting with making my own dough. The baguette recipe remains intimidating, so I thought I’d try pizza dough. I’ve been terrible dissatisfied with pizza since visiting Cannes. No, that’s not as weird as it sounds. That part of France was once part of Italy. There are still a lot of Italians there. I had the fortune or misfortune of having real Pizza Margherita. Don’t get me wrong. There are pizza’s here that I enjoy. I worked in Manhattan for a year and there are great pizzas there. And in Philly, Jon and I like this very non-traditional Greek Pizza made by Hispanic guys at Germantown Style Pizza. It’s particularly good when eaten with a luridly red colored soda called Tahitian Treat. But I digress. I really loved the Pizza I had in Cannes and have made several attempts to reproduce it with store bought pizza shells. The results were satisfactory at best. A couple of weeks ago, I saw Jamie Oliver make pizza on his new show, Jamie at Home. It looked really easy, so I gave it a try. The recipe called for only one rising for the dough to double in size. Then, it could be refrigerated until use. I did everything in the recipe, then I wrapped the dough in plastic and put it in a gallon sized bag in a bowl. An hour later, I looked in the fridge to find the dough was about to burst my bag and envelope the top shelf of the fridge. Even after I divided it into four sections, they grew in the bags. It had nothing but dough on my top shelf until I could pre-bake the shells to freeze. It was a tasty pizza cannibal, but oy, do I have a lot of pizza shells.

The Pie Bird

The pie bird was the final clue. I’d never heard of them before two weeks ago. Then, it was in my kitchen along with a tart/quiche pan with the push out bottom. This cooking thing has moved beyond routine to something of a specialized hobby. When I informed Jon of this revelation, he gave me that very patient husband look one gets when the incredibly obvious has been stated. Arriving with the pie bird was Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook (scroll down to the Publisher's Weekly review). I ended up ordering that when I was searching for online recipes for the fish soup he had in Arcachon, France. While searching, I discovered he’s written a book on French cooking from Les Halles, the popular New York restaurant he worked in last. I knew Mr. Bourdain would provide a different spin on cookbokos, but I never expected to be yelled at in the introduction. In fact, there was lots of yelling and cursing. There was a full page diatribe before the actual recipe for Poulet Roti. I have many cookbooks. I even have French cookbooks given to me by my two lovely friends there. But I’ve never had a cookbook call me a numbnuts. Needless to say, it is a hilarious book. I’ve never laughed so hard at a cookbook. And it is inspiring, if more than a little pushy. I spent Saturday making stocks from veal and beef bones, and I made another attempt at frites. The Wiki entry is French Fried Potatoes, but that does frites no justice at all. We never had less than an extraordinary experience with a plate of potatoes anywhere we went in France. I have yet to really capture that cricpy, crisp exterior and delicately tender interior. The pie bird went into an apple pie a al Alton Brown. It was an ordeal that we do not know for sure worked. I’ll let you know next week. I am happy to have attempted home made pie crust for the first time in decades. Tonight, I make the Poulet Roti and reduce my veal stock to a glace. Yep, I’m obsessed.

Chance of Lightning and threat of Mud

Surprisingly, LA is on Stormwatch! once again. I say surprise, because despite the numerous Doppler weather systems in HD with numeric suffixes, the weather guy was surprised that it had rained over night on Thursday. Since the skies were really overcast on Friday, I paid close attention to the forecast on the noon report. They said there would be 'sprinkles' through the weekend. Saturday we woke to find ourselves on Stormwatch. There had been torrential downpours, movie FX level lightning and mudslides in the burn areas. Either these weather forecasters have a warped sense of what sprinkles means or they need to go back to technology of 20 years ago. Accu-weather radar sans Doppler or HD worked just fine. So does looking out the window in a pinch. At least fire season has been put on hold for the time being.



Speaking of the weather and forecasts out here, these are observations from an old blog


December 2007


Dopplers and Weather Woes


For a city that has very boring weather most of the year, Los Angeles local news stations have a lot of high powered weather equipment. Most involve the word doppler. The least doppler intensive – at least by the name they use – is Live Weather Doppler Plus at Channel 4. Channel2 has Sky View Doppler Radar with Futurecast. That sounds both impressive and sci-fi. But the winner seems to be Channel 7’s Live Mega Doppler 7000 HD with forecaster Dallas Raines. I am not making this up. The problem is that when you have all this equipment and not a lot to do most of the year, actual storms make these forecasters and their stations go absolutely insane. The rain storm of the last few days was really bad. We didn’t lose power, but I’ve never had to walk in wind that strong. And I haven’t had that cold a soaking since I lived back east. But the coverage may have well included the phrase 40 percent chance of the apocolypse. This feed was picked up by CNN and Yahoo. The first of the worried e-mails from Philly came in while we were still at work. In addition to figuring out how to get home without getting wacked by falling tree limbs and palm fronds (those things are heavy) or LA drivers who spin out in a drizzle, we had to worry about our folks worrying. Criminey! The forecasters or futurecasters remain unrepentent. I think they’re drooling of the notion that LA will have a real rainy season this year.



October 2007

More on the Fires


I want to thank everyone who sent notes in concern over our safety during the fires last week. We were never in any danger from flames. I can understand why there was a lot of concern. The media maps of the fire used a an outline of the coast with a big flame over Malibu, but the scale of the map was such that the flame also looked like it covered Santa Monica and was really close to Venice and the environs where we live as well as some of our friends. In reality, we were more than 20 miles from the closest fire. Only our friend and former assistant Phil saw any action as we had to help evacuate the very pampered guests at one of those infamous rehab centers. I think he’d rather have run into one of those blazing canyons. What we all needed saving from is the fire coverage on the local media which is still only 48% contained. I know that they had to get information out to the affected areas. And I admit to joining my friends in the pool as to whether or not chuck Henry from Cannel 4 news would burn another newsvan. Here’s a paragraph on that from his Wikipedia article:Henry was once nearly killed in the field filing a report about California forest fires in October 2003. Although the newspeople were told to leave by the fire department, the NBC team decided to stay longer and were soon surrounded by flames. Their van was completely engulfed and lost to the fire and the team had to be rescued by the LAFD. Chuck Henry was later seen on air crying about the situation referring to the newsvan as a "Stupid truck, full of equipment."



This incident was parodied on a 2005 King of the Hill episode Gone with the Windstorm.
Incidentally, that’s one of my favorite King of the Hill episodes. And I didn’t know until today where the inspiration came from.


All of this was intriguing, but the news never told viewers where the shelters were or where the road closures were. They would refer them to websites. How in the heck are they going to do that while on the run? We had to look at the transit websites to figure out if we could get to work via our regular route. In the hours of couverage that we watched, I never saw a list of places or recources for evacuees. Nor did we see a full weather forecast which was supposed to be important to the firefighters. I gave up by day two.

More observations to come!