food and drinks

Biting into a strawberry shortcake from Zaiya is like eating slightly strawberry flavored air. Another light summer treat from those seasonal Japanese peeps.Cafe Zaiya, 69 Cooper Sq, NY, NY 10003 (near Astor Place)addthis_pub = 'FrontStudio';

Beer appears to be on Angelenos' minds these days. That's not just because we're thirsty for foamy forgetfulness at the end of a long, not-so-hot summer that never quite got going. It's also not just any beer that we're going crazy for. It's craft beer.
Beer bars such as the recently opened Venice Ale House, Verdugo, Blue Palms Brewhouse, 1642, the Surly Goat and Tony's Darts Away are quenching our obsession along with homegrown breweries like Eagle Rock Brewery. Last year's Craft Beer Fest L.A. at the Echoplex drew more than 800 fans, and Christina Perozzi, a.k.a. one of the Beer Chicks, has become a beer lovers' cult hero in the local scene.
Add to this growing craze the introduction, on Sept. 25, of the Los Angeles Craft Beer Crawl, which is being sponsored by Cedd Moses' 213 group, the L.A. Weekly and the Beer Chicks.
Brand X just posted the details about the crawl, which includes 50 beers, seven bars and "only five hours to drink your fill." Also detailed in the post is some interesting information on how sales of craft beer are on the rise while sales of mainstream commercial beers decline.
-- Jessica Gelt 
Photo: Bartender Anthony Pecos serves up, from left, Old Rasputin, Old Godfather, Anvil Extra Special Strong Bitter and Velvet Merkin beers at Tony's Darts Away in Burbank. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

We started walking up Lafayette, feeling uninspired, until we ended up many blocks further north than we had intended. But Menkui-tei is like that, capable of drawing us out on a hot summer day. It's great, straightforward Japanese, every dish is solid eating. Like this classic Japanese summertime plate, hiyashi chuka.Menkui-tei, 63 Cooper Sq, NY, NY 10003 (near Astor Place)addthis_pub = 'FrontStudio';

Is there an unsaid rule that bar cookies have to be heavy and gooey? Two weeks ago, we picked up a cup of coffee on our way to the park so that the little monkey could continue his path of destruction outside our apartment, and I fell for something in the bakery case called peach shortbread, cut into bars. But instead of being thick and intense, it was delicate, light and barely sweet — a thin layer of shortbread, even thinner slices of peach and the faintest sprinkling of streusel on top. I knew I had to share it.

And it wasn’t until I had jotted down “peach streusel bar” on my to-do list that I remembered a recipe for brown butter peach bars from that I found in a preview of The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook in The New York Times nearly three years ago, and have pined for since. (This recipe didn’t make it into the cookbook, but a rhubarb version — that looked almost as time-consuming and delicious — did.) Every summer, I swear, I’m going to summon the inertia to make them. First, you make a peach jam from fresh peaches. It involves a candy thermometer. It takes an hour to cook. Then you brown butter and freeze it until solid. Then you make a crumb base with this butter, bake it for 20 minutes and let it cool. Then you make a custard filling with fresh vanilla bean, and brown more butter. This filling is spread over the baked crust, the peach jam is dolloped over that, and you bake it for 30 minutes more. I have no doubt that nirvana ensues, in fact, a reader recently told me that she tried them and they were absolutely worth it. But I got tired just typing this paragraph and I realized it was time for me to admit that it might not be worth it to me, especially since so much of time right now is spent doing things like this.

... Read the rest of peach shortbread on smittenkitchen.com

© smitten kitchen 2006-2009. |
permalink to peach shortbread | no comment to date | see more: Bars, Cookie, Peach, Photo, Summer

All recipes that appear in the L.A. Times' weekly Food section are tested and perfected in our Test Kitchen before they're deemed fit to print. (That means you don't have to worry about a trial run before serving one of our recipes to company.) Rest assured, they should work the first time out of the gate.
If you try one of our recipes, please let us know about it so we can use it on the blog. Take a picture of the finished dish and send it to me at rene.lynch@latimes.com. Here's a look at this week's recipes:
Chicken thighs with honey, olives and oregano
Leek, apple and thyme soup
Pears in pomegranate wine with honey and lemon thyme
The strawberry coconut cake served at L'Angolo Café in downtown Los Angeles
Want more? Check out our online recipe collection at www.latimes.com/recipes -- and bookmark it. We're constantly adding new dishes.
-- Rene Lynchtwitter.com/renelynch
Photo: Leek, apple and thyme soup. Credit: Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times
 

 
We like to think that we have one up on earlier generations when we talk about using the best ingredients  -- fresh eggs, the best butter, the purest extracts.... But that's the same exact conversation that serious bakers were having back in 1894, according to this article that I dusted off from the L.A. Times' historical archives:

Good cake requires good butter, as good as for the table. It demands fresh eggs, pure flavoring extracts, and the "foundation" recipe embodies correct proportions.
My favorite part of this article regards sugar, which apparently was a tricky ingredient to buy and use back in those days.

Opinions differ as to sugar. Some insist on granulated, which doctors say is the purest in the market. It should therefore certainly be used in all invalid cookery. ... The fact that cane and beet sugars are sold indiscriminately renders it necessary for one to be sure of the sweetness of sugar before relying altogether upon proportions given in a recipe.

This is as close to being a doctors' endorsement of sugar-eating as I've ever seen. I wonder, though, what was meant by "invalid cookery." And what happened when dutiful readers began doling on the white stuff...
Click below to read the full article.
--Rene LynchTwitter / renelynch
Photo: The Dutch apple walnut loaf served at 1881 Coffee Cafe. Click here for the recipe: (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)

Amid a rolling landscape of browning chaparral and battered trailers, Alan and Ryan Armstrong's metal hen houses line up like military barracks. Keeping their 450,000 birds safe — and keeping Salmonella enteritidis out of their hen houses — is a daily battle.
Since they were old enough to drive the family skip loader and shovel chicken droppings, the Armstrong brothers followed a state-sanctioned quality-assurance program designed to curtail salmonella in eggs. So have dozens more California egg farmers, who helped develop the guidelines alongside federal and state officials following a salmonella outbreak 15 years ago that sickened thousands of people.
The program, which includes vaccinating hens and testing barns regularly for bacteria, has essentially wiped out salmonella on California farms, industry officials say. Yet only nine other states have enacted similar government-sponsored efforts. Read more in P.J. Huffstutter's article in Wednesday's Business section:

Photo: Francisco Jimenez Cruz gathers eggs laid by Leghorn hens at Armstrong Egg Farms in Valley Center, Calif., in northern San Diego County.  Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Aaaah, those happy cows. California dairies took 13 first-place trophies at the American Cheese Society’s annual competition this week in Seattle. In addition, Golden State producers took home seven second-place and 12 third-place awards.
Karoun Dairies in Turlock and Rumiano Cheese Co. in Crescent City each won three firsts--Karoun for its queso crema, feta with green olives and thyme and labne kefir cheeses; Rumiano for Dry Monterey Jack, Monterey Jack and Mediterranean Jack. Two dairies took two each: Bellwether Farms in Petaluma for fromage blanc and crème fraiche, and Bravo Farms in Traver for Silver Mountain cheddar and Bravo Bl’u blue cheese.
Also taking home first prizes were Fiscalini Cheese Co. in Modesto for Purple Moon marinated cheese; Mozzarella Fresca in Tipton for its fresh mozzarella ciliegini, and Marin French Cheese Co. in Petaluma for its Schlosskranz.
In addition, Marin French Cheese Co. won three second and four third-place awards, Karoun took home a second, and Fiscalini and Rumiano each earned a third. Cowgirl Creamery of Pt. Reyes and Fagundes Old World Cheese of Hanford each took home one second and two third-places. Mozzarella Fresca received two third-place awards, Vella Cheese Co. of Sonoma received one second place, and McClelland’s Dairy of Petaluma took one third.
--Russ Parsons
Photo of California Jack by George Wilhelm

About 250 food bloggers from 27 states descended on Seattle over the weekend to attend this year's International Food Blogger Conference -- more than double the number at last year's inaugural IFBC. It's an indicator of the growth and evolution of food blogs. According to search engine Technorati, there are now 11,427 food blogs. And the number of conferences is growing too, capitalizing on the ever-increasing interest in producing one's own food blog. 
BlogHer Food '10 takes place next month in San Francisco (it is already sold out). This summer, Internet Week in New York included TechMunch, a series of day-long conferences "to provide food bloggers with all the ingredients they need to succeed." Big Summer Potluck took place in Bucks County, Pa., last month. There's also Camp Blogaway and Food Blogger Camp (not to mention the South African Food Bloggers Conference, the Australian Food Bloggers Conference and Food Blogger Connect in London). 

"There were no food blog conferences at the the time" of the first IFBC, says Barnaby Dorfman, founder of Foodista, the Wikipedia-style cooking site that hosts the event (held this year at the Theo chocolate factory). "But we sold out within days. This year we increased the number of tickets, sold out two months before the conference and had a sizable waiting list before we had to cut that off.
"When we did the first conference it was mostly grassroots bloggers, people who came to it out of personal interest and passion. This year there was a much higher representation of two other categories of food bloggers – more traditional food journalists, food writers, authors and cookbook authors who now have food blogs.... And marketers who see this as a corporate communications tool." 
Highlights of the IFBC included panels on recipe writing, building traffic, pitching to print media, and blogging for specialized diets. Saveur editor James Oseland was a keynote speaker at a winemaker dinner on Saturday evening. Nathan Myhrvold discussed his forthcoming cooking tome "Modernist Cuisine." And Penny De Los Santos, a photographer for Saveur, received a standing ovation for her presentation about food photography.  
Some participants, admittedly, were there to schmooze. "There seem to be more and more of these conferences and workshops," said Alice Currah, of local Seattle blog Savory Sweet Life, whose eponymous cookbook will be published in spring 2012 by HarperCollins/William Morrow. "I'm here to see friends." 
That is all right by the conference's organizers. "As much as I love tech, there’s really no substitute for people meeting each other face to face," Foodista's Dorfman says. "Many, many people had met each other online but not face to face. Out of that only comes more connections and opportunity."
For more information about the third annual International Food Bloggers Conference, watch www.foodista.com/ifbc.  
-- Betty Hallock
Photo credit: Flickr/Foodistablog

One of the people Jeff shares the Weekly Wednesday Treat Day goodies with happens to have gluten issues, so she hasn't been able to indulge in most of the treats we've done. She was able to snack on those Caramel Corn Clusters, but not much else. Jeff reminded me of that and this week I thought it would be good to do a treat she could eat without worry, which ended up being these salty/sweet Flourless Peanut-Chocolate Cookies. I did, however, just find out tonight that she has apparently been back to eating foods with gluten and is doing well! Either way, you won't miss the gluten in these cookies!One of the best traits about this cookie is that you don't need anything fancy to prepare the dough - a bowl and a sturdy wooden spoon does the trick. The next best part? It uses pantry staples (well, we keep them handy) - creamy peanut butter, sugar, a couple eggs, baking soda, salt, chocolate and peanuts. Yes, you read that right - there is no added butter or oil! I did toss in a splash of vanilla as it tends to round out the flavor in cookies and suggest you do the same, but they wouldn't be ruined if you didn't have it.You can use completely granulated sugar if you like, but I swapped out a portion for brown sugar to add a bit of complexity from the dark molasses. The dough is fairly stiff, especially once the ample amount of chocolate and peanuts go in - since there is no flour involved, you don't have to worry about over-mixing to work them all in. Being so stiff, I baked a couple test cookies to see how they do before I started loading up the sheets. I found the cookies didn't spread much at all - we flattened them for a more traditional cookie round, but you could leave the dough as a ball if a puffier mound is desired.Being slightly crumbly in texture, the cookies have an interesting tenderness to them that oozes into more of an addictive chew the more you eat. The peanut flavor is abundant, coming from not only all of the peanut butter in the dough, but the crunchy addition of the salted nuts jammed in. I loved the bite from the bittersweet chocolate nuggets, but semi-sweet may be more appropriate if you'd be serving these to kids.RecipesFlourless Peanut-Chocolate Cookies

Just around the same day Y was lamenting about the departure of Tennessee Mountain (now a Crocs boutique), I noticed a delivery menu from Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q near our office. With the monstrous heat wave resurgence, we agreed that it was indeed a "order in" kind of day. There was nothing special with anything we ate, but we'd certainly be willing to go eat at the restaurant, and for now, a sufficient replacement for a long lost restaurant. Dallas Jones Bar-B-Q, 178 West Houston Street, NY, NY 10014addthis_pub = 'FrontStudio';

It's a scorcher today! We thought we'd take a little walk to go get our dessert, but we only made it two blocks until we changed our minds. Luckily for us, whatever we would have gotten couldn't be much tastier than the super freshly baked oatmeal raisin cookies from Eileen's. Eileen's Special Cheesecake, 17 Cleveland Pl, NY, NY 10012 (btwn Spring and Kenmare)addthis_pub = 'FrontStudio';