Grave-side picnic

The Chinese celebrate something similar to the Day of the Dead, where people go to the burial grounds of their relatives to pay their respects and leave an offering. My mom thought it was great that I was in town this year so that I could go with my family to the grave site of my grandfather.

Jeanne and I woke up early. We were disappointed to see that the ground was wet with recent rain (it meant that we had another day of not driving around in the rental convertible with the top down), but our dad thought it was the perfect weather for a trip to the cemetery. Our mom sent our dad off to pick up the roast pig, some bread, Chinese buns, and dumplings as she worked in the kitchen frying up turnip cake.

We packed up the van with the food and drove off to the Rose Hills burial ground, where we were met by the rest of our extended family. Mom laid out the blanket and started to spread out all the food: the whole roast pig, the loaves of bread, sticky rice, turnip cake, the buns, the dumplings, fruit, and candy. Dad opened up a bottle of Tsingtao beer and placed it in front of the grave marker, which was surrounded by burning incense that we lighted and stuck into the ground. There was also a 12-bottle case of Heineken's that my uncle brought. My aunt also placed a loaf of bread and some candy on one of the neighboring graves, that of a former LAPD officer, and some rice and turnip cake for the grandmother of my friend Sophia.

Able to see our breath in the cold, we said our prayers to Grandpa and I wished him a good life wherever he was. Afterwards, it was time to eat. My mom pulled out her cleaver and the chopping board and, on the wet hill, hacked the roast pig into small rectangles. She filled bread with the meat and passed the sandwiches around so that we all stood eating roast pork sandwiches around my grandfather's grave. The bread was crunchy and its crumbs flecked my purple hoodie. The pork was succulent, sweet, and juicy, and the skin perfectly crisp. I stood on that hill eating my sandwich as I watched the clouds break over the buildings of downtown LA. My aunts, uncles, and cousins also took bites of the pork, praising its tastiness. Dad opened a bottle of Heineken to go along with his sandwich.

When we finished eating and were tired of the cold, we packed up all the food, said a final goodbye to Grandpa, and caravaned down the hill.

Pizzeria Mozza

I don't buy into all the hype of celebrity chefs. Sure, I know their names and recognize some of their faces, but I'm not going to throw my panties at them. Likewise, I don't rush out the door to try their new restaurants. But, I wanted to eat at Pizzeria Mozza for months now and not simply because its co-owned by Iron Chef Mario Batali and La Brea Bakery's Nancy Silverton but because that combination was reputed to have created some damn tasty pizza. So, for this stay in LA, I made reservations to eat there.

Our lunch reservation was for 3:15pm, the earliest they could seat us. Jeanne and I drove passed the valet parking for $8.50 and found a free spot on the street. Pizzeria Mozza is situated on the corner of Highland and Melrose, next to a suspiciously dumpy-looking house and across from an EZ Lube, and it felt appropriately LA. We walked through the large windowless doors, was greeted by a friendly hostess, and took a seat at one of the several empty tables.

The space was small and unpretentious, which was a nice surprise as I had feared the worst for a hip, LA restaurant. Our table setting was simple: a paper place mat with instructions on how to speak Italian without words and how to make a pizza margherita on top of which was a plate with a paper packet filled with our utensils. There was a wall of wine on one side of the restaurant and a bar that encompassed the yellow-tiled wood-fired oven on the other.

As we perused the menu, trying to narrow our pizza options from more than a dozen to just three, I felt my mouth water and my eyes grow large. I wanted to eat it all. There were too many options: rapini, cherry tomatoes, anchovies, olive, and chile; gorgonzola, fingerling potatoes, radicchio, and rosemary; clams, garlic, oregano, parmigiano, and pecorino. But, we settled on the Bianca with fontina, mozzarella, sottocenere, and sage, the Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, and scallions (we opted to go sans bacon), and the egg, guanciale, radicchio, escarole, and bagna cauda.

The Bianca came out first and its thick ring of crust made its way to the edge of the plate. The middle was a beautiful white combination of cheeses speckled with the green of sparsely placed sage leaves. I ripped apart one of the four slices, wondered if I should attack it with a knife and fork, and decided upon folding the slice in half and biting its drooping tip. It was decadent, dripped of warm oil, and left my fingers and lips glistening with grease. But it was good, especially the crust, which was unlike any that I'd tasted before. It was chewy and charred at spots, deeply flavorful without elbowing to be the star of the show, thin enough yet substantial, and hinted at the tang of sourdough. This was one pizza crust that I did not want to leave on my plate. A little bit of reading before the visit told me that Nancy Silverton thought that the dough was at its best around 3pm, so perhaps that 3:15 reservation worked to my favor.

The egg, guanciale, and radicchio pizza arrived next at our table. Like the Bianca, it had a sizable ring of crust and the toppings looked like a mesh of shredded bits with a circle of bright yellow in the center. I poked my fork into the egg yolk and smeared it across the slices. This pizza was better than the first. I couldn't pick out all the different flavors of the ingredients (except for the slight bitterness of the radicchio) because they worked so harmoniously together. And, it had the most amazing aroma.

By the time the goat cheese, scallion, and leek pizza arrived, we had almost nowhere to put it on our crowded little table. It looked like a garden of greenery with dabs of white cheese and whole roasted garlic cloves. I only had room for about half a slice of it, which I was happy for. This one tasted of grass. It was too leek-heavy. Perhaps the bacon would have made it magnificent.

And, we couldn't pass up dessert. I read about the butterscotch budino with caramel and sea salt beforehand and was then reminded of it as, waiting for the bathroom, saw a newspaper clipping declaring the budino a triumph. The little dish of pudding came with two tiny pinenut and rosemary cookies and a dollop of whipped cream. I dug my spoon in and was wowed. The pudding was creamy and smooth. As I let the sweetness coat my mouth, I could taste the salt crystals cutting into the saccharinity and slowly dissolve. I savored every spoonful and the end of the budino came too soon.

For my first experience at a hip, LA restaurant with celebrity chef names attached, it was quite pleasant. I walked out of Pizzeria Mozza deeply satisfied yet longing to try everything on the menu. Perhaps there was something to these celebrity chefs.

Portable meat pies

I look forward to Wednesdays. That’s when The New York Times publishes its food section. I eat my lunch (usually leftovers or, recently, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) as I read about new restaurants and recipes. This past week’s had a piece about meat pies, with accompanying recipes, and I was excited.

I don’t remember when I developed my fondness for meat pies. I think it might have been when I was in London and had my first meat pasty at high tea. Since that revelatory taste of meat and pastry, I’ve been hooked. I am especially fond of the portable meat pies, little treats you can eat as you go without cumbersome knife or fork and, if you wanted, could slip into your pocket. And, if the idea of meat wrapped in dough and cooked to be handy wasn’t awesome enough, it comes in cultural variations—think of the empanada, samosa, calzone, and, the venerable, Hot Pocket.

Even though I’ve eaten plenty of meat pies, I’ve never made one and took the recipe from The Times as my starting point. I was so excited at the idea of making meat pies that I doubled the recipe. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought it would be a good idea to make so many individual pies, but I did.

I started by making the dough and substituted whole wheat flour for some of the white, thinking that I’d make it a little healthier. My efforts were thwarted when it came to the butter. The recipe called for 14 tablespoons, so, doubled, that made 28 tablespoons. I didn’t think that I was possible; that’s a lot of butter. I double and triple checked the recipe and my math, but they were right. In addition to butter, the recipe also called for six tablespoons (or 12 doubled) of shortening. This was not going to be a skimpy, low-calorie pie. I combined the flour, fats, salt, and ice water to make the dough. Once those little rounds were ready and resting in the refrigerator, I started working on the filling.

I sautéed two onions and three cloves of garlic. To that, I added diced Granny Smith apples, a cinnamon stick (I couldn’t find my ground cinnamon), salt and pepper, and raisins that had been soaking in chicken broth (the recipe called for dried currants and white wine, but I didn’t have any of either). Once the liquid evaporated, I turned off the heat and let the mixture cool a bit. Then, I added the ground pork, chopped sage, and toasted pine nuts.

I rolled out my disks of dough into equal portions, using the shape of a bowl to ensure that I had perfect circles, filled the dough with the pork mixture, sealed it shut, and marked the edges with the tines of a fork. Then, my little pies went into the oven for 40 minutes.

When the timer buzzed, I retrieved my pies from the oven and cut into one to check to see that the pork was cook. It was, and I took a bite of the steaming pie (burning both my finger tips and tongue in the process). The meat pie turned out better than I hoped. The crust was incredibly flakey and really buttery (though I think it didn’t really need all 28 tablespoons of butter), and the filling was a nice touch of sweet and salty. I ate two pies, wrapped up the other six that were cooked (hoping that Eleanor and Colin may want a pie as a snack for tomorrow’s movie), and put the uncooked five in the freezer. I’ll be eating meat pies for a while.

Fried chicken off

I didn't think I was capable of turning down fried chicken. I didn't think I had the will power to do so. But, last night, at Carlo's, I reached my fried chicken limit.

When Eleanor told me that Carlo and his friend Tony were having a fried chicken off, my eyes lit up. The two of them were planning on experimenting with different methods to try to achieve the best fried chicken. It was like their very own America's Test Kitchen. All Monday I waited anxiously to hear from Eleanor to see if it was really going to happen if I would get invited. So, when her text arrived asking if I waited to join her, my response was an astounding yes.

When Eleanor and I arrived at Carlo's, he and Tony had been cooking and eating chicken for an hour and a half already and had ruled out a number of fried chicken variations. There were pots of grease on the stove and a small deep fryer off to the side. On the counter were various dry coatings. And, there were pale chicken drumsticks waiting in the wings. Eleanor and I stood off to the side, watching this two-man fried chicken show. And, when Tony's wife, Karen, arrived, the three of us stood off to the side.

The chicken drumsticks had been brined overnight in a mixture of buttermilk, garlic, and ginger. Carlo and Tony tested different coatings: white flour, wheat flour, cornmeal, panko bread crumbs, soybean flour. They tested different liquids: buttermilk alone, buttermilk with vodka, buttermilk with whiskey, buttermilk with soda water. They tested different greases: vegetable oil and Crisco. They tested different cooking methods: deep fry versus shallow fry. They tested different batter methods: one dip, two dip, dip and then immediate fry, dip and then postponed fry. They tested variations of all of those factors.

Each time a new method was tried, the chicken drumstick would get passed around. Each of us would take a bite and contemplate the chicken. How was the batter? Was there too much batter? Was it crunchy enough? Was it too greasy? Did the batter stick to the chicken? This went on all night, until all 30 drumsticks were cooked and all different variations were tested.

Despite how delicious all the chicken pieces were, I could see us slow down. The piece of chicken would linger a little longer on each plate with each passing drumstick. The bites would get progressively smaller. Until, finally, I had to say no. I had enough fried chicken.