Assembly required

Ramen schmamen. For not much more time to make a 15 cent bag of cheap ramen, a bowl of udon noodles with assorted items can fill your belly. All the bits and doodads are either pre-cooked or take only seconds to be ready. Just boil everything in broth and in a shake and a shimmy, you have supper.

Celery root (celeriac) is one of my favorite vegetables (and also hideously ugly.) It's the Gerard Depardieu of the root vegetable world. People think I'm crazy because I leap for joy whenever I see one of these celeriac monstrosities at the market. We will be blitzing these with butter and a sploosh of half and half.

Salting veggies does many things. Goodbye sponginess and waterlogged flavors.

And some pre-party assembly means extra opportunities to procrastinate tomorrow. We'll put on the last two layers and heat these up tomorrow. If I wasn't so lazy and easily distracted, I'd make a good caterer.

Hari-kari

While having my coffee at the dining table this morning, I see out of the corner of my eye a brown blur aimed squarely at my noggin. Feeling like prey first thing in the morning wakes you up much better than any cup of Costa Rican. The labrador retriever in Preston wants to fetch the dying kamikaze dive bombing hawk that smacked itself against the window. This appears to be a somewhat endangered-like sharp shinned hawk. Can any of the bird watchers in the audience identify this one? If the other hawks are similarly prone to committing suicide with windows, they'd be extinct soon.

Unagi from the frozen section of Mitsuwa Marketplace. These are surprisingly good for frozen food that takes seconds to heat up. It has umami.

Winter stores

It's the tomato sauce time of the year. This year's Summer of Garden Neglect has produced much less bounty than last year. But we will make do and be grateful for with what we have. Thankfully, supermarkets and Costco have been invented so I'm in no danger of starvation this winter.

I went totally nuts at the Super H Mart bulk bins. All sorts of flavored and dried and pickled fish products. The octopus jerky and candied anchovy snacks were especially delicious. All you pasty white people gagging right now need to get over your food prejudices and keep an open mind. Delicious is delicious in any culture.

I only bought this because she reminded me of those WW2 Rosie the Riveter "We Can Do It." posters. I had no clue what these were when I threw her into the shopping cart.

Tomato sauce. And crimini mushroom tapenade. If I had a basement, I'd totally have a giant freezer chest. And I'd buy an entire hormone free grass fed cow to fill it.

I made Nancy chocolate toffee chunk cookies for Greg's party tonight. I even followed the recipe. It was painful to do so.

Will power

I need adult supervision when I go to grocery stores. It's impossible to practice restraint and self control. I want to try everything I see. It's like I'm five years old.

Crazy soda pop. Rather than the usual screw top cap, pressure generated from carbonation forces a glass marble in the upper chamber to seal tightly against the opening. The pinch in the middle keeps the marble from settling into the bottom after it's been forced down by the bundled punch mechanism. A marvel of pointless physics and engineering.

Anything sporting panda illustrations or panda logos will pretty much guarantee a spot in the shopping cart. 

The first of the string beans this season are ready. I started with an equal number of green, yellow, and purple bean seeds. For some reason, the yellow beans have taken off, followed by purple, and the more common green beans are withering away before producing flowers. A lone strawberry survivor. And it wasn't even all that tasty. Slugs got to all the other ones.

Nowhere near a peck of pickled peppers. But we don't need that much quantity as these peppers are intense enough to strip varnish. The radishes will turn a shade of flattering pink as it pickles.

Looing assorted items. This is the start of a master loo juice sauce base that can be passed down many generations. Each time it's used, you add a little more spice, a little more water, a little more soy sauce. It's supposed to darken with age and bloom with complex flavor like a fine wine. If you treat me right, I will bequeath this sauce to you upon my death.

Loo lo. Loo gee. Loo zhu. Loo hsiang goo. 

Sautéd dandelion greens. My mulching efforts over the past year have cut down the number of weeds growing in the yard. So I actually paid good money at the farmer's market for these weeds.

Chocolate blood orange sorbet refuses to freeze. The flavor is incredible, but WHY WON'T YOU FIRM UP?

Tonight's batch of chicken stock yielded over a gallon and a half. I'm not going to will this to anyone upon my death, so you'll have to make your own.

Laying it on thick

Sunchoke gratin. Late spring and summer produce are about to show up at the markets. Fall and winter items must be cleared out of the refrigerator to make room for the new seasons.

Carrot apple ginger soup. With a smidgen of cilantro. The idea is to take advantage of pectin locked away in unpeeled apples to help give the soup an unctuous texture without muddling up the plant flavors with dairy or gelatinous meat broths. The texture turned out great, but I'm not really sure I can credit the apples. I didn't make a batch without the apples to compare. And pectin's jelling effect probably doesn't do much at warm soup temperatures. Tastes good though, so no matter. These would be great with some toasted pumpkin seeds sprinkled on top, but I didn't want to wash another pan.

Roasted orange beets and garlic- possibly for a salad later in the week, or some sort of marinade or sauce. Orange beets don't stain fingers and cutting boards and clothes and walls and napkins and dog noses like the more common red beets. I think orange ones are also slightly milder and more subtle in flavor, but that may be psychological. I'm easily swayed by pretty colors.

Today's bounty from the Super H Mart includes items such as Ca Ca flavored glazed chip snacks. Assorted shaped and filled mochi. Traditional Chen Pee plum candies, and coffee drinks named "Let's Be Bitter." In addition to being swayed by pretty colors, I am easily tempted by entertainingly named things. I will also be conducting comparison tests on cans of coconut milk.

And I couldn't resist trying the little crabs at the giant kimchee bar. Cute little itty bitty crabs! I'm such a sucker for little kawaii things.

A sucker for things like mini-me bananas. These mini bananas sliced and served with melon baller scooped ice cream would make great banana split sundaes for toddlers and dieters. I would top it with a tiny swedish lingonberry instead of a full sized maraschino cherry.

Sambal grilled corn. And Davy sauced ribs. Sometimes, there's nothing better on a weekend than grilled corn and a frosty beer. I had forgotten how good grilled corn can be. We will aim to grill more corn this summer. The pork ribs were so tender that it fell apart like pulled pork. Messy and delicious. This batch of Kentucky Davy Bourbon sauce included dried mangos and oregano. Now that I've realized bbq sauces are incredibly easy to make, there's really no reason to buy sauces and marinades that include xanthum gum and lecithin.

Fermenting funk

The Pasadena Trader Joe's sells bourbon for $3 less than the Woodford Reserve gift shop. Had I known, my luggage would have been a lot lighter on the way back. And the bourbon likely safer to drink because I didn't have to wrap the bottle with my underwear.

Fail. Darn you yeast!

House boy

Goodbye to the insanely large house in Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln's house would fit inside the master bathroom with room to spare for an alligator moat. 5000 square feet is pretty much insane for any family with less than 30 people. Such a short trip. We never did get to visit those bourbon fudge packing monks.

It's impossible to resist things like "Boy Bawang" and "Ppushu Ppushu" at the store.

Signs of the Messiah

Visiting the giant new 2 story Whole Foods that opened up a few miles away. It's opening had been treated like the second coming of Christ around here. I'm still a bit bummed that they replaced my favorite tire shop to build the largest Whole Foods west of the Mississippi. No amount of $19.95 champagne brunch can replace the funny little old man that would patch my tires for a nominal fee (or free depending on his mood.)

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Some of us like to leave our holiday decorations up year round.



And fake trees too.



And we still have giant snowflakes up.



And garland. We pretty much keep the holiday spirit year round.



I love the person getting squooshed graphic.



Very old olive tree. I'm trying to get my neighbors together and press olive oil from our trees. CalTech nearby now harvests the olives on campus and presses the oil for their rich donating alumni.



And because CalTech and JPL and NASA are nearby, we have strange secret Area 51 spots here and there. Totally unmarked aside from the warning signs.



This place is like totally Graceland.



Inspired by our ridiculously upscale Whole Foods, I splurged at the Food4Less and spent 50 cents on the Premium version of Cup O'Noodle. It wasn't 17 cents better than the 33 cent kind. So save your money.