This Is Why I'm Fat

While Nathan’s parents were visiting from Michigan, the four of us took a weekend jaunt down to lovely Laguna Beach. When we got back, as always, we watched a slideshow of all the pictures we took, and it struck me how much fried food we’d consumed in the past 3 days. Of course, none of it even begins to compare with the disgustingness (deliciousness?) of anything featured on This Is Why You’re Fat, but I think I’ll be laying off the grease for a while.



Well, I might make an exception for the rice balls at Little Dom’s (upper left). These baseball-sized palate pleasers were made from risotto cooked in mushroom broth, mixed with creamy burrata cheese, breaded and deep-fried and dusted with Parmesan. I could have them with a salad...

The remaining pictures are, clockwise, crab cakes, fried zucchini, fried wontons with pork and shrimp, fried calamari, and chicken empanadas.

Coffee Talk

A week after dominating the 2009 United States Barista Championship with four of the top five spots (including no. 1), Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea is near completion of its second California location, in Venice. This will be no ordinary coffeehouse. Introducing a new model for caffeine purveyance that’s being hailed as “groundbreaking,” the new shop will forgo a counter and instead will be outfitted with separate pods where your own personal barista will advise you individually about what kind of “coffee experience” you seek and suggest pairings. The café will even offer flights, or “cuppings,” a sampling of several different varietals similar to that provided in the tasting room at a vineyard, a trend that’s already caught on elsewhere.

Being open to new epicurean experiences of all stripes, I’m partly intrigued by the concept. But mostly I find it kind of absurd. I mean, do people really want to engage in a one-on-one coffee consultation every morning? Maybe they should’ve asked this guy before they went ahead:


Mr. Advice Man, Intelligentsia Silver Lake

I very rarely indulge in Intelligentsia anymore. For a period of about a week after the Chicago-based company opened its first West Coast outpost in Silver Lake, I went almost every day for its Iced Angeleno, a heavenly chilled concoction of four (4!) shots of espresso and milk, sweetened with agave nectar (sounds weird, tastes amazing). The thing is, they were 4 bucks a pop back then—now $5—and you don’t have to be Asian to calculate how many dollars were quickly being subtracted from my wallet. Since then, it’s been strictly a special-occasion treat—even before in this economy became a cliché.

So I was thrilled when a package arrived in the mail from HenriettaHaus Coffee Roasters, based in Wyandotte, Michigan. Small-batch, hand-roasted coffee beans delivered straight to my door? Now that's groundbreaking. The beans therein had been roasted to a milk-chocolate hue and produced a brew that was nicely mellow. HenriettaHaus proprieter Amy Duncan started experimenting with home roasting a few years ago as a simple DIY project. Now she’s preparing to launch the venture as a true mom-and-pop roastery and coffeehouse with help from her husband, Jeremy. Amy recently answered some questions about starting HenriettaHaus (named after a thrift store painting that hangs in the couple’s home) and the small-batch roasting process.


HenriettaHaus logo designed by Jeremy Duncan

What inspired you to roast your own coffee?
I was having a birthday dinner at a really good Ethiopian restaurant in Windsor and we had the Ethiopian coffee ceremony where they bring out incense to the table and then come back and wave coffee that they’re roasting under your nose and then come back again with the brewed coffee in the clay pot. Anyway, I love coffee and I was sitting there and when they waved the roasting coffee under my nose I was totally inspired to roast my own!

How did you get started?
I received a Whirley Pop stovetop popcorn popper and some green coffee from my mother-in-law as a birthday gift along with some basic directions from the Web site she ordered them from and that was it.

Where are your beans from?
Directly, they come from sweetmarias.com, an amazing company dedicated to the home coffee roaster. Right now I’m drinking beans from a small co-op in Chiapas, Mexico, that I roasted 4 days ago. I have some green coffees from Hawaii, Sumatra, Brazil, Peru, and Guatemala waiting to be roasted. I don’t have any African coffees right now. I love to roast coffees from all different coffee growing regions because they all have their own unique characteristics. I’ve been roasting single-origin coffees but I’m starting to experiment with blending.

What is the roasting process? How long does it take?
I moved on from the Whirley Pop a few years ago because I wanted to be able to roast larger quantities. I was then using a stainless steel drum on a rotisserie in a barbecue grill that was dedicated to coffee only, but living in Michigan makes it hard to roast outside year-round so right now I’m using an indoor rotisserie that somebody modified for coffee roasting. They added an extra heating element and an exhaust fan and made a stainless steel drum for the beans. I just heat it up, put in the beans, and watch, listen, and smell. I did a 3-pound batch a few days ago for 27 minutes, which is not ideal. It should take about half that time but this is what I’m dealing with right now. This is also a big motivation to get my roastery going because I’ll be getting a better roaster!

What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered in transitioning into a commercial/retail business?
I don’t know if there’s enough space on the Internet to answer that question! The first challenge I think is writing the business plan for the bankers and getting a loan. Next is finding the right spot to open shop. Then you have to deal with the inspectors and city officials and health department and everybody else that wants to reach into your pocket. These are all challenges that can be conquered. I think my biggest personal challenge is patience. All I want to do is roast coffee and make people go “mmmm”!

Gold's Records

Normally I find KCRW relentlessly uninteresting, but it came to my attention that this week Jonathan Gold was featured on the station’s “guest DJ project” hosted by Garth Trinidad. Gold, who writes for the LA Weekly and Gourmet, is the first food critic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. The guy’s knowledge of the Los Angeles food scene encompasses everything from decadent Michelin-starred restaurants to divey bowling alley coffee shops, not to mention his fluency in the limitless diversity of the region’s ethnic cuisines. But before becoming the country’s most-lauded restaurant reviewer, Gold actually wrote about music, including the first major piece on NWA back in 1989. For his guest spot on KCRW, he brought records (or maybe MP3s) by Dr. Dre, the Germs, Funkadelic, Louis Armstrong, and John Dowland. Deep. The annoying thing is that they play only a portion of the songs, and they talk over them, too.

Incidentally, this Sunday in West Hollywood, Jonathan Gold will be hosting the Gold Standard, a tasting of 30 restaurants hand-picked by the Gold himself. The event is sold out, but my brother was smart enough to get a discounted ticket weeks ago; hopefully he’ll remember to take pictures.


Jonathan Gold's Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles (St. Martin's Press, 2000)

Creative Kimchi

I don’t know if Koreans have a national dish, but if we do, it must be kimchi. Dating back several thousand years, the salted and spiced cabbage (or, in other variations, cucumber or radish) originated as a way to stretch out the shelf life of perishable ingredients usually grown in one's own yard. In lieu of refrigeration technology, it would be buried in vessels underground and naturally fermented in its brine, resulting in the pungent, sour, and piquant dish so ubiquitous on Korean tables.

In my family, we ate kimchi every single evening with dinner, and a favorite daytime snack was simply kimchi stacked between two pieces of white bread with the crusts cut off. I’ve since stretched beyond kimchi sandwiches and lately have been experimenting with it in a variety of ways.



1. Kimchi burger. In this version I mixed ground pork with chopped kimchi and a little bit of soy sauce to make the patties. On top are sliced red onion and some wilted spinach flavored with sesame oil and garlic.
2. Pepperoni and kimchi pizza. It was one of those lazy nights when I just took a frozen store-bought pie, slapped some kimchi on top, and stuck it in the oven.
3. Black bean, pork, and kimchi tacos. This was inspired by Kogi and some leftovers I had in the fridge.
4. Roast pork tenderloin stuffed with kale and kimchi. Today’s LA Times Food section has a feature on using kitchen string to tie roasts and such. I’ll do it when it’s essential, like with a roulade, but I usually don’t have the patience or, let’s face it, the gastronomic integrity for it. For this tenderloin I just made an incision lengthwise through the middle with my carving knife.



5. Kimchi-stuffed pork roast. This is similar to number 4, but with a center-cut loin instead of tenderloin and just kimchi. I’ve actually been practicing variations on this for a while; this one turned out pretty well in terms of kimchi-to-meat proportions.
6. Steak and kimchi quesadillas. I used leftovers from the Korean BBQ–marinated sirloin steak I'd made the night before.
7. Shepherd’s pie. Here's another great vehicle for leftovers. I made this with the remnants from number 5, including the wasabi mashed potatoes that went with it.
8. Roast chicken stuffed with kimchi. For this I inserted kimchi just beneath the skin but I really couldn’t taste it much; next time I’ll use more.

Objet Orange

This makes me happy.

1960s tea kettle, found in Torrance, California