Bar Pintxo, June 6, 2010

Summer weather turns a Girl's fancy to cold soups, especially one of my all time favorites, gazpacho. Like a V8 with bits of salad floating in it, nothing beats the heat - and gives you one of your eight-a-day - like a nice bowl of gazpacho.

The choice of gazpacho had a two-fold purpose: I had asked my friend Shiho, a talented illustrator and watercolorist, for special artwork for GMS. So we needed a colorful and textural dish for her to depict in her inimitable style.



Shiho and I started with some very flavorful olives. She drew them, I inhaled them.


I remembered that i had seen a tapas place on the Santa Monica Promenade, but could not remember the name of it. I called Shiho, who started looking up places on Yelp where we could have the chilly concoction, but none of them had the all-important "stroll factor," the better to have that post-dinner constitutional by. So I talked her into this unknown place, remembering that it was on Santa Monica Boulevard near 4th Street.

I met here there and the recognized the storefront, with the sign for Bar Pintxo. When we were seated, we immediately asked what the soup of the day was, ever hopeful for the long-awaited gazpacho. But it was lentil with chorizo, which was fine with me. The afternoon swelter had given way to a cool marine layer and suddenly warm soup sounded good. It was. The smokiness of the sausage was a great counterpoint to the homey-ness of the lentil soup, which despite the pork product, was not at all salty. But that was only the beginning.

A hearty soup like this one can be a meal in itself, but not when you can have all kinds of unusual little dishes alongside it. Upon exploring the menu, we found a number of enticements and succumbed to temptation. So distracted were we by these delights that I forgot to take a photo of the soup. But since the point of the exercise was Shiho's sketch, we were covered there.



Shiho's masterpiece - talk about multitasking... I don't think I can eat and paint at the same time!


We happily obeyed the axiom, "Eat dessert first" with a "pintxo" or "small bite" of dates wrapped in bacon and filled with valdeon cheese. I can't even begin to describe how good this was. Salt is the new sugar, and this celebrated the pairing of both with great flair.

Next up was the ensaladilla rusa or Russian salad. This consisted of a potato salad with house-conserved tuna in a light, non-greasy mayonnaise. A taste revealed the fact that a) the peas and diced carrot were fresh, not frozen as I had surmised and b) tuna is pretty darned good in potato salad.




Not your mom's potato salad - unless your mom happens to be from Barcelona!

For dessert we hemmed and hawed about the churros. In America, churros are foot-long tubes of tasteless dough coated with a fur of sugar that you buy at the movies or a fair. Bar Pintxo's version was what I've always imagined authentic churros to be: yeasty but dainty blips of dough served with a cup of bittersweet, cinnamon-laced chocolate for dipping.




This beats Krispy Kreme.

For more of Shiho's work or to subscribe to her newsletter, click here. She's a Scorpio, her favorite color is everything, and she digs long walks on the beach, candlelight dinners, and guys who are willing to go to museums, change a flat tire, and check her dim sum selections for hidden shrimp: she's allergic to shellfish.

Short Orders: The Lusty Month of May

Although spring has sprung, this Girl still loves her some soup... and bagels... and Vietnamese street food... and...?

Although May was a busy month, I still took time to stop and smell the:

May 22, Vietnamese Rice Cake with Caramelized Onion in Chinatown: Jolene and I always delude ourselves that we can just run into Chinatown, pick up whatever trinkets and treats we decide we can't live without that day, and depart in a timely fashion. We are always so wrong.

On a mission to fetch supplies for the necklaces I make and sell at local museums (the Japanese American National Museum and the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum), my sister and I hurried to Chinatown on a mission, promising my brother-in-law that she would be back "soon" for the onslaught of Saturday activities with the kids. While puttering in a shop that sells knock-off handbags on Broadway near Ord, I caught a whiff of something that took me back to childhood. It was as if someone had opened the world's biggest bag of Funyuns. I looked around and noticed a boy eating something white and gelatinous out of a styrofoam box.



I always share snacks with my sister. Unless she takes too long putting more money in the meter!

As we headed down the street, we stopped in front of a little Vietnamese deli where I found the object of my olfactory delight. As we entered the store, a woman was unwrapping a pan the size of a tire that was filled with something covered with caramelized onion. She was selling slabs of this to passersby, dousing each serving liberally with a light brown sauce full of little red chilies. Although I had already surpassed my allotted carb intake for the morning - miniature pan dulces from Venice Bakery - I had to try it.



Move over, Gaga. This is my neuvo-disco diva name: Lady FishPaste.



Although we had only meant to stay an hour, Jolene and I took turns running back to the car parked a few blocks away to add more change about three or four times. While she was gone, I put some of what the vendor and the people in the deli simply called "rice cake" and dug into my portion greedily. The consistency was custard-like and white as snow. The onion topping also had dried shrimp in it, Southeast Asia's answer to bacon bits. I tried to stop eating after my first helping, but decided that Jolene, who is as fanatic as I usually am about counting calories, wouldn't mind a smaller piece of the stuff.

May 23, Smoked Whitefish Salad on a Black Russian Bagel at the Bagel Factory: Fish is said to be brain food and I need all the help I can get. A weekend treat is a toasted Black Russian bagel - dark pumpernickel with raisins and onions - slathered with smoked whitefish salad from the Bagel Factory.



One bagel is said to be the caloric equivalent of five pieces of bread. My rules of thumb are a) if they use dark flour, it's practically whole-grain, which doesn't seem as evil and b) toasting a bread product makes it like a cracker, which is usually lower in carbs. No wonder I flunked freshman algebra.

May 29, The Big Steak at Grand Casino: When I'm not wearing one of my many weekend hats as roving reporter, social butterfly, or doting aunt, I grab my beading board and go to one of my favorite spots in downtown Culver City, Grand Casino. I love the quasi-European twist to the menu and bakery, which is largely influenced by Argentine cuisine. I have spent many a sunny late afternoon alone there, reading or making a necklace, basking in the melodious conversations of the other patrons, who speak only Spanish.

It was getting close to dinnertime and once again I was faced with having to make a low-cal decision. And I was hungry. I spotted the steak on the menu but did not want potatoes or anything starchy on the side. I asked the waiter if I could just have twice the salad. He was very accommodating and told me he would have the cooks put something together.



Grand Casino always feels like I've gone back in time to a slower, more gracious era, where a "Lost Generation" isn't necessarily lost, just looking for comfort. If Lady Brett and Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises" would have stopped all their agonizing, they could have gone to a little sidewalk cafe to eat something like a juicy, medium-rare steak with a crisp, fresh salad - with yes, a little Pernod on the side - they would have felt as I did on that Sunday afternoon, alone in a babel of Spanish whose words I did not understand, but whose emotion was clear. Damned fine.

El Rocoto, May 17, 2010

A veritable treasure trove of international cuisine can be found on Artesia Boulevard west of the 91 Freeway despite the seemingly endless arcades of nail salons, boba shops, and Starbucks. El Rocoto is one such gem, a change of pace from all the admittedly wonderful but plentiful Asian food available in the Torrance/Gardena hinterlands.

Dylan, who by now expects the possibility of soup as a main course when dining with me, accompanied me to El Rocoto, a local favorite of fans of South American cuisine. Those of us who grew up eating the Mexican food of Southern California are always surprised by the inclusion of different ingredients in what we consider "traditional" dishes: saffron- infused masa for tamales, ceviche garnished with sweet potatoes and corn, walnut sauce.



Traditional Peruvian tamale, with chicken and egg mosaic and colorful garnish

Although most restaurants treat soup as merely a prelude, at El Rocoto it is an integral part of a meal at El Rocoto, as listed on the menu under "Soul Warmers." I chose parihuela salvaje, a lightly spicy brew of snow crab, shrimp, fish, mussels, squid, and octopus. Dylan ordered the chupe de camarone, which despite sounding like something you shout out the window when getting cut off on the 110, was surprisingly mild in flavor, although loaded with a cornucopia of ingredients - including corn.



When I was a kid, soup was something that you ate when you were under the weather. Not so at El Rocoto, where you need to have all of your faculties present to partake of their hearty crustacean and mollusk-laden soups. By this I mean that you need to be able to use knife, fork, hammer, tongs, or blowtorch in order to extract the meat from claws and shells.



The right tool for the job... might still be in the garage. But we made do.

While Dylan is more handi-capable than most TABs I know - I just learned that this means "temporarily able-bodied"- his motor skills cannot easily accommodate a bowl full of crab legs and mussels on the half shell due to cerebral palsy. So I have come to anticipate certain tasks when dining with him such as cutting long strands of pasta into manageable lengths or large portions of meat into bite-size pieces.

I grew up fearing no fish and learned from my parents - who served boiled crabs and lobster thermidor as if they were meatloaf - how to take dismantle any shellfish in a relatively tidy manner. So I proceeded to use everything from the flatware on the table to my tiny Swiss army knife to extricate the sweet and savory flesh from its casings.

The shrimp chowder had among many other things, a fried egg, sunny-side up, on top of it. It had a full and satisfying sea-like flavor, very creamy and potatoe-y, with a surprising green herbal finish. Mine was more like a cioppino, very tomato-esque and spicy. My parihuela was full of snow crab legs, octopus, mussels, and squid.



Who you calling a shrimp?

While each serving is enough for three or four people, we tried bravely to make a dent in our respective bowls. We quickly surpassed the emergency supply of extra napkins that were thoughtfully tucked in anticipation underneath our bowls and had to ask for even more napkins to keep ourselves and the table presentable.



The aftermath. No clean napkin left behind.

Later, I was struck by the irony of humans who may not have the full use of their hands eating creatures who before they were dropped into a kettle of hot soup, once did. Which led me back to Seiji's admonition to my sister and I about eating shark fin soup.

The very food chain embodies the Orwellian fact that "some animals are more equal than others." This raises the question: If four legs are good and two are better, then what does ten get you?