Must be grilling time!

And these are just some of the veggies almost entirely from last week's farmer's market.  I love colorful summer produce!

Spending my winnings

While running errands all over town for Saturday's bbq, I happened to stop by Lululemon since it was so conveniently on my way, to spend some of my stock gains as a reward (too bad I don't still own the stock, it continues to soar).  I picked up two items on sale in the citron color: the vinyasa scarf and my favorite style workout tank, the cool racerback.  Since I sold a little too early, I restrained myself and did not buy a bag that I had my eye on that was also marked down.

The citron color is a little bright and highlighter-y yellow for my taste and for my skintone, but I just love the cool racerback style so much that I know I will get a ton of use out of it.  I've already worn the vinyasa scarf everywhere I've gone; it's perfect for fall socal weather with the recent fluctuations in temperature from morning, day to night, and it's functional and stays put with all the snaps with all the random ways to wear it.  It's made out of running luon which is super soft and comfortable and it is nice and big.  Some of the different ways to wear it (not me in the pictures):

Bann Restaurant: Fancy Korean in K-town

We had lunch today at the relative newcomer, Bann Restaurant in Koreatown across the street from the Wiltern Theater on Western.  It had just gotten a decent 1.5 star review in yesterdays LA Times, and we were in the neighborhood at the Galleria Korean market picking up the makings for tomorrow's bbq, so we stopped in to give it a try.  Bann is owned by the same owners as Woo Lae Oak restaurants, an upscale Korean BBQ concept with locations in LA and NYC (soho).

The space is lovely and airy, with soaring ceilings and wood and marble accents.  We ordered an appetizer of the pa jun (seafood pancake) and two lunch specials: the seafood soup with homemade noodles and the beef soup with dumplings and rice cakes.  The seafood pancake was one of the best seafood pancakes I've had, filled with delicate rings of squid and small shrimp, pillowy eggs and some vibrant peppers and scallions.  It was fluffy and delicious.  Both soups were very good too; both had very clear delicate broths, and they were generous with the noodles, seafood and rice cakes.  We had a nice assortment of panchan (side dishes), included a salad, two kinds of kimchi, two kinds of daikon, and some meat and other vegetables.  We were stuffed and couldn't finish all the noodles or rice cakes; it was a very reasonable $30 for the two of us.  Dinner is bound to be a lot more expensive though without the lunch special deals.

Starter salad

Seafood pancake

"Young" kimchi: the cabbage was still quite crisp

Panchan: from left clockwise - Daikon kimchi, kimchi, vegetable, picked daikon, dried beef

Seafood soup with homemade noodles

Beef soup with mandu (dumplings) and rice cakes

Bann Restaurant

621 S. Western Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
(213) 834-2244

End of Summer Farmer's Market

Picture from last week's farmer's market. AOC is a perennially packed Suzanne Goin restaurant on 3rd Street.  I love seeing chefs actually doing their shopping at the farmer's markets.  You often see crates and crates of reserved produce for some of the top restaurants in the city.

Nothing really new to report from the Santa Monica farmer's market yesterday...pretty much the same stuff as the previous few weeks.  Lots of grapes, melons, tomatoes, peppers, some interesting looking dates.  Starting to see fall-ish vegetables such as winter squash and kale, but those could be aberrations.  I bought beefsteak tomatoes, corn, potatoes, grapes, red leaf lettuce, salad greens, thyme, cilantro, onions for our bbq this weekend.

Summer Reading

 

I read a decent amount of books over the summer, thanks to a few long plane rides.  I never made it past the first 50 pages of the Proust book despite many valiant efforts; it was just way too sloooooow for my tastes.  I am a fast reader and anything that requires me to read slowly where nothing much happens soon exhausts my patience.  I did manage to actually finish several books including "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" by Jamie Ford, "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini, "Tinkers" by Paul Harding, "Icy Sparks" by Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and finally the "Millennium Trilogy" by Stieg Larsson: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire," and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest."  Aside from the Millennium Trilogy, I enjoyed all the books; they were all well-written and transported me to vividly different worlds and really captured my imagination.  I wouldn't say I loved any of the books, but they were all good.

I just finished "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" last night, completing the Millennium Trilogy.  The series has been much hyped; all three books have topped the best sellers list and several people have personally recommended the books to me.  The series is going to be made into an American movie (there's already a Swedish version), starring Daniel Craig, Robin Wright and relative newcomer, Rooney Mara, directed by David Fincher.  To be honest, I didn't care for the entire series.  I just didn't find the attraction of any of the characters, in fact I downright disliked a few of them, and I found a lot of the plotlines to be unnecessarily salacious and violent.  All three of the books had very slow beginnings and it took a long time to get the plot moving, and even once moving, I didn't get that engrossed.  Maybe it's because it was set in Sweden and all the characters had jarring Swedish names (no offense) and the geography was unfamiliar, or maybe because I don't care much for Swedish politics and general conspiracy theory plotlines involving the secret police, but I just couldn't get into the books.  Case in point; the only reason that I finished "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" last night was because I had to return the library book today; normally I can finish books that I'm really into within one sitting, not 2 weeks.  I persisted and didn't give up on the books to keep up with pop culture and in the hopes that I would finally come across that "a ha!" moment when I would get all the hype was all about.  Similar to why I read the entire Twilight Saga, and similar to the Twilight Saga, the "a ha!" moment never came.  Oh well, on to the next book, any recommendations?

Lily's Eggs

At last week's farmer's market, I splurged and bought fancy free range, pasture fed (grass-fed) fertile eggs from Lily's Eggs for $4.50 for a dozen.  These eggs are even a step up from cage free chickens and organic grain fed chicken.  With all the recent hullabaloo over the massive egg recall of over half a billion eggs, I decided to give these a try to see if they actually tasted better.  I always buy organic eggs; it's one of the items that I am quite adamant about, so I wasn't as worried about salmonella but more about the taste.  I tested them out yesterday in a breakfast egg scramble with tomatoes, olives, cotija cheese and fresh tarragon; just a couple of leftover items I had in my fridge.  It tasted good, although I'm not sure I could tell the difference against my regular eggs, particularly with all the other ingredients in the scramble.  I'll have to test them out more on their own, simply poached or fried.  Nevertheless, it did make for a nice breakfast out on the patio by the pool: we had the egg scramble, pancakes, english muffins, lattes and grapes.  It was a beautiful Sunday morning; we had ridden our bikes to the free Lululemon yoga class in Brentwood, and came back for a nice, relaxing breakfast by the pool under the sun. My idea of a perfect Sunday!

A Trip to Morocco

I was feeling adventurous and wanted to experiment with some different flavors the other day so I decided to try my hand at Moroccan food, inspired by a recent episode of the Barefoot Contessa.  Saturday night, I made a lamb tagine with olives and preserved lemons served over quinoa with raisins.  I didn't like any of the recipes I saw on Food Network or Epicurious so I made my own.  What was nice is that I didn't have to buy any more spices; I had pretty much everything except for saffron in my pantry.  One of the things always amazes me about cooking is how you can combine the same basic ingredients and spices in different ways and you have a totally different cuisine.  I used a lot of the same spices and ingredients in my Mexican and Indian cooking, but this dish tasted totally different and discernably Moroccan.  I also wanted try cooking with lamb; I've always loved lamb but haven't cooked with it much, particularly using the braising method.  The dish isn't hard to make, just time consuming with the braising.

First I made the preserved lemons.  I actually was going to be lazy and try to buy it at Whole Foods, but they didn't have any so I was forced to make my own.  It's really easy and we always have lemons from my parent's tree.  All you do is slice 1-2 lemons lengthwise into about 6 slices per lemon, put them in a glass baking dish, sprinkle with 2 TB of salt, cover with water and put it in the oven at 250 degrees for 3 hours.

To prep the tagine which served 2 with a little leftover (we are big eaters):

• Cut 1.5 lbs of lamb shoulder into cubes, trimming off excess fat.  I also used the bones as it was hard to get all the lamb off the bone and put it in a bowl
• Grated 1/2 an onion, squeezing out excess water and chopped 1/2 an onion (I was going to grate the entire onion, but grating onions make me tear like crazy and I couldn't take it anymore.  I don't usually shed tears when chopping onions but grating onions was painful).  Toss the grated 1/2 onion in the bowl with the lamb and reserve the chopped 1/2 in a separate bowl
• Minced 5 cloves of garlic, half into the bowl with the lamb, half reserved with the chopped onion
• Grated 1 tsp of ginger (a lot of recipes call for ground ginger, but I only had fresh ginger) and add to bowl with the lamb
• To the lamb bowl, added 1 tsp of cumin, 1 tsp of paprika, a pinch of saffron threads, 1 tsp of turmeric, 1 tsp of ground black pepper, pinch of salt, 1 TB of olive oil and mix everything together
• Chopped two carrots
• Chopped 1 fennel bulb
• Minced 1/2 bunch of cilantro and 1/2 bunch of parsley
• Chopped 1 large tomato (I could have used two tomatoes)

To cook, I heated up a few TB of olive oil over medium heat in the 5 quart Le Creuset french oven (I probably could have used my 3 quart oven)

• Add the lamb mixture and seared it for 2-3 minutes
• Add the remainder of the garlic and onions and saute for another 2 minutes
• Add 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of red wine and bring to a boil. Add the cilantro and half of the parsley, reserving a handful for garnish at the end.  Add the carrots and fennel.  Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1.5 hours, partially covered
• After 1.5 hours, add the tomatoes, the pulp from the rinsed preserved lemons (slice the rind into thin strips and reserve) and simmer until the lamb is tender

When the lamb is ready, remove it with tongs into a serving bowl and tent it.  Add 1 cup of pitted green olives, the preserved lemon rind slices and a couple sprinkles of chili flakes to the braising liquid, turn the heat up and boil for ~5 minutes to reduce.  Then pour the reduced sauce over the lamb, sprinkle on a handful of fresh parsley and serve!  I served it over 1/2 cup of quinoa with an assortment of raisins that I rehydrated in hot water for a few minutes.

I really liked the dish, it was quite intense and bursting with all sorts of different and interesting flavors, from the savory meaty lamb, to the briny olives, to the slightly sour preserved lemons (preserving actually mellows out the lemons a lot), to the carrots, fennel and tomatoes.  It was salty, sour, sweet (from the raisins) and spicy all at the same time.  All the spices and herbs added a nice smoky depth to the dish and the sauce was rich and delicious.  My only change is that I would use a less salty olive, or at least halve the olives.  I can't wait to make this dish again!