Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for October 2005

Hot Chocolate: the review

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Let’s put it this way: after one reading through Hot Chocolate by Michael Turbeck, I wanted to have sex with this book. Not with the author. With the book.

The Amazon page says there are “more than 60” recipes in this book, which probably means there are 61 or something. It’s a thin book, with a wide range of chocolates for every taste: the thick chocolate from Cafe Angelina in Paris, spicy Aztec-inspired chocolates, a hot white chocolate from Sweden, Frrrozen Hot Chocolate from Serendipity, alcoholic chocolates for adults, side dishes of tuiles and little cookies, coconut marshmallows…

Seriously, depending on how this winter goes my entire running program could be for naught, because I seriously want to try half of the recipes in this book tonight. I’ll leave the lavender-and-pistachio hot chocolate (yup) for tomorrow.

Running progress

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A week or two ago Rob IM’d me with “Guess how fast I ran the Wildcat Trail today? 51 minutes.”

51.

Together we’d been doing it in 61. 51 was quite an improvement over that.

“You didn’t stop, did you?”

“Didn’t really feel like it, no.”

Wow.

Then last week, when we ran it together, I noticed that by staying with me the entire way up, he wasn’t working. He might have been strolling in the park for all the effort he was putting out. “Lose fifty pounds, and you can do this too,” he joked.

Well…damn.

So when I ran the trail with Nina (Rob was off vacating), I did run the entire way up. Of course, Nina took off ahead of me and had to wait for me at the top, but as long as she was willing to do that, we were cool.

The three of us were running together again today, and pretty much we had the same plan: You run to the top and wait for me there.

Rob took off. Nina took off. Diane plodded the whole way up. Rob and Nina had completely cooled down by the time I got up there. We managed to run in sync the whole back to the starting line. Okay, I sometimes fell a little behind but then either I pushed to catch up or they slowed down or perhaps both.

Time at the end? 57 minutes.

Not quite as earth-shattering as 51 (or, for the woman who blew past us on the trail, 41 or so), but still: an improvement. I’m getting stronger. Yay, team.

Now they do it

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I opened the LA Times today (figuratively) and what do I see? WHAT DO I SEE? An article about the joys of bakeries in LA:

COULD L.A. be turning into a real bakery town? It seems to be shaping up that way, judging from all the dough on the rise.

On West 3rd Street, Parisian master baker Eric Kayser recently opened the understatedly appealing Breadbar, with a second branch in the works in Century City. At the Brentwood Country Mart, New York restaurateur Maury Rubin is getting ready to introduce the city to a bakery café that’s unlike anything it’s seen before. In West Hollywood, pastry chef Michelle Myers has expanded her offerings, making bread for sandwiches to supplement her line of sweets at Boule.

Elsewhere, Belgian company Le Pain Quotidien, which has multiplied six times over since 2001 in Southern California, is expanding into Manhattan Beach and Pasadena in the coming months. The Japan-based cream puff specialist Beard Papa’s has opened in Hollywood. Santa Monica chef Hans Röckenwagner plans to turn his thriving bread and pastry business into a bakery café in Venice. And on an unlikely stretch of Pico Boulevard, two sisters with no formal training have plunged right in, opening La Maison du Pain and importing a trained Frenchman along the way as they slowly get off the ground.

For a city of such great size and culinary enthusiasm, Los Angeles doesn’t have many world-class bakeries. To be sure, those we do have are hot spots: Clementine in Century City, EuroPane in Pasadena, Jin Patisserie in Venice and Sweet Lady Jane in West Hollywood among them. But such places are few and far between.

The new arrivals — particularly Kayser’s Breadbar and Rubin’s City Bakery — could signal that L.A.’s bakery culture is finally starting to grow up.

Not just pastry bakeries! Bread bakeries! I weep. Now that I’m finally developing a taste for the finer wheat products in life, they pull this on me, when I can’t enjoy any of it.

One thing that’s driven me nuts around Silicon Valley is that there’s no good bread bakery. (There is an outlet of Le Boulanger within walking distance of my house. My opinion stands.) We go to Campbell’s Farmer’s Market on Sundays to visit the Boulangerie Bay Bread stand — but that’s a bakery from San Francisco (one that used to be two blocks from my mother’s house, in fact). Excellent, excellent bread. But it’s fifty or so miles away. And my Sunday baguette doesn’t really hold out until Thursday, know what I’m saying?

Today, in fact, we went to the Farmer’s Market, followed by breakfast at Stacks’ in Campbell. Sophia practically dragged us to the Farmer’s Market, because she wanted her panini bread from the Bay Bread stand. Five years old and an appreciation for fine bread. (When I was her age undoubtedly all I’d eat was Wonder, a fact that makes me shudder to this day.) When I bought the panini, both Sophia and Simon went nuts, grabbing the bag and reaching in. I grabbed a panini to give them as the lady behind the table said, “Would you like me to cut that in half?” “There’s no time!” I said, ripping the roll in half to give each kid a piece.

(I asked Darin if he’d seen what happened. He nodded solemnly and said, “I’ve seen piranhas at work.”)

One day I had an excellent sandwich at Fleur de Cocoa and asked them where they got their bread. Sogo bakery in Cupertino, they said. Which turned out to be a little Japanese bakery in a strip mall. I had trouble believing they actually made pain de mie. It’s also too far to drive to pick up some bread. I suppose I could ask Darin to stop by on his way to work, but once he gets into his car he’s Mr. Safari Manager and pretty much forgets everything else.

The baguettes from the market are underwhelming. Grace is okay, as is the-other-brand-that-escapes-me-right-now. I used to get La Brea bread at Whole Foods, but the whole parboiled/slightly underdone aspect palled on me after a while.

Maybe everyone in this area is low-carbing it or something, or you need so much money to rent a store around here it wouldn’t be worth a baker’s time to make fresh bread. But I totally think there’s an underserved community around here!