Need a sensational dessert? One that requires only three ingredients and will have your friends begging for more? And for the recipe? If you have potatoes, chocolate chips and sea salt, you can make it. It’s Thick-Cut Potato Crisps with Dark Chocolate (above). They’re in Raghavan Iyer’s latest cookbook, “...
How many cookbooks do you have that contain recipes for freekeh? Probably not many. More likely none. Freekeh is roasted green wheat, which you can find in markets that stock Middle Eastern products. I recently bought a box, needed a recipe and found a terrific one in Carla Snyder’s latest book, “One Pan, Two Plates:...
Wine tastings are great. They’re even better when wines are paired with food so well that each shows at its best. This happened when Erica Crawford of Loveblock Wines in New Zealand (at the top) presented her wines at a lunch at Wolf restaurant in Los Angeles. Marcel Vigneron, Wolf’s chef/owner, came up with the [&...
Ever seen a taco that looked like this? Probably not, that is, if you haven’t been to Necco, a Japanese tapas restaurant on Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Instead of corn masa, the “tortillas” are made of brown rice and potato starch. The filling is avocado and spicy tuna, as in the rolls you get […]...
My favorite place for Chinese food right now is Little India in Artesia, not the San Gabriel Valley, Hong Kong or Taipei. The food isn’t classic Chinese but Indo-Chinese, what people in India like to eat. I love Hakka noodles, vegetables Manchurian, chilli chicken, Szechuan fried rice and whatever else turns up on the lunc...
Imagine a magic carpet of food, sumptuous dishes scented with cardamom, cumin, saffron, mint and turmeric, plates of succulent meats, fish and vegetables, handmade breads and stuffed dumplings, followed by sweets and heaps of fruit. This is the food of Afghanistan, which flies far under the radar in Los Angeles. There may be a h...
Want to go out for Thai food? Tacos? Pizza? Sure. For Turkish food? What’s that? Turkish cuisine is just not known in Los Angeles, even though Turkish ingredients are easy to get–I even found pomegranate vinegar from Izmir at my neighborhood 99 Cents Only Store. Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city. To put ...
It was a tough competition. Food bloggers were showing off their finest treats at the annual dessert cookoff staged by Melissa’s Produce. I worked all one afternoon to produce a glorious lemon cake, which I dusted with powdered sugar, then glittery gold sprinkles and surrounded with candied lemon slices. It looked beautifu...
(Gerry Furth-Sides) The Inimitable Chef Celestine Drago’s wide smile (above) says it all about the event of the season, Planned Parenthood Food Fare, now over a quarter century running. And so does the playful grin of another regular icon, Chef Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill (below) with Mexican dishes. Both were...
(Gerry Furth-Sides) Market City Caffe (164 East Palm Ave.), a top local lunch spot for more than 20 years with their delectable fresh pastas and wood-fired pizza, introduces a new, convenient quick serve lunch for those in a pinch for time. Inspired by generation after generation of fine home cooked family recipes, Market City C...
Gerry Furth-Sides 
Barbara Hansen 
Chef-owner Alain Cohen 
Roberta Deen 
Jose Martinez 
Nivedita Basu 