I pretty much know where everything is in every supermarket in LA. Owen’s Market has the best meat counter. Elat Market has the best hummus and eggplant dips. Whole Foods, as much as I don’t want to admit it, has the best pre-cooked shrimp. The Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica is great for heirloom tomatoes. Fresh & Easy has the best olive bread. Bay Cities has the best baguettes. I could go on for pages. It’s not my fault. It’s genetic.
When I was younger, I thought it took five hours to drive from LA to Santa Barbara because my mom convinced us we had to stop to eat at least three times on the way (at John’s Garden for fresh juice, at the Malibu Fish Market for fried fish sandwiches and at some divey Mexican place in Oxnard for tacos). When I went away to college I found out it takes five hours to drive to San Francisco and about 1 1/2 hours to drive to Santa Barbara, and, in fact, you probably don’t have to stop to eat even once on the way.
Food, Family and Memory
Food, Family, and Memory
Cheesecake Memories
From the Los Angeles Times
The happy childhood goes like this: My mother unwraps the silver boxes
of cream cheese as if they are presents. She beats the soft cheese –
the crack of eggs, a dust-storm of sugar – into pale snowbanks in the
bowl while she lets me crush the graham crackers with a hammer. I sneak
a few butter-laced crumbs and, later, watch the cooling cheesecake with
that wistful ache children can have about certain foods. Such moments,
repeated through the years, transform simple favorites into profound
emblems.
Cheesecake has that kind of power; it also has range. Stamped with an ancient provenance (Alan Davidson reports a description of a Roman cheesecake in Cato's 2nd century "De Re Rustica") and European pedigree, it's made with ricotta in Italy, quark (a fresh curd cheese) or farmer cheese in Eastern Europe. And the distinctive texture and clean flavor of classic American cheesecakes comes from silky smooth, creamy but tart cream cheese.
Family Reunion
My favorite all time saying is that 'you can pick and choose your friends but not your family.' Perhaps that's because I have some extended family members who are constant reminders of that famous quote.
My immediate family is very close as well as my 1st cousins, aunts and uncles and for the most part, I would choose to be friends with them. However, I do have some cousins "that don't know me and I don't know them" and would prefer to keep it that way. I have been known to desert my grocery cart and flee when I catch a glimpse of them at the grocery store. These people and their lifestyles made Jeff Foxworthy rich and famous.
Food Fight

When I was younger my brother and I were constantly fighting. One day, my mother decided to ban swearing. We were at a loss. We stared at each other across the dining room table with enough venom to take out a tiger, but we had no words. I have no idea how it started, but we began to call each other the names of the foods around the kitchen.
"You're such a Quaker, Oatmeal." "You're a can of tuna fish that isn't even dolphin safe." "You're a carton of milk." "You're a half empty bottle of soy sauce. We threw these terms at each other every morning over breakfast and every night over dinner, somehow making the terms more and more apropos to our specific fight.
"You're Tropicana orange juice, some pulp." "You're sour cream." "You're such an apple." "You're a nectarine." "Yea, well, you're a banana." It went on for days.
The Bootleg
Every summer when we were kids, my brother and I would visit my grandparents on Lake Minnetonka in Orono, Minnesota. We spent some of our days waterskiing on Mud Lake, seeing plays at the Guthrie, and riding the rollercoaster at Mall of America. But most of our WASPy Midwestern days were spent at the Woodhill Country Club playing tennis or lounging poolside. Many teenagers were bored by Woodhill’s sea of Lilly Pulitzer sundresses and Brooks Brothers’ monogrammed golf-sweaters, but I was fascinated. I was convinced (since I was a teenage TV junkie) the Woodhill Country Club, built among some the largest estates of suburban Minneapolis, was built on a bedrock of scandal.
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