Nothing Hokey About Honeycombs

Three years after I moved to Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay Area, my respiratory system was nearly paralyzed by severe allergies. I couldn't figure out why my ability to breathe was so compromised. One person suggested that I eat some honey so that the pollen present in the sticky sweetness would fortify my immune system. I thought that theory was hokey. Until this past spring, when I not only consumed honey from California, Minnesota and wherever I could find it, but I also traded the breeze blowing through my open car windows for a sterile A/C system that circulated through my air-tight Prius. The precautions I took nullified the sniffles, sneezes and asthmatic wheezing that seized me in past seasons. Taking the next step closer to a holistic diet (I draw the line at wheat grass, however), I began eating raw honeycomb that a far more sophisticated foodie friend gave me as a gift.

I baked pre-made puff pastry, topped with a generous serving of freshly whipped cream, plump blueberries and a chunk of honeycomb. Miguelito said it was the best home-made dessert he ever had.

Sausages on Sunday

Miguelito and I had been hearing chatter about Wurstkuche for weeks. Though we're both on our respective wedding diets (not too much bourbon for him, lots of sit-ups for me), we rounded up our most gastronomically adventurous friends for some sausages last Sunday. Here's Wurstkuche's refrigerator packed with piles of home-made wieners.

Here's the coterie of condiments sitting on every corner of the long communal tables shrouded in brown paper.

If I remember correctly, there used to be a small, cramped, moodily lit restaurant on the same spot where Wurstkuche now stands. Walls were knocked down and the ceiling open for an airy, loft-like atmosphere that is de rigeur for architecture in downtown L.A. I don't think anyone has a ladder tall enough to reach the birthday balloon that floated away in Wurstkuche's dining room.

While our friend Johnny ordered two sausages for himself (he said he was eating on behalf of his absent girlfriend), Anita had the Filipino (a juicy pork sausage with spices) and Carol, a pescatarian, fit in with the confab of carnivores by picking a vegetarian sausage. Miguelito and I decided to split the difference between our foodie friends. We ordered three, that we could share for one and a half apiece. We had the duck bacon with jalapeno (topped with sweet peppers and caramelized onions), rabbit and veal (same topping as the duck bacon) and alligator (paired with hot peppers and caramelized onions). We skipped the sauerkraut, the other option in the quartet of toppings for the sausages, because it wouldn't fit well with the unusual wieners.

The restaurant actually messed up our order for the sauces to dip the Belgian fries. We had requested chipotle ketchup, but we ended up dipping our twice-fried taters in curry ketchup (more sweet than spicy) and bacon bits mixed with blue cheese.

This is a close-up of the duck bacon sausage. The black peppers and jalapeno masked the game flavor, which was unfortunate because I actually love the earthy taste of duck.

The rabbit and veal sausage was the most politically incorrect -- and unsurprisingly the yummiest of the three, in my opinion.

The alligator was perhaps the most exotic offering. It was also the one I liked the least among our triptych of treats. We were told that the casing for this roll was quite thick. That wasn't the problem. The alligator meat just wasn't that juicy. A bit of pork or other fatty meat would have injected some life into the dryness.

A Cool Viet Chick's Food Party

The New York Times published a story today about Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Thu Tran moving her Web show called "Food Party" to the IFC. The second after I finished reading the article, I asked Miguelito, "Do we get IFC?" Indeed, we do. And I'm going to be glued to the television every Tuesday night to catch what reminds me of Pee-Wee's Playhouse inhabited by hungry characters from my friend Emmie's Fomato Cards.

R.I.P. David Carradine

When I was in pre-school, I received a notice about a field trip that required students to bring a brown bag lunch. Having just arrived in the U.S. from Vietnam, my parents and aunts sat around a kitchen table in a frustrating attempt to translate the form. They didn't realize that, all over their newly adopted country, thousands of parents tossed a PBJ sandwich and apple in a brown paper bag and wrote their kid's name on the outside. My parents figured I had to eat on this school outing, so my dad went to the store and bought me a "Kung Fu" lunch box. We didn't write my name on it. As a result of our shortsightedness, I had to follow the teacher around the outdoor picnic tables on the day of the field trip, as she asked every single boy in the class if the lunch box belonged to him. I didn't speak enough English to yell, "Excuse me, Miss Teacher, but that is mine." Eventually she turned around and saw me shadowing her. My brother subsequently inherited the lunch box from me, and the first thing he did was smear his name in blue ink over Kwai Chang Caine's forehead. I have the metal container back now. It sits on a book shelf, next to a stuffed R2D2 and baby Buddha plushie. Proust may have had madeleines to remind him of his childhood, but I'll always have this lunch box.