Pigs & Pinot

On Sunday, Miguelito and I hustled down to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., to celebrate the birthday of a friend who turned 66. A momentous occasion called for an extraordinary meal. So we pulled into the high-end shopping center's parking lot in front of Charlie Palmer at Bloomingdale's. It also helped that the birthday boy is a good buddy of Palmer's.

The personal connection with the cooking maestro earned me a mini tour of the kitchen, where executive chef Amar Santana let me peep at one of the two -- count 'em, two -- suckling pigs that he prepared for our extravagant feast.

In tribute to Palmer's famed seminar, Pigs & Pinot, where participants spend a weekend in Healdsburg, Calif., learning how to make the most of the other white meat, Santana paired a Pinot noir with our dinner. (Our appetizer of seared foie gras with pears and apples was complemented by a Riesling.) Santana used every piggy part for our dinner. From left to right in the photo, my plate was filled with lentils, pork belly, crackling skin, polenta, sweet potatoes and shallots, Brussels sprouts roasted with bacon, mushrooms and a rillette of pig's ear stuffed inside pork belly.

DineLA Restaurant Week Ends Soon

This is the last weekend when you can take advantage of the prix-fixe deals offered at a number of pricey restaurants as part of DineLA Restaurant Week. Miguelito and I are heading to Ciudad on Friday to try the $34 three-course dinner. Half-glass pours of wine cost only $5. Ole!

Blogging Ethics

The Federal Trade Commission devised a new batch of rules this week mandating that, starting Dec. 1, bloggers must reveal all the freebies, payments and perks they receive from advertisers. This makes sense. Still, the need to disclose isn't completely new to me as I've been following the Food Blog Code of Ethics as well as the rules of righteousness that I use in my day job. And on the few occasions that my night hobby poses a conflict of interest with my day job, I choose the latter. That's why I recently had to turn down a blogger boondoggle that packaged a night at a four-star hotel, meals with chefs brandishing shiny knives (not to mention marquee brands) and monetary incentives for tweets and prompt posts on my blog. Oh, how I missed out! But it only takes 30 seconds of bad judgment to ruin a career that was built over 11 years.